Home » The long life of raves – Vanni Santoni

The long life of raves – Vanni Santoni

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The long life of raves – Vanni Santoni

In reality, the term is linked to a precise moment in the history of free parties, that of the acid house parties of the English scene of the late eighties, which were the harbinger of future raves, but had very different characteristics from those of today.

That the word lends itself to exploitation is clear from its origin. “A new and unpleasant term has entered the English vocabulary: raver”, Wrote the British popular newspaper Daily Mail in 1961 about the participants in the Beaulieu festival in France, inflamed by the notes of the jazz bands playing on stage. “Rave” was therefore already used in a derogatory key.

In the Italian newspapers it appeared much later than the organization of the first free parties. Something similar to raves was already seen on the Roman scene in the nineties, with events such as the Virus or the Hard raptus. And in Tuscany, where a network of out of hours, or parties that began at dawn to welcome those arriving from other evenings, had joined the progressive circle of clubs (in which the music was techno and not tekno, which indicates a faster subgenre, but also some practices such as the occupation of abandoned spaces, events that last several days and the opposition to the circuits of commodified entertainment). All this happened in complete ignorance of the media.

The underground was truly underground and it would have been for a long time: in 2001, events related to the world free tekno like the one organized for New Year’s Eve by the Level 57 social center in Bologna, they were described by the press with words like “odyssey from alternative out of hours” or “great party of sounds and images in the name of contamination”. Still lacked the right terms to describe that world. And if you weren’t using rave yet, let alone free party, free tekno o tribe (groups of people who carry around a soundsystem, or the walls of speakers, often making it a lifestyle).

When something cannot be defined it is also difficult to repress. In Milan, at the great free New Year’s Eve party in 2002, some policemen arrived: finding themselves in front of those walls of crates firing tekno at 160 bpm, they asked perplexed what was happening. Historical pioneer Betty23 told him it was “just a gathering of underground cultures that would be over in a couple of days” and they quietly walked away, just saying not to leave glass lying around.

In those days, even if the press still lacked the words to tell them, the world of free parties had already entered the next phase, the era of the tribes. To understand what we are talking about, however, we need to take a step back.

In 1992, when the first wave of acid house had already passed in the UK, an important event happened: six tribes (Circus warp, DiY, Cirkus normal, Adrenaline, Bedlam and Spiral tribe) brought their soundsystems to the Castlemorton common festival, a hippy event in Worcestershire, turning it into a week-long party, with peaks of thirty thousand admissions.

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Although everything had unfolded in peace and harmony, the media unleashed a storm of alarmism, and thirteen people from the Spiral tribe were arrested and brought to prison in what would have been one of the longest and most costly trials in the Kingdom’s history. United. They were all acquitted, but in 1994 the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was approved, which prohibited “events where music includes sounds characterized by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”.

An almost unique case of musical discrimination, so much so that looking for a precedent ends up in Nazi Germany, where the regulation for orchestras prohibited the “syncopated and hysterical rhythms of the music of the barbarian races” in order not to “stimulate low instincts” contrary to “Aryan sense of discipline and moderation”.

But the invention of the techno tribe it was too powerful to be stopped by a law, and the Spirals, who still had the festive masses of Castlemorton in their eyes, knew it. A new synthesis had been found between four subcultures: the nomadism and psychedelia of the hippies had met the self-production of punk; the Jamaican idea of ​​the soundsystem as a means of re-appropriating public space had found its ideal music in techno sounds and the result had a mobilization capacity not seen since the dawn of rock.

So it was that the Spiral tribe decided to leave the United Kingdom to spread the word. France, Italy and the Czech Republic were among the first destinations: announced by simple photocopied flyers with the words “Spiral tribe in the area”, free parties small and large began to pop up around the continent. Soon, tribes from other countries began to join the Spiral tribes and other British groups.

In France the Okupé, the Tomahawk, the Ubiq, the Metek, the Heretik were born, in Italy the Olstad, the Kernel panik, the Latitanz, the Tekno mobil squad (and then Revolt99, HZD, OTK, Tribe Unitz, Zapotek, Mad Factory ), in the Czech Republic the Cirkus alien and the Matchbox (and again Metro, Swamp, Frontall) in Austria the Legos, in the Netherlands the Kierewiet …

It is a long but incomplete list, given that new tribes were born all the time and others merged under different names: within a few years the movement’s websites presented lists of more than two hundred tribes, from small local soundsystems to the organizers of technology choice by tens of thousands of people.

With the multiplication of the tribes, large annual gatherings also began to take shape, the teknival in fact, where more walls of crates were mounted, thus giving life to real temporary cities: the bible of the movement was after all the essay published in the United Kingdom in 1991 TAZ Temporarily autonomous zones (Shake 2007) by the anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey.

