We openly dare to question this new form of vibe religiosity which the new electronic music culture proposes. This collective trance, experienced through an energetic overstimulation, wants to fill the inner void formed by the absence of sacred landmarks. Our modern tribe, made up predominantly of computer scientists and hunters of a new passive income, works its life to exhaustion, and then feels the urgent need to relieve itself of stress as efficiently as possible. So new forms of ecstasy appear, the one that can most urgently solve this problem for us, so necessarily new gods appear to facilitate it.
And our modern pantheon also has its gallery of gods. We have Mamona, the god of money, to whom we offer the most consistent sacrifice of our time.
Then armed with a substantial capital in our account, we bring the goddess of wellness a very generous portion of our monetary resources. Because suffering is for the poor, not for the citizens of such an evolved culture as the one we belong to. This goddess should be called Gaia, mother earth, who, if we allow her, would hold her bountiful breast in our tender mouths until death takes us apart. Sick of work and predictable comfort, aspects that keep us captive in the solitude of our own individual interests, we need to lose our minds in a collective ecstasy, and this is where the god of vibe comes in. In its current incarnation it would be a subtype of Dionysus, perhaps with influences from the realm of the god Pan. And this new Dionysus, instead of the cup in his hand, has a high-performance disc jockey, which he uses to mix new beats that instantly take us into a wild ecstasy. And this old god, disguised as a new one, gives you consistent and intense pleasure. The small sacrifice he asks of you is the price of an EDM festival ticket (maybe some drugs if you can afford it), but what’s really important: the willingness to surrender to the vibe he gives you. He will take away the pain you feel, and the burden of reality will be forgotten, as long as you give the vibe your power to be lucid. His whisper sounds like this, and it’s the same echo repeated for thousands of years: you don’t need to feel the crush of these emotions, don’t seek to confront life, it’s not worth daring to walk through the pain, to want freedom, the price is too high, and my price is much lower. Let yourself go numb, I want to give you the perfect illusion, the one you need to forget that it ever hurt, the one you need to be instantly happy.
As a certain Tayson, a participant in an EDM festival said:
“It’s all about the vibe. Vibe is a real thing, like where you are, the light, the smell, all of these play a part in what you become in the end. It’s about how you feel in that moment. It’s about how you feel because of the lights, because of the air. Everything you can perceive with your five senses has to do with the vibe. “10
Introduction:
Gordon Lynch conducted a number of interviews with frequent club-goers, and from these discussions, it emerged that the club experience brings a deep sense of meaning to them. “There is enough evidence to support the fact that club culture has a religious function in some way for most participants”1. Graham St. John, in his ethnographic study, presents club-goers as participants in a new form of tribal organization which has rituals based on trance. He discusses EDMC (Electronic Dance Music Community) as involving courageous jumps into uncertainty2 on the part of those who open themselves to this culture. Leaping into the unknown, or among those you don’t know, more precisely, becomes a form of secular faith, one based on the assumption that others are trustworthy, that you are safe among them. The one who dares to make the leap is taken out of the control zone, so he manages to experience intense bodily ecstasy. It takes faith to be able to surrender control to such an experience, one in which critical thinking does not manifest itself. So it becomes obvious that this EDM culture performs, for those involved in it, many of the functions that religion traditionally performs. The fact that it shares many of the specific features of religion and magic3.
