First, there is evidence that professional staged music is perceived to pose a threat to ConFest's folk ethos. The Music village has been the principal locus for 'stars' to entertain relatively passive audiences.32 According to critics, this is little more than a transference of 'the pub scene' to the bush, and is seen to compete with genuinely spontaneous music and dance (incorporating a range of indigenous styles and instruments) at spaces like the Fire Circle and Spiral. The latter accommodate what Les Spencer calls 'communal music' (1995), where the emphasis, by contrast to 'staged music', is on total participation not the passive witnessing of an entertaining spectacle. A contributor to the former WA DTE News called this dissolution of the performer/audience distinction 'the new tribal music':
No one is 'up there'. The musical leadership seems to rotate in an unpredictable way, unconnected with privilege, flattery or special status. To me it's anarchy, primitive communism ... It has to do with mutual respect and affection for all. Its spirit is emotional and cannot be commanded or organised. It may be recorded but no recording can convey the feeling of participation. (Thorell 1980:12)33Second, Trance Dance or techno at Tek Know (and Rainbow Dreaming) has been an even greater locus of antagonism. Reckoned to be a legitimate spiritual path by many, techno-trance's loud repetitive pulse, synthetic alterant and non-renewable energy use, and immediate impact on wildlife, are cited by others to justify exclusion or implement restrictions. While some directors, like Janet - who compares the reaction of older members to the hysterical response to the 'evils' of rock music by parents in the 1950s and '60s - have been supportive ('we cannot discriminate against what the young see as their ritual'), others have been far from sympathetic, even hostile ('I don't like it. I think it's a waste. It's a guru thing ... It has an Apollonian inspiration. It's just fucking horrible. It kills everything around [Laurie]).
I will now provide specific attention to this theatre of conflict.
Deterritorialisation: Slipping Out of the Nets
Through the mid nineties, from its nascent clandestine appearance near the Market at Moama III and its association with the Labyrinth at Moama IV, to its more recent outlet at CIDA at Gum Lodge I, Trance Dance has been implicated in a running battle of attempted elimination and recalcitrance. It is necessary to outline the sequence of events between 1996-97.
In mid 1996, Krusty attempted to shift the dance party assemblage to the DTE Winter Solstice Gathering. At an RGM prior to the event, however, DTE cancelled that event, with David Cruise arguing that the proposed event's poster - which featured an image of, and reference to, psylocibin ('magic mushrooms') - contradicted DTE and ConFest's 'family' orientation. Laurie, supporting techno's shift to a separate event, laments this decision:
Cruise resisted right down the line, to in the end banning the poster ... But they just wanted an excuse ... completely overreacting. I mean, you'd think better of parents. You'd think better of older people, and particularly people who espouse to be wise and clever.Thus, 'manning the moral barricades' protecting the community from a new form of space invader, DTE stifled an alternative outlet for techno-trance. This decision eventually backfired when it became apparent that techno-trance would not go away quietly, if at all.
Events came to a head at Moama V when efforts to eliminate Trance Dance necessitated the collaboration of the latter with the MRTC in the Labyrinth.34The Labyrinth, however, was constructed on the site's highest region. Along with time and power excesses, this provided the context for the ensuing 'theatre'. As the doof penetrated the festi-scape from atop the Labyrinth hill into late morning of April 1st, Bilby claims he attempted to find the generator and 'stab the beast in its belly'. Another vigilante claims he was convinced that the number of noise complaints justified his actions: driving his car into the Labyrinth honking the horn in an effort to drive off with the generator in tow. Commenting on the matter, Laurie suggests he 'was more interested in getting an off knob. And, not just an off knob during the festival to turn them off when they're running late, but an off knob to have them not in the festival at all'.
