Dance Music Culture Research Articles

Imagined possibilities and bodily feelings embedded in personal fashion archives

This article examines the significance of the body and its sensory and embodied aspects associated with a historical milieu and set of practices associated with ‘rave’ subculture and its relationship to fashion creativity. It focuses on a personal fashion archive that documents menswear designed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Using an autoethnographic approach, the study investigates how the design of the garments in the archive was shaped by ways of experiencing and understanding the body that integrated the embodied experiences of moving and dancing with electronic music, the embodied experience of dressing, and the embodied experiences of designing men’s fashion in the years that followed. While rave and electronic dance music cultures received considerable scholarly attention in the mid- to late 1990s, less attention was devoted to men’s fashion and the interaction between fashion design, embodied experience and the rave sensoria. Moreover, while this study lays at the intersection rave and electronic dance music culture, fashion and design, all of which are understood to have European and North American origins, the article considers the way those practices took a unique shape within an Australian context. The contribution aims to provide insight into fashion as part of situated and embodied practices, that take place in local milieus, and the way fashion creativity can be understood not as surface ‘ripples’ moving out from global fashion centres or trickle-down versions of ‘authentic’ fashion developed elsewhere, but as fashion creativity, shaped by global forces, energies, and technologies, and embodied and enacted via local manifestations.

The Cultural Treasures of Baima Tibetan Folk Songs in Gansu Province, China, as a Resource for Literacy Education in Chinese Music History

Baima Tibetan folk songs are an integral part of the Baima Tibetan music culture. They are performed in diverse styles, including solo, duet, lead singing, round singing, and chorus. The objective of the study was to explore the significance of Baima Tibetan folk songs as a resource for literacy education in Chinese music history. By engaging with key informants divided into three groups - scholar informants, casual informants, and general informants. The result of this study reveals that ritual music holds deep roots in religious beliefs and is performed during sacrificial ceremonies, marriage ceremonies, and funeral ceremonies. Dance music culture reflects the collective nature and community cohesion of the Baima people, with dances like the fire circle dance serving as prominent expressions. Folk songs encompass a wide range of themes, including labor, wine, wedding, and love, showcasing the diverse musical expressions within Baima Tibetan society. The unique rituals, dances, and songs of the Baima people contribute significantly to the preservation and celebration of their rich cultural heritage. This study highlights the educational potential of Baima Tibetan folk songs as valuable resources for promoting literacy and understanding in the context of Chinese music history.

Is there an Indian way of raving? Reading the cultural negotiations of Indian youth in the trans-local EDM scene

ABSTRACT In India, the past two decades have been crucial for the growing popularity of Electronic Dance Music (EDM). This is largely due to the burgeoning presence and significance of EDM festivals as a performative site of a contemporary Indian youth culture. A salient feature capturing the zeitgeist of twenty-first century, urban, modern Indian youth is EDM’s gradual permeation into the cultural fabric of India through crucial collaborations with cultural industries like Bollywood. It is a truism that the legacy of Goa Trance remains a dominant point of reference in the global imagination of the Indian EDM scene. This article, however, argues that the contemporary mode of Indian Electronic Dance Music Culture (EDMC) has largely developed independently of this legacy. The main proponent of contemporary EDMC in urban India has been the multiple greenfield EDM festivals held annually all over the country. This article draws on fieldwork data collected between 2016-2018 at Indian EDM festival sites. Using this empirical data, the article examines the ‘performance’ of Indian EDMC and considers whether it is viable to speak in terms of an Indian way of raving, as a variation of other ‘local’ ways of performing EDMC that may exist elsewhere in the world.

