Crossdressing Diogenes fanzine for techno & underground culture in Cyprus
Issue #
6
September 2020
What do you do when ?
When things are so out of place that nothing exists for t o ?
In moments like these, we as a collective should ask ourselves what exactly it is we want. We are united in a shared passion for, not just electronic music, or rave cuture, but subtly in ideology, as well. Our shared tastes in music and in subculture, reflect mutual aspirations for the future. United we have the resources and the passion to achieve what we want: we have talent, soundsystems, connections, locations. We have people. We have power.
Issue 6 / October 2020
Text :
Niko Mas
Layout Design: Polymnia
Contents:
n/a
@constant_projection
@Spirithkia
CDCY on the Quarantine: Weird isn’t the word. The past months have thrown everything into question. Almost everything we had to look forward to has been cancelled indefinitely. It is a time to be aware that the humans who make up our scene are individually under immense pressures, and our mental health and wellbeing matters. We take a pause collectively, to make sure we are all okay. Instead of dwelling on these things too much, we want to talk about the cultural aspects of the quarantine period. While it was a hard time, there was a lot of experimentation and cultural development that happened in this period. What we want to analyse in this issue, is the response from the electronic music scene to the quarantine, including a look at Live Streaming as a format. Part I When the Quarantine was announced, it was obviously an instant finishing move for rave culture. Overnight the scene just died. All events were cancelled, all preparations delayed. Winter was just passing and those glorious summer sunrise raves appear on the horizon. We lost Reiss at S//IP, we lost Low Society, and we lost the Gathering V. It even seemed like the summer of raves was to be cancelled outright. In this kind of bleak situation, the world just kinda coughed up a streaming culture, and the development of this bizarre, ad hoc, emergency rave culture was extremely fast: from ultra basic to future changing. This analysis of streaming culture looks at some different examples of this streaming format, and deconstruct them to see what we can learn. Some of the parameters of success include such things as: user enjoyment; video, audio and stream fidelity; creativity; understanding the performance medium; and whether there seems to be any sense of purpose in what they are trying to achieve or create. There were some general complaints that were surfacing through social media and blogs, particularly to do with the lacking quality of the video and audio streams. Generally, audio quality can be forgivable to a varying degree, and depending on the circumstance, video quality varies in importance. Streaming quality however is probably the only basic requirement, without which a stream is doomed. In the context of electronic dance music, small interruptions in audio are simply distracting, as it actually denies the entire cyclic methodology of electronic dance music, the music cannot take hold of you if its symmetry and rhythmic structures are interrupted. No immersion can be achieved. No trip can be had.
The best way to deconstruct streaming would be to start looking at examples of variations in format. The initial two formats were Facebook Live, and Zoom. Zoom was already being marketed to the max before the quarantine, and it made sense that it was one of the first tools to be experimented with. What was impressive about the zoom rave was the social organisation involved. There was one particularly successful zoom rave in terms of social organisation, put together by some of the Honest Electronics community. Being that H.E are really on top of their game with their social organisation, it was no wonder that they were able to get 40-50+ people to install zoom correctly and get online in the same stream, at the right time, from all over the world. However, being that it was in the first wave of streams, it showed a number of limitations with the format itself. Before anyone states that the obvious limitation of a lack of a physical, “IRL-ness” (in real life), hold that thought for now; in hindsight, it wasn’t a waste of time to push into streaming, as what happened a month later changed the game regarding this. In both Zoom Raves and Facebook streams, there was an issue where the format would seem to imply that the listener should be sitting at their laptop. Zoom was the worst for this, as you couldn’t go away from the keyboard without also visibly “leaving”. Both Facebook and Zoom also had chat systems next to the stream, which fostered a very awkward culture of sitting at the laptop interacting with the chat as performatively as possible. The very fact that people were interacting in the chat would imply to others that “the chat section is where the party is at”. This led to exhausting marathons of sitting on camera, or sitting in a virtual chat room pressing the love react over and over again. The other sharp edge of the chat-centric format was that it was self-reinforcing, as the streams went on, the more this culture of interacting in the chat became a kind of etiquette, everything about Facebook is telling you to click on the screen as many times as possible; there is no other way through this format to express interest to the performer. If a performer had no comments, they are likely to assume the worst, because until then, all they would have seen would have been active chat boxes. Furthermore, the streamer count was haunting for artists, who would suddenly see a drop in 20 viewers and assume they had just messed up badly. All of this social-media-ness and the sort of bleak business-level workflow of zoom were really off-putting and really prevented any kind of immersion. After this first wave, it seemed unlikely that there would be any future value to streaming after the immediate quarantine-conditions had passed; it seemed a rather ineffective and limited way to engage with electronic music. It really just spotlighted that lack of shared physical space that had been lost. The other main issues were aesthetic ones. People are not used to performing to an audience who are isolated in their own homes, people are not used to being on camera. There were a lot of sets that, depending on how well you knew the DJ, were obviously their usual rave set. Unfortunately, a lot of the usual value of these sets dropped due to mismatching with the format. Different stages and different contexts require a different kind of flow, different mixing, different selections. It started to improve drastically once the first few performances had passed.
