new year party, part 1
I'm back! RAVEmw is back!
Last Sunday i stuffed clothes, sleeping bag and a couple other essentials into my small pack, strapped my sleeping pad to my tent and tucked it under my arm to head out to my first festival since Garbicz, back when i still lived in Berlin.
It was so worth it.
I arrived in Kaohsiung in the evening and grabbed a quick snack from a teppanyaki-style joint by the station and then blundered around like an idiot trying to find the correct kiss-and-ride. Eventually i found it, and i jumped into a car with two strangers and a driver on our way to the party. Total flashback from old days of going to raves where people would just figure out carpooling via email and trust that whoever you jumped in the car with wasn't going to be a complete psycho.
We're all mini-psychos, of course. The two women in the car both knew each other from previous parties ("we are part of the psytrance family!") and they entertained the taxi driver who had a karaoke machine in his car by singing along with cheezeball Chinese ballads while simultaneously debating the merits of psytrance versus techno versus house and bemoaning their challenges at interacting with "normal people".
That's the thing, you see, ravers are pretty much "normal people" in our everyday lives - same jobs, same shows, same food, same economic problems, same family drama... but we also have this other thing where we like to run away for a weekend and listen to extremely loud electronic music with a bunch of nutters dressed in silly outfits, many of whom are on all kind of hard drugs, and we hug each other and talk nonsense and dream of a better world. And it's hard to explain that to people who either haven't experienced it, or who have experienced it but didn't like it, or who grew out of it. Perhaps it's the same way some people feel about sports, or fishing, or other hobbies? When the hobby becomes a core part of your identity, talking with people who don't get it can end up feeling like you're only sharing half of yourself. Although, i suppose, talking rave stuff with ravers can also feel a bit superficial. I remember having conversations with ravers who eventually became "real life" friends where we felt reluctant to cross the streams, because rave friends exist in this bubble of joy and happiness where nobody give shit about work or bills or any of the other stuff we have to deal with when we're not at the party.
Anyway, we got to the venue and found a spot where we could set up our tents. It felt so cool to be a trio of single women all traveling down by public transport and setting up our own tents while the bigger crews arrived in private internal combustion vehicles and paid extra for glamping setups or sites with full electric connection. It was in a proper camp ground, you see. From talking to people at the party, this is very common in Taiwan - the promoters rent out an entire camp ground and throw the party there, so the punters can have showers and flushing toilets and whatever other luxuries unheard of in most festivals i've been to in the past.
First night there was no music so we crashed out and woke up the next morn when the opening DJs started at 9am. That's the other thing, with this party at least - music from 9am to midnight, no music overnight. Well no official music overnight. Because the majority of the people had cars full of gear, there were plenty of rebel sound systems throwing mini-parties till the wee hours of the morning. Unfortunately one of those dudes was parked right next to our spot, and they liked hip-hop.
There is a special place in hell for anyone who comes to a techno party and plays fucking hip-hop at their campsite.
I mean, that place in hell exists for anyone who plays music that isn't electronic, but the largest contingent of vibe-destroying assholes seem to pick hip-hop, presumably because they think it's "close enough" due to the 808 beats and synthesizers and whatnot. Yeah, at a party full of PLUR it really sucks to go to sleep to the sound of misogynistic, homophobic and hypersexualized bullshit. Fuck those guys. I'll never forget one post-PLUR philosophy that got shitposted on the 604 mailing list years ago: PLURFY. Peace, Love, Unity, Respect and Fuck You!
But, man, i let it go pretty quick once the sun rose and the opening DJ in the techno space started playing classic Detroit sounds, acid house and electro - the kind of music i listened to when i first started going to raves in the 1990s. On one side, mountains, on the other side, pineapple fields, on the third side a Funktion-One sound system enveloping me in a 303 line. Bliss.
