This piece is a revised version of an rejected journal article. I’m posting it here in its full length.
I.
Suddenly the music that had been pounding out of the speakers suspended above the dancefloor flashed right into focus gorgeous slash of the riff, was slicing through every single cell in my body, transmuting its physiology. The drums seemed to sparkle in midair, reverberating as if in a cathedral, and the bass [. . .] it was as though I’d never heard it before. It resonated through to the core, pulsing from both inside and outside simultaneously. The tune separated out into its constituent parts, a lattice of textures, each ringing with angelic clarity, each sliding right into me, locking, holding, releasing... 1
There is a classic 1990 track called Altered States, written by a 15-year-old Ron Trent. When it comes down to it, couldn’t it be said that all electronic dance music is about “altered states”? The list of classic tracks with titles referencing altered states is almost endless: Acid Tracks, Energy Flash ... There's an interesting ambiguity to these titles. They are drug references, but they also refer to a psychedelic, “altered” essence within the actual music itself. There's hardly a more literally acidic, mind-altering sound than the squelchy, dripping resonant filter of the TB-303 that Acid Tracks launched into the wider world, a sound no acoustic instrument could have ever hoped to produce.
The sound of acid, alongside the sudden mass availability of MDMA, democratized mind-bending psychedelia: Just take this pill and tweak a few knobs, the machine(s) will take care of it. It is worth remembering that, by the time that acid house exploded in the late 80s, psychedelic music and culture were a bit long in the tooth, considered a remnant of a bygone hippie era.
But then, something new and inherently psychedelic arrived: the rave. It remains unclear to this day as to what exactly the word is supposed to mean, but everybody knows the mental images it conjures: Flashing lights, repetitive synthetic rhythms, closely weaved bodies dancing in resonance. A site, a situation in which altered states are produced. Rave breaks with the bourgeois individualism of canonical psychedelic rock. It doesn't explore anything, certainly not oneself. It does, it works (work that mutha fucker, as a classic Steve Pointdexter track goes). The rave is a psychedelia-producing factory; altered states are not pre-given but need to be engineered. Of course, there's not one approach to such engineering, but many different regimes, each diverging in their own way from the regular states of life.
Perhaps it is exactly this “deviant” nature that made raves the target of a moral panic in the early 1990s. Even thirty years later, Italy's new far-right government just announced a renewed crackdown on illegal raves. The devil's lure persists, because rave perpetually promises an escape to an u-topia, a not-yet-existing place in which the self flows out of itself, dissolving into an ocean of sheer atmosphere. Step into any rave in progress and you will know what it is that people are trying to lose themselves to - movements, intensities, speeds, patterns, rhythms:
MDMA's users neither trip nor dream. They are immersed, entranced, possessed, as nameless as the planes to which the drug takes them, as faceless and anonymous as the warm airs and cool clear breezes washing through the skin. They are dancers, rhythms, speeds, and beats, disorganized and dispersed beyond their own individuation, overwhelmed by their own connectivity.2
II.
While it is unlikely that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ever attended a rave, their definition of altered states couldn't be more apt: "All drugs ['drugs' here standing in for altered states in general] fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of speed".3 This definition has its roots in Deleuze's Spinozism. According to Spinoza, all corporeal bodies are made up of kinetic relations of speeds and slownesses. Whether a relation with another body (be it a thing or a living being) benefits or hinders us depends on how well our speeds complement each other: too fast or too slow? To modulate experience and enter altered states always requires experimenting with varying speeds and slownesses.
