ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most important laboratory is one not mentioned by Kodwo Eshun, in More Brilliant Than the Sun (see chapter 5)—namely, the emerging communities in which ravers are attempting to integrate the rave experience into the nitty-gritty details of their daily lives. Rave communities provide a working context in which this integration can take place—through a supportive network of like-minded fellow travelers, through ongoing events and activities informed by rave culture, through organizational structures that are more concrete and lasting, and through a sense of ongoing spiritual and religious fellowship:
It's more a part of my life than I thought it could be before. It's taken a whole other realm of meaning that's beyond music—the sense of building community, having an impact in the world, how do you live the lessons of community outside and spread the gospel…. To me, while the rave scene, while the music and everything is very, very important, what I've come out of the experience having is it was an enabler to create community and to explore what community really is. We all know that music is a great way to bring people together, but in this case, it feels like it's not the end-all and be-all, it's not where the experience ends. It's just a catalyst to create the experience to make the spark happen and then there's all the stuff that happens beyond that when you stick with the connections that you make…. 1
This is no longer a new experience for me in certain ways and it's come to the point where I'm helping create the reality I want to create with that medium of dance culture—being a part of collectives, being a part of communities and networks where people strive towards some sort of goal with it all, whether it be creating change or creating a more spiritual sense of community. And we have a very unique culture in that we're not quite a dance scene, in the sense that we're not just a scene, we're a community. And as far as communitarian movements, we're not quite your average community because we're based in this common ground of partying together. 2
I think that's where community becomes a strong force in the process because, whereas the drug became the binding catalyst for this unified experience, in the new form I sense it's the community, the group of people that have done the work, that have created the increasing closeness, the sympathetic resonance, that when you come together and create, they actually are creating a field…. New seeds have been brought to the table that whole communities are emerging around and new manifestations…. I've always said that when the economics crashes, it will actually be the community that stands…. And I think they will have the transformational significance that was at the root of the original rave scene…. The real evolving communities, you can see it in the individuals in the community, that they'rre growing, they'rre becoming stronger. These communities, over a long period of time, will have more economic and social impacts, will have more interlaced networks amongst other communities. That they actually, because of the nature of how they were formed, they have an interest in the workings of the world, and are willing and interested in impacting it in positive ways. 3