Alas, my oldskool sound was not to remain the theme of the day, as eventually the grizzled old opening DJ made way for younger talent who soon started blasting Berghain-style mainroom techno. Dear lord, that style of techno is so fucking boring. It's why i don't like to say that i like techno these days, because modern techno mostly fucking sucks. Great big 808 bass drum, and there's no bassline because there's no space left in the track to fit it in, and all this white noise swooshes around on top, while a wood block goes tap-tap-tap exactly on-beat with the bass drum... It's not funky, it's not danceable, it just sounds like a washing machine bouncing around on the back of a truck going through a tunnel. Because it's full of reverb too, so the whole thing just turns into a wall of dissonant, unlistenable noise.
But for some reason that noise is very popular.
I walked over to the psytrance space. It was a psytrance party, after all, and on that side the speaker stacks were much larger, and the BPM was much higher, and there were a great many more hippies. It seems that the psytrance scene has moved on from full-on, and now the most popular subgenre is dark/forest trance, which has higher tempos, no melodies and an abundance of - you guessed it - fucking reverb. It also sounds like it was recorded in a tunnel, but its saving grace is that they kept the infamous "three note bassline" which is the hallmark of a psychedelic trance track. You get a pissant little bass drum on the first 16th note, then three stiff, staccato bass hits, then the next bass drum lands. It sounds like heavy metal double-pedal kick drums and it can get really intense on these modern tracks which don't have any breakdowns. On top of the relentless bass hits, you get the usual squiggly synthesizer noises and weird little sounds that come and go, and that's the whole song. It's almost as tedious as Berghain techno, except not nearly as physically painful to listen to, so i remained dancing there till my body had had enough.
It got faster after i headed to bed. Apparently there is a new subgenre of psytrance called hi-tech which is basically happy hardcore, except with a three note bassline. It is stupidly, ridiculously fast and i am sure if i was in my 20s i would have found it hilarious and enjoyed dancing to it, but now i am old and happy to be in my sleeping bag by 11pm.
My camping buddies were old too. C walked down to the nearby village and brought back breakfast for us on day two, just some 蛋餅 (egg pancake) but it was a nice change from the hippie stuff in the festival marketplace. L said the problem with hippie food is they're so focused on being healthy they forget to add oil so it doesn't end up being very filling. C was in her 50s and L was in her 40s. Both looked like normal middle age Taiwanese woman, until C pulled out her box of bohemian buttons to bedazzle her flowery outfit and L conjured up a rainbow fractal hoodie to melt into. I don't have any such rave signifier any more. I used to have kandi bracelets.
Being able to go undercover as a normal person has its perks, though. C showed photos of the village, which had a bunch of indigenous artwork around the place, and gave us the skinny on what the locals thought of all the ravers invading their land for the new year. "They like the 熱鬧!"
I talked about 熱鬧 (rè nao) here before, when i lived in China. There isn't a good English translation, but it means something like... a positive hustle and bustle. It's like "noise" but without the negative connotation. And for the new year, it's good luck to have 熱鬧 because it scares away the bad spirits (hence the popularity of firecrackers). So perhaps these rural folk weren't too upset at the weirdos with their three note basslines and 808 bass drums echoing for miles around.
Down on the techno floor i met another oldie. A gray haired chap in a deck chair drinking booze. He bought me a gin and tonic. He said that he didn't really like psytrance, he was a techno fan. I asked if there were a lot of techno parties like this. The psytrance scene has been doing outdoor parties all over the world for decades, but i get the impression other electronic music scenes haven't embraced the outdoors quite so much. He said it's a bit of a new thing, since COVID. He said that's when a lot of techno promoters started to do gigs outside, and then a certain subsection of the techno crowd got hooked on the vibe. He said going to an outdoor party is nice because it's more free.
I have to wonder, though, if the reason why Taiwanese guys like these outdoor parties is because they can bring deck chairs. Honestly, i have rarely seen so many people sitting down at a party in my life. It's not a disrespectful sitting, though. Everyone brings chairs and they set up them around the dancefloor all facing the DJ, then they sit there and get high and drink booze and enjoy the music all day long, occasionally getting up to dance.
The crowd was all-ages too, which was nice. Not just oldies but also youngsters - toddlers and tweens and teenagers, kids of the oldies. I remember that from psytrance parties in Australia and it was great. But to make it extra-Taiwanese, of course people brought their pets, which in Taiwan means meticulously coiffured poodle-like apartment dogs and - no joke - a goddamn cat in a cat backpack with little bubble window. I feel like this is one of those "only in Taiwan" things.