According to Deleuze, the first artistic movement that fully embodied this were the Beats: "They [the Beats] wanted to know how all drugs involve speeds, modifications of speed, thresholds of perception, forms and movements, microperceptions, perception on a molecular level, superhuman or subhuman times, etc."4
In altered states, the speeds of the body and the speeds of perception are closely intertwined, drifting in tandem towards "...the world of speeds and slownesses without form, without subject, without a face. Nothing left but the zigzag of a line...".5 A line that is never static, but always continuously varying in its speeds, accelerating and deaccelerating. Like on a rollercoaster, the subject of altered states is subject to modulating speeds and rhythms that it is not fully in control of. The French writer Henri Michaux captured these aspects in his own experiments with mescaline:
Even the speeds themselves are continually shifting, discontinuous, uneven, ‘as though under the effect of an unexpected gear-shift or of a chain reaction.’ Runaway velocities are marked by interruption and disturbance, ‘extreme acceleration, the speeding-up of released arrows’; movements that, ‘however rapid and extraordinarily speeded-up they may be, must periodically be interrupted, must cease and come to a complete halt, in order to suddenly set off again.’ And if once ‘you were unaware of such turbulence’ and ‘all was apparently immobile,’ now infinite turbulence is inescapable…6
Couldn't these descriptions - written in the 1950s! - be just as well about the experience of a rave? Speeding up and slowing down, building up and breaking down, all the common tools of the DJ. Like in Alice's Wonderland, in altered states, perception enters the world of the rabbit hole that follows a new, strange and continuously iterating rulebook. The regular rules of time and space no longer apply, the microscopic becomes gigantic and the gigantic becomes microscopic - not so much a new reality as a different point of view on it.
Deleuze and Guattari fittingly speak of microperceptions here: "... we attain a visual and sonorous microperception revealing spaces and voids, like holes in the molar structure....".7 Such observations track well with more contemporary philosophical accounts of altered states, for example this account by Jason Day and Susanne Schmetkamp:
... subjects commonly report that the world, their bodies and subjectivity appear with profoundly heightened detail and complexity during their psychedelic experiences. Furthermore, usually unnoticed or underappreciated phenomena and features are instead focalised. Inversely, this can result in greatly diminished awareness of usually fundamental aspects of consciousness—of reality, time and space, embodiment, and self. On the other hand, subjects commonly report drastic changes in how they are conscious. They emphasize a profoundly greater degree and scope of attention and, inversely, a loss of interest in ordinary foci. It thus seems that crucial features and objects of attention in everyday life are substantially altered in psychedelic experiences.8
It is striking how much accounts of altered states tend to resemble the experience of listening to electronic dance music in general. Small details that would, in other forms of music, be situated in the background, suddenly take on the center stage. The micrological dimension of timbre is amplified through continuous repetition and carried across the thresholds of perception into the audible. Sadie Plant is on point here, getting at the inherently perception-altering character of this music in its process of dissolvement and dissipation towards new states and places, driven by machinic repetition:
Like jazz, dance music's repetitive beats had little to do with the representations and accompaniments of song. This was music as a matter of modifying states of mind, perceptions, bodies, brains; music that became almost as immediate as drugs themselves; music that remembered the techniques of dance and drumming, rhythm and trance, and anticipated the sense that music has more to do with sound and frequency than with melody and meaning [...] This was not a means of escaping the body but a way of letting the body escape the structures and boundaries that keep it organized.9
Electronic dance music always operates within a dialectic between a given structure and its own dissolvement. While the music’s foundations are usually rigidly, even geometrically structured, through continuous repetition, those structures tend to dissolve into organic flows. Hours into dancing, one no longer perceives the literal 1-2-3-4 pulse of the kickdrum, but its flowing gaps and in-betweens. Our motor-matrix is hijacked by forces that throw the body out of its usual operation and drive it towards a-subjective flows and atmospheres.
III.
