Riffs - Volume 3, Issue 2 - November 2019

Experimental writing on popular music

Of liminality and repetition, the real and the unreal, Of festival and noise, time and perception.

Vol. 3 Issue 2 November 2019

Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR), Birmingham City University, 5 Cardigan Street, Birmingham, B4 7BD, UK Managing Editors Craig Hamilton Sarah Raine

Editors Emily Bettison Asya Draganova Matt Grimes Dave Kane Chris Mapp Ed McKeon Richard Stenson Sebastian Svegaard Iain Taylor

Designers Ian Davies Iain Taylor Cover design by Adam Kelly-Williams - Bread PR

Riffs is published twice a year.

Copyright information Contributors hold the copyright to their submitted piece. They may distribute their work in the journal format as they see fit. Contributors also have the right to republish content without permission from the journal.

Riffs: Experimental writing on popular music (online & print) ISSN 2513-8537 Funded by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR).

S T N E T N O C

Editorial - Sarah Raine & Craig Hamilton

A Festival of Human Crisis - Patrycja Rozbicka, Gemma Bird and Amanda Beattie

Ship ‘Fam’, Festival ‘Virgins’ and a Cruise to Nowhere: Liminality and cruise ship festivals - David Cashman

Psychedelic Aesthetics and Territorial Agency-ing - Ana Ramos

‘The Undiluted Squash of UK Math Rock’: The Performer’s View of ArcTanGent Festival - Joe O’Connell

A Journey in the World of Queer and Feminist Punk Festivals - Louise Barrière

Ritual Sacrifice in the Music and Noise of a Metal Festival - Owen Coggins

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EDITORIAL IN DEFENCE OF FESTIVALS

Sarah Raine and Craig Hamilton

2 EUSSI 3 LOV

The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta. All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days.

The fiesta of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) set the scene for this issue of Riffs. The pages that follow consider the liminal and the repetitive, the real and the unreal, time and perception, noise, and the experience of the festival.

In a journal dedicated to experimental engagements with music, this theme is apt. The festival experience is a strange one; real and unreal. Forced into tents and muddy fields, tins of beans and all-day drinking (if not something stronger) become a strange and liberating normality; unwashed bodies and eclectic 'festival clothes' (brought out just for the occasion) can transform even the most placid soul into a demon dancer. And the music. Forced up against another disparate set, of sharing that experience in the sun, rain, snow, wind, with those that won't remember and those for whom this moment will be indelibly etched, to be recalled in claims of belonging; that "I was there". The cornerstone of musical histories.

To study music festivals in their myriad forms is to study music culture in its most transient but iconic state. The boundaries of pleasure and work meet, and are fraught with peril. 'Festival ethnography' a sitting duck to those bemoaning the flippant excesses of academics wont to spend taxpayers money on good-times and naval-gazing. Yet as these pages will attest, much can be learnt from the seemingly consumerist and escapist nature of festival attendance. Hemingway's fiesta offers the increasingly nihilistic characters seven days of the inconsequential and the unreal, a brief respite from the realities of their entangled and emotionally complicated lives. The blur of the fiesta brings a pause to their problems. And so it must do for some festival (or fiesta) goers. Yet, in his iconic study of carnival in Brazil, anthropologist Roberto DeMatta (1979) lifts away the veil of chaos and disruption and demonstrates the clear social function that carnival plays in defining the roles and rules of Brazilian society. Any of us who have found ourselves changed on the silent journey back home know the true power of the liminal, of repetition, the strange/unreal, and the noise.

The sheer size, scale and scope of festivals can act to intensify the musical experience, shocking all of our senses into living with the music. If only for a couple of days, our sole focus is to negotiate the people, places and sounds of the festival space/place, carving our own paths into and through them. We create our own narratives of these musical experiences and we make sense of them to ourselves and others, both at the time and upon reflection. For who knows what will be remembered as a pivotal moment when all we wanted to do was to dance and to sing.

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2 EUSSI 3 LOV

A FESTIVAL OF HUMAN CRISIS Patrycja Rozbicka, Gemma Bird, & Amanda Beattie This essay draws comparisons between music festivals and refugee Reception and Identification Centres (RICs) on the islands of Lesvos, Chios and Samos, with the aim of demonstrating initial similarities that may exist between the two environments and uncovering striking differences between them. It is intended as a first step in assessing how, and if, the provisions provided for one can offer lessons for the other (Bernet, 2017), and whether the knowledge of the festival sector could be adapted and put to use in improvising the conditions for refugee provisions. While we understand music festivals and how they look intuitively, RICs require a definition.

Reception Centres are intended as a temporary space, one that provides immediate shelter and basic needs whilst initial asylum processing takes place (Avramopoulos, 2015). As such, these structures, spaces and provisions rely on temporary development and maintenance.

They need to be reactive and able to adapt to growing populations and, as they have become less temporary solutions to crisis, they have to be adaptable. The temporary nature of both structures and systems (festivals and RICs), as well as the ways in which people flow around these spaces suggest an important point for comparison.

Photograph: www.iandaviesphoto.com Ⓒ 2012 - 2019 | All Rights Reserved

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The relative success of festivals in responding to complex needs suggest that RICs can learn from the governance of a multi-million pound industry. Past experiences on the island of Lesvos suggest a reality in which this is actually the case (Bernet, 2017). In 2015 a grassroots movement built an informal refugee camp on Lesvos to house around 800 people. The Better Days camp was a response to the overcrowding of the official Moria Reception Centre on Lesvos. In building this camp they were supported by a group of Dutch volunteers from the festival industry who were able to draw on their networks to bring festival infrastructure to the camp, in particular high quality tents that could withstand the conditions. Importantly though, these volunteers not only brought equipment but also knowledge of sanitation, waste disposal and lighting to improve safety and security (author interview with Glocal Roots, 2019) and it is the success of this project that further emphasises the wider applicability of knowledge from the festival sector for improving official, as well as unofficial, housing solutions for refugees. It is through recognising the capacity of festivals to provide food, washing facilities and quality shelters that we can come to understand the capacity to achieve this and as such the failings of different state, and international bodies, to do the same when it comes to refugee provision in South East Europe.

We use photographs to question the initial visual similarities (pairing photographs from festivals and RICs) before re-focusing attention on the details that exist within the mosaic of images we present. To achieve this we also draw on interview and ‘serial ethnographic’ (Mannergren Selimovic, 2018) data from multiple visits to both UK festivals and the islands of Lesvos, Chios, Samos and Kos between 2017 and 2019, we make suggestions of lessons that can be learnt from the experience of festival sites for rethinking refugee housing and support inside RICs. In so doing, we remain ever mindful of the inherent privilege interwoven alongside the institutional tapestry of the festival experience, from those who organise them and those who enjoy them. Based on interviews with activists, however, we recognise the importance of drawing on other experiences, even those that stand in stark contrast with refugee lived experience (Anonymous author interview, 2018; author interview with Liska Bernet, 2019).

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As such, we recall that the festival-goer, imbued with wages and disposable income is situated to fully enjoy the perks of global capitalism. Moreover, as a paying participant, they expect, and even demand, appropriate service provision. The refugee, on the other hand, lives within extreme conditions of depravity and lacks mobility rights, within and beyond, the state. In that understanding, the festival goer is viewed as human and citizen in his/her full rights. Refugees, in contrast, are defined as non-humans or ‘missing people’ (Braidotti, 2018), as ‘ungrievable’ bodies (Butler, 2012), or non-citizens (Azoulay, 2008). The ability of the refugee to demand service provision is limited to protest, itself curtailed by state officials. It is in this vein, and with this understanding, that we draw these comparisons and make suggestions for how the lessons of the festival industry can begin to provide more humane conditions, that in fact recognise the humanity of refugees, challenging the narratives of non- human and ungrievable bodies.

This photo essay is based on visual material collected during research visits to music festivals in the UK in 2017, 2018 and 2019 and during primary research (#IR_Aesthetics Project) in RICs in Lesvos, Chios and Samos in 2018 and 2019, as well as a series of prolonged visits in the area engaging with activist and NGO support networks. It was, during this fieldwork, that we were alerted to conversations within activist communities, which imagined the comparative value of festivals and RICs (anonymous author interview, 2018). A conscious decision has been made in the production of this essay to avoid photographing human beings living in and around RICs. There are a number of reasons for this. The first being the inability to guarantee the safety and anonymity of people photographed. We wanted to avoid negative consequences for subjects of our study. Like Butler (2011), we conceptualise a body as never devoid of its context (Butler, 2009) and vulnerable to injury and suffering (Murphy, 2011). A body is always impinged upon from outside: by others, by social norms, by historical specific conditions of embodiment (or lack of it), by social and political organization, and by environmental factors (Lloyd, 2015).

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Refugees are often unintelligible in those terms and thus are unrecognisable, they do not appear in public as legible subjects in their own rights, their life is ‘ungrievable’ or dispensable (Butler, 2012: 11). An empty photograph intends to challenge the exploitation and silencing that occurs through the endless photography of people’s lives without their permission. The exclusion of human beings from our images not only challenges the unethical practices of taking photographs without permission, it also allows to highlight not only what can be seen, but also what is missing. These photographs are not works of artistic endeavour, rather they are a testimony of the events and human experiences that have been taking place in the RICs and their vicinity, an attempt to raise awareness of conditions and to challenge their continuation. Second, we wanted to avoid sensationalising and exploiting the stories of individuals who are propelled into the public domain and thus taking away those individual’s sovereignty and power in deciding what happens with their image. To this day, weak populations remain more exposed to photography, especially journalistic photography, which coerces and confines them to passive, unprotected position (Azoulay, 2008). Thirdly, there is an imaginary value of presenting empty spaces into which people can imagine the effects on their own lives (Greene, 1995) provoking, hopefully, self-reflexivity. Following Azoulay (2008) we recognise the co-ownership of photography, by photographer, photographed, and witness.

Each element of this triumvirate is a necessary condition under which photography is truly effective. Thus, we encourage a reader/viewer of this essay to imagine crafting a life for multiple years in a temporary space capable of providing a standard of living akin to that of a festival and to draw on this imagination to better understand the images and discussions we present.

We situate our key comparisons within this stark contrast of beneficiary populations. The first approaches the geography of these spaces from a distance, focusing on size, location and borders. The second considers accommodation types and how they are spaced and located. From there we engage with questions of security, fences and their materiality (Sundberg, 2008; Squire 2013; and Soto, 2018).

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Fourthly, we engage with medical provision, doctors and trained medical staff available at these sights, their role and the expectations placed on them. Finally, the last section focuses on waste disposal and sanitary provisions, each of which are fundamental aspects of both RICs and festivals, and as experiences on Lesvos demonstrate, are the starting point for conversations between the two (Bernet, 2017).

1. View from a distance The ten largest festivals in the UK in 2017 had a combined capacity of 700,000 participants, with Glastonbury alone hosting 120,000 guest and Latitude and Bestival (ranking ninth and tenth) selling 35,000 and 30,000 tickets respectively (Consultancy.uk). Smaller festivals such as Truck Festival in Oxfordshire sold 5,000 tickets in 2018 (Truck Festival, 2019) and, Moseley Folk Festival in Birmingham had a reported daily capacity of 6,000 visitors (eFestivals.co.uk, 2018).

Photo 1: Panoramic view of the Truck Festival, Oxfordshire, UK, Summer 2018

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In contrast, whilst the number of refugees arriving into the countries of South East Europe has decreased overall since 2015, the flow of people nevertheless continues, with 79,500 refugees and asylum seekers residing in Greece as of May 2019 (UNHCR 2019) and an increase in arrivals on to the islands between July and August 2019. Those arriving are in the first instance accommodated in RICs either on the mainland or on the islands of Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Kos and Leros, most commonly known as the Hotspots (Dimitriadi, 2017) (the focus of this piece). These spaces in structure, and often location, resemble festival sights in their reliance on temporary accommodation and impermanent administration structures, yet in keen contrast to festival sites, they are dealing with humanitarian crises and have additional problems such as difficulties with mental health and asylum procedures to contend with (anonymous author interview, 2018). Whilst we recognise these vast differences in problems faced, we suggest that drawing on festivals to support improved conditions in housing structures, waste disposal, sanitation and food, would provide a safer and more secure environment for overcoming the deeper issues associated with crisis, as, as one interviewee told us, on Samos at least ‘everything comes back to food and water’ (Author interview with Project Armonia, 2019).

Photo 2: Panoramic view of the Vathy RIC (lower left corner), Samos Island, South Greece, January 2019

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2. ‘Sea’ of tents While not all festivals look the same, they have a commonly acknowledged aesthetic. The stage is always present at the centre of attention. We also have camping sights, on occasion, romantically compared to the ‘sea’ of tents (Mair and Laing, 2011).

Photo 3: Tent field with view of the stage in the background, Truck Festival, Oxfordshire, UK, Summer 2018

The reliance on tents to house refugees is also becoming a common occurrence in RIC’s. The RIC on Samos has an official capacity of 650 people, yet between December 2018 and January 2019 an estimated 5,000 people were waiting on the island for an asylum decision (Beattie et al, 2019).

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The numbers are continuously fluctuating. When the number of people rapidly increases, the majority of people live outside the RIC’s fence. This area is referred to as the ‘jungle’ (Bird and Beattie, 2019) and relies on tents and makeshift shelters that are unable to withstand the rain and cold in winter, or provide protection from the heat, snakes and rats in summer (anonymous author interview, 2019).

Photo 4: The 'Jungle' outside Vathy Reception Centre, Samos Island, South Greece, January 2019

3. Security provisions The security at festivals relies on check-points, fenced off areas, as well as wristbands indicating area-access. There are occasional flare ups: This is Tomorrow festival in Newcastle in May 2019 was cut short due to security concerns (NME, 25th May 2019), organizers of the We Are FSTVL in Upminster, also in May 2019, faced festival-goers storming the festival entrance when they ran out of wristbands (Independent, 27th May 2019).

Yet, in general, the use of fences and wristbands lead to smooth running events.

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Photo 5: Security check point, Truck Festival, Oxfordshire, Summer 2018

Photo 6: Beach stage, the Great Escape Festival, Brighton, UK, Spring 2019

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Security in RICs relies on a combination of organisations including local police and, similarly to festival environments, private security firms.

Particularly poignant to a comparison with the UK is the presence of G4S, at both festivals (Guardian, July 2019) and in RICs. RICs also make use of barbed wire fencing, often multi layered, and, whilst they are presented as being open, the layers of security present an aesthetic of ‘enclosure and control’ (Barder, 2016: 32; Tazzioli, 2018). Like a festival site there are zones of exclusions within an RIC separated by fences, zones where only administrators can enter, zones that are often associated of a higher standard including containers with working air conditioning and heating.

Photo 7: Moria Reception Centre, Lesvos, South Greece, Summer 2017

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Photo 8: A fence surrounding the Vathy Reception Centre, Samos Island, South Greece, Summer 2018

4. Medical provisions While medical provisions at festivals have not always been perfect (Chapman et al. 1982), there has been growing improvements in this area. More data is available on successful application of emergency medicine at music festivals (McQueen and Davies, 2012) and medical provisions now focus exclusively on the needs of festival emergencies. A notable example is Festival Medical Service created in 1979 and is now a recognised provider of high-quality professional event medical services at large and small events (FMA ‘About’). Festivals not only provide more information on emergency first aid, but also install functional medical emergency points (with Glastonbury going as far as having main medical centre and number of smaller walk-in emergency points; Glastonbury ‘Medical and First Aid’).