There were expats too. A whole crew of South Africans. Some Germans, French, Americans... And a Canadian! She throws parties too, wife of a local Taiwanese DJ. The nice thing was that being surrounded by mostly Taiwanese people i got to hear other white people speaking Chinese, which i never hear at work. Of course plenty of immigrants do eventually learn the local language, but maybe only longer term migrants get good enough to hold a decent conversation. It reminded me of living in Berlin where sometimes you would be speaking German to someone and then realize halfway through you're both native English speakers. Being able to speak Chinglish in a conversation with both migrants and locals was relaxing and made me feel more at home than i do with my colleagues where we're always speaking full-speed English, even when it's clear the locals can't keep up with the conversation.
I wonder if that comes from the scene being a bit more of a diverse group than just university-educated tech workers? And, actually, that's what made this party better than any of the club nights i went to when i lived in China. In China i always felt like the techno scene only existed for the idle rich and well-heeled expats. But here there were people who were legitimately living the lifestyle. House in the bush, smallhold farm, keep chickens, make jewelry, sell trinkets at the night market, work in a café, go to a rave. L eventually admitted that she used to be a firmware developer, which explained her conspicuous Intel backpack, but then gave it up for "the forest life". Although i am sure the tech industry is still over-represented in the electronic music scene, she and i seemed a bit like outliers at this gig.
A bunch of people had stories of backpacking around the world, living the typical wandering psytrancer lifestyle, hitching rides from one festival to the next, interspersed with more traditional hippie/wellness stuff. Not sure there's another scene where you'd start out talking about the subtleties of different electronic music subgenres and end up hearing about someone's detox retreat where they had enemas and underwent poop inspections from the local mystic who apparently could give health advice based on the color and consistency of the excretion. Or the mountain village they ended up at where they roughed it for a week and started thinking we should all go back to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Full power, 24 hour, no toilet, no shower, etc etc. Dreadlocks and knit tops and incense and woo, oh my! I always forget the hippie scene also has superstitious, conservative and heteronormative streaks running through it.
There were a couple of gender benders, though. One super charming fella sported a well-tended goatee, crop-top, schoolgirl skirt and leg warmers. I bet they were a techno fan. Techno is much gayer than trance.
L said she had a feeling the party wouldn't make any money. "Everyone here is friends with a DJ!" She was probably right. I'd guess there were maybe 300 people, and the venue could easily have handled twice that. But for me that kind of party is the best kind. Having been involved on the promotion side, i know that you need to get the casuals to show up to make money, but also as a punter the vibe is so much better when the only people who show up are people who really love the scene. Plus when all the promoters show up at each other's parties, when DJs who are there as punters jump in to do an unpaid bonus set, it shows it's a real community and not a competition or capitalistic endeavour.
From the mountain top came paragliders...
I had to think about the psytrance party in Israel where a bunch of militants paraglided in from Gaza and murdered hundreds of people at the gig. I haven't really talked about it much on LJ because Israel was and still is on my personal shit list and anyway everything everyone has to say about Israel/Palestine has already been said before, nobody has budged on their opinions in decades, and the whole topic is tedious as fuck. But this particular tragedy hit close to home just like that fire at the rave in Oakland a few years back. When hundreds of people die in a scene as small as this one... i'm sure that some of the people at this party knew people who were at that one. I hope the paragliders flying overhead didn't send them on a bad trip.
Because, actually, looking up at the paragliders was really quite pretty. Just floating around up there, they looked so free. I imagine them floating around on the breeze, listening to the beats wafting up from our dancefloor, gazing off into the distance... what a life! I always had it on my bucket list to learn how to fly a helicopter, but i've accepted that's never going to happen, so i have downgraded that item to one day flying an FPV drone. (Hey, if China invades maybe that could be my contribution to Taiwan defense!) Looking at those paragliders, though, man it would be great to fly.
But my feet remained on the ground, dancing away to the tunes.