Altered States are not merely “psychological”, but also a phenomenon of the body, phenomenology's lived body that extends itself beyond the limits of the physical body. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us, all perception is closely intertwined with our bodily motor-schema. It does not come from nowhere but from an embodied perspective. When listening to music, our bodies are always in motion, whether we are subtly shifting in our seats or full on dancing. This is both an active and a passive act, receiving but also shaping, touching and being touched, reaching out into the world and being affected by it. Strong modulated and altered perception can cause us to feel like we are melding together with the world around us:
Such expanded consciousness of the body may cause it to appear deeply strange or alien. However, there is a second sense of bodily expansion in which there is instead a dissolution of the boundaries between body and world. The body is felt to viscerally merge with surrounding objects, the bodies of other subjects, and even the whole perceptual field which leads to a sense of boundlessness.10
In altered states, the lived body flows out of itself, it widens itself, as the German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz would say. In its widening, it becomes submerged in affective atmospheres that exceed the individual body. A given space’s atmosphere always modulates our perceptual experience. When visiting a multi-room nightclub playing different styles of music, wandering around from room to room, we are immediately hit with a given room's atmosphere, its unique speeds and rhythms that are the product of the entrainment of a million micro-rhythms. Nobody is ever “altered” in the exact same way, and yet, a room always has a specific atmosphere. Whether we will have a good time depends on how well we can attune ourselves to the atmospheres around us, our perception is always in resonance with the world, an interplay that is not static but dynamic, always open to change.
Out of the dark mist of kick drum and bass, a lone offbeat hi-hat emerges, tick-tick becomes tick-tock. Suddenly, a shift of the entire situation, new times, speeds and rhythms. I am in a different state than I was in before. On the dancefloor, we are always adjusting to newly emerging states, both passively reacting but also actively forming an improvisatory dialogue with the perceptual and kinetic suggestions presented to us in the form of shifting and cycling patterns. Within altered states, everything melts into speeds and patterns: lines, curves, circles, envelopes …
IV.
In electronic dance music, speed and politics are closely related. The ways in which different genres of electronic dance music have differentiated each other through speed and rhythms isn't a mere matter of aesthetics, but a kind of “Sonic Warfare”. Steve Goodman (Kode9) has spoken of speed tribes here, referring to communities that have constructed their own, singular regimes of rhythm and speed. Techno perpetually accelerates. Dubstep marches into a locking stasis. Drum & Bass builds and drops. House sways left and right. Garage skips along in steps. Different speeds and movements, different affective atmospheres: Techno-acceleration, garage-shuffle, dubstep-skank, house-groove ... speed or slow down? With what curvature, what density, what force?
In the course of dance music's history, numerous conflicts have emerged over clashing attitudes towards altered states - especially in regard to the usage of different drugs and the unique speeds and slownesses they can conjure. In the following, I am going to look at a few case studies, without meaning to present a complete survey of electronic dance music's long history of psychedelic politics.
In early 1990s Berlin, MDMA was the burgeoning techno scene’s drug of choice. Within an initially small and close-knit scene, the drug amplified its strong sense of connection and togetherness. But as the young techno movement exploded in size and went mainstream, things started to diverge. While the common raver on the floor was still drawn to MDMA, the scene's "elite" increasingly switched to cocaine, marking a shift in atmosphere from the collective to the egological. For the more idealistic of the scene's early protagonists, such a shift represented a betrayal of techno's original utopian values, marking its failure as a political project; irreconcilable lines were drawn.
But differing attitudes to altered states don't necessarily need to lead to fracture. When Detroit's Underground Resistance first came to Berlin, they were appalled at the rampant drug abuse among the young German ravers, since in their hometown, crack cocaine had wreaked havoc on black inner cities, leading to a distrust of all mind-altering substances. In a freshly reunified Germany however, MDMA embodied freedom and expression, particularly for those that had grown up under East Germany's restrictive cultural politics. Despite these differences, the music and the crowd were a match. UR's fast, dark, intensive and wordless tracks had no chance of ever gaining a larger audience in America, but it was just the right sound for young German ravers clamoring for speed and intensity, at any cost.
Speed and intensity, at any cost. In the period from the mid-90s to the early 2000s, many genres of electronic dance music got faster and faster across the board, as if they were trying, and failing, to recreate the raw intensity of rave’s early years. Eventually, in the mid-2000s, something that had never happened before, happened: dance music's tempos dropped, drastically, across the board. Techno in particular went from about 140 BPM to 120 BPM within the span of about two years (the Drumcode label’s mid-2000s catalog serves as a good example for this development).