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Photo 9: Welfare tent, Truck Festival, Oxfordshire, UK, Summer 2018

Photo 10: First Aid point, Truck Festival, Oxfordshire, UK, Summer 2018

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With growing numbers of medical provisions at festivals, the situation is very different in RICs. The proportion of medical professionals on duty is striking, with one protest sign reading ‘one doctor per 6,000 people’ and interviewees telling us of lengthy queues to see a doctor, with only one doctor present in an RIC for some months. This is against a backdrop of attempts to hire more staff, with doctors then failing to arrive for their first day of work (anonymous author interview, 2019). The support offered by the third sector differs between RICs, as does the relationships between camp or reception centre officials, local and national government, and third sector providers. In particular, Médecins Sans Frontières (the largest and most active medical provider after UNHCR) tries to maintain a strong presence on Lesvos and Chios. However, their involvement on Samos is limited as they are unable to carry out vaccination programmes nor medical services inside the RIC, they have however provided psychosocial support, advice for how to stay safe medically when travelling and children’s vaccination programmes outside of the borders of the RIC (author interview with MSF, 2019).

Photo 11: Taken during January 2019 protests around Vathy RIC, Samos Island, South Greece

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5. Sanitary Provisions There is a social rhythm expressed in daily routines of the festival-goers and a sense of community between participants (Tjora, 2016). And while every participant accepts certain levels of inconvenience, almost written into the ‘to-do’ list of any festival experience, we have grown more accustomed to the presence of sufficient amenities, like showers and toilets (Saleh & Ryan, 1993) and waste disposal, meaning that the festival industry have the ideal knowledge base for supporting the setup of camps and temporary accommodation (Bernet, 2017).

Photo 12: Fresh water access, Truck Festival, Oxfordshire, UK, Summer 2018

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Photo 13: Toilets facilities, Truck Festival, Oxfordshire, UK, Summer 2018

Photo 14: Rubbish bins, Truck Festival, Oxfordshire, UK, summer 2018

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Life in the island RICs is one of continuous queues (Bird and Beattie, 2019). Everyone has access to showers but they must queue to make use of them and most people do not have time to do this daily whilst also queuing for food. There are also often issues with water supply, in particular for the provision of sanitation, a major problem that occurred in the summer of 2019 on Chios (Action for Education, 2019). A problem the solving of which would benefit from the knowledge of an industry that is used to establishing water provision in temporary locations.

As well as issues with water provision there is a lot of untouched food littering the ‘jungle’ outside the Vathy camp, leading to further risks of vermin and disease and a limited number of toilets, many of which are broken and unclean. Following genderbased violence, a number of RIC residents in fact rely on plastic bottles as an alternative to the toilets, especially after dark. In the outside area of Vathy Reception Centre additional toilets were brought in by an NGO, but they have since been removed as they were placed on adjacent private land (Author interview with NGO, 2019). In addition, while festival-goers have wellies to navigate sanitation, RIC populations often do not. Many members of the community in fact take their socks off when it rains to stay dry and warm when they arrive at their tents and rarely have seasonally appropriate shoes.

Photo 15: Littering outside of Vathy RIC, Samos Island, South Greece, January 2019

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Conclusions A parallel narrative between music festivals and RICs opens our eyes to alternative solutions to the management of refugee provision. Knowledge that drawing on the experience of the festival industry has had some success in providing grassroots support also suggests that a more sustained collaboration, also working with RICs, could be of value. There are similarities between festivals and RICs and lessons to be learned. For example, there is evidence that festivals located in urban spaces have better facilities at their disposal, are a social space where people may pursue their interests, meet with family and friends (Cudny, 2018), or encourage cultural engagement and social cohesion (see for example research by McGillivray); all those elements which are lacking in the peripheral locations of RICs (Bird et al. forthcoming). The recycling practices introduced at the festivals in recent years (eg. banning plastic bottles at Glastonbury, Guardian, February 2019; or, tents recycling by an NGO, Julie’s Bike), are practices aimed at cutting waste, which could also be transferred to the RICs which are dealing with waste disposal issues (WHO2019).

Photo 16: Plastic bottles with urine outside of Vathy RIC, Samos Island, South Greece, January 2019

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Some of these practices are already happening on the Greek islands but they are carried out by NGOs rather than the RICs. The organisation Dirty Girls on Lesvos, for example, wash used blankets so that they can be reused rather than being destroyed which was previously happening inside of Moria (author interview, 2018). Similarly, the organization of medical provisions at the festivals, could be a model for voluntary organizations engagement with the needs of RIC populations.

As mentioned above, the same security company, G4S, is already contracted in both cases, at festivals and in RICs. Yet, there seems to be a lack of reflection on how experience from one could be implemented in the other. Further research is necessary to draw on the suggestions above in an impactful way. The proposed research agenda concerns itself with the inhuman(e) aspects of our historical conditions, including for example: human rights studies, humanitarian management, trauma, memory and recognition studies (Braidotti, 2018); and advocates for the necessity of interdisciplinary work. Through engaging with two different examples the point of this photo essay was to draw attention to the horror of one (RIC), placed against the idyll of the other (festival) and the lessons that can be learnt.

If then, the devil resides in the detail, what does this tell us?

It is true that we can organise large numbers of people at a music festival yet, cannot replicate the same flexibility for refugees in Reception Centres. We question the initial superficial visual similarities apparent in ‘matching’ photos from festivals and RICs and instead refocus the lens on the differences discernible in the detailed tapestry of the photos.

The temporary nature of music festivals reminds us that RICs too were meant to be temporary. They are not. They permanently reside in the landscape. The voluntary nature of attendance at a music festival versus the confines of the reality of life in an RIC is a further stark contrast. Life at a music festival is- and always will be- a luxurious experience.

Life in an RIC is the complete opposite. Whilst both environments represent a departure from normality, a suspension of the real, of time, and of perception, the comparison between the two demands further reflection.

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It is to acknowledge the conceptual shift towards the surreal.

Consequently, it asks the reader to grapple with a seemingly superficial similarity between festivals and RICs and embrace a filtered lens. A lens which when seen through a glass darkly, reveals a nightmarish parody mirroring of the fiesta. Yet it also reveals an opportunity to learn, an opportunity often embraced by grassroots organisations, that suggest that the lessons of festival management can indeed be drawn upon to provide for refugees in a way that provides solidarity and dignity (Author interview with Glocal Roots, 2019), an approach sorely missing from the RICs themselves.

The #IR_Aesthetics , funded by the Aston Centre for Europe (Aston University) and Europe and the World Centre (University of Liverpool), is a field research project investigating the stories of migration and the refugee crisis in Serbia, Macedonia, and Greece from inter-disciplinary perspective. It focuses on (1) political expression in marginalised communities through use of graffiti and music, (2) use of technology and social networks, (3) investigates everyday geographies of the refugee crisis, and (4) migration and trauma, and children in IR. Dr. Patrycja Rozbicka is a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Aston University, Birmingham Dr. Gemma Bird is a lecturer in Politics and International Relations at University of Liverpool Dr. Amanda Russell Beattie is a senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Aston University, Birmingham

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References: Action for Education. 2019, Water: why is there such a shortage for asylum seekers on Chios (online). Available at: https://www.actionforeducation.co.uk/post/water-chios(accessed 26/08/2019).

Avramopoulos, D., 2015, Explanatory note on the ‘Hotspot’ approach. Available at: https://www.statewatch.org/news/2015/jul/eu-com-hotsposts.pdf(accessed 02/07/2019).

Barder, A., 2016, Barbed Wire, in Salter, M. ed. Making Things International 2: Catalysts and Reactions, University of Minnesota Press Bernet, L., 2017, Learning from the Grassroots Response to the European Refugee Crisis. Available at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqLvPSFN5kg(accessed 02/07/2019).

Bird, G. & Beattie, A. 2019, Samos: grim winter leads to protests by refugees living in limbo on Greek island (online). Available here: https://theconversation.com/samos-grim-winter-leads-toprotests-by-refugees-living-in-limbo-on-greek-island-110116. Accessed 09/08/2019.

Bird, G., Obradovic-Wochnik, J., Beattie, A., Rozbicka, P. (fortcoming), The ‘badlands’ of the Balkan Route(s): refugee provision in urban space, Global Policy, Special issue.

Braidotti, R. 2018, A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486Butler, J. 2009, Frames of War : When is Life Grievable? London: Verso.

Butler, J. 2011, ‘Remarks on Queer Bonds’, GLQ, 17 : 2-3, 381-387.Butler, J. 2012, ‘Can one lead a good life in a bad life? Adorno Prize Lecture’, Radical Philosophy, 176, pp. 9-18.

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Factors, Processes and Effects (2016), Springer, Cham.

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Greene, M. 1995, Releasing the Imagination, Essays on Education, the Arts and Social Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Mair, J. & Laing, J. 2012, The greening of music festivals: motivations, barriers and outcomes.

Applying the Mair and Jago model, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 20:5, 683-700, DOI: 10.1080/09669582.2011.636819 Lloyd, M.S., 2015, The ethics and politics of vulnerable bodies'. IN: Lloyd, M.S., (ed.) Butler and Ethics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University, Press, pp. 167-192.

Mannergren Selmovic, J. 2018, ‘Everyday agency and transformation: Place, body and story in the divided city’ Cooperation and Conflict 1-16.

McQueen C, Davies C. 2012, ‘Health care in a unique setting: applying emergency medicine at music festivals’, Open Access Emerg Med., 4, pp. 69–73.

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Murphy, A.V. 2011, ‘Corporal Vulnerability and the New Humanism’, Hypatia, 26:3, 575-590.

Saleh, F. & Ryan, Ch. 1993, ‘Jazz and knitwear: Factors that attract tourists to festivals, Tourism Management’, 14:4, 289-297, DOI: 10/1016/0261-5177(93)90063-Q Soto, G., 2018, Object afterlives and the burden of history: between ‘trash’ and ‘heritage’ in the steps of the migrants American Anthropologist 120 (3), pp 460-473 Sundberg, J, 2008, ‘“Trash talk” and the production fo quotidian geopolitical boundaries in the USA-Mexico borderlands’ Social and Cultural Geography 9(8): pp 871-890 Squire, V. 2014, “Desert `Trash': Posthumanism, Border Struggles, and Humanitarian Politics.”

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Photograph: www.iandaviesphoto.com Ⓒ 2012 - 2019 | All Rights Reserved

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SHIP ‘FAM’, FESTIVAL ‘VIRGINS’, & A CRUISE TO NOWHERE: LIMINALITY AND CRUISE SHIP MUSIC FESTIVALS

David Cashman 2 EUSSI 3 LOV

It may be a startling thought to a festivalgoer on a cruise ship, as they sit watching Cannibal Corpse play from the luxury of the hot tub at the side of the stage, but the luxurious space in which they are apparently sipping beer, slowly pruning their fingers, and potentially suffering hearing loss, doesn’t actually exist.

Acknowledgements : The author would like to acknowledge the efforts of talented illustrator Jessica Robinson (@jkrillustration), creator of the webcomic “Roxy”.

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At least in the way the space of many land-based festivals do. Cruise ships are an example of what Augé (1992) calls ‘non-space’. Humans create and construct places from spaces by naming them (Relph, 1976) . Cruise ships, however, exist in the dark and nameless spaces oceans where it is hard for humans to survive. To do so, we have to build ships and even then, sometimes, people do not survive at sea. And yet, being among the largest humanly constructed moving objects, cruise ships are also mobile geographies unto themselves, named by the ship’s geography, such as lido deck, forward, in the Blue Sapphire lounge, or cabin 942. Casey (2009, pp. 3–6) notes the distinction between maritime space and place in his account of Admiral Cloudsley Shovel becoming lost in fog for eleven days in 1707. Although Shovel’s men knew where they were on the ship (ship place), their geographic place had devolved into space with no idea of where they were.

Over the past decade and a half, music promoters, seeking to monetise live performance as much as they can, have begun to organise music festivals within the hyperreal and liminal non-spaces of cruise ships.

Cruise ships are, in many ways, an ideal place to place such festivals. Performance spaces already exist with cutting-edge technology. Accommodation is plentiful and luxurious. Food and drink is available. Security is in place. They are regarded as luxurious and exotic vacation products. Consequently, such aquatic festivals have become successful, significant, and profitable cultural tourism experiences. They share many parallels with their land-based counterparts.

They celebrate a genre of music. They offer many of the same enticements that land-based festivals do such as concerts, autograph signings with star performers, and celebratory events. However, there is a fundamental difference. Land-based festivals exist in a geographic place and often celebrate that place.

Cruise music festivals occur within the mobile

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experiential placelessness of a cruise ship. There is nothing but the ship with which to interact. There is no ‘local’. This enhances the liminality and experience of the festival as there is no distracting ‘outside’ for festivalgoers to engage with. The physical limits of the festival are delineated by the confines of the ship. Within these boundaries, exists a visceral, hedonistic, neotribal, and liminal experience—a celebration of music without the distractions of a place.

This paper is the result of research undertaken in 2016. The views of 129 cruise festivalgoers were sourced via an open-ended survey.

Follow-up interviews with key informants were conducted and analysed using a grounded theory approach. Resulting themes were considered and analysed. The datasets were further enhanced by my own experiences as an orchestral pianist on board cruise ships between 2004 and 2008.

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COMIC STRIP 2

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This basic formula, repeated on popular music cruises between different production companies and cruise lines, comprises a standardised and profitable approach. Like the cruise product, it results in expectation realisation. Even if moving between different cruise ship festivals, festivalgoers know what to do, how the festival operates, and thus consistency of product across the industry is ensured.

While rock music cruises are recent phenomena, they emerged from previous models of cruising. In particular, their origin is in excursion shipping, a tourism product that originated in the mid-nineteenth century. Commercial estuary and coastal steam-powered vessels of this time were financially affected by the development of the faster and more convenient railways. In an effort to reverse declining fortunes, pleasure or excursion cruises were organised, where a ship would take passengers on a short voyage, returning them to their origin at the end of the day. The provision of professional musicians, still decades away on ocean-going vessels, was often offered on these trips as an inducement to partake in the pleasures of such cruises. Even when musicians began appearing on oceangoing steamers in the 1880s, pleasure cruises continued play the waterways – and still do; over the years I have played for dozens of weddings and functions on pleasure cruises in Sydney Harbour. With the rise of the modern cruise industry in the 1960s, new opportunities for pleasure-cruising arose. In 1970, a promoter named Richard Groff attempted to charter Greek Line’s SS Queen Anna Maria for a waterborne reconstruction of Woodstock, which Groff reportedly liked, except for the mud. This venture ultimately failed because Bermuda, the destination, felt the cruise was ‘alien to the way in which Bermuda has been promoted over the years’; also the Greek government, which flagged the ship, had recently voiced disapproval of rock music. However, the idea of chartering a ship for a music festival was a sound one, and between 1974 and 1979, Holland America’s SS Rotterdam hosted a biannual jazz cruise. The idea was revived from 1983 aboard the SS Norway.