(Picture by C)
More later...
Last Sunday i stuffed clothes, sleeping bag and a couple other essentials into my small pack, strapped my sleeping pad to my tent and tucked it under my arm to head out to my first festival since Garbicz, back when i still lived in Berlin.
It was so worth it.
I arrived in Kaohsiung in the evening and grabbed a quick snack from a teppanyaki-style joint by the station and then blundered around like an idiot trying to find the correct kiss-and-ride. Eventually i found it, and i jumped into a car with two strangers and a driver on our way to the party. Total flashback from old days of going to raves where people would just figure out carpooling via email and trust that whoever you jumped in the car with wasn't going to be a complete psycho.
We're all mini-psychos, of course. The two women in the car both knew each other from previous parties ("we are part of the psytrance family!") and they entertained the taxi driver who had a karaoke machine in his car by singing along with cheezeball Chinese ballads while simultaneously debating the merits of psytrance versus techno versus house and bemoaning their challenges at interacting with "normal people".
That's the thing, you see, ravers are pretty much "normal people" in our everyday lives - same jobs, same shows, same food, same economic problems, same family drama... but we also have this other thing where we like to run away for a weekend and listen to extremely loud electronic music with a bunch of nutters dressed in silly outfits, many of whom are on all kind of hard drugs, and we hug each other and talk nonsense and dream of a better world. And it's hard to explain that to people who either haven't experienced it, or who have experienced it but didn't like it, or who grew out of it. Perhaps it's the same way some people feel about sports, or fishing, or other hobbies? When the hobby becomes a core part of your identity, talking with people who don't get it can end up feeling like you're only sharing half of yourself. Although, i suppose, talking rave stuff with ravers can also feel a bit superficial. I remember having conversations with ravers who eventually became "real life" friends where we felt reluctant to cross the streams, because rave friends exist in this bubble of joy and happiness where nobody give shit about work or bills or any of the other stuff we have to deal with when we're not at the party.
Anyway, we got to the venue and found a spot where we could set up our tents. It felt so cool to be a trio of single women all traveling down by public transport and setting up our own tents while the bigger crews arrived in private internal combustion vehicles and paid extra for glamping setups or sites with full electric connection. It was in a proper camp ground, you see. From talking to people at the party, this is very common in Taiwan - the promoters rent out an entire camp ground and throw the party there, so the punters can have showers and flushing toilets and whatever other luxuries unheard of in most festivals i've been to in the past.
First night there was no music so we crashed out and woke up the next morn when the opening DJs started at 9am. That's the other thing, with this party at least - music from 9am to midnight, no music overnight. Well no official music overnight. Because the majority of the people had cars full of gear, there were plenty of rebel sound systems throwing mini-parties till the wee hours of the morning. Unfortunately one of those dudes was parked right next to our spot, and they liked hip-hop.
There is a special place in hell for anyone who comes to a techno party and plays fucking hip-hop at their campsite.
I mean, that place in hell exists for anyone who plays music that isn't electronic, but the largest contingent of vibe-destroying assholes seem to pick hip-hop, presumably because they think it's "close enough" due to the 808 beats and synthesizers and whatnot. Yeah, at a party full of PLUR it really sucks to go to sleep to the sound of misogynistic, homophobic and hypersexualized bullshit. Fuck those guys. I'll never forget one post-PLUR philosophy that got shitposted on the 604 mailing list years ago: PLURFY. Peace, Love, Unity, Respect and Fuck You!
But, man, i let it go pretty quick once the sun rose and the opening DJ in the techno space started playing classic Detroit sounds, acid house and electro - the kind of music i listened to when i first started going to raves in the 1990s. On one side, mountains, on the other side, pineapple fields, on the third side a Funktion-One sound system enveloping me in a 303 line. Bliss.