Suddenly, ketamine was the most fashionable drug and Ricardo Villalobos the hottest DJ in the world. While Villalobos' music is concerned with conjuring altered states, with its extended track durations, strange percussion and various bleeps and noises, it does conjure drastically different speeds than raving early 90's techno. It is less about acceleration and more about deacceleration, slow-motion movements that fit well to the "endurance marathon" afterhours that would come to define mid-2000s dance music culture.
Of course, a backlash inevitably emerged, deeming the now reigning “minimal” techno to be too lethargic, not fast and energetic enough. Part of what initially made Berlin's infamous Berghain club's reputation were rumors that inside, people were still (or perhaps again) playing the real deal techno, committed to intensity and acceleration. Over the past decade, electronic dance music’s tempos have again steadily crept up in search of more thrill and intensity. Will history eventually repeat itself and bring with it another “speed-crash”?
To further understand this crash-and-burn dynamic, it is worth looking at the rapid and tumultuous development that British electronic dance music underwent in its early years. As Matthew Collin details in Altered States, MDMA initially came to the UK in small quantities. It was kept a well-hidden secret by a small bohemian elite intent on keeping it for itself. This initial scene was not about "raving", but about slower paced, light, "Balearic" atmospheres. However, as the available supply increased and word spread, the scene exploded with a new generation that was looking for rougher, faster and more intensive sounds - hardcore was born. The old "ecstasy elite" was not pleased with what they saw as a perversion of MDMA's original promises and started derogatorily referring to the new ravers as "acid teds".
Their laments were already too late, of course. Hardcore brought with it a new regime dedicated to the slogan "harder, better, faster, stronger", a culture of perpetual thrill-seeking driven by sounds that were mutating on a weekly basis. But eventually, a new problem emerged: altered states are not infinitely sustainable, certainly not in their original intensity. Acceleration eventually hits upon a speed limit, what was previously exceptional becomes the new usual. This was almost prefigured in MDMA's psychopharmacological workings itself, since the drug's magic (as we know now) wears off rather quickly with extended regular use. At the time, people were frantically searching for alternatives - the only solution was to abandon the "innocence" of pure MDMA and to “go further still”, towards the drug’s “darker” derivatives and unpredictable poly-drug mixtures.
In tandem, the music's speeds and rhythms changed. Was the change in drug regiment the cause here? Hard to say in retrospect. Perhaps it is more productive to set such causal questions aside and to think of altered states as heterogeneous "assemblages" simultaneously operating on different levels (musical, psychopharmacological, social, political...). The rave can be a site of complex and contradictory experiences, since participants are affected and altered in manifold ways.
Whatever the deciding cause behind this shift towards "hardcore" was, it marked a distinct break in dance music's culture. One journalist, seemingly still loyal to the scene's "old" ideals, reported in a dance magazine about her experience with this new form of rave:
The breakbeats seem to be getting faster, the faces bonier and uglier, the eyes expanding like they’re about to explode […] I’m alone in hardcore hell, being jostled by skinny lads who are jogging on the spot. Everywhere I look I see [Edward Munch's] 'The Scream'. The phrase ‘loved up’ could never apply to these hardcore gurning children. The grinning ones look like mass murderers; the aggressive dancers resemble skinhead thugs and the ones with vacant stares look like the scary schizophrenics you meet in shopping centres. Somebody grabs my arm and I actually scream.11
There is obvious race and class anxiety in this account. The night's “hardcore” ravers remind the author of the urban underclass (“skinhead thugs” and “scary schizophrenics”) that threaten her middle-class existence during the day. To certain circles, altered states were only palatable so long as they stayed within the bounds of polite (liberal, white, upper class) society.
This new multi-racial, multi-drug working class regime was simply too much, too fast; too much lived death drive from people that had little to lose. Hardcore had transformed "loved up" altered states into zones of collective annihilation. Simon Reynolds refers here to a "desire to disappear”, a turn of phrase that, aside from Deleuze’s concept of “becoming-imperceptible”, also bears strong resemblance with Foucault's notion of the "utopian body":
Utopia is a place outside all places, but it is a place where I will have a body without a body, a body that will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, speedy, colossal in its power, infinite in its duration.12
V.
