Cyberia: Slipping Out of History

PART 3
Technoshamanism: The Transition Team
CHAPTER 9
Slipping Out of History

Much more than arenas for drug activism, Toon Town and other “house” events are Cyberia’s spiritual conventions. House is more than a dance craze or cultural sensation. House is cyberian religion. But the priests and priestesses who hope to usher in the age of Cyberia have problems of their own.

We’re at an early Toon Town–the night Rolling Stone came to write about Earth Girl and the Smart Bar. It’s their first party since one fateful night three weeks ago when their giant, outdoor, illegal rave got crashed by the cops and they lost thousands of dollars. Preston is still a little pissed at Heley over that mishap. The English newcomer got too ambitious, and now Preston and Diana’s baby, Toon Town, is in serious debt. They may never recover, and all Heley can think about are his damn cultural viruses. This used to be a dance club!

Heley’s in no mood for arguments now. It’s 11:00 p.m. Earth Girl hasn’t shown up with her bar–correction: with Toon Town’s bar. She isn’t picking up her phone. The laser is malfunctioning. It’s still early, but it’s already clear that either the owners of this venue or the hired doorpeople are stealing money. A Rolling Stone reporter is on his way to write about the Smart Bar, which is nowhere to be found. R.U. Sirius and Jas Morgan, the editors of Mondo 2000 magazine, arrive with about forty friends whom they’d like added to the guest list. Tonight is supposed to be a party for the new issue, but, on entering the club, R.U. Sirius announces that the real release party will happen in a few weeks at Toon Town’s competitor Big Heart City. Tonight is “just a party” that Mondo is co-sponsoring. News to Heley. News to Preston. News to Diana.

Bryan Hughes, the virtual reality guide, is setting up a VR demo on a balcony above the dance floor. Along with his gear he’s brought a guest list of several hundred names. Cap’n Crunch, notorious reformed hacker and the original phone phreaque, and his assistant are trying to hook up his Video Toaster, but the projector isn’t working. The place is buzzing, but Heley is not. Perched on a balcony overlooking the dance floor, he looks away from the confusion, takes off his glasses, and pinches the bridge of his nose. He’s angry. Chris–the future nutrient king–mixes Heley a special concoction of pyroglutamate to take the edge off the apparent conflux of crises.

Diana and Preston are running around with wires and paperwork, arguing about the limits of the building’s voltage. They perform much more actual physical business than Heley does, but they know, even begrudgingly, that he’s engaged in an equally important preparation, so they give him all the space he needs. Heley is the technoshaman. He is the high priest for this cybermass, and he must make an accurate forecast of the spiritual weather before it begins. He is guiding the entire movement through a dangerous storm. But instead of using the stars for navigation, he must read the events of the week, the status of key cultural viruses, the psychological states of his crewmembers, and the tone and texture of his own psychedelic visionquests. Tonight, most of Heley’s calculations and intuitions indicate doom. He brought cyber house to San Francisco and was willing to man the helm, but now it’s getting out of control.

“I brought the house thing to Mondo, I did their article, and I introduced them to it.” Their disloyalty, Heley feels, has undermined his efforts to bring real, hard-core, spiritual, consciousness-raising cyber-influenced house to America. “Sometimes I just feel like there’s only fifteen of us really doing this. There’s Fraser Clark in England, who does Evolution magazine, there’s me, there’s Nick from Anarchic Adjustment, Jody Radzik, Deee-Lite. I don’t mean that we’re creating it, but we are painting the signs. We’re indicating the direction.” Heley looks down at the confusion of people, machinery, and wires on the dance floor and sighs. “God knows what direction this is pointing in.”

It was about three weeks ago that things began to get messy. Heley, Preston, and Diana had arranged a huge “rave”–a party where thousands take E and dance to house, usually outside, overnight, and illegally–at an abandoned warehouse and yard. A club competing for the same business on Saturday night found their map point (a small hand-out circulated through the underground community indicating where the party was to be held) and notified the police, who were more than willing to shut it down. Heley recounts the bust with the conviction of a modern-day Joan of Arc.

“They arrived and they only saw people having a good time. People having a party. There’s no rational argument they can make against us. They smell it. They smell it and they understand.”