Rave Racing

In the origin story of futuristic racing game WipEout (Psygnosis, 1995), co-creator Nick Burcombe talks about turning down the game audio in Super Mario Kart (Nintendo, 1992) and substituting it for his own electronic dance music. Burcombe, who was himself a keen participant in the Liverpool rave scene, argues that people who went clubbing in the 1990s were always looking for new forms of interactive entertainment. WipEout, where players take control of anti-gravity ships and race them to the electronic dance music tracks of artists like Cold Storage, The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, and Orbital, was that next step in interactive entertainment.For its marketing campaign, WipEout’s packaging took its inspiration from dance music records and PlayStation installed consoles in nightclubs across the UK. In the follow-up to the original, WipEout 2097 or WipEout XL in North America (Psygnosis, 1996), players could put the game disk into a CD player and hear the soundtrack play out in its entirety, separate from the gameplay. Through a close textual analysis of the first and second versions of the game released on PlayStation, created as they were at the height of electronic dance music culture in the UK in the 1990s, and grounded in popular music studies and ludomusicology, this article inquires into the construction of the video game soundtrack, arguing that WipEout’s audiovisual relationship creates a space where players can become immersed in a rave-related experience of techno in their homes.The research finds that Burcombe and the team at Psygnosis set out not to replicate the rave experience in their video game. Rather, in WipEout, dance music is used to immerse players in a mediated extension of the contemporary UK rave venue or club. As players move their racers onscreen, they engage in actions that edge them closer to the game’s soundtrack itself, in its use of repetition and pulsating beats, as an embodied or corporeal performance. Rather than dancing to rave, WipEout’s players are gaming to techno.

Records as records: excavating the DJ’s sonic archive

ABSTRACT This paper uses four vinyl record collections to identify and infer the praxis of DJs and the evidential value of their sonic archives. The work positions the DJs’ vinyl records as a document of dance music culture while defining the DJ as the arbiter and transmitter of that record. The work adopts an archaeological perspective, questioning how to understand a DJ’s praxis from the material culture of their vinyl records, viewing these records as artefacts which together form an assemblage warranting ‘excavation,’ analysis and curation. A framework of evidence is proposed and applied to the four vinyl collections, focusing on what can be learnt from such close archaeological scrutiny. The work concludes with a discussion of themes suggested by the analysis and proposes a proactive approach to planning for the preservation of DJ archives.

‘House is not universal. House is hyper-specific’: dance music sequences and affect in 120 BPM and Eden

ABSTRACT Dance floor sequences in narrative film are often directly informed by an oversimplified heteronormative interpretation of the Peace Love Unity and Respect ethos. Among the growing body of films that have dance floor sequences, 120 BPM (2017) stands in direct opposition to this construction. After an initial discussion of how identity and dance music intersect in 120 BPM and the contemporaneous French film Eden (2014), this article will centrally focus on the way the former film subverts three core features that are prevalent in the latter: the centrality of the DJ, a superficial engagement with the political dimension of dance music culture and a literal interaction between the dance floor space and the rest of the narrative. I will argue that by subverting these structural markers, 120 BPM not only distances itself stylistically from Eden, but also locates the club as a specifically queer space. Simultaneously, this paper will engage with the role of affect within these sequences. By illustrating how 120 BPM combines both emotional and affective strategies, I will argue that the film’s presentation of the dance floor space contextualizes how dance music culture and HIV/AIDS activism relate to one another.

White Label

White Label

Part of the Tribe: Crews, Residence, and Affiliation in Underground Dance Music Scenes

With diverse roots including the Jamaican sound system, the New York hip-hop collective, and the UK rave crews of the early 1990s, the event ‘crew’ is an important organising force in contemporary electronic dance music cultures. These small groups of individuals are responsible for bringing together performers, audience, equipment, and venue. This is rarely profitable and in fact tends to incur losses – most crewmembers willingly put in their time and effort for free. This work is vital to the maintenance of local EDM scenes; however, it has often gone unnoticed by scholars and the media. Drawing on my recent research into psychedelic trance (psytrance) culture in Bristol, UK, this paper details the activities of three urban event crews in a thriving local scene. It then looks at the concepts of ‘residence’ and ‘affiliation’ which denote formal or quasi-formal relationships between artists, crews, and record labels. Throughout, the paper aims to illuminate the role that these relationships play in musical careers and the structure of music scenes more widely.

Have Things Really Changed, or Is It Just Me? Ageing and Dance Music Culture

Have Things Really Changed, or Is It Just Me? Ageing and Dance Music Culture

Being and Performing "Older" Woman in Electronic Dance Movement Culture

This article foregrounds the accounts of a cohort of clubbers who are largely ignored both by journalists and scholars alike. Grounded in the accounts of aging female clubbers and their participation in electronic dance music culture, it investigates the lived experience of being and performing the category of ‘older woman’ in this context. It examines the materiality of their participation and their tactical responses to being in an environment that has been associated traditionally with youth. In a landscape where scholarship on female participation in club cultures is, at best, scarce, research into the experiences of older women in dance music culture is virtually non-existent. As such this article represents a first step in addressing a significant gap in understanding women’s engagement with dance cultures as they mature.