In 2004 at the CzechTek in Boněnov, in the Czech Republic, 165 tribes from all over Europe came together, with 84 walls of crates. It was just the culmination of a great season – at least a couple of times had been going on for nearly a decade technology choice per year in Europe – but such magnitudes of scale could no longer go unnoticed.

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The media began to frame the phenomenon – obsessively using the word rave -, politics saw an opportunity for propaganda and the police changed their attitude.

The 2005 CzechTek in Mlýnec was brutally attacked by the Czech police and the episodes of repression multiplied everywhere, without however being able to stem the phenomenon, which continued to change and move, protean.

In 2007 in Pinerolo there was the largest party ever organized in Italy, with fifty-seven walls of boxes for a week and more of dances. To many it seemed like a swan song, given that in the following years there would have been a relative degeneration of the scene: becoming more visible, free parties began to be frequented even by people who did not share their libertarian values ​​and drugs have sprung up. heavy as heroin and cocaine, which worsened the atmosphere.

The substances of choice of raver they are psychedelics like LSD, entactogens (molecules that increase empathy) like MDMA and dissociative like ketamine.

This degeneration, coupled with the increase in repression, has led some to stop attending free parties and others to turn to the world of psytrance, the other half of the sky of rave culture. Born in Goa, India, these festivals are characterized by a post-hippy imagery and from the beginning they preferred to stay within the perimeter of legality, with a ticket to buy to participate.

Perhaps the knot is there, and the reason for a fury that continues today: free party means free party, but also free party, and this obstinate positioning outside the logic of capital still does not go down to the system, a word that would be modern. , if the free tekno he hadn’t put it back into circulation with his “fuck the system” borrowed from punk and flanked by corollaries such as “the only good system is a soundsystem” (the only good system is a soundsystem).

All this leads to the events of last summer. Compared to the dark years between 2009 and 2014 many things have changed, also thanks to a new generation of tribes, less tied to a nomadic lifestyle but very motivated to organize free parties.

Already in 2015 we begin to see large parties – and with the right vibration – such as the various Borderless sound explosions, the first Space travel or the Labirinz decay. Until, in mid-August 2021, the unexpected happens: Valentano’s Space travel vol. 2, on the border between Tuscany and Lazio, looks like a real technology choice at full power. Almost a hundred tribes from all over Europe for about thirty walls of crates: numbers from the golden age.

The reaction of the press, however, exceeds the alarmism seen until then. False news spread to criminalize the event, starting with the one about the drowning of a boy, Gianluca Santiago, in a lake half an hour from technology choice.

No newspaper verifies whether the two facts are connected – a few days later the father will say that his son had not been to the party – and the “dead at the rave” ends up on the front pages. At this point the narrative goes even further: there is talk of a second death, of alcoholic coma, rape, dead dogs and even of a birth in the middle of the dust.

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Fake news that in most cases appear in the online newspapers of Tuscia, are taken up (always without checks) by the local editions of the major newspapers and end up on TV and in national news.

Already in the days of technology choice newspapers such as Esquire, Il Dubbio, il Manifesto, DinamoPress, Il Foglio, RomaToday, Leggilanotizia and L’Indipendente dismantle this narrative, but it is not enough to break the climate of moral panic against raves.

In parliament, Minister Luciana Lamorgese is accused by the right, but in reality the management of the event at the level of public order was sensible, with external monitoring that allowed to avoid accidents, leaving the ravers also the time to clean up the area. The League proposes a bill against raves, ignoring the sentence 36228/2017 of the court of cassation, which establishes the legitimacy of raves by virtue of article 17 of the constitution.

Common sense and history say that a law against raves is useless and harmful: in France, where such a provision has existed since 2001, the effect has been nil, given that there are more free parties today than twenty years ago. , while the only thing that has changed is the ferocity of the crackdown, as evidenced by what happened in June 2021 in Redon, where a boy lost his hand to a flashball (a non-lethal weapon used to disperse crowds ) used by the gendarmerie.

But perhaps it is appropriate to go beyond a simple no to laws of this type. Thirty years after Castlemorton, free parties have established themselves as a practice for girls and boys who decide to get together and party, and should be considered as such.

The effect on European society of such a rhizome of freedom, music and sociality was only positive. It is worth remembering the words of an elder from Pinerolo who, interviewed on the occasion of the technology choice organized in a former military gallery in the city, he pointed out that the place where boys from all over Europe danced was the same place where other boys had once trained to kill during the draft.

Then we could take up an idea that was circulating on certain flyers right in Pinerolo: a candidacy of free parties (no, not raves) as an intangible heritage of Unesco. It was something halfway between the joke and the provocation, but it takes little to take it seriously: like it or not, free parties are one of the few spontaneous and transversal European cultural expressions at the level of class, race and gender, and they do by now part of the collective consciousness and history of our countries.

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