Heley swigs down the rest of his pyroglutamate and soon appears to have gained a new clarity and, along with it, a new reason to fight on. “This is not a countermovement. It is the shape of the thing that will replace them. But it will be painless for them. It’s not a thing to be frightened of. If you’re frightened of acceptance, yes, be afraid because this thing is a reintegration. The trouble is that it just dissolves the old lies–all the things you just know are untrue. We’re not living that life anymore. You can only live the old lies when the rest of the paraphernalia is in place. Really, house just destroys that. It’s not a reactionary thing.”

Let’s leave Toon Town for a moment to get a look at the history of this thing called “house.” Most Americans say it began in Chicago, where DJs at smaller, private parties and membership-only clubs (particularly one called The Warehouse) began aggressively mixing records, adding their own electronic percussion and sampling tracks, making music that–like the home-made vinaigrette at an Italian restaurant–was called “house.” The fast disco and hip-hop—influenced recordings would sample pieces of music that were called “bites” so (others spell it “bytes,” to indicate that these are digital samples that can be measured in terms of RAM size). Especially evocative bites were called “acid bites.” Thus, music of the house, made up of these acid bites, became known as “acid house.”

When this sound got to England, it was reinterpreted, along with its name. Folklore has it that industrial (hard, fast, high-tech, and psychedelic) music superstar Genesis P. Orridge was in a record store when he saw a bin of disks labeled “acid,” which he figured was psychedelic music–tunes to play while on LSD. He and his cohorts added their own hallucinogenic flavor to the beats and samples, and British acid house was born.

“When I heard acid house music would be playing, I figured for sure they meant it was a psychedelic dance club–music to take acid to,” explains Lyle, an ex-punker from Brixton who has followed the house scene since its beginnings in the suburbs of London. “It began on an island, Ibetha, off the coast of Spain. Everyone goes there on holiday, does Ecstasy, and stays up all night. We got back to England and decided we didn’t want to give it up and started raving on the weekends.”

Lyle’s explanation is as good as any for how raves got started. These Woodstock-like fests begin on a Friday evening and carry on through Sunday afternoon. Dancing is nonstop. They became most popular in the late 1980s, when thousands of cars could be seen on any weekend heading toward whichever suburb–Stratford, Brighton–was hosting the party. Police began cracking down on them in 1990 or so, but then they went legit by renting out permitted club space. News of raves eventually rebounded to the United States, where the original house clubs began to incorporate the British hallucinogenic style and substances. San Francisco, where psychedelics are still the most popular, was most receptive to the new movement, which is why Heley and other English ravers wound up there.

As Heley suggests, there’s more to raves and house than meets the eye. Coming to an understanding of the house phenomenon requires a working knowledge of the new technology, science, and drugs that shape Cyberia, as well as an awareness of the new spiritual dimension (or perhaps archaic spiritual revival) arising out them. Just as the new, quantum sciences and chaos mathematics developed out of the inability of materialist models to effectively map our reality, house is meant as a final reaction to the failings of a work ethic—based, overindustrialized culture.

The ravers see themselves and the creation of their subculture as part of the overall fractal equation for the postmodern experience. One of the principles of chaos math, for example, is phase-locking, which is what allows the various cells of an organism to work harmoniously or causes a group of women living together to synchronize their menstrual cycles. Phase-locking brings the participants–be they atoms, cells, or human beings–into linked cycles that promote the creation of a single, interdependent organism where feedback and iteration can take place immediately and effectively. A phase-locked group begins to take on the look of a fractal equation, where each tiny part reflects the nature and shape of the larger ones.

Members of rave culture phase-locked by changing their circadian rhythms. They self-consciously changed their basic relationship to the planet’s movements by sleeping during the day and partying all night. As Heley says in defiance: “It’s in the face of the network that tells you seven to eight-thirty is prime time. You sleep during prime time. You share the same place physically as that society, but you’re actually moving into a different dimension by shifting through the hours. It’s an opportunity to break out from all the dualistic things.”