Dance music's altered states promise an escape from the limits of the body, towards pure rhythms and speeds. But to let the body escape itself is dangerous business: go too far, cross all the limits, and you might just fall into the void of dispersed subjectivity that Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a "black hole". They urge caution - mind your speed, don't go too fast all the time, or you might find yourself dead, or worse, a fascist. The infamous cyber-accelerationist philosopher Nick Land - enthralled with amphetamines and early darkside jungle - notoriously took the bet, crashed into a black hole, and came out the other end peddling idiotic bio-essentialist racism.
Altered states always require careful calibration, the right mixture of speeds and slownesses. As if to remind us of this dialectic, an early Jeff Mills record features a cover that depicts a face that is half “acid-smiley”, half menacing Terminator. The stable Apollonian body of the daylight, the dissolved Dionysian body of the night; we can’t rid ourselves of either. The body is both intolerable and indispensable, and yet, we still throw ourselves into the night, into this vast atmosphere that modulates our bodies and perceptions:
The night is not a black mass that stops our sight on the surfaces of our eyes; our look goes out into the night which is vast and boundless. The sense of sight can be taut and acute in the depths of the dark. The night is not a substance but an event; it pervades a space freed from barriers and horizons. It extends a duration which moves without breaking up into moments; night comes incessantly in a presence which does not mark a residue as post nor outline a different presence to come.13
This night is boundless, but it is not eternal. Eventually, day arrives. What now? To dance music's detractors, this music is a vampire. True art endures in daylight, but this “drug noise” cannot last beyond the night, they say. But perhaps vampires can subsist - the last flyer of Berlin's legendary Ostgut club featured a picture of birds in flight with the word Restrealität on it (which translates to "remainder-reality" or "surplus-reality".) The "indivisible remainder" of altered experience keeps haunting reality as a ghostly trace, even long after it has worn off.
Altered States go beyond the night and haunt the day, even more so in today’s globalized, “24/7” world. Thanks to the internet, more people than ever before are listening to electronic dance music at any time, anywhere, far beyond the specific situation of 12-inches played by DJs in dark clubs. Something is driving someone to listen to electronic dance music while preparing breakfast at 8am on a Wednesday.
What are they after - a quick productivity boost, a little clean morning high, a-drug-without-drugs? In an interview with French musique concrète composer Pierre Henry, he disparages electronic dance music not for being music for drug-taking, but for the music itself being drug.14 Real art stays sober! Yet, so-called serious music has always secretly indulged in altered states and psychedelic experience while simultaneously dismissing it. Even Theodor W. Adorno was fond of doing the odd bump of uppers.15
Yet, only electronic dance music is frequently accused of being pure “drug noise”. Perhaps not because it does conjure altered states, but because of the kind of altered states it conjures. Recall the UK's infamous 1994 Criminal Justice bill outlawing dance music events specifically based on the music’s repetitive characteristics. No other genre of music has ever been outlawed based on such formal criteria. As the music of the night, electronic dance music is at odds with civil society’s daytime rhythms, just think of all the clubs that have been forced to close due to noise complaints or real estate development.
VI.
The music vibrated through my body as if I were one of the instruments and I felt myself becoming a full percussion orchestra, becoming green, blue, orange. The waves of the sounds ran through my hair like a caress. The music ran down my back and came out of my fingertips. I was a cascade of red-blue rainfall, a rainbow, I was small, light, mobile.16
Within altered states and their varying rhythm and speeds, inevitably an ethical question emerges: "How fast should we live?", to quote phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels.17 What is invoked in this question is the otherwise, how things could be different, how time could be different. Michel Foucault here speaks of “heterochronisms”, modes of lived temporality that diverge from the social norm. Perhaps it could be said that rave adopted the “work hard/play hard” temporal structure of emergent neoliberalism, but turned its impulse to productivity upside down; closer to something resembling the non-productive ecstasy of religious sacrifice, since the rave “produces” nothing, serves no material purpose and leaves behind only exhausted bodies and minds.