At Gum Lodge I, CIDA was home to the solar powered stage and a New Year Trance Dance event. During the night the battery was damaged by unknown assailants, incapacitating the sound system for an hour. This proved to be a significant affront to those who subscribe to the therapeutic and spiritual qualities of the music and dance, and who interpreted it as an act of aesthetic terrorism carried out by older non-understanding members of the ConFest community - by 'the parent culture' of DTE. For Mardo, claiming 'dance is a very very spiritual thing all through history, and [that] this is just the modern version of a trance', this sabotage justified a 'workshop' conducted by a band of direct activists the following afternoon.35 This 'ritual of resistance' saw a sound system 'fire up' on the beach, a designated 'quite area'.
As the t-shirt design, 'ungovernable entity', encapsulates, attempts to suppress Trance Dance and its clandestine techno-corporeality have been continually resisted by its young adherents. The persistent desire to experiment with Trance Dance has inspired mutations and innovative manifestations. Like reggae sound systems in the Notting Hill Carnival, and subterranean dance parties in the UK, ConFest Trance Dance could be:
compared to the mythical many-headed Hydra, a creature which captivated and entranced, only to make disappear, all those who beheld it, and which mutated inexorably, by growing new heads, when its protagonists attempted to destroy it. (Gore 1997:51)Trance Dance, like raving, is a 'deleuzoguattarian' 'desiring machine' (Jordan 1995). The dance is 'rhizomatic', it 'cannot be killed off [since] its stems will inevitably proliferate despite pruning' (Gore 1997:57). Yet, libratory 'deterritorialisation' may take different forms. Thus, adherents have sought to 'disappear' (evade restriction and control), engage in confrontation (e.g. the beach action), and achieve compromise (see 'Magic Happens', below).
It's like smoking. If you smoke indoors, you breathe out and everybody else has to breathe it in. And techno is a very invasive process, 'cause it uses very high power levels of sound, which not everybody finds - if there's a word called discordant ... not many people find it very cordant. And you can't escape it. Particularly on these type of sites, because the low frequencies propagate over the flat areas and they go for miles. So you're stuck with 'vooour vooour vooour' whether you like it or not ... So I find that it's a very arrogant, aggressive, selfish process.Yet, opponents often couch their objections in the idiom of aesthetics or style. The common view is that techno-trance poses a danger to ConFest's folk or 'earthy' communality. Various assumptions are held about the assemblage's (in)authenticity. In the following comment, techno is seen to be aesthetically misplaced:
The house-like disco at one end of the festival does not have the earth/beat energy that one goes to ConFest for. There are thousands of discos but only one ConFest ... [the 'disco'] greatly disrupts wildlife in a way drums and non-amplified sounds don't do and this seems contrary to a Down to Earth attitude. Also, any pre-recorded music saps the energy from the creativity and life that was so much a part of ConFest. (letter from A. Palmer to DTE)Of the city, it is thus an urban profanity disrupting the spontaneity of ConFest's rural idyll. Pre-recorded tracks are presumed to compromise the authenticity of 'live' happenings.36 Thus, another emailer laments the dearth of musicians who 'used to wander around various camp sites playing guitars, flutes, penny whistles, singing songs [and] ballads in the QUIET peaceful TRANQUILITY of the evening' (25/8/98). Bilby expresses a profound uncertainty about the technology driving the music:
I'm not entirely sure that I trust the machinery that the trance inducing stuff is coming out of. It seems to me that there is a lot of powerful machinery being used ... It's really alien, and it's really machine driven, and it's ... opposed to a lot of the values that I think we need to be preserving if we've got any chance of continuing existence on this planet. You know, this sounds a bit wild eyed and dramatic, but I don't trust techno. I don't trust it at all.Indeed complaints about the technology upon which Trance Dance relies are not uncommon. A notable example of the charge of 'inappropriate technology' came in the form of a polemical document distributed prior to Moama IV, after techno-trance secured nearly one third of the village budget for that event. Denouncing techno as yet another form of parasitic, alienating Western technology, Les Spencer (1996) argues that the 'trance' to which the music's producers and consumers lay claim is specious. It is argued, contentiously, that this form of music is 'a-rhythmical' and disharmonic:
Our bodies are organically rhythmical. We respond to cord and withdraw from discord. We like harmony and withdraw from disharmony ... The techno-format is a-rhythmical (absence of rhythm) and discordant, either with or without simple down beat under-rhythm. From a distance this down beat sounds like industrial noise. In techno, up beats are virtually non existent. The up beat is the spiritual. The up beat is for lightness and celebrating. The down beat is grounding. It is also the beat of the war dance. (Spencer 1996:1)Genuine trance contrasts with this Anglo-European style of electronic and computer generated music, which can only give rise to ersatz trance. While the:
techno-trance process typically involves moving to trance via sensory overload - beyond threshold typically via the a-rhythmic and discordant ... [t]he indigenous trance dance tradition is typically complex rhythmic and poly-rhythmic (multiple variations on a base rhythm). [It is] rarely, perhaps never a-rhythmic and discordant. (Spencer 1996:1-2)Above all, 'indigenous music' is esteemed because it is not 'amplified, prerecorded, technical and machine made' (ibid:2). Real 'trance', it is suggested, 'can be explored without any power at all. Indigenous and tribal people have been doing it for over 40,000 years' at no cost. And it is spaces like Spiral - and the more recent Laceweb 37 - that are perceived to induce authentic trance. At Spiral, in a drug, alcohol and generator-free community performance zone featuring a 'medicine wheel' of Native American or Celtic origin, drumming impresarios (like Rashid Yunus) and skilful rhythm collectives converge to generate hypnotic pulse 'African trance dance style' (Prion), launching dancers into states of ecstasy.
There, the didj (a form of 'appropriate technology' [Neuenfeldt 1998b:80]) and African drums (such as the doumbek - which is often used as an accompaniment to belly dancing) augment the authenticity of an experience, which is ostensibly closer to the 'heart energy' of 'tribal and indigenous' musics (Spencer 1996) than the implied artificiality of sounds produced by electricity and machines. Accordingly, to 'call trance induced by noise bombardment from electronic machines "ancient"' is nonsense' (Les, DTE email-group 27/11/97).
Furthermore, while the authentic 'tribal' musicality at Spiral may be seen to enhance community, techno-trance is deemed to have 'little to do with communal bonding during the dance':
[T]he indigenous communal rejoicing trance dance has a preponderance of rhythmical up beats. People move into the dance connected to the community. The community, as community, pulses together in entering and sharing other realms of experiencing and understanding together ... My personal experience of techno trance is profound dissociation from self and from others. It is not for me a 'community building' experience. (Spencer 1996:2)Due to invasive sound systems, acid and ecstasy traffic and use, and the apparent hedonism of the raver milieu, some commentators are even prone to rather 'tabloid' outbursts. For instance, frustrated by the way techno has denied him his 'basic human rights' (to sleep, to choose, to be consulted), for one passionate opponent, the techno crew are imagined to employ sinister 'methods' like those used in 'the interrogation of prisoners to destabilise and disorient ... [Indeed] the way Techno has been done would be illegal under the Geneva Convention if Confest were a prisoner of war camp!!!'. DTE must, therefore, 'prohibit techno Nazis' (DTE email-group 30/8/98). This and other commentary parallels the kind of media manufactured 'moral panic' surrounding Acid House raves in the UK.38 Take the following predicted scenario:
Moama, ConFest, young people, techno, ecstasy, 40 degree heat, dehydration, death in the darkness and found in late afternoon, not sleeping it off, but already stiff. Headline 'Five young teenagers dead at "Go to Heaven in 1997 Spiritual Festival"'. (Spencer 1996:1)Although less 'sensationalist' than 'Killer Cult', 'In the grip of E', 'Rave to the Grave' - all British tabloid headlines (Thornton 1994:183) - there is a family resemblance here, an attempt to 'sell' an idea by making appeals to morality. According to Artemis, who 'felt dizzy' just looking at 'the electronic set up' at Toc IV, 'techno ... can trigger epilepsy'. Indeed, participants are deemed to fall victim to this decadent and diabolical dance assemblage 'endangering the sacred' (cf. Sibley 1997): '[o]ur young people are being misguided ... [we must] get back Down To Earth' (Artemis 1996:5).
