Matthew Collin

Electronic dance music was once the utopian frontier of pop culture. But three decades after the acid house 'summer of love', it has gone from subculture to the global mainstream. Does it still have the same power to inspire? From the pleasure palaces of Ibiza and Las Vegas to 'new frontiers' like Shanghai and Dubai, raving is now a multi-million-dollar business. But there are still hardcore believers upholding its DIY ethos - the techno idealists of Berlin and Detroit and the queer subcults of New York, the post-apartheid party people of South Africa and the outlaw techno travellers of France. In Rave On, Matthew Collin travels the world to experience these unique scenes first-hand, talk to the key players and hear the story of how dance culture went global - and find out if its maverick spirit can survive its own success.

Global Adventures in Electronic Dance Music

Rave On

alexi gunner

THE HUGE TURBINE HALL starts to rumble and hum as if an electri- cal storm is gathering, streaks of noise flashing back and forth across the lighting gantries high above us, swelling steadily until they finally resolve into an imperious motorik bassline and the mighty speaker stacks start to pick out the individual chatterings of the 8o8 snares, splashing them around the room like a shower of hailstones in the wind. The sound system breathes sub-bass frequencies through our stomachs and fusillades of percussion detonate like mortar shells as the treble notes soar and swoop around our heads while the next sonic surge begins to gather force before crashing down hard yet again. We are many hours deep into it now, and the music has grown wilder and looser, careening maniacally like the whirling of a dervish troupe as night becomes day in the perpetual darkness of a place where time has lost all meaning and reality slipped away into the shadows long ago. Angular, sculpted girls and boys are spinning out right at the centre, right in that sweet spot where the sound is at its most exquisite, top- knots sprouting at outlandish angles from shaven heads as their hands slice abstract patterns into the low-rolling cloud of dry ice, smiling just tor each other and yet consumed in the mass by the magic of this col- lective ritual that has somehow in this moment at least - connected us all.

As the hours pass, it feels like some kind of psychological barrier has been breached and all the repressed fantasies are pouring out and eve- ryone has somehow dissolved into the mass, into the music itself... and in the darkened alcoves and secluded cloisters, the boys are snorting and sucking greedily, babbling and philosophising and declaring their love and vowing eternal friendship and saying all those other things that need to be said before the long night's journey into day is finally Over.

Something seems to be deeply amiss in what we imagine our tools are tor. This thought has crept up on me in recent years as I've watched as new technologies - particularly the most novel and 'intelligent' ones - are used to undermine and usurp human joy, security and even lite itself. I'm not the only one to think this. The ways in which the devel- opment of these supposedly intelligent tools might harm, efface and ultimately supplant us has become the subject of a wide field of study, involving computer scientists, programmers and technology firms, as well as theorists and philosophers of machine intelligence itself. ridi for the AI is E th

One of most dramatic of these possible futures is described in som: thing called the paperclip hypothesis. It goes like this. Imagine apit of intelligent software- an Al-designed to optimize the manutactut of paperclips, an apparently simple and harmless business goal. T: software might begin with a single factory: automating the produ itlet tion line, negotiating better deals with suppliers, securing more outie for its wares. As it reaches the limits of a single establishment, it mg

Rave On quotes

Join the club