Secondly, and this is a big one, the video streams, honestly, seemed totally pointless most of the time. Especially with Facebook live, the video was only being used because it was a requirement of the format. How many times did someone aim their laptop webcam at the cables? Not only did the format insist we sit near the keyboard and watch the screen, the kind of “whatever” attitude towards the video content meant hours of watching a fairly uninteresting static image. If we consider academic audio visual theories, and philosophy of audiovisual arts, the juxtaposition between music and video content is really important. What this implies is that, not only are boring visuals boring, boring visuals detract a lot from the audio. The lack of artistic relationship between the two breaks immersion, as the video reminds you every millisecond that you are staring at a computer screen. Basically, the video either has to be intentional and synergetic with the audio, or the video should not be there. Webcam streams do not really stimulate any immersion, rather they make the format feel limited. Then there was the Club in the Cloud, a zoom rave that suffered the same format issues but improved and experimented in some areas. The main novelty was the wall of zoom screens being projected on one of the inner walls of the club space being streamed out of. This was credit worthy in so far as they thought about how to use the zoom format to achieve something specific to the paradigm. It was actually even more necessary to stay on camera in this case, as now your stream was being projected onto the wall. There was a heightened pressure to stay there in case you were selected and the DJ saw your absence. It asked the question, for who was the zoom display for? Just the DJ? While it was important to experiment with the format, the stream was still akin to a CCTV camera in an empty club, and the music was still pushing for a kind of “same thing but at home” vibe. CdV took the level up, being that the artists really seemed to get that their audience were at home. That doesn’t mean that they all just played ambient, the point is that they seemed to carefully consider how to deliver an immersive music experience to a listener at home. Their streams were more visually pleasant, but it didn’t escape the boundaries of the camera-computer screen framing. At this stage, that CdV format seemed to be the peak of what streaming could offer, and it was entertaining, but it wasn’t invoking that feeling of rave. Sunwaves absolutely tore this down. It was such a dramatic shift in purpose and presentation that it had a huge impact. It was not just that streaming got better: what Sunwaves achieved profoundly impacts the future of rave culture. This is not specifically about minimal music, although there is something important about it. They were the first to truly understand the performance medium, and they fully embraced the idea of turning the computer screen into part of the performance. Continues in Part II
On this note, we would like to thank WDIT for over a month of weekend online events. It was a great opportunity to use their platform for communal benefit, and regardless of what is said in the analysis of formats and audiovisual theory, WDIT put a lot of effort into providing content for us all while we were stuck at home. It was greatly appreciated. Shout out @constant_projection for those animated posters, they were a game changer.
@venus_of_mars
@venus_of_mars
CDCY SECRET LIBRARY
You can now follow the barcode to access a stash of e-books about rave culture and electronic music.