ConFest is not a neutral field. Like the variant pilgrimage devotees to the rock shrine of St Besse, 'the battle over narrative power, the fight over who gets to (re)tell the story' (Weber 1995:532) arises as combatants, taking up various vantage points in the authenticity war, 'try to dictate how the event is to be interpreted' (McClancy 1994:34). As such, competitive promotions are launched wherein techno-trance is variably wished out of existence or highlighted as an integral component of the total experience.
The 'Tribal' Beat Goes On ... and On
In response to 'some of the old ConFest farts [who] think we're just dicken' around doing fuck all' (Krusty), Trance habitués reply that the experience holds a communal authenticity, and therefore legitimacy, of its own. As Krusty contends, despite techno's dearth of the kind of sophisticated stories Aboriginal peoples exchanged when 'there was corroboree all over the landscape', what adherents are doing is principally 'the same today ... Coming together and dancing ... communicating through dance'. Trance Dance is then perceived to trigger the unifying effervescence attributed to 'corroborees'. Effecting an 'emotional community', according to Mardo, the techno beat 'brings every other individual around you into that same beat, brings everyone to that same level, and brings them together like a tribe'. Indeed, outdoor parties like ConFest's Tek Know, 'allow us to reclaim ... carnival' (Shell 1998). Such events:
succeed in bringing people together to experience the ancient ritual of dance ... During the party we become a community which can continue beyond a party. [The dance] connects us all together as we shed our urban skins ... [It is] the time and place where people who connect can dance under a canopy of trees, under a blanket of stars and feel a part of one tribe. (ibid)And, so far as Krusty is concerned, Trance Dance potentiates trance. He describes how:
working from the body [you can] allow yourself to move into a state of bliss, or, if you like, ecstasy. And that's what dance does. And ... the heart beat drumming, which is the bottom end of the techno, the 'doof', starts to sink and align the whole energy system of the body to a rhythm ... So you really can let go of a lot of your cognitive presence and just allow yourself to be open. And, in a ritual sense, if you're coming into the space and people are energised either through the dance or the energy from working with psychedelics or shamanistic herbs ... you get a special energy that starts to lift ... There's some therapy going on there in a way, because people can really release.An empowering upliftment may thus be achieved, especially in an environment where 'there's no right or wrong way to dance'. It is not too difficult to perceive how the electronically advanced percussion in Trance music - engineered by 'techno-shaman' - induce the forms of effective impact associated with transition (cf. Needham 1967). Ultimately, however, Trance is collective. It potentiates a form of that which Kapferer (1984b:188) calls 'self negation through adduction', which is 'most regularly a group phenomenon establishing a unity with others but above the level of the self'. As discussed earlier, Trance Dance is a node in ConFest's own 'underground centrality', a manifestation of 'sensual solidarity'. Posting a retro-Durkheimian perspective, Shell (1998) writes: '[o]nce you've experienced the collective trance state brought on by dancing to repetitive beats in the bush, you begin to understand the collective consciousness that develops between people around you'. Therefore, adds Krusty, 'the total is far greater than the sum of the parts'.
As Laurie argues, 'toleration ... is the most intolerant of all virtues'. In other words, permission breeds chaos. As this example of competing music authenticities demonstrates, ConFest occasions a clash of 'communities'. And as tensions arise between music constituencies, pre-existing differences are amplified. Here, in a most transparent case, rival 'bands' mobilise their physical and intellectual resources to delineate the event's acceptable parameters, and thereby articulate contrary versions of the community. On the one hand, for one reason or another, techno-trance is regarded as a form of 'internal colonialism'. With physical, aesthetic and moral objections ranged against it, it is an intolerable form of difference, a violation. On the other hand, for habitués, Trance Dance is a highly valued experience with a 'passional logic' of its own. And the desire for its performance triggers a repertoire of tactics resistant to exclusionary strategies.
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Footnotes
Maps
Chronology
Appendices
Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations
References: A-L
References: M-Z
Chapter Eight Contents
Thesis Contents