Classical cruises began appearing in the eighties in the Mediterranean, but rock cruises would have to wait until the new millennium.

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On the Labor Day weekend in 2001, the first Rock Boat festival was launched aboard Carnival’s tiny MV Jubilee. Organised by Floridan alternative band Sister Hazel for 450 of their fans, it proved so successful that it became an annual event, with its upcoming 2020 festival marking the twentieth consecutive Rock Boat. Sister Hazel (now trading as Sixth Man Productions) began to organise other cruises themed around performers (KISS Kruise, Kid Rock Cruise) and genres (roots-themed Cayamo, country cruises, blues cruises, EDM cruises). So successful was this formula that other companies began organising similar cruises such as EDM-themed festival Holy Ship (organised

by American music festival HARD) or 70,000 Tons of Metal, organised by Swiss promoter Andy Piller.

These festivals keep increasing in number and success.

Cruise ship festival spaces are hybrids made up of several other experiences. On one hand, they take place amid the non-space of the ocean. But they also exist onboard the cruise ship and also take into account music festival spaces. Some do not engage with the land at all, preferring instead to remain at sea. Others do go to land, but only to the hyperreal, and cruise-line leased islands, which are constructed as nameless and deserted Caribbean islands. Others do go to ports, and some interaction with these places, such as Jamaica or St Thomas, does occur; however, given that the ship stays in port only for a short time, these are more of a transitory destination than a real engagement. The main festival space is aboard the cruise ship.

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The camaraderie between festivalgoers, as well as festivalgoers and star musicians can be understood within Morgan’s concept of ‘social interaction’, which he also refers to as communitas. This term has overtones of equality within a community. Communitas is a core

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concept within the anthropology of ritual as pioneered by Victor Turner (1969) . Turner (1974) also believes that travel as well as ritual also constructs communitas, a view shared by subsequent tourism scholars (Cohen, 1979; Wang, 1999; Franklin, 2003, pp. 49–52; Yarnal and Kerstetter, 2005; Duffy et al., 2011) . Urry and Larsen (2011) note that a tourist, out of their usual social and spatial residency, experiences liminality, where the individual finds him/herself in an ‘antistructure … out of time and place’ – conventional social ties are suspended, an intensive bonding ‘communitas’ is experienced, and there is direct experience of the sacred or supernatural. (p. 27) However, the social structures of music also generate communitas. In discussing music as a device for social ordering, DeNora (2000) notes that music can foster ‘a co-subjectivity where two or more individuals may come to exhibit similar modes of feeling and acting, constituted in relation to extra-personal parameters, such as those provided by musical materials’ (p. 149). Of particular relevance to cruise festivals is Connell and Gibson’s (2003) observation that music tourism sub-cultures have emerged around the tours of particular artists, with groups of highly committed fans (even ‘groupies’), who follow performers around from concert to concert, even generating a sense of ‘communitas’ through shared experiences, fan clubs and traditions maintained on-tour. (p. 228) The inhabitants of a liminal space “dress differently, eat and drink differently, sleep differently, act differently, play differently, and feel differently” (Yarnal and Kerstetter, 2005, p. 370) .

Cruise ship festivals are considered liminal because they result from the convergence of music festivals—a liminal experience (Kim and Jamal, 2007; Gibson and Connell, 2012) —and cruise tourism—also a liminal experience (Wood, 2000; Yarnal and Kerstetter, 2005) . Cruise festivalgoers recount how a music festival on a cruise ship improves on both models. It forms a memorable life-affirming experience, where strangers become family and you get to meet your musical heroes. A strong sense of communitas is established with the other festivalgoers.

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Festivalgoers enter the festival spaceof the cruise ship, have an intense and life-affirming experience in close proximity to likeminded fans and, and at the conclusion of the festival go back to their lives; however communitas and liminal space continue as participants maintain contact through social media.

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The experience of music festivals on cruise ships is intense, hedonistic, and short. Ties with everyday life—family, work, and home—are severed and participants are placed in an experiential cocoon. The communitas of a cruise festival is more intense than the larger festivals on land due to the smaller numbers and more intimate nature of the festival, and that ship festival communitas includes the star performers, a feature that is not part of larger land-based festivals. The star musician you saw on the stage last night is lining up in the breakfast queue in the morning. Regularly festivalgoers recount meeting their musical idols around the ship.

Some festivals mandate fan interaction in their contracts with musicians. Everyone is on the same ship and there is no opportunity to leave. Many cruise music festivals do not approach human habitation and culture for the duration of the cruise; the only lands they may approach are the hyperreal and constructed cruise line-leased islands for a hedonistic beach party. Some do not even do this and spend their entire duration at sea.

This liminality separates participants from their daily lives and permits immersion in a constructive and hyperreal festival. As liminal spaces, cruise ships festivals construct an experiential cocoon conducive to the evolution of quick but intense friendships (a manifestation of communitas) among fans and star performers. Several accounts in academic literature, in fire camps, within the anthropological field, within expat communities, and within cruise ship crews, document the development of intense relationships within the combination of intense experience and unfamiliar surroundings (Cupples, 2002; Altork, 2007; Walsh, 2007; Kaspar and Landolt, 2016) . These might be platonic or sexual relationships. Altork, for example, describes the experience of documenting the world of rural firefighters in North America, an intense and unfamiliar environment, which sometimes led to unusual intimacy and even eroticism between firefighters and support staff. One of her informants notes:

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’ll tell you, after five days men get horny as hell and they will proposition anything they think they can bed. We call them fireline romances. You’re very tight with people and shut off from the outside world (Altork, 2007, p. 123)

Both in my own experience, and within Forsythe’s research (2012, pp. 29– 30) , working on board a cruise ship suffers the same disconnect, the same intensity of experience, and the same powerful platonic and sexual relationships. It is not unexpected then that the music festivals aboard cruise ships engender that same quick intensity of relationships within participants within a cruise ship festival, whether star performer or festivalgoer. Festivalgoers and star performers refer to each other as ‘ship fam’ (or variants thereof) and post to social media with the hashtag #shipfam.

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Festivals are social and high-intensity events. They involve “social interaction with family, staff, and other visitors, leading to a sense of communitas� (Morgan, 2008, p. 84) . Many scholars have noted the relationship of festivals, liminality, and the generation of communitas (Turner, 1978; Arcodia and Whitford, 2006; Rutherdale, 2008; Heerden, 2009) . Cruise ship festivals are a particularly strong example of communitas within the tourism model. Stranges become friends, friends become family, and star performers become relatable people, friends, family kicking back in the corridors of the ship with a guitar, having a few beers, or lining up in the breakfast buffet.

The liminal space of the cruise ship festival contains unrestrained behaviour and an escape from reality. During the cruise, festivalgoers are encouraged to adopt patterns of behaviour they would not exhibit on land. This might be dressing up in costume on theme nights, drinking and eating to excess, and dancing until 6am. This unfamiliar and hedonistic environment, where excess is demonstrably exhibited by festivalgoers, is actively encouraged both by the production company for the festival, interested in creating a memorable experience, and the cruise line, interested in maximising profit from onboard revenue streams such as the casino and alcohol sales. Cruise festivalgoers recount this weirdness and abandon as one of the most memorable parts of the experience.

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Despite such excesses, festivalgoers also account the space of festivals as a ‘safe space’. One informant observed: First off, you're safe: there's a doctor on board and tons of staff that care about your well being. If you're feeling sick, you can go back to your cabin and rest. If you're hungry, you can walk five minutes and grab free food. If you're dehydrated, you go to a water station and grab a glass of water. Outdoor festivals have NONE of those things, and if they have those things, they're expensive, inconvenient, or difficult to access. A cruise ship is so, so insanely safe.

Music festivals on cruise ships remove guests from their everyday lives and place them into a liminal, encapsulated, and themed experience. These festivals isolate participants from their regular, everyday life and create a hyperreal experience with which participants engage. Such festivals are different from normal cruises which engage with destination ports as well as

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the ship, instead avoiding any aspect of the actual for the constructed. These festivals typically engage only with the ship experience, the extensions of the ship experience (themed islands, cruise ship tours) and the theming of the festival.

Because cruise festivals draw their liminality from both the festival and cruise tourism models, liminal experiences in themselves, they develop a sort of hyper-liminality. The experience is more engaging. The rite of passage and escape from reality more striking. The behaviour within the liminal space more extreme. The communitas greater where fans and musicians who barely know each other become family and catch up year after year. This manufactured liminality and communitas is highly seductive and, along with the music, one of the points of the festival that is extremely marketable, contributing to the success of the festival and ensuring sustained profitability.

Dr David Cashman is a pianist, popular music educator, researcher, performer, advocate, and Adjunct Associate Professor at Southern Cross University. He studies live music performance and industry particularly in regional areas, within tourism, and the performance practice thereof. He is an advocate for regional music scenes and a founder of the Regional Music Research Group. His book Performing Popular Music written with Dr Waldo Garrido, is being released in December 2019. @davidcashman http://www.davidcashman.com.au

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Altork, K. (2007) ‘Walking the Fire Line: The Erotic Dimension of the Fieldwork Experience’, In Antonius C G M Robben and Jeffrey A Sluka (eds), Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 92–107.

Anderton, C. B. (2007) ‘(Re) Constructing music festival places’. PhD Dissertation.

University of Wales, Swansea.

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University of Jyväskylä, Department of Music, pp. 11–15.

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Gibson, C. and Connell, J. (2005) Music and tourism: on the road again. Clevedon: Channel View Publications.

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Farnham: Ashgate.

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Turner, V. (1974) ‘Pilgrimage and communitas’, Studia missionalia, 23, pp. 305–327.

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PSYCHEDELIC AESTHETICS AND TERRITORIAL AGENCY-ING Ana Ramos

2 EUSSI 3 LOV

Once the party has been detected, we may hear, from afar, that characteristic clunking noise of the rolling bass. At this point, it is still considered noise because the bass is the only musical element that reaches far-ranging distances. Without the remaining musical elements, the beat becomes only a striking. The bass-line constitutes the basis of the psytrance music. It extends across bodies to fulfill its capacity to delimit its own territoriality. Once you reach the assigned area of the party, the continuous drumming vibrates not only outside the perceiving bodies, but also inside the chest. This bass-line is the basis onto which a felt-like infinity of sounds overlaps. Sounds seem to be coming from everywhere.

However, the number of speakers is necessarily limited. They are, in fact, strategically positioned. The multiple overlapping of sounds meticulously and carefully layered creates a density that has a precise effect: a psychedelic feeling. The experience of sound overflows with sensory information at every possible level. We not only hear the music, but we “feel” it vibrating inside/outside/passing through the body.

On the dance floor, the experience is overwhelming. Sounds burst from everywhere, the ground seems to be bouncing, and an acute feeling of presentness arises with the dancing: every sense is heightened.

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To party is a serious thing. The authentic party experience is always lived in a setting that allows the nights to extend through a long stretch of days. The experience is necessarily one of excess. To dance for hours ceaseless until the body does not hold together anymore underlies the question asked by Deleuze and Guattari: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?

(1987, 149-166). The concept of body without organsis in counterpoint to that of organism, which entails a signifying totality. On one hand, the organism is ordered and organised in order to bear a name, a purpose, and the signifying totality expresses itself through the production of subjectivity. On the other hand, the concept of body without organsconveys, first of all, a sense of multiplicity of asignifying particles. It is a limit concept. There is no body without organs without an organism.

They are partners in the dance of embodiment. As tendencies, the far range extreme of body without organs propels multiplicity and pure potential into the foreground of body experience. That multiplicity is always in movement: the body without organs is a dimension of movement. It can only be lived as a passage of intensities. The passage of intensities through the organism dismantles it, unties the knots of subjectivity, transforming the organism into a crossroads of pure intensities. The answer to the question “How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?” contains two steps. The first one is related to setting forth the conditions that will allow something to circulate. These conditions are pragmatically set, and they require practice. The second step is to have the waves of intensity circulate. The purpose in setting a programme is to reach efficacy in the circulation of intensities.

The question that underlies the practice is what is the effect of this programme?

To party, in the festival context, certainly means to set forth a programme. The key element is the length of time. The longer you party, the most efficient the experience. Once you have entered the psychedelic territory, the programme starts. You set up your tent, searching for the best spot.

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Considering the usual sound of the rolling bass, and the sun that will hit your tent unpityingly during the day, the spot must follow the necessities of the programme, i.e. sleep at any moment of the day or the night. To dress accordingly is the next requirement in order to be past the threshold. [1] As a programme, to party means a construction and a practice. The setting of a programme is as valid and necessary for the bodies that inhabit the psychedelic territory as it is for the setting of the psychedelic territory itself. They both function as a micro and macro level. The construction of the territory is the first step. The practice and the constant improvement of the psychedelic territory sets certain conditions that will allow a psychedelic atmosphere to appear. The second step relates specifically to the circulation of the psychedelic vibe. The vibe allows the psychedelic state to happen: to party means tolift off. The party technique settling the psychedelic territoryconsolidated among travelling foreigners passing

by Goa, India. The aesthetic quality of the psychedelic territory resides essentially in this passage. From elsewhere to Goa, then back and forth, it spread all over the world. The music itself carries this notion of passage, a feeling of being carried-out, sometimes translated as flying.

[2] How do you differentiate psychedelic music from other genres and what differentiates psy-trance from other electronic styles? One thing is certain: even though there are different psychedelic genres, the psychedelic quality is unique. The aesthetic quality transversally permeates the whole atmosphere; it is invisible, but palpable. This quality is responsible for the psychedelic wave that is embodied by the party as vibe. The psychedelic vibe is actualised by variable waves of intensity that traverse bodies of all kinds.

It is invisible, but endowed with a power of action.

[1]Space Tribe emphasizes:“Whatever you have thought about the world before, forget it, now you are on this one.” In “Atomic Pow Wow,” Sonic Mandala, Spirit Zone Records, 1997.

[2]According to Astral Projection: “When you dream there are no rules, people can fly, anything can happen". In “People Can Fly,” Trust in Trance, Trust in Trance Records, 1996.

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It remains the principal element responsible for the dynamic that arises on the dance floor. What emerges throughout the extended period of time that the party lasts is a genuine psychedelic register. It means that the psychedelic feeling is not only produced as an emergent process, but it is in itself movement: the psychedelic aesthetics is firmly anchored in the notion of passage. Travel as passage, the transversal movement between different cultures that it embodies as mixture, the passage of a psychedelic vibe, and the movement of a multiplicity of intensities lived as asignifying particles. In this sense, to affirm that to party means to lift off is also an affirmation of movement itself.[3] Partying (going beyond time and space, reaching the limit of the body and beyond) becomes then mainly a practice of the passage.

Ultimately, the passage is the place where one stands when partying: this is nomadism. The experience not only passes through the body, but in this passing through leaves an imprint of movement.

The practice of the territory: something doing

Territorialization is an act of rhythm that has become expressive, or of milieu components that have become qualitative (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 315).

As it is assembled, a psychedelic territory is already meant to be dismantled. The party is a relay, and a passage. In other words, the party is assembled and lived only to be left behind. For some, there is a customary path: they go from one party to another. But the parties are not an end in themselves; they are only consequences of a nomadic life. The principle is music: Psytrance is the refrain of contemporary psychedelic parties.

