From the shaman to the raver: electronic music between primitivism and ecstasy

An anthropological reflection on the collective enjoyment of electronic music and on the phenomenon of "raves": from the ritualistic tribalism of the group to the "invasion", from the "death of the ego" to the ecstatic possibility. 

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di Robert Siconolfi

 

Net of mythicizations towards what is mostly psychic and physical destruction and prejudicial reasoning related to tastes and lifestyles, we can define techno music - and, more generally, electronic - and the phenomenon of rave (literally "go delirious") one of the most interesting sub-cultural, musical and youth movements of the last 30 years. We exclude from this analysis the premises of the Dance and the House and also the notably descending parable in which this movement falls, and we exclude many of the genres and styles that are not very interesting for our type of correlations.

In particular, to grasp the hidden or "metaphysical" sides we should devote ourselves to that whole picture defined as "acid", which was born on the basis of the House movement, in Chicago in the second half of the 80s and later developed in England. This scene catches on with the Acid House movement, and with the spread of the so-called psychotropic substance Ecstasy, which is a family of sister substances, the most important of which is MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine), a methamphetamine that has similarities to both amphetamine and mescaline. It was first synthesized by Merck laboratories in 1912 and had his first employment for war purposes in the First World War, and in the 70s for psychoanalytical activities. This correlation with a stimulating substance (amphetamine) and a psychedelic (mescaline) - to which is added the increase in introspective and contact capacities with the outside world, typical of entactogenic or empathogenic substances - favors the reverberation from the psychic point of view of the continuous and ecstatic rhythm of House music, and more generally of Techno.

In fact, on the one hand we have the stimulating effect that keeps you physically awake for hours and hours in order to face the dance, on the other hand we have the psychedelic part useful to favor the sensory expansion of the mind. To complete the whole, the empathogenic side, which makes you feel internally "connected to a whole" in a kind of "universal" and "neighbor" love. According to some medical neurological reconstructions carried out on brains under the effect of the substance, unlike a Speed-type methamphetamine, Ecstasy follows a circular path rather than a linear one, in the movement of brain neurotransmitters. The thing therefore achieves a precise correspondence between the continuous rhythm of the straight drum, that is the great electronic drum case used in the rhythmic parts of this genre of music, and the continuous movement of dance and cerebral connections. These, moving in a circular way, in fact, favor the absorption of loop, that is the musical part that is repeated continuously in House music as in the different types of Techno and electronic music.

From here we could find an opening to the ecstatic and in some ways, to the tribalistic, or the shamanic, as for example in the case of the Tribe genus and for all the experience of the Free Parties and Technival, that is the free-spirited rave party, of an illegal - clandestine - type, sometimes free and lasting for several days. The Tribe genus was born with the parable of the Spiral Tribe, and of the Tekinval in fact. Starting from the 90s some English producers and musical DJs gave life to the first Tribe, the Spiral, that is a collective of musicians and the like who travel around the United Kingdom, and subsequently for Europe and the rest of the world, equipping their own Sound System, or the audio system and machinery in isolated places, without legal authorizations, and in a self-managed way. to produce and play music (cymbals, drum machines, synthesizers, virtual instruments, etc.).

Another interesting genre linked to the Free Party movement is that Goa Trance, born in the Indian state of Goa, reputed to be the hippie mecca in the 60s-70s. It is interesting for this type of examination as it is a genre imbued with spiritualism, musically very psychedelic, and whose "fluorescent" aesthetic atmospheres they open the imagination and the mind of the participants to ecstatic and psychedelic experiences, in fact.

On the opposite side, both for settings and for basic "spiritual" fluids, is the genre Hardcore, of which only some sub-genres are played in Free Parties, such as Industrial and Frenchcore. It is much more based on a certain "Sonorous nihilism", given by the hard distortion of the bass drum (Kick) and by the high number of BPM. Even the environments are marked by particularly lucubrious atmospheres and decidedly less welcoming than both the Goa and the Tribe genre. Obviously this in addition to the main genre (main), mostly linked to the Gabber movement and to identity and "stadium" themes, which present a certain ritualistic and "group" tribalism in some ways interesting.