Forty-Seven DJs, Four Women: Meritocracy, Talent, and Postfeminist Politics

In 2016, only four of forty-seven DJs booked for Musikkfest, a festival in Oslo, Norway, were women. Following this, a local DJ published an objection to this imbalance in a local arts and entertainment magazine. Her editorial provoked booking agents to defend their position on the grounds that they prioritise skill and talent when booking DJs, and by implication, that they do not prioritise equality. The booking agents’ responses, on social media and in interviews I conducted, highlight their perpetuation of a status quo in dance music cultures where men disproportionately dominate the role of DJing. Labour laws do not align with this cultural attitude: gender equality legislation in Norway’s recent history contrasts the postfeminist attitudes expressed by dance music’s cultural intermediaries such as DJs and booking agents. The Musikkfest case ultimately shows that gender politics in dance music cultures do not necessarily correspond to dance music’s historical associations with egalitarianism.

Introduction to Women and Electronic Dance Music Culture

Introduction to Women and Electronic Dance Music Culture

‘In dance we trust’: comparing trance-dance parties among secular and Orthodox Israeli youth

Israel is arguably a place where music-centred ‘trance-dance’ parties have attained their highest degree of national/cultural prominence, with these events being extremely popular in secular communities and even among Orthodox youth. Based on findings from ethnographic research, the article compares the core features – settings, participants and conduct – of trance parties for secular and Orthodox Israeli youth and examines the functions they perform for each group of partygoers. The findings point to variances in the cultural and personal needs that participation in trance parties fulfils for these disparate communities, which, accordingly, are reflected in their contrastive features. At the same time, both communities of partygoers paradoxically reproduce the very same attitudes and practices their participation intends to challenge, demonstrating that, unlike in other countries, the consumption of psychedelic electronic dance music culture in Israel is essentially devoid of subversive intentions.

Analysing the media discourses surrounding DJs as authentic performers and artists within electronic dance music culture magazines

This paper critically analyses how the media construct, consolidate and perpetuate discourses surrounding DJs as artists. It explores representations of their status and roles in a selection of dance music magazines (Mixmag and DJ Mag) and the links to wider ideologies concerning music and dance culture such as authenticity, originality, innovation, cultural progression and performance. It considers how the media bestow DJs with artistic credibility and authenticity in addition to the range and type of references used to position DJs within the cultural landscape and hierarchy of electronic dance music culture. Furthermore, it discusses their sensationalist construction as powerful performers and the links between DJ performances and wider discourses surrounding event experiences. This paper concludes that not only do the discourses perpetuated serve to elevate and sustain the cultural status of DJs, they also validate and perpetuate a wider range of ideological notions within dance music culture. It also highlights the power relations between authors, audiences, DJs and promoters and the media’s role in sustaining the social capital of different players, through projecting a vibrant and dynamic culture.

Yoga Jam: Remixing kīrtan in the Art of Living

Yoga Jam are a group of musicians from the United Kingdom who are active members of the Art of Living, a transnational Hindu-derived meditation group. Yoga Jam organize events—also referred to as yoga raves and yoga remixes—that combine Hindu devotional songs (bhajans) and chants (mantras) with modern Western popular musical genres, such as soul, rock, and particularly electronic dance music. This hybrid music is often played in a clublike setting, and dancing is interspersed with yoga and meditation. Yoga jams are creative fusions of what at first sight seem to be two incompatible phenomena—modern electronic dance music culture and ancient yogic traditions. However, yoga jams make sense if the Durkheimian distinction between the sacred and the profane is challenged, and if tradition and modernity are not understood as existing in a sort of inverse relationship. This paper argues that yoga raves are authenticated through the somatic experience of the modern popular cultural phenomenon of clubbing combined with therapeutic yoga practices and validated by identifying this experience with a reimagined Vedic tradition.