Alas, my oldskool sound was not to remain the theme of the day, as eventually the grizzled old opening DJ made way for younger talent who soon started blasting Berghain-style mainroom techno. Dear lord, that style of techno is so fucking boring. It's why i don't like to say that i like techno these days, because modern techno mostly fucking sucks. Great big 808 bass drum, and there's no bassline because there's no space left in the track to fit it in, and all this white noise swooshes around on top, while a wood block goes tap-tap-tap exactly on-beat with the bass drum... It's not funky, it's not danceable, it just sounds like a washing machine bouncing around on the back of a truck going through a tunnel. Because it's full of reverb too, so the whole thing just turns into a wall of dissonant, unlistenable noise.
But for some reason that noise is very popular.
I walked over to the psytrance space. It was a psytrance party, after all, and on that side the speaker stacks were much larger, and the BPM was much higher, and there were a great many more hippies. It seems that the psytrance scene has moved on from full-on, and now the most popular subgenre is dark/forest trance, which has higher tempos, no melodies and an abundance of - you guessed it - fucking reverb. It also sounds like it was recorded in a tunnel, but its saving grace is that they kept the infamous "three note bassline" which is the hallmark of a psychedelic trance track. You get a pissant little bass drum on the first 16th note, then three stiff, staccato bass hits, then the next bass drum lands. It sounds like heavy metal double-pedal kick drums and it can get really intense on these modern tracks which don't have any breakdowns. On top of the relentless bass hits, you get the usual squiggly synthesizer noises and weird little sounds that come and go, and that's the whole song. It's almost as tedious as Berghain techno, except not nearly as physically painful to listen to, so i remained dancing there till my body had had enough.
It got faster after i headed to bed. Apparently there is a new subgenre of psytrance called hi-tech which is basically happy hardcore, except with a three note bassline. It is stupidly, ridiculously fast and i am sure if i was in my 20s i would have found it hilarious and enjoyed dancing to it, but now i am old and happy to be in my sleeping bag by 11pm.
My camping buddies were old too. C walked down to the nearby village and brought back breakfast for us on day two, just some 蛋餅 (egg pancake) but it was a nice change from the hippie stuff in the festival marketplace. L said the problem with hippie food is they're so focused on being healthy they forget to add oil so it doesn't end up being very filling. C was in her 50s and L was in her 40s. Both looked like normal middle age Taiwanese woman, until C pulled out her box of bohemian buttons to bedazzle her flowery outfit and L conjured up a rainbow fractal hoodie to melt into. I don't have any such rave signifier any more. I used to have kandi bracelets.
Being able to go undercover as a normal person has its perks, though. C showed photos of the village, which had a bunch of indigenous artwork around the place, and gave us the skinny on what the locals thought of all the ravers invading their land for the new year. "They like the 熱鬧!"
I talked about 熱鬧 (rè nao) here before, when i lived in China. There isn't a good English translation, but it means something like... a positive hustle and bustle. It's like "noise" but without the negative connotation. And for the new year, it's good luck to have 熱鬧 because it scares away the bad spirits (hence the popularity of firecrackers). So perhaps these rural folk weren't too upset at the weirdos with their three note basslines and 808 bass drums echoing for miles around.
Down on the techno floor i met another oldie. A gray haired chap in a deck chair drinking booze. He bought me a gin and tonic. He said that he didn't really like psytrance, he was a techno fan. I asked if there were a lot of techno parties like this. The psytrance scene has been doing outdoor parties all over the world for decades, but i get the impression other electronic music scenes haven't embraced the outdoors quite so much. He said it's a bit of a new thing, since COVID. He said that's when a lot of techno promoters started to do gigs outside, and then a certain subsection of the techno crowd got hooked on the vibe. He said going to an outdoor party is nice because it's more free.
I have to wonder, though, if the reason why Taiwanese guys like these outdoor parties is because they can bring deck chairs. Honestly, i have rarely seen so many people sitting down at a party in my life. It's not a disrespectful sitting, though. Everyone brings chairs and they set up them around the dancefloor all facing the DJ, then they sit there and get high and drink booze and enjoy the music all day long, occasionally getting up to dance.
The crowd was all-ages too, which was nice. Not just oldies but also youngsters - toddlers and tweens and teenagers, kids of the oldies. I remember that from psytrance parties in Australia and it was great. But to make it extra-Taiwanese, of course people brought their pets, which in Taiwan means meticulously coiffured poodle-like apartment dogs and - no joke - a goddamn cat in a cat backpack with little bubble window. I feel like this is one of those "only in Taiwan" things.