[3]It is from this standing point, for example, that the psychedelic culture explores various expressions related to intergalactic experiences. For instance, the album Dancing Galaxy by Astral Projection displays songs such as “Flying Into A Star” and “Life on Mars” (Trust in Trance Records, 1997).

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The complexity comes from the fact that if the “territory is in fact an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that ‘territorializes’ them” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 314), it “already unleashes something that will surpass it” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 322). Thus the differentiation that Deleuze and Guattari make between territory and earth, that “intense point at the deepest level of the territory or is projected outside it like a focal point, where all the forces draw together in close embrace” (1987: 338-9). The key word here is “forces” and this is exactly what happens on the dance floor: an agitation of forces. What are these forces, where do they come from, and what is their relationship to the territory?

The territory certainly implies the notion of space for the time of its actualisation. However, this actualisation never relates to the settling of a permanent geographical space; it is a transient space.

The territory implies, above all, affective forces. It is first delimited by a refrain, and this delimitation effectuates an agency-ing[4] of recurrent forces that play an affective role in the establishment of the territory. Deleuze and Guattari affirm that the territory protects from chaos: the song “jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos” (1987: 311). A comforting feeling arises. However, for nomads, home is where the heart is and the heart is always already in movement. The nomad, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), does not inhabit a pre-existent territory. Rather, he encounters certain qualitative conditions, and performs a relational grasp of the field of potentialities. This intensive interaction with a field of forces allows a relational grasp that is articulated in experience as the dimension of spatiality. Through these lenses, space is never the same because it requires a focus on qualitative differences.

Consequently, space folds into itself at every step, revealing intensities rather than stable references. The materials onto which the nomad walks are made of singularities, and the walking itself is a relational prolonging of the affective forces he encounters.

[4] When discussing Deleuze and Guattari’s concept agencement, Brian Massumi explains the difficulty of translating the French word as follows: “This is a word that is impossible to translate. The best anyone’s come up with is ‘assemblage’, but that’s misleading. Agencement connotes a doing doing itself. You have to understand the event itself as agency-ing” (2015: 157). I use agency-ing in the present text in order to render justice to the processual nuance embedded in agencement.

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How may we understand the consistency of a temporary but persistent territory? The massive volume of the music activates an affective territory imprint, and this imprint remains after the party occurrence. If the psychedelic aesthetic always re-emerges, it is essentially because the music allows a psychedelic affect to arise. What allows the transposition of the psychedelic territory is the fact that it carries a recognisable aesthetic. The psychedelic work of art conveys a recognisable trait of expression: the affirmation of movement itself, the affirmation of the passage. It happens through a transversal movement that unites every shifting position into one single aesthetic quality. The twist of colors characteristic of tie-dye carries the same internal logic that belongs to Goa and Psytrance music: saturation, spiral movement, and unified multiplicity. And despite this constant aesthetic logic pertaining to psychedelic works of art, creativity is always at work.

Every reiteration of the psychedelic affect carries the capacity of continuous renewal. Creativity in this sense is immanent to the event itself.[5] Therefore, for the length of time that it lasts, the psychedelic territory displays the (always reinvented) party conditions for the pack to come together as one. What these conditions allow is the circulation of a psychedelic vibe. Time is key.

The psychedelic aesthetic effectuates a shift in time perception.

Time’s texture is woven into bodying the psychedelic territory: the musical vibe articulates this territory. When you enter the psychedelic territory, you leave behind a threshold. It will no longer be a matter of hours, but days.

The refrain: an agency-ing of affective forces

In a general sense, we call a refrain any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes (there are optical, gestural, motor, etc., refrains). In the narrow sense, we speak of a refrain when an assemblage is sonorous or ‘dominated’ by sound—but why do we assign this apparent privilege to sound? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 323).

In the 1990s, Goa trance music emerged as one distinct form out of various electronic music genres. Today psychedelic electronic music [5] Even though it takes shape through its actualisation in the human body, creativity here does not belong to the individual experiencing a psychedelic affect.

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has evolved into many branches, but Psytrance is the motif that assembles most of them. As a vector, it directs the party assemblage to form the refrain shaping the psychedelic territory.

Hippies, Goa Heads, Psytrancers embody a psychedelic aesthetic for the period of time during which they assemble to practicethe party as a collective technique. For some, the atmosphere may seem unusual (“freaks” they call themselves). For others, it is magic and dazzling. In fact, the experience comprises all of the precedent adjectives and more since it is as complex as the broad spectrum of feelings.[6] The first thing that we learn when we enter the psychedelic territory is that time is not counted in terms of minutes or hours. It is rather a matter of experience. A qualitative time arises. There is an ideal musical style for every moment of the practice of the psychedelic territory; the party is conceived to be danced. This implies that psychedelic music is a broad term that encompasses other subgenres. Psytrance is one of them, but also Goa Trance, Psyprog, psybient, and other genres may be played according to the party’s wave of actualisation. This allows the different stages of the party to be considered in regard to an unstoppable dancing body. Of course, bodies do stop sometimes. However, the conditions are set in order to convey a trance state: one song after another, the music stands as one continuous beat. Switching from periods of continuous beat to atmospheric intervals throughout a combination of different subgenres of electronic psychedelic music, the programme sets forth the conditions for a psychedelic vibe to arise and circulate. Every song is chosen with a specific intention that responds to the immediate appetite of what is doing: what happens is a co-construction through sensations.

Relatively contained at the beginning, the music slowly builds-up to reach higher energetic reservoirs and then maintain itself on a plateau for a certain period of time. In this sense, the DJ’s function is to sense the dance floor, and improvise accordingly in order to reach that plateau. This plateau is called trance state, or trancen’dance. How long does it last? At this point, you are no longer counting the hours.

[6] The psychedelic affect, although being specific (like works of art, it is comprised by internal logic), also carries the power of variation pertaining to the event’s creativity at work. It means that its actualisation is always sited within a context. The variety of human experience belongs to the context and therefore plays an important role in affect actualisation.

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The first stage is the hardest to traverse because at a certain point bodies fatigue. The articulation between beats, ground, hunger, thirst, pleasure, light, weather, delight and pain starts. However, if a genuine relation arises between bodies and beats, the music pushes a body over the edge.

Which body? Ideally “every” body reaches that level of musical communion. After this threshold is crossed, every sensation that could possibly lead to a “disjunctive relation” (James, 2003) between music and body ceases to matter and is rejected from the attention spectrum. You are beyond yourself: trancen’dance. To break out beyond oneself means largely to break into a new self. The old self does not cease to exist, but is included in the new one. And this is happening all the time: what the expression “expansion of consciousness” means is exactly the transition from one experience into another, and it keeps only adding to itself. In the specific situation here described, what trance n’dance allows for is a significant leap forward, as if every experience could bear more than what it normally does, enhanced by a greater density. You are dancing your multiple selves. The feet are still sore and the thirst still strikes; but they remain only latent. Experience builds-up slowly, but when the setting is complete we feel it: the music is rolling deep and the dance floor is crowded. Something is doing. It happens through the articulation between not only sensations and music, but also the environmental conditions like sunlight or moonlight, the decoration, the light shows and so forth: an embrace of forces (the earth). What is doing is not the setting, but the articulation itself: the agency-ing (always a multiplicity) of qualitative intensive (objective) feelings. It desires as it produces something (a Body without Organs) in a definite locus (the psychedelic experience). The “desire” is the “production” itself: appetite (Deleuze and Guattari, 2009). As long as there is appetite, something is doing and the beat is rolling. At this point, we may notice that there is not even an object of desire; there is only the production of desire rolling with the bass line. It is not a force, but the expression of a force (psychedelic).

Here, desire is not related to a lack. It does not express a psychedelic force to fill in a gap. It desires as a cocreation with psychedelic embody-ings,

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in relation with what emerges, within the emergence of the psychedelic experience. Expression and content are merged into one single matter: the event. It here refers to the act of agency-ing itself, and desire belongs to that same event of agency-ing. In this sense, we are departing from a subjective/objective perspective to highlight exactly the midst dimension, the relational. This is where desire is manifesting itself.

Reaching (and losing) consistency: something feeling

At any rate, you have one (or several). It’s not so much that it preexists or comes ready-made, although in certain respects it is preexistent. At any rate, you make one, you can’t desire without making one. And it awaits you; it is an inevitable exercise or experimentation, already accomplished the moment you undertake it, unaccomplished as long as you don’t. This is not reassuring, because you can botch it. Or it can be terrifying, and lead you to your death. It is nondesire as well as desire. It is not at all a notion or a concept but a practice, a set of practices.

You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit (Deleuze and Guattari, 149-150).

The party’s consistency is made by its unleashed forces. These forces are psychedelic affects because they infiltrate bodies, spreading like a virus. When we feel that something is doing, we know that we have reached it: Psychedelia. The Natal, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the “the matters of expression themselves” (1987: 332). Among the notions of the territory, the earth, and the natal, the third is the most difficult to grasp because, as far as it is related to psychedelic aesthetics and territorial assemblage, it refers to the purest psychedelic quality. It implies, for the territorial agency-ing, the notion of the “innate”, and a “movement of decoding” that leaks into territoriality as that which is acquired and at the same time “forever lost, or refound, or aspiring to the unknown homeland” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 332).

The unknown homeland is Psychedelia. It hovers over the party, its matters of expression being agitated by the vibration of colours, feelings, and sounds. Psychedelic matters of expression appear.

These matters of expression experience themselves appearing, through perception itself. Here, decoding functions both ways: human and non-human. Perception stands right at its centre.

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There is a perception [7] of the event perceiving itself that belongs to a fugitive homeland. Psychedelia is a limit notion that is never fully reached. To party is the continuous tendingtowards this homeland: both in the sense of aesthetic qualities that we cultivate and also a tendency that we follow. As a homeland, Psychedelia is to be understood as a virtual land, continuously on the cusp of actualisation. It may be beautiful, and it may be terrifying. Its potential reaches your own apexes.

The territory reaches consistency through the reiteration of a refrain articulated by motifs and counterpoints. The organisation of the territory happens according to an empirical principle that arises immanently as agency-ing (assemblage).[8] To “possess” a territory is thus to practice expression. The territory starts to take shape with the construction of the scene as a central milieu. The delimitation of the camping area is established, and the needs in water and food are assessed according to the number of participants. Marks and points of reference are set. A code of conduct is established [9] (for example, the often circulated letters P.L.U.R. refer to Peace, Love, Unity, Respect). This is the plane of consistency where the distribution of psychedelic modalities is made. But the territory is not the earth. The earth, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), is that intensification point at the deepest center of the territory, the battlefield where desire subsists at its highest capacity. There, the embrace of forces is so dense that it may open to a disjunctive relation with that territorial consistency; sinking too deep into the “Ground” Deleuze and Guattari (1987), into the depths of Psychedelia’s own appetite for expression. At the core of territorial assemblage, [7] This perception is of a different kind than the human perception (based in the senses). This event perception is responsible and intimately linked to the event’s self-generating ontogenetic movement of agency-ing. We may understand it as a dynamic principle, what Alfred North Whitehead calls “prehension” (1978).

[8] In Deleuze, les mouvements aberrants, David Lapoujade distinguishes three planes that cross Deleuze’s thought: the plane of consistency, the abstract machine and assemblage – here referred to as "agency-ing" (2014: 29-30).

[9] I am here referring to Lapoujade (2014: 38).

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there are two parallel melodies. One is a melodic and constant refrain that effectuates an agency-ing of affective forces. Chaos is no longer lingering; the first stage is past, trancen’dance has now been installed. The party is rolling, joy and revel burst everywhere and it is at that deepest level of the territory that an urgent pull of the Ground may be felt. Another threshold, but not necessarily one that you will cross: you oscillate. Rather, it oscillates through you.

The song of the earth is the growl that may distort the first one. It is an “earth machine” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 339). This abstract machine effectuates a disjunctive relation with the actual territory effectuating a different distribution of affects. It leads to a different plane of composition, opening up to a new potentiality.

This earth machine is a deterritorialising vector located at the deepest core of the territory. It means that no territory is completely closed, especially the psychedelic territory.

The negotiation between territorialisation and deterritorialisation happens at the level of the party as a psychedelic territory, but also at the level of the body as an embodying territory. The psychedelic experience is made of multiple thresholds. Trancen’dance is the first one. It happens when you are no longer dancing, but you become the dance. Yet, there is still another threshold: the Body without Organs.

This is the abstract machine of desire at the level of the body. It emerges as an affective state of pure intensity. First, the conditions are set: a psychedelic territory, the dance floor, Psytrance as the refrain. Second, trancen’dance settles. Beyond that state, the next threshold propels the body into the state of a rhizome of felt intensities. The perception of structure fails, shifting towards the experience of a rearticulating of the body as intensity rather than extensity. What escapes the formal organisation of the body feeds into the establishment of a different articulation. Then, the circulation of psychedelic intensities becomes the central focus of experience. Intensities must here be understood as agglomerations of pre-individual singularities that are interrelated.

They form a rhizomatic web of embodied aesthetic qualities. This is the molecular level of experience. At this point, the matters of expression are directly experienced. The awareness of this molecular level of experience has consequences for the way we conceive communication theory, for instance.

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The rhizomatic understanding of experience is crucial if we want to introduce affect to communication theory. In a linear manner, we would understand the psychedelic matters of expression as being mediated as content. But what happens in a context where the content is a-signifying? Here, content and expression implode as one single event: waves of intensity. What the limit concept of the Body without organs allows is the understanding that, if we want to treat of a-signfying contents of experience (for example, intensities), we can no longer depart from music going towards music embodiment. What exactly is mediating the content? Through a relational perspective, the event is its own media. The psychedelic matters of expression being then immediately available to experience: they do not present themselves to experience, but are directly embodied. This affective dimension of experience can be understood and further pursued through the concept of “immediation” (Thain, 2017 ; Massumi, 2011: 72 ; Massumi, 2015 ; Brunner 2012 ; and Manning, Munster and Stavning Thomsen, forthcoming).

Ana Ramos holds a Ph.D. from the Department of communication, Université de Montréal. Her current postdoctoral research at the SenseLab, Concordia University, is devoted to process philosophy inquiry as related to art experience and techniques of the body. Her writings focus on finding a better grasp of the virtual processes acting at the foundational level of experience. She is most interested in the diversification of modes of perception through means of immersive technologies and the techniques of the body. Feeding from both affect theory and media aesthetics, her research work spans questions concerning: technology, perception, and collective subjectivity. Her current research is part of a wider SenseLab research project entitled Immediations. She is concerned with social contentenactment and the micropolitical implications acting through practices of emergent media technology. The key concepts of her research are: media/immediation, the virtual, affect, relationality, sense and singularity. In her publication “On consciousness-with and virtual lines of affection”

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(http://eventalaesthetics.net/aesthetic-inquiries-2/anaramos-on-consciousness-with/), she proposes the acknowledgement of an affective dimension of the body (affective consciousness). In order to do so, the body is understood as both a crossroads of “affective lines of affection” and a musical instrument that vibrates the affective notes of its environment. She is currently working on a manuscript called (Im)Mediation, Affective Entanglements, and Communication Theory.

References Brunner, Christoph. “Immediation as Process and Practice of Signaletic Mattering.” J. Aesthet. Cult. Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 4, 2012.