CDCY on the Quarantine : Part II First and foremost, it must be remembered that, in terms of subcultural value, Sunwaves is more than a rave. It is a kind of annual rominimal summit, where the “cult leaders” present their vision of the next phase or years of the rominimal movement. The idea is, that rominimal music as a movement is not just about the aesthetic of the music. Rather, what rominimalism is, is a specific trip, a specific feeling, a specific state of mind that is achieved through engagement with rominimalist ritualism. Certain combinations of drugs, matched to certain kinds of music, played in a certain kind of way; if these aspects are combined as they are by rominimal artists, there is a very unique experience to be had. It is cult-like in that the whole movement revolves around a closeness to this perspective and experience, or a closeness to this festival and it’s organisers. Year by year, those who are involved in the production side of rominimal, further develop this unique feeling or trip, and each year they produce new music and new sounds based on their understanding of how this trip works. Sunwaves takes on a kind of communion style presentation, embracing a format that can seem like a sermon. The concept of purposeness becomes important here, as the stream of Sunwaves was not just an ad hoc entertainment piece, but rather it had to take on the role of presenting the year’s sermon. Given that most of the music is unreleased, there was a consistent sense of excitement about what would be played next. The audience of sunwaves know what is going on, and they know that the music is always cutting edge, there were more reasons to tune in. It was broadcast on Youtube, with no comments or chat on the main screen. Being that it was international, too, opposed to listening to a friend, there was more freedom to just leave the set playing with no need to stay near the keyboard. The second important thing overall, was the way they made the screen part of the performance. They removed any boxing or framing on screen, and the angle of the video helped to hide any reminders that it was a computer stream. With no frame or box, the frame became the screen of your computer itself, as if the stream stepped one step closer to the viewer. Certain kinds of drugs like ketamine become highly influential here, as the lack of visual reminders on screen meant that the whole concept of place within the stream was distorted. This specific experience was reinforced by a truly inspired visual dimension: the animators and visual artists isolated several elements on screen, putting them in the foreground, and used a greenscreen technique to remove the background, leaving just the DJ and the decks floating around in the cyber abyss. These isolated entities also had some glitchy, acidic, broken video game fx processing on them, making them dynamic and fluid, seeming to move around and reshape themselves at will. As the music ramped up in energy, and as the artists started to deliberately pull at the strings of the trip, all these increasing visual distortions amplified this effect. The lack of framing on the screen meant that, under the influences of the trip, things in visual proximity to the viewing screen started to be pulled into the booth. At times,
these external elements could blur the line between virtual and real, seeming to leave the video feed sitting somewhere between the TV and the room; a superposition between the two worlds. There were moments where it could feel like there was a 3 foot tall hologram of Mihigh in the room, summoning bizarre and unholy sounds, like a dark wizard invading your reality and threatening the boundary between viewer and screen. It was as if this stream of sunwaves Sunwaves was intended as a Ph.D thes i s i n s o m e und e r g r o u nd uni ve rsi t y, a nd t h e so ph i stic ation that has gone into the engineering of the whole Sunwaves trip culture, pushes them to the foreground of rave culture in terms of redefining the future of electronic music and rave. And redefine the future they did. When Cap’s closing set drew to an end, the artist’s name was dropped off the screen, and Cap was replaced by a black silhouette of an unknown, unplanned DJ. It was clear, who the DJ was didn’t matter, they were obscured and anonymous, and they were entirely unscheduled. For everyone watching at that moment, the anonymous DJ and the rominimal cult actually achieved the goal of standing one step further ahead than everyone. At that moment they were in the future already, because not a single person watching had any idea how this was about to go down. At that moment, it seemed equally likely that the set would end suddenly, or that the festival was about to go on for another 5 days (or forever). This experience was of the same monumentality as the first kraftwerkconcerts, where everyone in the audience was unified by a collective awe-inspiring stare as these aliens from the future showed to them the future of music. Even the most rational music critics enjoy this idea that Kraftwerk had a vision of the future and their art was an attempt to show the audience this future through a kind of interpretive symbolism spelled out through performative sound and visuals. At times, at the peak of the trip, with the most fucked up visuals, Mihigh was not playing music as we know it. Those sounds, when isolated, don’t seem so musical, but these bizarre sounds have been composed with the intention of being heard from a particular perspective, from a particular level of sensory immersion. Listening to these sounds without being in the right place (so to speak), would be like standing on the wrong side of a rock concert stage and wondering why everything seems .. inverted. At the moment in which the rominimal directors stepped out of the present and into the future, the point was made. It didn’t matter, after all, how long this encore/after party would go on for, they had already proven to the audience that they were worth paying attention to: “we were the future, we are the future again, and we remain in the future”. When the stream suddenly cut 2 hours into the anonymous closing (who was Arapu in the end), it was like a mic-drop. After presenting that, no one can complain about the finish, it was everything and more, and they could kill it however they wanted.
