#2 - U.K. Rave Flyers 1991-1996
Something I often think about: can a person be too old to join certain subcultures? As someone who got into hardcore-punk as an 8th grader, I was always baffled by people who first discovered underground punk sometime after college… the idea of hearing Void or Agnostic Front for the first time at the age of thirty and connecting with it on an emotional level strikes me as strange, though not outright impossible. Even weirder are those who discovered they liked pro-wrestling as full-grown adults, an epiphany which I truly cannot fathom - it’s like maturing into a well-rounded adult only to decide that Spongebob is your favorite actor after seeing him for the first time in 2018. I acknowledge that there’s privilege, circumstance and luck baked into my personal formative experiences, but it’s still weird to see acquaintances who would’ve thumbed their nose at my pro-wrestling-themed grindcore band1 in high school post about how much they love Orange Cassidy nowadays. But I digress!
I bring this up because, as much as I truly love techno music, I will forever feel like an outsider having not been raised on the stuff. As a teenage punk I had no room for electronic dance music in my diet, an unconscious bias that persisted until I was on tour with my band in the summer of 2005 and a Benny Benassi CD found its way into the van’s stereo, over and over and over again, sometimes the highlight of the night. This led to me picking up Navid Tahernia’s Speicher 56 on a whim in the autumn of 2007 (a very random, non-seminal choice, as personally-pivotal music purchases often can be), and then downloading Ricardo Villalobos’ Fabric 36 mix, at which point I became hopelessly hooked2. Over the past fifteen years, my perception of the world of electronic music shrank from an impenetrable vastness to a manageable grid, like a complex multi-rail subway system that grows familiar from daily use. And yet I still don’t think I could ever reasonably pass as a raver, nor would I want to disrespect the culture by trying.
Still, my interest in dance music continues to grow at a stronger rate than any of my other obsessions3. Over the last year, I’ve spent more than a little of my time dreaming of colossal warehouse spaces packed with hundreds of sweaty bodies and impossibly loud music - the sort of thing we all took for granted up until March 2020. In an attempt to mentally transport myself to that alternate reality, I picked up the recent English translation of Rainald Goetz’s novel Rave, a head-spinning account of Berliner club life that puts you directly inside Goetz’s exhilarating and exhausting social scene, which proved to be an intentionally confusing (yet satisfying) escape. And then even more recently, I picked up this humble chapbook, which features nothing more than a variety of reprinted U.K. rave flyers from 1991 through 1996 (just as its title promises), care of Colpa Press. Colpa appears to be situated within the art world, which is why this is listed as an “art book” as opposed to a “zine” (maybe that’s just my punk upbringing creeping in again), but whatever you want to call it, it’s been incredibly satisfying to flip through.
I’m no graphic designer, but I appreciate the way these promoters used the space allotted on an A5-sized postcard: grab the passerby’s attention with a neon scene of airbrushed sexual energy on one side, and cram every name, pricing detail, contest prize (£25 and a “free hairdo at London’s leading salon”!) and tantalizing quote on the back. In a way, these visuals better inspire my rave fantasies than actual photos of raves in progress - there’s something about the cosmic designs, party details, futuristic fonts and energetic layouts that aids my brain in filling in the gaps with the hypothetical people and sounds that permeated those spaces. Maybe if I was going to raves in the 90s, it would be different - I’d probably prefer a book of 90s hardcore photos than one of show flyers, for example - but since I have no real connection to the people who attended these events besides my own imagination, these images really do the trick. The deeper we go into this all-digital era, I find myself clinging to the tangible, a pull that I hope you’re feeling too (as I communicate this sentiment from my new digital newsletter). Would you rather grab a flyer at a record shop, or squint at the poorly-resized header JPEG on a Facebook event page?
The book is one in a series of rave flyer reprints, featured alongside London, Los Angeles, and two volumes each of San Francisco and New York4. I figured one book would suffice for my collection, and I chose the U.K. edition because it struck me as the one that hits closest to the heart of the matter, not merely a satellite but ground zero itself. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to chainsmoke in my closet with the lights off, blasting some Luke Slater and pretending I’m working coat check at Lust.
That’d be The Ultimate Warriors, of course.
Villalobos continues to serve as an inspirational figure in my life, particularly due to his ebullient pursuit of creative freedom. Plus he’s got a killer record room!
As a matter of fact, the song “Obsession” by Army Of Lovers is one of my favorite musical discoveries of 2020, this music video (there are somehow two similar-but-different versions!) in particular.
Amazingly, no Detroit!