Guattari, Félix, and Gilles Deleuze. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Guattari, Félix, and Gilles Deleuze. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London, UK: Penguin Classics, 2009.

James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Mineola: New York: Dover Publications, 2003.

Lapoujade, David. Deleuze, les mouvements aberrants. Paris: Minuit, 2014.

Massumi, Brian. Semblance and Event Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011.

Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015.

Manning, Erin, Anna Munster and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen (ed.).

Immediations, Open Humanities Press (Forthcoming).

Thain, Alanna. Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York, NY: Free Press, 1978.

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‘THE UNDILUTED SQUASH OF UK MATH ROCK’ THE PERFORMER’S VIEW OF ARCTANGENT FESTIVAL

Joe O'Connell 2 EUSSI 3 LOV

Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, this audio piece and accompanying essay examine the ways in which ArcTanGent Festival is perceived and experienced by performers within the largely underground UK math rock scene. The fieldwork took the form of a small-scale project at 2017’s event, engaging three UK bands of differing levels of experience of the festival (which I label ‘novice’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘veteran’) to develop an understanding of their approaches to performance and how this impacts upon their development and standing within the scene. As heard in the interview extracts presented in the audio piece, the findings of the project expose similarities, but also some notable differences, in each subject’s experience of ArcTanGent: for example, while it provides a valuable opportunity for a novice band, there is a sense of routine felt by veterans. Two important correlations are evident in their experiences. The first is the way in which ArcTanGent provides an ‘unreal’ experience in comparison with the everyday existence of each band, with one participant going so far as to suggest that it gives ‘a slightly falsified sense of how popular you are

as a band when you come here’ (Alpha Male Tea Party 2017a; audio 8.48). The second is a feeling that the festival has played a key role in establishing a community for scene participants from disparate parts of the UK. This essay outlines the contextual background to the study by considering definitions of math rock, the role of festivals in scenes, and notions of community within scene discourse. The audio piece provides a detailed discussion of the project’s findings via the analysis of fieldwork interviews.

QR link to Audio Piece

Math Rock Math rock is an under-researched style of popular music, which is emblematic of its niche status within popular culture as a whole; however, a handful of chapters approach it within scholarly discourse. Cateforis (2002) examines its relation to progressive rock from an aesthetic perspective, while Dale (2012) explores the DIY-punk context within which it largely exists. ArcTanGent itself has been explored by Forbes (2018) as an example of a small-scale music festival which sustains opportunities for performers as part of an ‘alternative alternative’ ecosystem. While math rock literature may be minimal, research to date highlights the range of existing debates to which studies such as this one can contribute. The aesthetic discourse of math rock provides scope for exploration in the context of genre studies, raising questions of authenticity and encouraging consideration of the influence of postmodernity and the internet upon its creation, dissemination and consumption. Furthermore, the UK math rock scene offers much in the realm of scene studies and exploration of industry practices, in line with texts on local scenes such as Cohen (1991) and Bennett (2000), and global/translocal (after Bennett and Peterson 2004) scenes such as Kahn-Harris (2006) and Bennett and Guerra eds. (2018).

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Given math rock’s lack of mainstream exposure, a brief overview of its aesthetics and culture is worthwhile (and readers may find the accompanying Spotify playlist (link in QR code) – ‘An ArcTanGent mixtape’ – a useful introduction to the sound of the current UK scene).[1] Since its establishment in the North American alternative rock 'An ArcTangent mixtape' landscape of the 1990s (with links to the concurrent post-rock scene), the label ‘math rock’ has been used internationally to categorize guitar-based music which diverges from mainstream rock by utilising complex rhythmical structures and virtuosic instrumental performance in its apparent avoidance of commercial appeal (Cateforis 2002). It is rhythm which provides the core grounding of math rock’s etymology: the frequent use of unusual time signatures, several of which may be used in a single song, leads to an unorthodox metric feel which differs greatly from the consistent duple, triple or quadruple time of most Anglo-American popular music. This is coupled with the use of extended instrumental techniques (guitar ‘finger-tapping’ is a key example), experimentation with digital effects (hardware which transforms timbres beyond expectations of electro-acoustic instruments) and, frequently, the absence of a vocalist – a choice which highlights the melodically and rhythmically disjunct instrumental material – to create music which is far removed from the usual expectations of rock performance.

It is also notable that math rock is considered separate from progressive, or prog, rock: the genre established in the late 1960s which alludes not only to the psychedelic rock style from which it sprang but also to elements of jazz, folk and classical music, and is similarly noted for its musical complexity and displays of instrumental virtuosity.

[1] The website Fecking Bahamas (http://feckingbahamas.com/) is a useful resource for exploring the translocal (after Bennett and Peterson, 2004) math rock scene. Alongside the usual reviews, interviews, features etc., there is an interactive map, several country-specific Bandcamp compilations and an essay series titled ‘History of Math’ which draws connections between US indie rock, prog and jazz.

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The tastes of composers and consumers of math rock do not usually exclude prog rock; on the contrary, it is regularly cited as an influence. The differentiation between the two can be explained at least in part by math rock’s debt to another antecedent: punk rock. Histories of popular music often portray 1970s punk as a rejection of the musical and theatrical extravagancies of progressive rock, opting instead for an approach which revelled in musical simplicity and sought to minimise the distance between performer and spectator (Laing 1985; Savage 2001). Punk is also credited with establishing DIY rock culture: while the most famous acts of the first wave of UK punk (Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned) were signed to major labels and therefore engaged with the established commercial intentions of the recording industry, what has come to be termed the post-punk era saw the creation of several independent record labels, sometimes run by performers themselves (Hesmondhalgh 1997; Reynolds 2006). While math rock cannot be said to appeal to punk in terms of musical simplicity, its relation to DIY culture provides a close link (Dale 2012). Math rock scenes around the world are sustained by a network of independent record labels and DIY concert promoters who largely treat their engagement as a labour of love, and the UK context is no exception. As a result, math rock has been viewed in popular discourse as a more ‘authentic’ style of progressive rock music, one which is concerned with artistic experimentation and exploration over conventions and commercialism (Echoes and Dust 2019).

This view is informed in part by the wide variety of music which is considered by audiences to be ‘math rock,’ as neatly illustrated by the sound of the three bands discussed in this study (and audible on the accompanying playlist). While Alpha Male Tea Party present carefully considered guitar and percussion timbres in their metrically shifting, riff-driven instrumental ‘I Still Live at Home’, Right Hand Left Hand’s ‘Seat 18c’ owes more to the sound of krautrock in its four to the floor loop-based development. While these two instrumental examples demonstrate the frequent absence of

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vocals, TTNG’s ‘Cat Fantastic’ lays conjunct pure-toned vocal lines (whose socially minded lyrics, while of interest in the context of scene politics, will not be analysed here) over the shifting metre of busy guitar finger-picking and experimental drum patterns.

Quite which is the ‘real’ math rock is a debate commonly held among audiences, and the evidence presented here only serves to demonstrate that any claims for primacy should be critically scrutinised. Performers themselves can also shy away from the label: two of the bands interviewed for this project stated their belief that they were not math rock at all, while accepting that genre labelling is a process outside of their control (Alpha Male Tea Party 2017a; Right Hand Left Hand 2017a). This poses the question of whether math rock – as a collection of stylistically varied performers who are united only by their opposition to certain ‘norms’ of mainstream rock music – should be considered a genre or a scene. While the style of bands categorised as math rock varies widely, it is still considered by audiences as a genre: see, for example, the frequent use of the tag on the independent streaming/retail website Bandcamp and the ubiquitous ‘List of math rock groups’ entry on Wikipedia. For the purposes of this project math rock is considered a genre, though there is certainly scope for consideration of how this term is used in the postmodern, post-digital age. The key reason for these performers (or any, for that matter) being organised into a genre is economic; to allow for the ease of finding products to engage with financially (Frith 1996). Math rock is not peculiar in its sustained lack of investment: it is one of an unquantifiable number of popular music genres/scenes which exists despite its limited commercial potential. However, in the UK it has been given a significant boost in the last seven years by ArcTanGent, ‘the UK’s only festival dedicated to the very best music from the worlds of math-rock, post-rock and noise rock’, which occurs annually on a farm south of Bristol (AIF 2019b).

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ArcTanGent The first ArcTanGent took place in 2013 as a spin-off from the longer-established 2000trees, a now 10,000 capacity festival which takes place in Gloucestershire and features a line-up largely comprising melodic rock bands. Robinson (2015: 69) discusses 2000trees in the context of ‘boutique festivals,’ arguing that it adopts a model which provides attendees with a celebratory space positioned outside of commercialised consumer culture. Unlike larger festivals, such as the comparable Reading/Leeds Festivals and the US-based Warped Tour (Dowd et al 2004), 2000trees is treated as an escape from mainstream culture. However, it is not entirely devoid of commercial interests: while big-name branding is not to be expected on the site, it prides itself upon an engagement with small-scale enterprise, particularly with regard to its provision of ‘locally handcrafted ales, lagers and ciders’ (AIF 2019a).

However, it is also keen to point out that it is ‘all about the music’ (2000trees 2019). Two of 2000trees’ organisers, Simon Maltas and James Scarlett, joined forces with Goc O’Callaghan to establish ArcTanGent on the same boutique terms after identifying a strong thread of math and post rock bands enjoying popularity at the elder festival (Scarlett 2017).

Interviewing Scarlett onsite in 2017 as approximately two thousand people assembled to watch the Physics House Band (‘a weird band’ by his own admission – judge for yourself via the accompanying playlist), he explained that while the organisers knew at the outset that they were taking a risk in catering to niche musical taste, he was ‘happy’ and ‘proud’ that it had taken off (Scarlett 2017).Most of ArcTanGent’s audience is UK-domiciled, but it also draws attendees from around the world (Alpha Male Tea Party 2017a; Forbes 2018).

It has a committed and highly engaged audience and has come to assume congressional status among participants in the UK math rock scene, providing an opportunity for stakeholders to interact socially and strengthen networks (Forbes 2018).

ArcTanGent is not peculiar in this regard: in their analysis of three examples which represent distinct scenes, Dowd et al conclude that music festivals ‘can both constitute scenes

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and be embedded within existing scenes’ (2004: 165). Given the disparate ‘translocal’ (Bennett and Peterson 2004) nature of the UK math rock scene, with small pockets spread across key urban centres of England and Scotland (Wales and Northern Ireland do not feature consistently on touring circuits), peer interactions are largely maintained via social media: for example, the Facebook group ‘UK Math and Post-Rock’ (which boasts over 6000 members to date) provides an online forum for the sharing of recordings and promotion of live events.

My research demonstrates that in its short history ArcTanGent has become an important pillar in the structure of this underground scene, and has for some participants come to constitute the scene. Where the ‘UK Math and Post-Rock’ Facebook group allows for digital expressions of cultural belonging, building what Bennett and Peterson (2004) term a ‘virtual scene,’ ArcTanGent provides a rural space for the expression of collective identity and an opportunity for performers to engage with an audience who may provide them with further performance opportunities. This demonstrates how festivals provide a unique venue for performers as a site at which local, translocal and virtual scenes coalesce. ArcTanGent, as other scene-specific festivals, allows participants to ‘enact the ways of life idealized within the scene’ (Bennett and Peterson 2004: 10). In the case of the UK math rock scene, study of ArcTanGent uncovers that this coalescing has resulted in the formation of a nationwide community in which the mutual support offered by stakeholders has muted explicit expressions of competition.

Community-building In labelling the demographic which attends and performs at ArcTanGent I use the terms ‘scene’ and ‘community’ as derived from Straw (1991) and developed by, among many others, Bennett and Peterson (2004). I entered the field to conduct the project with an understanding that there was a UK math rock ‘scene,’ in the sense that while there are few unifying musical aesthetics or traditions defining the work

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of participants in locations across the country (factors which Straw (1991: 469) considers to define a community), they are drawn together by common tastes and goals. However, my fieldwork interviews uncovered performers specifically identifying the UK network as a community in terms of creative, performative and social interactions.

While the novice band perceived that they stood at the margins of a scene, they assumed that ArcTanGent had a sense of community in which participants shared an outlook on how to engage with and respond to the festival line-up (Right Hand Left Hand 2017a; audio piece 17.21). After performing at the festival and reaping the benefits of exposure to this community, they do not express a feeling of membership of it but rather acceptance into a ‘musical circle’, which I interpret to mean scene (Right Hand Left Hand 2018; audio piece 21.35). The intermediate band are very clearly members of a UK math rock community and identify the network in such terms, recounting the ways in which it has sustained their creative endeavours. As such, they suggest that ArcTanGent is the most important gig in their calendar each time they play it (Alpha Male Tea Party 2017a; audio piece 8.38). The veteran band give some indication of notions of community, detailing their enjoyment in socialising with friends who have also performed at the festival (TTNG 2017b; audio piece 30.30), but do not explicitly express an identification with a scene and/or community, giving some indication that they have reached a level of fan support whereby neither one or the other is something which they have to rely upon to continue to write, record and perform their music. As such, they suggest that ArcTanGent has little to offer them in terms of creative and commercial development given that most festival attendees know what they sound like and have an opinion on them (TTNG 2017c).

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Conclusion This piece for Riffs has provided background information and a theoretical framework within which the results of the project, detailed and interpreted in the accompanying audio file, should be considered. The project demonstrates that ArcTanGent is viewed positively by each participant, but there are divergences in the way in which it impacts upon each band’s development. Much of this has to do with their position within the scene and/or community, and as ArcTanGent approached its seventh iteration a debate broke out within the scene’s blogosphere which provided an interesting lens through which to view the project. The audio piece details this and provides the overall conclusions to the submission (audio piece 37.20).

Joe O’Connell is a Lecturer in Music at Cardiff University. His PhD research examined notions of authenticity in the presentation of politically-engaged performers in Thatcherite Britain, taking in Rock Against Racism, Live Aid and Red Wedge, alongside studies of Billy Bragg and Crass. He is currently undertaking ethnographic research on the UK math rock scene, with specific focus upon subculture and genre formation. This has encompassed interrogation of performers experiences of festivals such as StrangeForms and ArcTanGent, an event which has played a key role in strengthening a nationwide math rock community. Joe is also a practitioner and continues to cultivate designs upon rock stardom. oconnellj2@cardiff.ac.uk @Joe0C

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References 2000trees. (2019) Info. 2000trees. Available from: https://www.twothousandtreesfestival.co.uk/info/ [accessed 15 July 2019] AIF. (2019a) 2000trees. Association of Independent Festivals. Available from: https://aiforg.com/directory/2000-trees/ [accessed 15 July 2019] AIF. (2019b) ArcTanGent. Association of Independent Festivals. Available from: https://aiforg.com/directory/arctangent/ [accessed 15 July 2019] Bennett, A. (2000) Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place. London, Macmillan.

Bennett, A. and R. A. Peterson. (2004) 'Introducing Music Scenes'.

In Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual, 1-15. Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press.

Bennett, A. and P. Guerra eds. (2018) DIY Cultures and Underground Music Scenes. London, Routledge.

Cateforis, T. (2002) 'How alternative turned progressive: the strange case of math rock'. In Progressive Rock Reconsidered, 243-60. Edited by K. Holm-Hudson. New York, Routledge.