The EDM religion: on the open
Some EDM festivals are not shy about expressing their religious intentions openly. Obviously, because we are culturally situated in postmodernity, the religion of these festivals seems liberated from moral authority and the judgements that go together with it. We are presented with a psychological-spiritual approach, which seeks to appear to be beyond primitive religion. We are sold a new form of religion, one that seems to combine a set of universally valid symbols. The salvation proposed in this new age movement is just a state of well-being, so it becomes justified to use a pseudo-religious approach, one lacking internal coherence. Their perspective is that there is nothing that makes one more alive or more dead in terms of eternity, but all that really matters is to forget our pain, and this without questioning the price that has to be paid and without coming into conflict with each other. A good example of such an approach is the Boom4.1 festival, which takes place every year in Portugal on the shores of Idanha a nova lake. It has included in two of its editions, those of 20064.2 and 20084.3 what the organizers called the liminal village. But what is this term liminal? In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin limen, meaning “a threshold”) expresses the disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage. Those who reach this stage, therefore, no longer have the status they had before the ritual, but they have not yet reached the status they receive at the end of the ritual. In the liminal stage of a ritual, participants ‘stand at the threshold’ between their previous way of structuring their identity, time or community and their new way of seeing things5. For Victor Turner the liminal stage is a period of neither here nor there3. A good example for this complicated definition would be the phenomenon of quantum superposition. This describes a state, in which a particle is neither in A nor in B, but somewhere between the two positions. So in the ritual, liminality thus plays the role of the reconfiguration stage. The festival organizers have introduced this concept to describe a space of destruction and subsequent restructuring. They proposed a variety of ways to access this restructuring, a range of approaches including: Tai Chi sessions, exploration of spirituality through seminars and workshops, discussions on new age topics, exhibitions and art3. And this commercial approach to religion continues through the festival’s annual editions in many other forms. What has remained constant, however, is the accessibility of cheap euphoria and its confusion with authentic spiritual states. Namely a simple state of altered consciousness, which avoids confronting the reality of pain and thus seeks the quickest way to forgetfulness. What is searched for is a simple collective trance, one induced by tribal syncopated rhythms and perhaps even enhanced by mind-altering substances. True spirituality has nothing to do with the denial of fear, followed by the reckless expression of inner pulses. True spirituality requires you not to bypass fear, but to choose to move through it to freedom. This is the way by which you will be able to surrender your control, the root of which is fear, and then experience true love. Other examples of similar festivals would be: the Ozora festival in Hungary, the VooV Experience festival in Germany, the Earth Frequency festival in Australia and unfortunately many more6.
The EDM religion: on the hidden
The fact that there are elements of religiosity, spirituality and meaning, even at an implicit level in EDM culture, is something that can be proven. Dick Hebdige, says that these kinds of subcultures are often a way of resisting, through culture, some form of moral monopoly16, or authority, to put it better. So this revolution, manifested through the cultivation of club activity, is rather anti-religious17 or a-religious, born out of a desire to fill a void of meaning, but by rejecting constraints and limits. The desire to defy and challenge what is conventional, can be explained by the accumulation of an enormous amount of frustration. The suppression of ecstatic dancing in certain puritanical Western Christian traditions has given rise to a strong desire for revenge. EDM develops out of the disco culture of the gay community, African trance culture, specifically secular African-American music and the madness of the 1960s centered on psychedelic experiences3. Because it has such a beginning, one that is born out of emotions of suppression and repression, EDM virtually recreates the religious experience, that is, the experience of liberation. But, unfortunately, such an experience is lived in an illegitimate way, because ultimately reality demands what is rightfully hers. And the price that reality demands is within everyone’s reach, being accessible to any human being. Few, however, dare to pay it, because it is a very high one. And this price is nothing less than the cultivation of thankfulness, in the area of freedom of the heart. Where, beyond what others can offer or take away, you have the chance to become truly free. This is why a slave can be free and his master can be a prisoner.
Conclusion
It seems that collective trance is not the answer, but being alive and awake, in an assumed way, in community. Love reality and then surely reality will love you back!
Bibliography:
1.Gordon Lynch, Understanding Theology and Popular Culture (Oxford, 2005), pg. 177.
2.Graham St. John, ‘The Difference Engine: Liberation and the Rave Imaginary’, in Graham St. John (ed.), Rave Culture and Religion (Abingdon, 2004), pg. 19 – 45
3.Rupert Till, Possession Trance Ritual in Electronic Dance Music Culture: A Popular Ritual Technology for Reenchantment, Addressing the Crisis of the Homeless Self, and Reinserting the Individual into the Community ISBN 978-0-7546-6527-4
4. Boom Festival, website accesat 14:15, 11/11/2023
4.1 https://boomfestival.org/boom2023/
4.2 https://www.boomfestival.org/boom2023/gallery/2008/gallery_7723/
4.3 https://boomfestival.org/boom2023/gallery/2006/gallery-7695/
5. Liminality
6. https://tribalreunion.com/festival/best-psytrance-festivals/
7. Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music Meaning and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge, 1995), pg. 105.
8. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, (London, 1979).
9. Nicholas Jay Demerath III, ‘The Sacred as Surrogate: Notes on Implicit A-Religion’, in Edward Bailey (ed.) The Secular Quest for Meaning in Life, Denton Papers in Implicit Religion, (New York, 2002), pg. 55– 66