Of course, sleeping days and partying nights is just as dualistic as working days and sleeping nights, but the point here is that the “dualistic things” considered important by mainstream culture are not hard realities, and they are certainly not the “best” realities. Ravers were able to create a subculture different from the work-a-day society in which they had felt so helpless. They used to be the victims of a top-down hierarchy. As the poor workers to a mean boss or the powerless kids to a domineering father or even the working class to a rigid monarchy, they were just numbers in an old-style linear math equation. Now, phase-locked as part of a living, breathing fractal equation, they feel more directly involved in the creation of reality.

“When you move away from a massive guilt trip in which there is a direct hierarchy, you suddenly find that it doesn’t matter a fuck what your boss or the authorities think of you. You’re creating yourself moment by moment in an environment that is created by people who are like-minded. It’s a liberation, and it’s completely in the face of twentieth-century society.”

The ultimate phase-locking occurs in the dance itself, where thousands of these “like-minded” young people play out house culture’s tribal ceremony. The dance links everyone together in a synchronous moment. They’re on the same drugs, in the same circadian rhythm, dancing to the same 120-beat-per-minute soundtrack. They are fully synchronized. It’s at these moments that the new reality is spontaneously developed.

“The dance empowers you. It reintegrates you. And then you can start again. It’s an ancient, spiritual thing. It’s where we have always communicated to each other on the fullest level. Instead of being in this extremely cerebral, narrow-bandwidth-television society, people learn instead to communicate with their bodies. They don’t need to say anything. There is just a bond with everyone around them. A love, an openness. If you look at a society as repressed as England, you see how much impact that can have.”

The various forms of social repression in England, along with its own deeply rooted pagan history, made it the most fertile soil in which house could grow. As Heley shares: “I felt it was slipping out of history. That this was an alternative history.”

House became massive in England. News of raves was always spread precariously by word of mouth or tiny flyers, but somehow everyone who needed to know what was happening and where, found out. Either one knew what was happening or one didn’t. It was as simple as that. By the end of the 1980s, house was everywhere in the United Kingdom, but it had never seen the light of day. Tens of thousands of kids were partying every weekend. Mainstream culture was not even aware of their existence. By the time the tabloids caught on and published their headlines proclaiming the arrival of house, the ravers had realized they’d gone off the map altogether.

Off the Map and into the Counterculture

Today, the English house scene still defines the pulse for other house-infected cities. Whether through the brain-drain of emigrees like Heley or the exportation of London-mixed dance tracks, Great Britain still holds the most coherently articulated expression of the house ethic. While there’s less technology, fewer gays, and fewer smart chemicals at London clubs, there’s a much clearer sense of house’s role as a countercultural agent.

Some argue that this is because London’s morphogenetic field of counterculture is more developed than America’s. London’s pagan cultures have endured centuries of repression and distillation. Their phase-locking was probably achieved somewhere in the twelfth century. Symbols and even personalities from ancient pagan times still live in London house.

One such pagan hero is Fraser Clark, a self-proclaimed psychedelic warrior from the 1960s who began Encyclopaedia Psychedelica magazine, which has since mutated into London house culture’s `zine Evolution. At his London flat, which he shares with two or three students half his age, the long-haired Welshman rolls some sort of cigarette and explains to me what’s happening. From the British perspective, this is a historical battle for religious freedom.

“A kid grows up in a Christian culture and thinks he’s probably the only one questioning these ideas. When he comes to house,” the English are found of using the word alone like that, as if it’s a religion, “he suddenly realizes he’s got a whole alternative history. He might get into UFOs or whatever there is–drugs, witches, it’s all in there.”

And all quite accessible. To participate in this experience of resonance, each participant must feel like part of the source of the event. Where a traditional Christian ritual is dominated by a priest who dictates the ceremony to a crowd of followers, pagan rituals are free-for-alls created by a group of equals. For house events to provide the same kinds of experiences, they had to abandon even traditional rock and roll concert ethos, which pedestals a particular artist and falls into the duality of audience and performer, observer and object. The house scene liberates the dancers into total participation. Fraser, whose new club UFO opens tonight, explains the advantages of a no-star system:

“Nobody is that much better than the next guy that he needs a whole stage and twenty thousand people fillin’ up a stadium to see him. Nobody’s that much better than the audience. We don’t need that and people don’t want it anymore. A lot of the music you’ll hear tonight is never gonna be on a record. Kids just mix it the week before and play it that one night.”