Cohen, S. (1991) Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making.

Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press.

Dale, P. (2012) Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground. Farnham and Burlington, Ashgate.

Dedman, R. (2019) Shooting at the wrong targets (or why ArcTanGent can surely only be a good thing for Math Rock). Musicisum. Available from: https://www.musicisum.net/blog/2019/03/04/shooting-wrong-targets-orwhy-arctangent-can-surely-only-be-good-thing-math-rock/ [accessed 15 July 2019] Dowd, T. J., K. Liddle, and J. Nelson. (2004) 'Music Festivals as Scenes: Examples from Serious Music, Womyn’s Music, and SkatePunk'. In Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual, 149-67. Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press.

Echoes and Dust. (2019) Echo Chamber: ArcTanGent and the Accidental Death of Math Rock. Echoes and Dust. Available from: https://www.echoesanddust.com/2019/02/echo-chamber-arctangentand-the-accidental-death-of-math-rock/ [accessed 15 July 2019]

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Forbes, K. (2018) '‘The Sound of the Future is Here Today’: the Market for Post-Rock within the Traditional Small Music Festival Landscape'. In Popular Music in the Post Digital Age, 69-92. Edited by E. Mazierska, L. Gillon and T. Rigg. London, Bloomsbury.

Frith, S. (1996) Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.

Hesmondhalgh, D. (1997) Post-Punk’s Attempt to Democratise the Music Industry: the Success and Failure of Rough Trade. Popular Music. 16 (3), 255-74.

Kahn-Harris, K. (2006) Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. London, Berg Publishers.

Laing, D. (1985) One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock. Milton Keynes and Philadelphia, Open University Press.

Reynolds, S. (2006) Rip it Up and Start Again. London, Faber and Faber.

Robinson, R. (2015) Music Festivals and the Politics of Participation. Farnham and Burlington, Ashgate.

Savage, J. (2001) England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London, Faber and Faber.

Straw, W. (1991) 'Communities and Scenes in Popular Music.' In The Subcultures Reader 2nd ed, 469-78. Edited by Ken Gelder. London and New York, Routledge.

Walker, C. (2019) The Death of Math Rock. Fecking Bahamas. Available from: http://feckingbahamas.com/the-death-of-math-rock [accessed 15 July 2019]

Interviews Alpha Male Tea Party. (2017a) 18th August. ArcTanGent Festival, Bristol.

Alpha Male Tea Party. (2017b) 2nd September. If Not Now, When? Festival, Oxford.

Right Hand Left Hand. (2017a) 12th August. Music Box Studios, Cardiff.

Right Hand Left Hand. (2017b) 18th August. ArcTanGent Festival, Bristol.

Right Hand Left Hand. (2018) 31st August. Facebook video call. .

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TTNG. (2017a) 18th August. Telephone.

TTNG. (2017b) 18th August. ArcTanGent Festival, Bristol.

TTNG. (2017c) 15th October. Skype video call.

Music played in audio piece (in order of appearance) Alpha Male Tea Party, ‘Happy as Larry, Larry is Dead’, Droids (2014) Alpha Male Tea Party, ‘You Eat Houmous, of Course You Listen to Genesis’, Droids (2014) Right Hand Left Hand, ‘Seat 18c’, Right Hand Left Hand (2016) TTNG, ‘Cat Fantastic’, 13.0.0.0.0 (2013) Alpha Male Tea Party, ‘Athlete’s Face’, Droids (2014) All recordings used with permission from relevant copyright holders.

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A JOURNEY IN THE WORLD OF QUEER AND FEMINIST PUNK FESTIVALS 2 EUSSI 3 LOV

A LOOK AT THE PROCESS OF IDENTITY-BASED COMMUNITY MAKING

Louise Barrière Nothing is Static

by Agatha For a little more than five years now, I have spent considerable time traveling across France and Germany to attend to various queer and feminist punk-related festivals.

At first, they were only communal spaces I visited as both a queer young woman and a strong fan of hardcore punk music, but two years ago, I also started studying them as fieldwork for my PhD dissertation. Since 2014 I have attended events such as the Bitcherland Bitches Festival in Lemberg (France), the Et Biiim Festival in Lille (France), the Queer Fest in Nancy (France), the Lady*Fest Mannheim (Germany), the Lady*Fest Saarbrücken (Germany), the Noc Walpurgii in Berlin (Germany), the LadiyFest Strasbourg (France), the Lady*Fest

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Karlsruhe (Germany), and the Böse & Gemein Festival in Dresden (Germany). I was also involved in the organization of a feminist punk festival in my hometown in 2017. Drawing on these various experiences, this piece for Riffs aims to offer a personal insight into how LGBTQ and feminist community spaces within music scenes, such as queer_feminist punk festivals, might impact on identity construction and affirmation.

Yet, it is firstly important to consider my positionality. I am a middle-class white queer woman with a college education.

Engaging in a PhD on the topic of queer_feminist punk festivals has made me realize some flaws of the scene I hadn’t noticed before, because of that specific background.

For example, nowadays I am quite critical regarding the appropriation of the concept of “intersectionality” by the queer_feminist punk scenes, as they remain mostly white and middle-class (as I myself am). This is something I had never considered before I had to do a cross-analysis of archives, fieldwork and academic research. Working on queer_feminist punk festivals as a research topic has made me realize that the scene was way less unified as I thought, and helped me identify the breaking points of the scene.

In a certain sense, my academic experience made me see queer_feminist festivals less as the safe spaces for all the minorities or marginalised people they sometimes claim to be[1], and more as critical platforms for feminism and LGBTQ politics where controversial topics are embedded and are to be argued upon. For once though, I wanted to approach the topic of queer_feminist punk festival from a personal and maybe even emotional point of view and, therefore, recall experiences I have had when I wasn’t even a graduate [1] The organising collective of Lady*Fest Heidelberg 2018 for example wrote “Through awareness we strive to provide all people with a safe space.” (Lady*Fest Heidelberg website, 2018)

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student. In order to make my own path within the punk scenes more understandable, I will first recall how I discovered punk music through recordings and my hometown local scene. Then, I will explain how queer_feminist punk festivals are places that participate in community building. And finally, I will analyse how they also provide tools that helped me navigate the masculine spaces of punk music.

Recalling that journey of my own wouldn’t be complete without music itself; therefore, as you might already have noticed, each section begins with an album. I highly recommend listening to them all.

Soft Cage

by Body Betrayal As a teen, I grew up in a really small town of north-eastern France. The landscape was full of fields and old factories.

The neighbourhoods I paced every day had nothing in common with the dynamism and the effervescence of the urban life. It felt like no music scene could ever grow there.

I’d spent my days skateboarding, and I slowly started to discover punk music when I was 10 or 11, with the help of a few friends and their older brothers. When it arrived to my parents’ home a few years later, the Internet was already full with music gems I could explore for hours and hours. At that point, music (punk especially) felt as an escape from a daily life where even skipping class sounded boring, as it would merely involve wandering in deserted streets. My first experience of listening to punk rock is therefore no exception to all the studies that highlighted the relationship between this kind of music and boredom (see for example Sikarskie, 2014 amongst others).

Nor did my first steps in a local punk scene differ from Sara Cohen’s (1997) analysis of music scenes as masculine network. I discovered her chapter “Men Making a Scene” (in Sexing the Groove) at the very beginning of my PhD.

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And when I read “The scene thus comprises predominantly male groups, cliques or networks engaged in activities shaped by social norms and conventions, through which they establish and maintain relationships with other men” (page 20), it instantly transported me back to my early days in my local punk scene.

At 18, I moved to the nearest city. It didn’t take me long to find the first shows I would attend there, nor did it to realize that the scene was mostly composed of straight white men. I still spent nice moments discovering the joys of live heavy music and slam dancing all night long and meeting new people, but each night had its own darker side. Sometimes someone would ask me the long-lasting casual interrogatory about my musical knowledge: “Oh you’re a hardcore fan, so you must know these bands and these bands.” Sometimes a random guy would think I came to see his band live hoping to hook up with one of the members. Sometimes someone would call me a groupie. Sometimes a guy would try to prevent me from going into the pit because I would get hurt. Sometimes I would just feel completely invisible. I eventually met some other girls, but sooner or later I would nonetheless have that strange feeling of otherness, being queer in a predominantly straight scene. I felt “out of step with the world” but also out of step with “my” scene. So far, the whole environment I had gotten to know was far away from the feminist punk and queercore bands that I loved.

At that point, it felt urgent to me to find queer representation everywhere I could. It was around 2012 and France was experiencing huge weekly antigay protests, as the state was about to authorize same sex marriage. Times weren’t easy but music helped get through them. Queer hardcore punk provided me with a good soundtrack to fight back.

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Choose Your Weapon

by Closet Burner I started traveling to visit queer_feminist scenes and festivals) across France and Germany.

Sometimes I was alone, sometimes I had the company of friends I had met in my local scene or online. The first times were determining experiences. September 2014. I'm sitting on the stairs that lead to the entrance of a small bar, located in a tiny village in North-Eastern France.

Inside, an electro-punk band named Fumer Tue is playing and a bunch of girls from the nearest city are organising their very first feminist DIY music festival. It is the very first time that I attend an event of this kind. October 2014. Only one month has passed and, wanting to live this experience again, a friend and I have been driving several hours to Lille (France) in order to attend another punk-feminist festival. In the cellar of an anarchist social centre, an allwomen punk band from Belgium named Vagina Dentata are playing some loud crust-punk soundtracks. Between the songs, the singer makes long statements about patriarchy, queerness, psychiatry and a few other topics, which truly speak to my heart and mind. These two consecutive experiences blew my mind. The frequency of my trips obviously increased when I started my PhD in 2017 and started playing in an all-girl post-punk(ish) band. The more I attended festivals, the more eager I was to feel that I was part of this queer punk community again.

Images: Walls of the JUZ Mannheim, taken during Lady*Fest Mannheim 2017.

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Festivals and Community Resistance The classic reference for all scholars working on or with festivals is without any doubt Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “carnivalesque”. In his work, Bakhtin introduces the carnival as “opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutise a given condition of existence or a given social order” (1984: 160). Festival scholars such as Bennett, Taylor and Woodward (2014) also draw on this quote to consider festivals as sites of resistance, building on the medieval carnivalesque analysed by Bakhtin. They, therefore, dedicate the first part of their book, The Festivalization of Culture, to chapters dealing with “Lifestyle, Identity and Cultural politics”.

Indeed, notions of community and politics are also central to the offerings of queer_feminist festivals and music festivities. Queer movements link culture, political engagement and partying. A queer party often has a political dimension, and a queer protest often has a festive dimension. For instance, pride parades and their festivalisation clearly bridge community politics and community festivities (Taylor, 2014). Sharon Fernandez (2006) analyses the impact of the Toronto-based Desh Pardesh arts festival on the South-Asian LGBT community. She explains that the festival helped the participants “[negotiate] a sense of being simultaneously a part of two (or more) cultures” (31) by bringing them “a home away from home”(31). Feminist movements have also played out their activities

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through music festivals since the 1970s. The National Women Music Festival, and the way its lesbian-feminist community deals with diversity, has been studied by Donna Eder, Suzanne Stagenborg and Lori Sudderth (1995).

As primarily political music festivals, the queer_feminist punk festivals I have witnessed, both in France and Germany, largely draw on two DIY music movements of the 1990s: Riot Grrrl and Queercore. Both movements held at their heart bands and zines before they developed into local collectives or were expressed through social and musical events. Riot Grrrl was born in Olympia, Washington around the early 1990s. Led by punk bands such as Bikini Kill or Bratmobile, they used fanzines as DIY medias through which they could share their ideas. The dissemination of fanzines helped to rally geographically dispersed young women attracted to this new punk-feminist movement, and local Riot Grrrl chapters developed all over the USA. In 1992, the first Riot Grrrl Convention was held in Washington, DC. The movement started attracting the attention of professional North-American media and Riot Grrrl bands quickly felt that their messages were being distorted and misquoted by the mainstream press. The original movement vanished around the mid 1990s, but its values didn’t disappear from the scene.

Rather, they re-emerged in the form of the first Ladyfest that took place in Olympia in August 2000. The festival positioned itself as “a non-profit, community-based event designed by and for women to showcase, celebrate and encourage the artistic, organizational and political work and talents of women” (Ladyfest Olympia Website, 2000). As examined

by Elke Zobl (2005), Ladyfest Olympia inspired local collectives all over the world to organise their own festival, creating an international network that now has local representations in four continents.

Queercore appeared a few years before Riot Grrrl, at the end of the 1980s. Its goal was to rally queer punk fans that felt marginalised both in the punk scene for their sexual orientation, and within gay movements for their engagement with punk culture. Like Riot Grrrl, Queercore had its iconic bands such as Pansy Division or Fifth Column and fanzines such

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as HomoCore and OutPunk through which local chapters were inspired. In the United States, events such as the SPEW convention, DirtyBird Queercore Festival (held in San Francisco in 1996), Homo-A-Gogo Festival (that took place in Olympia and later in San Francisco between 2002 and 2009), or more recently Chicago’s Fed Up Fest or Philadelphia’s Get Better Fest, also galvanized the movement.

Emerging out of this very particular history, events that I have attended offer their attendees workshops on LGBTQ and feminist issues, as well as shows by queer- or feministidentified bands such as Anti-Corpos, a lesbian-feminist hardcore punk band from Brazil (but now Berlin-based) or Finisterre, a crust-punk band based in Cologne (Germany).

These festivals aim to provide community spaces for anyone who isn’t a cisgendered man, as is sometimes indicated in the festivals’ documentation.

Festivals have been considered by participants, scholars and the media alike to provide a space that cuts their attendees from their daily lives, hence their potential to subvert the social order, as suggested by studies drawing on Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque”. Based upon my own experience and my doctoral research that followed, it is clear that the rules that regulate the social space of the queer_feminist festival are therefore different from the rules that govern the social space of each attendee’s daily life. One of the things that initially surprised me the most was how everyone is encouraged to ask for each other’s pronouns or even wear a pin or a label displaying their own. Some people even make up new pronouns in order to sound more neutral. Through this, everybody has the opportunity to experiment with their own gender. Respecting each other’s chosen pronouns translates as a respect for one another’s gender. And most of the time, awareness teams are in attendance to support interpersonal mediations in case one of the attendees feels offended by the attitude of another. Organisers aim to guarantee that the festival is a safe(r) space for minorities and marginalised people, especially women and queers.

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As a consequence, an outsider of the scene would probably find the milieu of queer_feminist punk “cliquey”. And it is true that queer_feminist punk festivals are deeply underground events and it sometimes feels like they don’t try to attract new people, and are organised instead for people who are already well aware of how to navigate in queer_feminist spaces.

In that sense, my experience within queer_feminist punk festivals relate to Susan O’Shea (2014) study on homophily in the world of Ladyfests in the UK. She relies on McPherson description of “homophily” as “the principle that a contact between similar people occurs at a higher rate than among dissimilar people” (2001: 416) and on actor-network theory to evaluate if “similar types of people” regarding data such as gender or sexuality “tend to be attracted to Ladyfest festivals and associated feminist music worlds” (134). She concludes her investigation by proposing that “involvement with Ladyfest increases the opportunity of forming meaningful relationships with others from different ethnic groups and places” but that “age, education, class and a nonheterosexual identity have a slight tendency to encourage more homophilous ties” (141).