Returning to the Free Party, one of the specific traits of this trend is the "nomadism". It is of a physical type, revealing the old experiences of musical nomadism carried out by the hippies - who first gave birth to the movement of traveler - and blues and psychedelic rock festivals. Hence the name Teknival, with the progressive introduction of Tekno within the festival, and the birth of the "tekno traveler”, That is, of the travelers who organize Teknival. But nomadism is also, or above all, psychic, as reported by Hoakim Bay, one of the reference writers of the entire Tekno movement, in his famous “TAZ”. This abbreviation stands for Temporary Autonomous Zone (Temporarily Autonomous Areas), a real "political" foundation on which the whole Teknival experience is based, but which draws inspiration from previous trends linked to particular blends of primitivistic and cybernetic anarchism.

In TAZ psychic nomadism is defined by Bay as a "Rootless cosmopolitanism", according to aspects discussed by Deleuze, Guattari and Lyotard. It is intended as a "post-ideological, multi-perspective worldview, capable of moving" uprooted "from philosophy to tribal myth, from natural science to Taoism". In short: "Gypsies, psychic travelers driven by desire or curiosity, wanderers with little loyalty (actually unfair to the" European project "which has lost all its vitality and charm) not tied to any particular time or place, in search of diversity and of adventure". They are:

"... nomads who practice raiding, they are privateers, they are viruses, they need and want TAZ, fields of black tents under the desert stars, interzones, fortified oases hidden along secret caravans, parts of jungles and" liberated "plains, forbidden areas, black markets and underground bazaars. These nomads trace their paths with strange stars, which may be bright data clusters in cyberspace, or perhaps hallucinations. "

Always of "contemporary" shamanism Mark speaks of Spiral Tribe in a famous interview available on the internet. The spiral of the Spiral tribe, and more generally of the tekno rave movement, is an ancient symbol that symbolizes expansion, growth and development or the universe and infinity, the sun and its movement, the "Search for oneself". In reality, rather than real shamanism understood in the sense of religious or magical-ritual practice, we could speak of forms of "inferior" spirituality, assimilated to certain practices of Voodoo much analyzed by Guénon, or to macumba and disciplines based on trance.

"Magic people voodoo people”Sang The Prodigy, and we see that forms of invasion, of uncontrolled unleashing of ecstatic and disintegrating forces, through repetitive music or dance, are evident and similar to what Julius Evola thought of Jazz. Here, the desacralized environment and the absence of institutional frameworks or ritual traditions, atmospheres and orientations, did not create precise evocations but a kind of widespread and shapeless, primitivist and collective possession. In a similar way to the rave party, Evola always described the experiences, typical of beat concerts, with semi-ecstatic and hysterical openings of a shapeless convulsive escape and empty of content, a form of unconscious rapprochement with certain frenetic collective rites of antiquity, which still had a sacral fund. After all, it is evident how ai rave parties, not infrequently tragedies occur and we are not referring only to those of a spiritual nature but to those that are solid and physical - eg. deaths or "insanities" dictated by drug abuse.

The spiritual form in question is also the daughter of Chaos Magick of the 70s originated from Austin Osman Spare, influenced by Terence mckenna and from the psychedelia of the counter-culture, and of which important exponents were William burroughs e Timothy Leary.

At this point, we should distinguish the type of individual able to take on the "wave" of this experience, without being overwhelmed, and able to grow through the breaking of the "state of consciousness". A kind of challenge implemented thanks to experiences of this kind, able to bring to the surface its true being and to bring down the set of superstructures due to the current world, globalized and anesthetized in the technique and in the typical processes of neo- liberal. Given the point of decadence of Western civilization, if these "special" types were already few in the previous mass movement linked to Jazz and Rock'n'Roll ', we will understand that we are now talking about "rarity", which by "natural predisposition" “They are able to dominate experiences of this type, even realizing through them their own integration and individual asceticism.

