[Dancecult-l] Begoggled in the Megavibe: Burning Man

[Graham St John]

Friends

A new e-postcard on Burning Man @ edgecentral


Begoggled in the Mega-Vibe: Burning Man
http://edgecentral.blogspot.com/2007/11/begoggled-in-mega-vibe-burning-man.html

This post offers a brief history of electronic 
dance music culture at Burning Man, referencing 
vectors of resistance and expression within EDMCs 
that are explore further in my forthcoming book 
Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. Towards 
the end there's some loose comments about the 
curious interfacing of desert and city, as the 
begoggled second life merges with the first.

In attending to electronic dance music, I 
recognize that Burning Man is most certainly not 
a dance festival or a "rave", that it hosts many 
different styles of music, and is, moreover, a 
site of multiple performance genres, visionary 
and fire arts. At this point it should be noted 
that while Burning Man is frequented by a growing 
population of those who might identify as 
"technomadic" (i.e. geek nomads and mobile 
digerati whose "anywhere/anytime" internet 
connectivity enables rootless business and 
lifestyle practices), the "techno" explicit to my 
discussion is specifically related to electronic 
music practices.

Burning Man is an annual festival held on the 
vast canvas of an ancient lake bed (called the 
"playa") in the Black Rock Desert, northwestern 
Nevada. As an unparalleled universe of radical 
self-expression and non-dogmatic ritual initiated 
on San Francisco's Baker Beach by Larry Harvey 
and Jerry James in 1986, Burning Man would 
become, following its transition to the Black 
Rock Desert in 1990, an outlandish pilgrimage 
center for alternative art and performance 
communities in the Bay Area, the West Coast, 
across the US, and around the world. The event is 
backed by decades of Californian freaklore. In 
his discussion of the "cults of Burning Man", 
Erik Davis (2005: 17) outlines "cultural 
patterns" manifesting in this "promiscuous 
carnival of souls, a metaphysical fleamarket, a 
demolition derby of reality constructs colliding 
in a parched void". Refractions of Californian 
spiritual counterculture more generally, these 
milieus of participant gravitation-the Cult of 
Experience, the Cult of Intoxicants, the Cult of 
Flicker, the Cult of Juxtapose, and the Cult of 
Meaningless Chaos-are cultures of performance and 
praxis overlapping with on-site vibe tribes, and 
their variant styles and outrageous commitments.

With a diverse array of musics ranging from 
neo-tribal rhythms to breakbeat, hip hop to lofty 
intelligent soundscapes alongside jazz and punk 
rock etc, as Robert Kozinets and John Sherry 
(2004: 289) point out, "multiple musics 
demarcate, blend and merge on geographic 
boundaries, spilling into one another Š pooling 
into pure concentrations near encamped banks of 
speakers". In this staged city such "pure 
concentrations" may coincide with the 
concentrations of responsibility constituted in 
Dionysian, outlaw, exile, avant-garde, spiritual 
and other vectors emerging within electronic 
dance music culture and gaining admission to this 
outland. As an ocean of vibes orchestrated and 
nurtured by "tribes" trained in these "cultic" 
practices and amplifying variant audiotronics, 
this vast counter-matrix appears as a miscegeny 
of bright lights and sweet spots, a sonic 
hyper-liminal zone like that which I experienced 
on my initial visit to Black Rock City in 2003 
when I camped with the crew at Low Expectations 
right by the House of Lotus dance camp.

......

Continued with loads of pictures at Edgecentral:
http://edgecentral.blogspot.com/2007/11/begoggled-in-mega-vibe-burning-man.html

Graham (from Madison, Wisconsin)




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