In the cases of the festivals I attended, only one of these events (Ladiyfest Strasbourg 2018) provided workshops for women, queer and non-binary people of colour only while most of the others provided workshops and spaces for women, lesbians, trans, intersex and queer people only. During the concerts, the organising crew also prioritises bands that are at least showcasing one woman or queer person. The restrictive gender balance they allow during workshops, as much as the female and queer representations they display on stage, contributes to community building by allowing the women and queer people in the audience to self-identify to empowering musician figures.

In June 2018, I attended Böse & Gemein Festival in Dresden, Germany. I took part in some workshops that were pretty interesting and insightful, but my favourite moments definitely were the concerts. There, I got the chance to see (or see again) some of my favourite punk and hardcore punk bands, such as Gattaca and Kenny Kenny Oh Oh and to discover new ones like Weak Ties and Choral Hearse. Over two nights, I saw many women and queer people on stage and at the front of the audience (where I was also standing). This was an extremely empowering moment for me.

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Kenny Kenny Oh Oh preparing themselves for their show during Böse & Gemein Festival 2018.

Gym Tonic’s show during Böse & Gemein Festival 2018.

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During Lady*Fest Karlsruhe, Germany in December 2018, I attended a workshop about DJing with vinyl records. I had wanted to learn the technique for quite a long time but never got the chance to meet anyone who could have taught me. The workshop was accessible to women, lesbian, trans, intersex and queer people only, in order to counter the usual male-dominated gender balance of music scenes and industries. We numbered only three attendees. A girl from a female-only DJ collective based in Freiburg, Germany showed us the required equipment and taught us a few easy mixing techniques. She, then, let us play with her records. Trying to implement what she had taught us for ourselves was not mandatory. I therefore felt absolutely no pressure, which was definitely relieving, and in stark contrast to the music courses I took when I was a kid.

Thus, the gender dynamics in queer_feminist punk festivals community building might recall women’s music festivals of the 1970s. Donna Eder, Suzanne Stagenborg and Lori Sudderth (1995) drew for instance on Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier’s (1992, 1995) works on the construction of a collective identity within lesbian feminist movements to analyse the National Women’s Music Festival.

Taylor and Whittier as well as Eder et al. stated that the formation of a collective lesbian feminist identity draws on boundaries established between themselves and what they considered as “dominant groups”.

To do so, lesbian feminists engaged in “creating alternative institutions and a women’s culture that promotes a distinct set of values” (Eder et al., 1995: 489), such as a music festival.

This also applies to my experience of queer_feminist punk festivals more generally. The main difference, though, is that contrary to women’s music festivals, queer_feminist punk festivals expand their target audience in order to develop a better balance of LGBT, queer and non-binary people. The gap between my daily life and the life at queer-feminist punk festivals therefore seemed –and still seems – huge. Coming to the end of a festival and (temporarily) leaving “my” community always kind of breaks my heart. But significantly, attending more and more queer_feminist punk festivals also helped me navigate the punk scene of my hometown.

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Queer_feminist punk festivals function as toolkits of practical, theoretical or interpersonal resources.

The attendees can apply these when the festival is over and, importantly, when they engage in nonqueer/non-feminist scene spaces. During the whole time of my journey within the queer_feminist punk festivals scene, I have learnt about various typical DIY music activities: booking and organising shows, making fanzines, making music, managing a record label, and so forth. Thanks to these festivals, I have acquired a subcultural capital (Thornton, 1996) that can also be translated into my participation within my local scene. I have gained confidence and built a network of contacts all over Europe. Moreover, I have been able to share part of this knowledge with other women back home who continue to participate primarily within a male-dominated and (sometimes) misogynistic scene. Therefore, queer_feminist punk festivals not only provided me new competences that were useful in the punk scene or the support of an international network of DIY bands, artists and promoters, but it also helped me reclaim a space within my local scene by bringing to other women the kind of expertise that used to circulate in mostly masculine networks. In a certain way, this experience directed us towards what Pauwke Berkers writes about punk-feminist women in the Netherlands in the 1970s, that is: “punk feminists tried to change the world just by being where they were traditionally not supposed to be, that is, within male-dominated punk scenes.” (2012: 167). In this way, it is vital that individuals such as myself, who traverse different subcultural spaces, continue to engage, when possible, with their local and cismaledominated spaces, both adding a level of gender or sexuality diversity and instigating conversations and actions with other women/queer participants which ultimately challenge and change the definitions and behaviour that have come to dominate particular music scenes.

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Conclusion: From My Personal Experiences to PhD Research Being with a group of like-minded people definitely has something powerful. It helped connect with other people who had a similar path within the punk scene and helped realize my experiences with men from the punk scene weren’t isolated experiences. While I had read that in zines, for example, being able to talk about it with other women and queer people was another step in my consciousness-raising process. In that sense, queer_feminist punk networks served as a community where I felt I belong.

Yet, looking at different identity criteria, such as race, age or class, would probably reveal that the whole queer_feminist punk community does not necessarily experience navigating music scenes the same. Teaming up with collectives stemming from other marginalised communities, in order to build a more diverse and inclusive space and festival programs might be a first step queer_feminist festivals can make to solve that problem.

Engaging in queer_feminist festivals has offered me a means to more successfully engage within my local scene. It has been truly empowering and has probably led to give a different representation of the scene’s gender balance. But it hasn’t washed gender boundaries away. Men still get more collaboration opportunities, venue owners seem to take them more seriously, and they, thus, keep gaining more and more visibility. Hopefully, keeping in traveling to festivals, bonding with women and queer people, locally and translocally, will help us tip the scale.

Writing this piece offered me an opportunity to recall my discoveries of that sense of belonging through the queer_feminist cultural effervescence of a binational festival scene. It also encouraged me to connect years of personal experiences with an academic expertise, that is articles, books, and dissertations I read during my PhD. In a certain sense, my (emerging) academic career did not only help me to better understand gender and popular music-related social phenomenons that I aimed to study, but it also made me step back in order to better understand my own experiences

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with both my local hardcore punk scene and queer_feminist spaces, and to use these to add a missing piece of the puzzle in our scholarly understanding of how marginalised groups engage within subcultural music scenes.

Louise Barrière is a PhD student in Performing Arts. She works for the Laboratoire Lorrain de Sciences Sociales (2L2S), at the University of Lorraine. In 2017, she has obtained a PhD scholarship and is thus currently studying punk-feminists festivals in France and Germany as a case study of political and artistic cultural transfers.

She is interested in cultural studies, popular music studies, gender studies and the history of feminist movements. Some of her previous or ongoing parallel research projects have also addressed questions of local punk scenes in North-Eastern France, as well as queer-feminist mediations of metal music. Since 2018, she is also a member of the editorial board of Volume! The French Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Besides her academic work, she plays guitar in an all girl post-punk band, enjoys experimenting with cassette tapes, organizes outdoor guerrilla music shows and has been involved in several feminist and queer collectives.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Bennett, Andy, Jodie Taylor, and Ian Woodward. The festivalization of culture.

Ashgate, 2014.

Berkers, Pauwke. "Rock against gender roles: Performing femininities and doing feminism among women punk performers in the Netherlands, 1976-1982." Journal of Popular Music Studies, Vol.24, no. 2, 2012: 155-175.

Cohen, Sara. "Men Making a Scene. Rock music and the production of gender." In Sexing the groove: Popular music and gender. Routledge, 1997: 17.

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Eder, Donna, Suzanne Staggenborg, and Lori Sudderth. "The National Women's Music Festival: Collective identity and diversity in a lesbian-feminist community." Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 23, No. 4, 1995: 485-515.

Fernandez, Sharon. "More than an arts festival: Communities, resistance, and the story of Desh Pardesh." Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol. 31, No. 1, 2006.

McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook.

"Birds of a feather: Homophily in social networks." Annual review of sociology, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2001: 415-444.

O’Shea, Susan. "Embracing difference in feminist music worlds: a Ladyfest case study." In Social Networks and Music Worlds. Routledge, 2014. 146-168.

Sikarskie, Matthew James. Bored with boredom: Engaging modernity in Wilhelmine Wandervogel and West German punk subcultures. Michigan State University, 2014.

Taylor, Verta, and Nancy E. Whittier. "Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities: Lesbian Feminist Mobilization." In Frontiers in Social Movement Theory. Yale University Press, 1992: 104-129.

Taylor, Verta, and Nancy Whittier. "Analytical approaches to social movement culture: The culture of the women’s movement." Social movements and culture, Vol. 4, 1995: 163-187.

Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, media, and subcultural capital. Wesleyan University Press, 1996.

Zobl, Elke. "Revolution grrrl and lady style, now!." Peace Review, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2004: 445-452.

Weblinks Lady*fest Heildeberg website, https://ladyfestheidelberg.com/ Ladyfest Olympia website, http://ladyfest.org/index3.html

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RITUAL SACRIFICE IN THE MUSIC AND NOISE OF A METAL FESTIVAL Owen Coggins Photograph: www.iandaviesphoto.com Ⓒ 2012 - 2019 | All Rights Reserved

2 EUSSI 3 LOV

The sacred is that prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of duration, the order of things holds in check, and that this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence. (Bataille, 1989: 52)

Roadburn is an annual music festival that since 1999 has taken place over four days in April in Tilburg in the southern Netherlands. Featuring various styles of heavy music, the focus (appropriately for this publication) is the riff, especially its amplified and distorted iterations. In 2019, several venues were used: in the 013 venue a 3000-capacity main stage and smaller Green Room; a converted warehouse complex incorporating the large Koepelhal stage, tiny Hall of Fame venue, and a skatepark hosting impromptu shows; and, in its last year as a Roadburn stage, the former church hall Het Patronaat complete with vaulted roof and windows depicting saints in stained glass. Around 100 bands played, the organisers highly respected by festivalgoers for curating eclectic, exciting line-ups featuring a rare combination of extreme metal, noise, psychedelic and experimental music.

Four thousand attendees travelled from Europe and beyond

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with accommodation in Tilburg booked out months in advance and many festival-goers camping in a field on the outskirts of the town.

Attending Roadburn is something of an economic privilege, tickets costing around €200 and other expenses incurred; the festival clearly operating under commercial logics. Yet, following Bataillean attitudes to riotous, sacred expenditure, participants acknowledge that money is part of the sacrificial mechanics of the event, but maintain that the communal, ritualised, festive noise is not fully reducible to consumer capitalism.

The music is noisy, as is the festival’s rambunctious atmosphere and disruption of participants’ mundane routines. References to ritual abound: bands feature skulls and incense on stage; musicians enact ceremonial movements; audience members are immersed in festive conviviality and intense listening; images on shirts depict abstract meditations on violence. Attendees, the objects they display, the practices they repeat and the spaces they traverse are constructed as a ritual, festive world evoking violence and noise.

Photograph 1. Skulls and amplifiers on stage before Turia’s set.

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Influential anthropologists of religion have theorised ritual as foundationally important to the structure of society, and involving forms of violence. Mary Douglas finds violence in the imposition of linguistic and conceptual categories which in turn construct conceptions of dirt or noise as transgressing those structures, therefore bearing dangerous, magical power that must be ritually controlled (Douglas, 1966). Victor Turner, following Arnold van Gennep, understands ritual as a tripartite process: separation from a mundane world; initiation or transformation into a sacred communitas; and reintegration into society having gained power, knowledge or status. Violence is necessary for drastic removal from ordinary life, and in the trials of the liminal realm (van Gennep 1960, Turner 1969).

René Girard’s depiction of ritual features a complex mechanism involving an economy of violence, as scapegoats are loaded with the antagonisms of a group and violently expelled or executed before their deification for having absolved that community of a more general violence (Girard 1977).

Adorno suggests that vestiges of sacrificial ritual survive in opera, and that audience applause ‘may be the direct descendant of ancient, long-forgotten ritual sacrifices’ (1992: 65), the sound even evoking sacrificial flames when heard over radio (1992: 77). Despite their uncharacteristically ahistoricism, Adorno’s suggestions connect violence with social-musical rituals. Jacques Attali considers this relationship further: ‘Noise is a weapon and music, primordially, is the formation, domestication and ritualization of that weapon as a simulacrum of ritual murder’ (1985: 24). Attali transposes Girard’s scapegoat mechanism into the abstract, temporal art of music in which figures of order (and therefore models of social organization) can be represented and experimented upon. Violence is committed upon the scapegoat victim, rescuing the community from the violence of asocial chaos: represented in sound, the chaos of noise is violently channelled into music. Noise and chaos are therefore subjectively, socially and discursively constructed and defined, and in the political economy of noise, violence appears in shifting guises.

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Separation Ritual implies separating from ordinary life in entering sacred space, participating in a period of liminal communality and powerful experience, and subsequently reintegrating into the world; a model consecrated by repetition (van Gennep 1960, Turner 1969). Roger Caillois doubts the survival of such festivals, premodern community-wide ‘paroxysms’ replaced by isolated relaxation in the modern individual’s vacation (2018: 405).

Contemporary festivals are no longer celebrations of unified small-scale societies, but gatherings of individuals drawn together in elective community, here centred upon music. With a friend I take four trains to Tilburg, idly looking out for any travellers displaying metal insignia that might indicate a shared destination. This alertness for other participants-tobe already marks difference from vacation, the temporarily-real annual festival constituted as much by participants as by bands, stages and locations. At Tilburg train station and around the town, flags display festival artwork, which most attendees will have seen online, but only now become materially manifest as markers of the festival space. The short avenue of bars and cafes near the 013 venue is jokingly named ‘Weirdo Canyon’ by attendees who drink and laugh amidst locals who sometimes appear bemused at the temporary influx. The nickname is marked on the programme map and also lends its name to the daily zine “Weirdo Canyon Dispatch,” celebrating the alterity of its denizens in their festivities. People mention the effort needed to detach from immersion in festive noise in order to remember to eat. Separated from home and work, basic bodily rhythms of eating, sleeping, even urinating are all reconfigured or even forgotten, in following the noise and riffs, the highest priority of the festival.

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Photograph 2. Remnants of excess at the campsite.

In the programme booklet, an introduction by the organising team describes the event as ‘a transformative space, place and time,’ which takes place on ‘Planet Roadburn’ yet is also a ‘journey,’ trip and arrival combined. Foreshadowing the third stage of classical ritual, they write, ‘If the positive vibes of Roadburn can be taken away, back into “the real world” then even better’. The supposed reality of the external world is framed in scare quotes, highlighting its relativity: at home, the festival is a strange world set apart from the normal; here, attendees repeat that it isthe festival which feels more real. Walking with a fellow reveller back to the campsite late one night in viciously cold temperatures, he predicts he will be cryogenically frozen, to be thawed and reanimated only at the next edition of the festival. A repetition as well as a separation, a re-emergence into an elliptically returning sacred space.

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A theatre of distorted bodies Attendees become altered through various abstract kinds of violence. Sounds themselves, especially from guitars, are distorted and amplified, then enthusiastically absorbed by listeners’ bodies.

