Pastiche - Rave On

Three times a week, for about four hours a night, I would sit on a plastic foldout chair and exchange parking passes for money. Club rats would drive on up, roll down their windows, and, between the stank of strong cologne and a blast of air-conditioning, I would hear the thunk of a drum machine and bleating synthesizers. Whether or not these people were just bumping it in anticipation of a night gyrating in the dark was beside the point…who were these people, and where did they find this music?

Image of a Squid Collective Compilation

Of course, people like to dance, and most music fans have some semblance of dance music in their collection, whether it’s something out of the pretentiously titled IDM (or “intelligent dance music”) genre like the mind-bending Aphex Twin or Boards of Canada, or the more danceable side of R&B and hip-hop, or, at least one record by an indie artist who has taken their direction into a world of programmed beats and blips (of Montreal, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Gossip, twenty billion others). But I’d bet cash money that while we all like some dance, most owners of Music Has the Right to Children don’t listen exclusively to dance music. So who does?

Five years later, I found them, or they found me, rather. Kent Wang helms the Squid Collective here in Austin, and on December 5th the organization threw a party at the New Guild Co-op entitled “Kraken” featuring five electronic musicians. I found the party itself by parking nearby and following a just-perceptible thump in the air. After unsuccessfully trying to get in through the front door on my own, it opened and I was greeted by a very stoned kid with messy hair who shepherded me inside. The living room was hung with black lights, and posters and silky fake flowers were glowing from the walls and ceiling.

I was introduced to Wang, a bespeckled twenty-four year old dressed in a grey hoodie and jeans. He politely gave me a tour, and we walked from the dance floor to an outside fire pit and then past a strange offside room with a black light glaze. Wang offered me a beer and we took a very circuitous route through siderooms and combination-locked doorways, and like every co-op party from college, it was nearly impossible to find a cup in the kitchen and the beer was well hidden. One of the house members dejectedly chided Wang for not ensuring the keg was just for New Guild inhabitants, and not for members of the Squid Collective or visiting journalists; apparently the beer was payment for using the house.

Image from the "Bug Out" party in March 2008

Outside, Wang and I spoke with a guy named Adam Sobel who records and plays under the name Tangled Lysergic Puddles on Celestial Threads. Sitting on a swivel office chair, the thin, reedy Sobel needed little conversational prompting and rolled his thoughts in unexpected directions. “Most importantly, I’m a dad,” he says when asked a question about being a musician. Sobel is home schooling his three children (they were birthed at home as well), and his interest in their development seems to eclipse anything else. He works as a vegan/vegetarian caterer in New Jersey, where he lives. At the time, Bill Bless was in the middle of a set inside and running kind of long. “People seem to be feeling it in there,” says Sobel. “There’s a good vibe, and I don’t want to disturb that.” He launches into a treatise about, amongst other things, the search for “bliss” in his music, which he likens to the trance-like qualities of tribal drumming. To create his tracks, he uses a Kyma, an "external effects processor." The specifics are lost on me.

It's fascinating that Sobel came from so far away to play at what basically amounts to a private house party attended by drug users in their twenties. Wang actively visits dance music festivals around the world with a friend, and when they find someone they like, they try to make arrangements to bring them to one of the Squid Collective’s parties. Wang says that the pace of the parties has slowed somewhat, and that they had probably thrown three or four events this year. It’s a high level of commitment from both sides - after all, Sobel isn’t on tour, and this is a one-stop gig. After he unplugs his gear, he’ll get right on a plane headed back to the Garden State and his tofu stir-fry.

Later, Wang explains to me that he is primarily into two types of music- first, there’s psytrance, short for “psychedelic trance,” and then something he calls “chill.” Given the name of the former, I expected psytrance to be a trippy, slow-moving type of techno perfect for that super stoned arms-outstretched dance that hippies do during a jam band’s flue solo. This is very incorrect. Psytrance is very quick (bpms are important to dance music fanatics), and features pumping four-on-the-floor bass drum beats better suited to calisthenics than mellowing out.

“I guess you know this is a drug scene,” Wang yells to me over the din inside, kindly accounting for the possibility that I may be that fucking naïve. “But not ecstasy." Nope - acid is the drug of choice for their parties. The thought of tripping balls and hallucinating giant earthworms crawling out of the ceiling and walls seems directly at odds with the frenzied and unforgiving pace of Tangled Lysergic Puddles on Celestial Threads, now performing. But by the looks of things, people could hang. Basically normal but slightly eccentric guys and girls danced with themselves to the beat - you had the typical white-dude-with-dreads contingency, a few ravers (pink hair, pacifiers), and guys who might be assisting you with your home loan in five years. It was refreshingly unpretentious. A party goer in a hat, gloves, and a Led Zeppelin t-shirt did the robot, a clubby girl wearing a snow hat with ears waved her glowing armbands in the air, and a scene veteran stripped off her shirt. The back room looked like a glowing drug den.

Outside, a smoky fire consumed a wooden pallet and people stood around in little groups. I was introduced to a Scottish person who has been traveling the States by motorcycle and who soon expects to head to Buenos Aires. “My plan is to have no plan,” he says with just a slight accent. I ask him if he usually shows up at dance parties. “Yeah…I mean this is the kind of music I like, so I end up at parties like this one. I just took some mushrooms, so in an hour…whoooo!” With this, he enlists a few others to collect more pallets, which, it turns out, can be found in the docking area of the Urban Outfitters on the drag. It nears two a.m. when the wood is added to the fire, and Lysergic Puddles on Celestial Threads show no sign of stopping - not that it’d be easy to identify said sign. Wang had earlier spoke about “chill” music, the counter-genre to the unrelenting step of psytrance. 2:30 seemed a good a time as any to start slowing down, but Wang had this party booked until 6:00 a.m. (god knows what the inhabitants felt about such an exhaustive bash). Relaxing would have to wait, apparently. Walking away from New Guild, it was easy to still make out the percussive heartbeat of psytrance, the streets filled with people oblivious and flush with less insistent pleasures.

Image from the "Lantern Festival" in February of \’08

It was strange to hear Sobel speak about psytrance as if the music itself was hot wired to a greater schematic to increase world peace, love and tolerance, but that’s exactly the message that he and many of acolytes of dance music (and psytrance in particular) hope to communicate with their throttling 150 bpm. To quote just one writer on the website Psychedelic Traveler: “A united race is already occurring within the psy-scene and it’s already taking a stance in a quest to unite the world to dance together, to celebrate life.” And then later: “The psytrance scene of the future will have minds with a whole breed of thinkers that can apply inspired visions. It will be a generation with psychical powers that can be transformed for the betterment of mindkind.” Compare this freewheeling thinking with that of grump Neil Young, who last year declared “I think that the time when music could change the world is past…I think it would be very naive to think that in this day and age.” Yeah, but what about the betterment of mindkind, Neil?

Your opinion on this hot-button issue aside, it’s fascinating to know that an entire worldwide community of dance music has spawned sub-scene after sub-scene while the rest of us were all hung up on guitars and drums and all that. Both a worldwide phenomenon and somehow a massively insular and underground movement in Austin (Wang tells me psytrance is “too weird” even for dance clubs), it’s odd to think that this community has been bubbling, very quickly, under our feet this whole time.