It redefined the future because it reminded the audience that there is a future at all. In a world where the future is cancelled (see: Mark Fisher), just reminding the audience that things will change, and things can move forward is unstatably important. They successfully pulled off a non-localised rave, where the audience was able to break through into deep immersion, without the need for immediate proximity. The sheer unexpected quality of the sunwaves stream made them seem like future pioneers in the same way pirate radio stations were in the 1970s. With enough Wi-Fi and wisdom, rave culture could sustain even in nuclear bunkers; everyone buried underground receiving a mysterious alien broadcast, interacting with holograms. If rave can always remind us that the future can be brighter than we imagine, then it is a important revolutionary tool, and one that must survive all changes of format and all modes of organising society.
This is a wonderful ambient and, at times, experimental electronica album. Starting from gentle, sparkling, cyber-brass tones, to full-bodied expressive movements. The sound design is extremely high level and refined. Aesthetically this work has a clear reference to old computer technology, and to fantasy role-playing games it is the kind of music that would sit behind a text adventure complete with 8-bit sprites, but taken to a different final form; there is a blending of classicalism with retro, it reminds of how the future used to be envisioned. Some of the futuristic elements are granted by the near-chromaticism of this album, often using melodic motifs which escape the conventional framework of scales and keys. Given that, it is not overly dissonant or chaotic, and the atonality is tastefully expressed. It is electronica at its most essential, it is a kind of 8-bit retro-futurism: not literally 8-bit in the quality/bit-depth, but in the way the melodies open and evolve, and the cycles of these folk-tale-esque melodic motifs are both simple and detailed enough to satisfy an attentive listener. The album achieves this by adding elements with longer phrasing behind the cyclic motifs, which adds more depth to the progression. It repeats en-loop as gaming music would, but it escapes a static sense of place through long, gliding, and less repetitive elements in the background. The use of rotating but somehow static motifs in gaming audio often served the purpose of reinforcing a virtual area’s sense of place - Mihalis’ take on this sees the use of longer movements and phrases to blur the boundaries of the implied space. We are stuck in a room, but the room itself is moving. Perhaps this is why the figure of the spaceship is an important language choice from the producer, as this duality of en-shrined space and movement really does offer the imaginary image of a little spaceship flying around, through different worlds, collecting coloured orbs and interacting with alien NPCs in weird vacuous places.
Announcements: The Dialectics of Rave We are happy to announce a two part expansion for CDCY this year. CDCY Presents the Dialectics of Rave, a side series of publications based on the idea of underground academia. We are creating an on going syllabus which deconstructs rave, music, music scenes, aesthetic theory, cultural change throughout history, and the politics of music, dancing, danc floors and sound systems. We see cultural forms as a gestalt, or Deleuzian singularity, where multiple parts unionise and begin to self-oscillate as a new, greater form. In the case of rave, Vol. 1 begins as an introduction, and 2 starts the deconstruction process, breaking down rave into componential “parts�, and begin to speculate how these parts come together; the dialectics of rave culture. Watch this space, Vols. 1 & 2 coming very soon.
@uvglov
For the second part of our 2020 expansion, as well as the expansion into underground academics, we are branching out into publishing music; moving from zine maker to DIY publishing house. The introductory release is coming soon including a very unique international guest. As of November we are accepting demos: techno; acid; minimal; underground.