So the house movement is determined to have no stars. It is “in the face” of a recording industry that needs egos and idolatry in order to survive. It depends, instead, on a community in resonance. The fractal equation must be kept in balance. If one star were to rise above the crowd, the spontaneous feedback creating the fractal would be obliterated. The kids don’t want to dance even facing their partners, much less a stage. Everyone in the room must become “one.” This means no performers, no audience, no leaders, no egos. For the fractal rule of self-similarity to hold, this also means that every house club must share in the cooperative spirit of all clubs. Even a club must resist the temptation to become a “star.” Every club and every rave must establish itself as part of one community, or what Fraser calls “the posse.”

“It looks sort of like a tribe, but a tribe is somehow geographically separate from the main culture.” Fraser finishes his cigarette and feeds his dog some leftover Indian food from dinner. “A posse is very definitely an urban thing. It’s just a group of people, sharing technology, sharing all the raves and music as an organization. We even call them `posses putting on raves.’ I really don’t think there’s such a thing as personal illumination anymore. Either everybody gets it or nobody gets it. I really think that’s the truth.”

UFO, a collective effort of Fraser’s posse, opens in an abandoned set of train tunnels at Camden Lock market. This English party is not at all like a San Francisco or even a New York club. It is an indoor version of the old-style massive outdoor raves. The clothing is reminiscent of a Dead show, but maybe slightly less grungy. Batik drawstring pants, jerseys with fractal patches, love beads, dredlocks, yin-yang T-shirts, and colorful ski caps abound. In the first tunnel, kids sit in small clusters on the dirt floor, smoking hash out of Turkish metal pipes, sharing freshly squeezed orange juice, and shouting above the din of the house music. In one corner, sharply contrasting the medieval attire, ancient stone, and general filth, are a set of brain machines for rent. In the second tunnel, dozens of kids dance to the throbbing house beat. Even though we’re in a dungeon, there’s nothing “down” about the dancing. With every one of the 120 beats per minute, the dancers articulate another optimistic pulse. Up up up up. The hands explode upward again and again and again. No one dances sexy or cool. They just pulse with the rhythm, smile, and make eye contact with their friends. No need for partners or even groups. This is a free-for-all.

A cluster of young men are hovering near the turntables with the nervous head-nodding and note-taking of streetcorner bookies. They are the DJs, who are each scheduled to spin records for several hours until the party breaks up at dawn. Tonight’s music will be mostly hard-core, techno-acid—style house, but there are many house genres to choose from. There’s “bleep,” which samples from the sounds of the earliest Pong games to extremely high-tech telephone connection and modem signals. New York house, or “garage” sound, is more bluesy and the most soulful; it uses many piano samples and depends on mostly black female singers. There’s also “headstrong” house, for the hardest of headbangers; “techno,” from Detroit; “dub,” coined from Gibson’s Neuromancer for Reggae-influenced house; and “new beat,” from Northern Europe. Less intense versions of house include “deep” house, with more space on the top layers and a generally airier sound, and the least throbbing kind, and “ambient” house, which has no real rhythm at all but simply fills the space with breathy textures of sound. Of course, any or all of these styles may be combined into a single song or mix, along with samples of anything else: Native American “whoops,” tribal chanting, evangelists shouting, or even a state trooper calling a mother to inform her “your son is dead.”

The DJs consider themselves the technoshamans of the evening. Their object is to bring the participants into a technoshamanic trance, much in the way ancient shamans brought members of their tribes into similar states of consciousness. A DJ named Marcus speaks for the group:

“There’s a sequence. You build people up, you take `em back down. It can be brilliant. Some DJs will get people tweaking into a real animal thing, and others might get into this smooth flow where everyone gets into an equilibrium with each other. But the goal is to hit that magical experience that everyone will talk about afterwards. Between 120 beats a minute and these sounds that the human ear has never heard before, you put them to music and it appeals to some primal level of consciousness.”

If it didn’t, house would never had made it across the Atlantic to America, where it could manifest not only on a primal level but a marketing one.

386 comments September 1st, 2005