It is this liminal difference to the social status quo that turns rave’s altered states into an implicit political question: If we can, in altered states, live and move according to different rhythms then why not during the usual, "the day”, too? Social and political norms dictate to eventually go home, go to work as usual the next morning. But what if it weren’t so? That is the threat, but also implicit promise of social change, the night makes to the day. Even if things continue as usual, it remains as a latent, virtual possibility.
Once we grant that altered states can transform the everyday, they are no longer confined to the club, the world becomes a site for them. In the production of altered states, the flesh of body and world become intertwined. I turn on the music. Suddenly, the world looks, feels, smells different, altered. When I turn it off, things no longer possess the same perceptual "glow". As one account quoted by Day and Schmetkamp goes:
Sensations were acute. I heard, saw, felt, smelled and tasted more fully than ever before (or since) […] what I had experienced was essentially, with few exceptions, the usual content of experience but that, of everything, there was MORE. This MORE is what I think must be meant by the ‘expansion of consciousness’.18
This “MORE” always points to the possibility that reality could be more than we are currently given, a different living and perceiving, a latent “elsewhere” in the here and now, what Herbert Marcuse calls a “new sensibility”. But perhaps, there is also a “LESS” in the way that dance music’s altered states reduce the subject to its machinic rhythms, demand time and energy that only dissolve into dust and atmosphere. Far from a mere expansion of personal consciousness, in altered states, we are always surrendering to forces larger than the individual subject. Perhaps the latent utopia of altered states lies precisely in this relation between the “more” and the “less”, the merging and dissolvement of the self into an reciprocally modulated and modulating world.
In conclusion, I would like to recall a sober, yet vividly altered experience that I had this past summer, listening, sitting in an outdoor café, at night, submerged in neon light:
Warmth is radiating throughout my body. A slight breeze, hues of light in neon shades, the slight blue tint of the night sky. The quietly whistling leaves of a tree. A lantern's seductive light becomes audible. I am looking, but also listening. The music melts with the sound of the world. It does not "enhance” reality, it qualitatively alters the entire scene. Radiating atmospheres, everywhere across. Immersion in the world, it has become me, and I have spilled out of myself, towards it. What remains are flickers of intensity that everything is submerging into. Warmth, haze, floating. Not being-in-the-world but being-the-world, as sound. Presence, dissipated. Bliss.
Footnotes:
Matthew Collin: Altered States, p. 1-3.
Sadie Plant: Writing on Drugs, p. 179.
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Thousand Plateaus, p. 282.
Gilles Deleuze: Two Regimes of Madness, p. 152.
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Thousand Plateaus, p. 283.
Sadie Plant: Writing on Drugs, p. 147.
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari: Thousand Plateaus, p. 227-228.
Jason Day & Susanne Schmetkamp: Psychedelic Expansion of Consciousness. A Phenomenological Study in Terms of Attention, p. 112.
Sadie Plant: Writing on Drugs, p. 177.
Jason Day & Susanne Schmetkamp: Psychedelic Expansion of Consciousness. A Phenomenological Study in Terms of Attention, p. 116.
Matthew Collin: Altered States, p. 250.
Michel Foucault: Utopian Body (In: Caroline A. Jones: Sensorium. Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art), p. 229.
Alphonso Lingis: The Imperative, p. 9.
Peter Shapiro: Modulations. A History of Electronic Music, p. 22.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Mein Leben, p. 456.
Sadie Plant: Writing on Drugs, p. 128.
Bernhard Waldenfels: Ortsverschiebungen, Zeitverschiebungen, p. 163.
Jason Day & Susanne Schmetkamp: Psychedelic Expansion of Consciousness. A Phenomenological Study in Terms of Attention, p. 114.