Benzodiazepine Dependence among Young Adult Participants in the Club Scene Who Use Drugs

ABSTRACTYoung adults ages 18–29 report the highest rates of benzodiazepine (BZD) misuse in the United States. The majority of club drug users are also in this age group, and BZD misuse is prevalent among participants in club scenes. This article examines BZD dependence and its correlates among young adult participants in the electronic dance music (EDM) culture in Miami, Florida, who use drugs. Structured interviews were with men and women (N = 356) ages 18 to 29 who reported regular attendance at EDM venues and recent use of both club drugs and BZDs. Prevalences of BZD-related problems were 12.6% for BZD dependence, 21.1% BZD abuse, and 24.2% BZD abuse and/or dependence. In a multivariate logistic regression model, younger age (OR 0.85; 95% CI 0.76, 0.96), severe mental distress (OR 8.30; 95% CI 3.07, 22.49), daily marijuana use (OR 2.10; 95% CI 1.03, 4.27), and heavy opioid use (OR 2.33; 95% CI 1.12, 4.83) were associated with BZD dependence. BZD dependence was higher in this sample than in other populations described in the literature. The links between BZD dependence, overdose history, and heavy opioid misuse are especially worrisome among this young sample. Recommendations for intervention and research are discussed.

Dancefloor-driven literature: subcultural big bangs and a new center for the aesthetic universe

AbstractThis paper sets coordinates squarely for Holleran's ‘aesthetic center of the universe’ – venturing towards the black hole of the nightclub dancefloor. Further, it will investigate those writers determined to capture the electronic essence of this at times alien dance music culture within the rather more earth-bound parameters of the written word. How might such authors write about something so otherworldly as the nightclub scene? How might they write lucidly and fluidly about the rigid, metronomic beat of electronic music? What literary techniques might they deploy to accurately recount in fixed symbols the drifting, hallucinatory effects of a drug experience? In an attempt to address these questions this paper will offer an altogether outerspace overview of this subculture and its fictional literary output.

The Aesthetics of Electronic Dance Music, Part I: History, Genre, Scenes, Identity, Blackness

Electronic dance music has much about it to interest philosophers. In this article, I explore facets of dance music cultures, using the issue of authenticity as a framing question. The problem of sorting real or authentic dance music from mainstream or commercial clubbing can be treated as a matter of history and genre-definition; as a matter of defining scenes or subcultures; and as a matter of blackness. In each case, electronic dance music, and critical discourse surrounding it, offers fresh illumination of aesthetic questions. I briefly characterise the main genres of dance music, match conversations about the hardcore continuum with philosophers’ accounts of genre, survey sociologists’ ways of thinking about cultures and their connections to taste and personal identity, and link criticisms that dance music now lacks blackness to conceptions of black aesthetics. This article is Part I of two; Part II focusses on dancers, DJs, and the aesthetics and ontology of dance music itself. Video abstract (click to view)

Entoptic Phenomena in Audio: Categories of Psychedelic Electroacoustic Composition

Altered states of consciousness (ASCs) are perceptual states, such as dream, delirium, or hallucination that fall beyond a commonly accepted normal waking consciousness. This article discusses Entoptic Phenomena in Audio, a collection of four electroacoustic compositions that are based upon the author’s research regarding these states. The compositional process utilised involves consideration of the typical features and structure of hallucinatory experiences, as described by participants in psychological studies and other available literature. Typical features of hallucination are then used to indicate the design of corresponding sonic materials, and the structure of the composition. This compositional process is described in detail, leading to a generalised structural approach for creating electroacoustic compositions based on ASCs, with several possible variations. In addition, the decision to present the works on 12″ vinyl is also discussed, as are the ways in which this project interfaces with electronic dance music culture.

Architekture and Teklife in the Hyperghetto

Analyzing “Footwork,” a form of electronic dance music local to South and West Chicago, and now also a major genre within the wider networks of dance music culture, this article presents an argument regarding the constitution of Footwork as black music. Focusing on the organizational, social, geographic, and aesthetic dynamics that reflect its status as “ghetto” music, the author makes the case that the question of its blackness needs to be understood in terms of the way that the sonic and performative qualities of Footwork mark a collective reconceptualization of the spatial and territorial modalities of race and class in the city.