Dance like there's no tomorrow. Why raves no longer want to change the world.

Electronic trance, textures, loops and tickling patterns, synth oscillations, obsessive samples, expansive euphoria, rumbling beats of a tectonic bass drum, acid lights sweeping like a barcode reader and epileptic strobes. It doesn't matter whether they are ultra-fast tracks with a pounding pattern or syncopated and polyrhythmic breakbeats . The biorhythms seek to align themselves with the woofer bits, launched by the DJ, which accelerate as the hours pass, to accompany the tachycardia provoked by the MDMA high . Dozens or thousands of ravers vibrate on the dance floor, moving frenetically, driven by the drug-addicted hedonism and seismic sub-bass of techno.

Sirat, the much-vaunted film by Oliver Laxe , has sparked interest in the lives of New Travelers and rave culture, presented in the film as a place of ritual community and "healing wounds" through hypnotic dance, where the fusion with music and the earth produces a state of transient alienation and redemption . It is worth noting that dance, since ancient times, has been a means of trance, as in the whirling dance of the dervishes, Haitian Voodoo rituals, Cuban Santeria, or the ecstatic dances of sub-Saharan Africa, as well as repetitive practices such as mantra recitation in Hinduism or zikr in Sufi Islam. All of these sought to alter the mental state, removing the subject from learned logic and opening the way to the transcendent, which is much more accessible with the help of catalytic drugs. We know that the narrative of mystical ecstasy is useful when you are looking to get away from the world.

Not surprisingly, techno knowingly uses terms borrowed from mysticism to suggest all kinds of trances, collective communion, catharsis, rituals, ecstasy, and transcendence , while turning the dance floor into a temple and the DJ into an officiant, to arrive with a shotgun blast at the seventh abode or nirvana: cultures to the consumer's liking. As Simon Reynolds points out in his essential book, Energy Flash , a journey through rave and dance culture, "ultimately, this music is not about communication, but about communion."

Rave culture emerged in the mid-1980s through the exploration of non-normative identities and desires, fueled by electronic music born in the US, especially Chicago house and Detroit techno. According to Reynolds, “house music offered a sense of communion and community to those who might have been alienated from organized religion because of their sexuality,” a paradox that had already occurred in institutions like the YMCA (Young Men's Christian Association), where young people, under moral control, danced disobey. But techno sessions also had a political narrative. In Detroit, a place that had transformed from the capital of automobile manufacturing into a post-industrial wasteland marked by crime, degentrification, and abandonment, techno emerged, linked to experiences of post-Fordist marginalization and racial liberation. Cybotron, the band that birthed techno and began experimenting with synthesizers in an ambivalent mix of affordable technology worship and apocalyptic anxiety, sang on Cosmic Cars, “I wish I could escape this crazy place.”

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Towards the end of that decade, the movement crossed the Atlantic and flourished in places like Ibiza and the United Kingdom , where acid house became the soundtrack to the industrial crisis, the scourge of unemployment, the abandonment of neoliberal institutions, and the generational gap. As Reynolds explains, a collective experience of communion and the breaking down of social barriers was generated: people of different classes, races, and sexual orientations, who would never have interacted, merged in the trance of dance and shared affection . Rave culture was presented as an alternative way of life that, under the motto "Peace, Love, Unity, Respect" (PLUR), formed heterotopias in the Foucauldian sense, a paradise where no one is abnormal, according to McKenzie Wark, a trans cultural theorist and writer.

The collectivity in the rave, identified as the desiring machine, in the times when Deleuze and Guattari hit hard, was understood as an expansive force with political potential, because it was understood that electronic music manufactured and shaped the sounds of the technocratic future, when common life was still analog, in the same way that Russolo collected industrial noise in the avant-garde movements. It is not strange that the neo-reactionary philosopher of accelerationism , Nick Land, saw in jungle and breakbeat a form of collapse of rational thought, due to their impossible rhythms, which should give way to a posthuman experience where the machinic would take command to reach a new era, passing through the necessary collapse . It seems he had a good dealer .

The clandestinity of raves was further fueled by the police repression measures of Margaret Thatcher 's government, which allowed open-air gatherings to break up to the sound of "repetitive music," which, in turn, fostered progressive and broken rhythms. One event that highlighted this tension was the Castlemorton Common rave in 1992, a week-long free party attended by thousands of people that horrified the conservative press , which saw rave culture as a descent into the depths of drugs, unbearable noise, and the abandonment of all hygiene habits, like the toilet dive in Danny Boyle's film "Trainspotting." From then on, the legal and media persecution of the movement intensified. Reynolds points out that, in rave culture, the promise of absolute freedom contains, within it, a constant possibility of collapse, paranoia, and bewilderment: “There is a moment, intrinsic to all drug culture, in which the scene turns 'to the dark side.'”

At its peak in 1999, the Love Parade brought together 1.5 million people in central Berlin. In its early years, the event was considered a political demonstration and benefited from that legal status , until local residents grew fed up with the garbage, the decibels, and the sexual exhibitionism in front of minors, forcing the organizers to assume the costs of cleanup and security. In 2010, a stampede in Duisburg ended the utopia with 21 dead and more than 500 injured. It was thus clear that raves and techno music do not in and of themselves create spaces of openness , since that must be constructed each time, thus dismantling the discourse of the benefits of total liberation from the rational.

It was revealed that the dance floor's potential for social communion could be used for other purposes when, in 1992, at Rotterdam's Parkzicht club, the epicenter of gabba, Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva played to an audience chanting Nazi slogans, until they realized it. Towards the end of the 90s, the movement was integrated into the market and the technocratic utopia became a business dream, professionalizing in the form of macro-festivals such as Monegros, Medusa or Sónar today, with sponsors, VIP tickets and DJs turned into celebrities . While others, under names reminiscent of utopianism such as Tomorrowland or Pulse of Gaia, have transformed their principles into slogans of a facelift.

Some believed that "the end of capitalism" could be imagined at a rave, even if it was merely a shared sentiment, and the possibility of a future remained an expressive urgency. We might wonder, then, why so many young people today seek temporary escape at a rave every weekend, to rack their brains, if they've abandoned the idea of building a future. Young people no longer want to change the world, but rather briefly escape the exhaustion of knowing they can't . This dynamic is reinforced by the imperative of enjoyment in the form of consumption, also commercial, in an endless cycle of work and instant reward that drives them to live in the moment. They are no longer the hedonists Reynolds described, but a practical nihilist: they dance because they have lost their sense of purpose and can no longer believe. Therefore, for them, the perception of time is no longer linear, but has become cyclical, structured around the weekend, transformed into a ritual pause, where the system is temporarily suspended before restarting on Monday.