About this we could draw a parallelism with the Aghoris, the Hindu sect of the eighteenth century that managed to obtain growth thanks to the use of substances, with "dark" experiences of all kinds and more precisely through the process of acceleration of the destructive processes called "Way of the Left Hand", aimed at a rapid overcoming of "states of consciousness".

This particular form of individual, however, is forged in the face of a mostly empty mass, completely anesthetized and psychically devastated by the use of drugs, which increasingly loses its originality, with the descending parable of the movement, and also of knowledge on the "what It really was this movement. As far as this type of "mass" and this terminal phase of the movement is concerned, it is the advent of the Ketamine, an anesthetic also used in veterinary medicine and known pharmacologically as Ketalar, Ketavet, etc. The effect it causes is a real one dissolution of individual consciousness, at basic levels of vital manifestation, such as "feeling like an atom". An experience that can also lead to near-death states "Near Death Experience" (NDE), the "tunnel" effect, typical of individuals in a comatose state and which, therefore, very well symbolizes a transition to dissolving states of being.

Other “historical” use substances are Lysergic Acid (LSD 25), and its dual action depending on the intensity: the desperate one - with distortions of the sensory capacity, especially sight and hearing -  and euphoric; the purely hallucinogenic one, in case of strong intensity of the substance - with an increase in sensory distortions, geometric and fractal hallucinations, distortion of awareness, sense of union with the surrounding environment, synaesthesia, ed ego loss (defined by Timoty Leary as  the loss of the ego). This second mode of effect, the strongest one to be clear, is the one capable of developing real psychedelic abilities, and is at least similar, in all respects, to the "out of body" experience - Out of body experience (OBE) -, to that of "Astral travel", and the ability to reach higher "planes of existence".

Returning to the aforementioned division, the mass movement that follows these genres, and in some ways the whole movement linked to dance, electronic and techno music - we distinguish in this case the general term from the specific "tekno" used before -  it fits perfectly into the prevailing nihilistic climate. There would be little to say but to highlight a perfect adherence to certain current transhumanistic dynamics - remember the role of cyber punk and of "accelerationism" in this direction. The "transhuman" is characterized precisely by the pervasive use of technology and its elevation to a real "Technological mystique", but also for the use of psychotropic substances and more generally for the debasement of awareness and identity.

A true anthropological change in progress linked to a clear qualitative reduction of human characteristics, unlike the Nietzschean figure of the “beyond man” or perhaps more properly in opposition to the figure of Vîra, the kind of Man of the Hindu tradition fully realized in himself. And in fact, the individual in question is heading precisely towards that "unconscious" humanity, debased in its essence, robotized, with no more cultural and traditional heritage to be handed down and in a final analysis dominated mentally, as well as physically by the "structure of power". Therefore, a true regression to the most elementary forms of life, however "complicated" by technology and by the harmful action of Man.

Even in this case, however, the differentiated individual, of which we spoke above, able to accept and overcome the challenges of dissolution, can reach another destination, in which accelerationism and transhumanism, lead to a "superior" development and returns to organic forms of society as in the solutions proposed by Nick Land or by movement Dark Enlightenment.

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Texts cited:

• Bey H., TAZ Temporarily autonomous zones, Milan, Shake Edizioni, 2007
• De Maistre L. L 'enigme Rene Guenon et les superieurs inconnus, Milan, Archè Edizioni, 2009
• Evola J., Riding the tiger. Existential orientations for an era of dissolution, Rome, Mediterranean Editions, 2009
• Evola J., The yoga of power, Rome, Mediterranean Editions, 2006
• TheThinyPage, Interview with Mark Harrison - Spiral Tribe, http://thetinypage.artathack.me/articoli/rave/int_markharrison.php

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