There were expats too. A whole crew of South Africans. Some Germans, French, Americans... And a Canadian! She throws parties too, wife of a local Taiwanese DJ. The nice thing was that being surrounded by mostly Taiwanese people i got to hear other white people speaking Chinese, which i never hear at work. Of course plenty of immigrants do eventually learn the local language, but maybe only longer term migrants get good enough to hold a decent conversation. It reminded me of living in Berlin where sometimes you would be speaking German to someone and then realize halfway through you're both native English speakers. Being able to speak Chinglish in a conversation with both migrants and locals was relaxing and made me feel more at home than i do with my colleagues where we're always speaking full-speed English, even when it's clear the locals can't keep up with the conversation.
I wonder if that comes from the scene being a bit more of a diverse group than just university-educated tech workers? And, actually, that's what made this party better than any of the club nights i went to when i lived in China. In China i always felt like the techno scene only existed for the idle rich and well-heeled expats. But here there were people who were legitimately living the lifestyle. House in the bush, smallhold farm, keep chickens, make jewelry, sell trinkets at the night market, work in a café, go to a rave. L eventually admitted that she used to be a firmware developer, which explained her conspicuous Intel backpack, but then gave it up for "the forest life". Although i am sure the tech industry is still over-represented in the electronic music scene, she and i seemed a bit like outliers at this gig.
A bunch of people had stories of backpacking around the world, living the typical wandering psytrancer lifestyle, hitching rides from one festival to the next, interspersed with more traditional hippie/wellness stuff. Not sure there's another scene where you'd start out talking about the subtleties of different electronic music subgenres and end up hearing about someone's detox retreat where they had enemas and underwent poop inspections from the local mystic who apparently could give health advice based on the color and consistency of the excretion. Or the mountain village they ended up at where they roughed it for a week and started thinking we should all go back to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Full power, 24 hour, no toilet, no shower, etc etc. Dreadlocks and knit tops and incense and woo, oh my! I always forget the hippie scene also has superstitious, conservative and heteronormative streaks running through it.
There were a couple of gender benders, though. One super charming fella sported a well-tended goatee, crop-top, schoolgirl skirt and leg warmers. I bet they were a techno fan. Techno is much gayer than trance.
L said she had a feeling the party wouldn't make any money. "Everyone here is friends with a DJ!" She was probably right. I'd guess there were maybe 300 people, and the venue could easily have handled twice that. But for me that kind of party is the best kind. Having been involved on the promotion side, i know that you need to get the casuals to show up to make money, but also as a punter the vibe is so much better when the only people who show up are people who really love the scene. Plus when all the promoters show up at each other's parties, when DJs who are there as punters jump in to do an unpaid bonus set, it shows it's a real community and not a competition or capitalistic endeavour.
From the mountain top came paragliders...
I had to think about the psytrance party in Israel where a bunch of militants paraglided in from Gaza and murdered hundreds of people at the gig. I haven't really talked about it much on LJ because Israel was and still is on my personal shit list and anyway everything everyone has to say about Israel/Palestine has already been said before, nobody has budged on their opinions in decades, and the whole topic is tedious as fuck. But this particular tragedy hit close to home just like that fire at the rave in Oakland a few years back. When hundreds of people die in a scene as small as this one... i'm sure that some of the people at this party knew people who were at that one. I hope the paragliders flying overhead didn't send them on a bad trip.
Because, actually, looking up at the paragliders was really quite pretty. Just floating around up there, they looked so free. I imagine them floating around on the breeze, listening to the beats wafting up from our dancefloor, gazing off into the distance... what a life! I always had it on my bucket list to learn how to fly a helicopter, but i've accepted that's never going to happen, so i have downgraded that item to one day flying an FPV drone. (Hey, if China invades maybe that could be my contribution to Taiwan defense!) Looking at those paragliders, though, man it would be great to fly.
But my feet remained on the ground, dancing away to the tunes.
(Picture by C)
More later...