Listeners approvingly use terms of brutality and pain in noise music as ‘abstract superlatives that relate the force and magnitude of its effects on their own bodies’ (Novak 2013: 47), and similarly in extreme metal’s approving rhetoric of violent excess speaks (however haltingly) of desired intensity from musical experience (Kahn-Harris 2007: 52-3). At the end of a relentless black metal set

by Turia, a guitar is left leaning on an amplifier, screeching feedback noise. Bandmembers stand unmoving, as do the crowd, exhilarated by the set and now communing in noise, the wild sounds now unbound even by human movement or control, eventually faltering and prompting longlasting applause.

The first band I see is sludge-doom duo Bismuth. I’ve heard them live several times so I know that the riffs that instantiate separation from the ordinary will be crushingly slow, fearsomely heavy and abysmally loud. Deep reverberations fill the room from the as-yet-minimallydistorted bass guitar, though amps, pedals and drums promise a more physically potent noise to come. Underwater scenes projected behind the band resonate with the droning, lapping, sombre waves of sound, thick layers of heavy air settling slowly like sediment. After a slow build, finally a crashing dam-break in sound is summoned by drums and the furious flood power of distorted amplification. I remember the title of this piece ‘The Slow Dying of the Great Barrier Reef’ just as the massive riff drops, and the projected film of subaquatic life cuts to a nuclear mushroom-cloud and the dynamiting of a forest mountainside. The scale of these slow-motion-filmed tragedies of human violence to natural environments is underscored with rushing, wretched, ice-shelf-collapsing riffs in the music.

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Photograph 3. Jellyfish on screen behind Bismuth on stage.

Later, I hear that in a set I missed, forest fires were projected behind Lingua Ignota’s electronic noise and vocal evocations of violence. While these juxtapositions involve clear ecological protest, they conjure more ambiguous complexities than simply equating heavily amplified distortion with environmental violence. Abstract sonic violence rages at ecological damage even while representing it, just as much metal music rails against (post)industrial modernity using sounds that are inseparable from it, those definitively modern tools of electrical instruments and amplification.

Ambivalent testaments of industrial violence have been fundamental to metal from its origins, when Tony Iommi’s steel-factory-damaged fingertips required loosening his guitar strings, leading to Black Sabbath’s signature down-tuned and doomy sound.

Other distortions: the bandmembers of experimental metal band Laster play in black clothing and strange bone-coloured masks, floating plague doctor heads or bird-alien skulls which theatrically depict the musicians as weird, other-than-human sources for sonic strangeness. In the corny, carnival performance of ‘Satanic doo-wop’ by Twin Temple, a tall smartly-dressed guitarist plays tightly controlled Chuck Berry riffs and middle-eight licks as if entranced, his spellbound zombie persona an uncanny aspect of an otherwise over-the-top stage show.

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Several Dutch musicians collaborate on the long, varied ‘Maalstrom’ piece which includes pummelling distorted metal, harsh noise, and clanging electronic beats, each style represented at the festival but striking in combination. In a section of harsh noise, one listener turned round to shush others for talking too loudly: making a noise to interrupt the noise of others who were interrupting the noise performed. Michel Serres observes that such strange relations are characteristic of noise, disruptive and unstable as signal and interruption shift places (2007).

Access to the ritual space of the festival is gained by exchanging tickets for wristbands, differentiating those with access to the key festival spaces. Within the festival, an ethos of community is commonly mentioned, though in some instances the extent and terms of inclusivity are contested.

One festival-goer on social media reported homophobic harassment; Photograph 4. Sketches of masked Laster groping was also mentioned in bandmembers. comments on this post.

The initial commenter stated that they had considered Roadburn safer than other events, and respondents, offering messages of support, were infuriated that this had happened at ‘their’ festival. Such instances, however rare, are important cautions against depicting the festival space as a utopia removed from the struggles of the outside world. Commenters troubled by the reports referred to the band Vile Creature’s onstage statement at the festival, in support of people marginalised because of gender and sexual identities. Rage at this kind of violence also fuelled Dutch band Gold’s performance, whose singer Milena Eva coldly dissected misogynistic rhetoric in songs such as ‘Why Aren’t You Laughing?’

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Another piece which confronted abuse, betrayal and gendered violence was the skatepark performance by Lingua Ignota, solo musician Kristin Hayter using a mic, laptop, pedals and three metal-encased lightbulbs surrounded by a tight circle of listeners in the darkened space. The set started with a recording of a woman complaining of never having received a fair trial.

Meanwhile, Hayter stalked the circle, singing and swinging the lamps, in circles, over her shoulder, out like a lantern, or against herself as if in flagellation. The Dolly Parton track ‘Jolene’ received a piercing rendition, and another song repeated the savagely delivered line ‘LIFE IS CRUEL TIME HEALS NOTHING’. The set was powerfully harrowing, with several audience-members in tears throughout.

Photograph 5. Sketch of Lingua Ignota with lightbulb and crowd.

Photograph 6. Attendees queue to get into Patronaat, Sint-Jozefkirk in the background.

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The spectacular 19th Century neogothic Sint-Jozefkirk church looms over the festival site, with the Patronaat stage located in an outbuilding (often itself described as a church by attendees). Such architecture has obvious ritual associations from Christianity, a religious tradition historically treated with scorn and fascination in metal. The performance of extreme metal in this space therefore affords a sense of sacrilege or inversion of (imagined) intended purpose. The icon of the burning church glares over the black metal subgenre in particular, after notorious arsons associated with the 1990s Norwegian scene. Icelandic black metal band Naรฐra performed in Patronaat in 2017, later releasing a live recording of that set. The CD case featured a woodcut-style image of a burning church, as if equating the symbolic transgression of playing black metal in a church hall with actually setting it alight. Such violent symbols are recognised and referenced, repeated and ritualised, sustaining a certain ambivalence between appreciating an apparently appropriate atmosphere for ritualised performances, and revelling in its imaginary destruction. At the train station in Tilburg on Monday morning, checking news on my phone is part of reintegration into the world beyond the festival: everywhere online are images of Notre Dame on fire, providing a stark reflection on art, religion, iconoclasm and loss. It is not long before black metal recordings appear with images of the burning cathedral on their sleeves.

Photograph 7. Naรฐra live album, recorded in church building at Roadburn, with artwork depicting a burning church.

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Repetition and initiation The most overt rituals I witness at the festival appear in quite different sets at the Patronaat venue. New band Twin Temple sound like Amy Winehouse singing 50s rock’n’roll songs about sex, death and Satan with a sharptongued feminist slant. Several festivalgoers left quickly, shaking their heads at the theatrically kitsch Satanic Americana, but a genially inebriated crowd stayed to enjoy the sassy lyrics and pop hooks. Taking cues from 1960s occult rock originators Coven, Twin Temple included a ‘satanic initiation’ recording on their album, reprised here towards the end of the set.

They seek an initiate for baptism, and a volunteer, John, is welcomed onstage to be blindfolded and his hands bound by the deadpan guitarist. The singer leads the audience in a call-and-response: ‘Hail Satan… HAIL SATAN! Hail… John! HAIL JOHN!’ With a long dagger and an ostentatious flourish the guitarist cuts the binding ribbon, John is ushered away and the band end their set with their album’s lead single ‘The Devil Didn’t Make Me Do It’.

Photograph 8. Twin Temple on stage.

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Reclusive black metal band Fauna perform a similar ritual on the same stage the following day. A hushed aura greets the band who have not performed in Europe for many years, as they play their most recent yet still six-year-old album Avifauna in full. Long brooding passages of acoustic guitar and birdsong are interspersed with dramatically melancholic black metal. Somewhat surprisingly, the acoustic pieces are pre-recorded, leaving the bandmembers, clad in ragged orange robes, to perform ritualised patterns of movement: lighting incense, passing around bowls, even flapping with feathered arms slowly across the stage. Late in the set, an audience-member is summoned on stage through wordless gestures: hands are bound, eyes covered, and then ties are dramatically cut away. Then a musician daubs red paste on the foreheads of fans in the front row. When the performance finishes, I go to the bathroom, and see three men at three sinks washing bloodcoloured smears off their faces; watching Lingua Ignota next, I recognise another attendee by his stained forehead, a bodily marker of temporary ritual transformation.

Photograph 9. Sketch of Fauna musician’s ritual gestures.

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For Twin Temple, the live version of the ritual repeats the recorded material, and is repeated by the band each night on tour, and by listeners in advance in their repeated spinning of CDs, records and tapes. In this their first tour, as well as ‘initiating’ an audience member, they are also subtly initiating themselves into the established metal and Roadburn community. Fauna perform an album that many in the crowd (myself included) have listened to many times before, but few have ever seen the band live: initiation and repetition combine. At both sets, in a sense, repetition precedes initiation. Explicitly referencing festival, Gilles Deleuze overturns linear ideas of difference and repetition: ‘This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an “unrepeatable.” They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the “nth” power’ (1994: 52).

Other bands make more oblique references to ritual and sacrifice. I overhear Treha Sektori’s atmospheric drones described as ‘ritualistic.’ Black metal band L’Acephale are named after Georges Bataille’s secret society, and a projection of the famous headless man glances off the drummer’s jagged broken cymbal (or symbol?). Repetitions and initiations echo through the festival, highlighting cyclical relationships between recordings and performances. Things happen again but for the first time. Recordings are released at the festival, of performances from previous years, some of which were sets reprising prior album releases. A 2019 release by the band Yob is a recording of a 2012 live set, which was a playthrough of their 2005 studio album. The title The Unreal Never Lived, Live at Roadburn hints at such cycles, never having lived and being live joined in unreality. Other recordings are purchased by listeners who will repeat their live experience by listening at home; at each live set audience members reenliven their past experience of recordings.

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Interconnected circles of listening Each live performance at the festival is surrounded by thousands of future and past repetitions of music recordings in the lives of each participant, preceding and echoing after their festive attendance, on revolving records, spinning CDs, or the turning wheels of cassette tapes. The festival can be (part) imagined as a bewildering complex of intersecting circling repetitions of ritual listening. Fans who have listened to these riffs over and over finally hear them played by the musicians in front of them. New listeners seek out recordings and spin them into the future. Audience members who have seen this or that band before cycle again through these same riffs surrounded by other listeners, each of whom is surrounded by their own spiralling cloud of past and future repetitions of listening. Some instances may be represented in tour shirts, patches and tattoos, visual tokens of the less visible effects of repeated listening on bodies, recognised and celebrated by others who have felt the same inscriptions. .lavitsef eht gnidnuorrus gninetsil fo secnatsni erutuf dna tsap fo skrowten denigami fo hctekS .01 hpargotohP

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Ecstasy and escape Yet even if this hypercomplex imaginary network of circles could be fully grasped, in every single repetition of a recording that every person had listened to, each of those instances of listening connecting to every other instance for every other person who had heard that recording, and even if connections could be conceptualised between every gig that every person in every crowd had been to with any other, and the circulation of all material objects of musical cultures and their relations to all those people could be depicted‌ then this would not represent the festival. The maintenance of community for the dispersed and diverse riff devotees is one effect and purpose of the festival. But the power that drives these intense events, that makes these moments worth commemorating and mythologising, is something less tangible or representable.

The festival requires, demands, creates, sacrality fired by ecstasy and intoxication, which escapes definition beyond the ritual boundaries of the festival.

Photograph 11a. Notebook with stickers; stickers collected this year for future display.

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Photograph 11b. Notebook with stickers; stickers collected this year for future display.

Things are missed by each participant, inevitably given that five stages run simultaneously. I missed watching Sleep play their second set in order to guarantee witnessing the first ever performance of Nusquama, whose debut tape I had been feverishly replaying in recent weeks. Two reviewers in the daily zine highlight what they didn’t see, worrying that they missed something special. But wild excess is the mark of the festival, and no careful plan could ever ensure a logical progression through the schedule that would win maximum musical enjoyment. Festival always escapes total capture. The event’s transcendence of merely personal experience is underlined by the impossibility of any individual encountering the whole of the festival.

The festival is the excessive, enlivening and chaotic totality of everyone’s different path through the circumscribed space and time.

And even for each person, some parts are lost, to intoxication, tiredness and sleep, even to sheer excitement transporting experience outside language or memory.

Lost to laughter, at the anarchic absurdity of Malokarpatan’s lurid, caped performance, for example, but more often laughter between music. Lost to absorption in powerful sound, in meditative or riotous crowds entranced in harsh screeching noise, pummelling repetitive riffs, buzz-picked agitated stasis, or austere ritual drones. Lost even in conversations in seven languages, intoxicated, all about those sounds, while you stare into the fire.

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The riff At the heart of these abstract, ambivalent, transformative manifestations of violence, the ritual mechanism of the festival itself is the repetition of the riff. Even harsh noise or drone performances are arguably concerned with riffs, by refusing them in chaos or drawing them out in extreme slowness. Thinking about festival, ritual, violence, noise, in some sets I scribble notes or sketches, in others there is no space in the dark crush, in others I can’t think for immersion in noise. Sleep play the main stage on Saturday night, the first of two performances, this one centred on their 1994 album Holy Mountain. For me though their crowning achievement is the absurd, sacred monolith of an album Dopesmoker/Jerusalem, an hour-long dirge released in various versions as if fragmentary testaments to something too enormous to capture in a single recording. Many Roadburn-related bands might be superlative in their commitment to droning, to industrial heaviness, to amplification or feedback or distortion, but there are few bands to match Sleep’s devotion to the riff. The band leave the stage after having completed their Holy Mountain set, the enormous screen backdrop goes blank, and I wonder if they’ve finished.

Photograph 12. Sleep play Dopesmoker.

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For a split second the Dopesmoker artwork flicks up, prompting a massive cheer from the vast crowd. The band return and launch into this intoxicating hymn to pilgrimage and intoxication. The sound is thick and heavy, and I am conscious of feeling exactly centred in my own body, as if its real physical extension and my ordinary (inaccurate) projected self are forced into conjunction by extremes of amplified vibration and riff repetition, this mind-bodyunity assisted by the music’s prior inscription into myself through repeated spinning of records (or perhaps, my inscription into this music’s repetitions?).

Immersed in the music I have no thought of analysis or writing, but suddenly a formula drops into my mind connecting noise, distortion, drones, replications, and ritual returns: A riff is disruption (in equilibrium), resolved by repetition. In ritual festival participation and in the noisy music around which festival is organised, difference from the ordinary is established, in repeated instantiation becoming ritual reinvigoration of the sacred, difference reintegrated into renewal of order.

Photograph 14. Self-portrait during Sleep.

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Ritual sacrifice Gestures and practices are consciously, collectively ritualised as participatory constructions of the sacred through separation and sublimation into the festive society, into carnivalesque upendings and ecstatic abandonments. However, warnings echo from Attali and Adorno: throughout the festival I wonder about violence and loss in the name of the sacred, the dark, threatening commitments implied by sacrifice.

Metal represents itself as fearlessly confronting mortality, rooted in exploring iconographies of death. Among the circulations of representations, a real impact: the death of Michiel Eikenaar, a musician who contributed much to black metal in the Netherlands, and who for me is bound up in experience of this festival. He died of cancer on the Friday of the festival weekend, and I, like many, discover this through an announcement in the Weirdo Canyon zine.

One of his bands, Photograph 14. ‘Weirdo Canyon Dispatch’ zine Dodecahedron, played on announces the death of Michiel Eikenaar.

Saturday night, but more striking for me was his other band Nihill and their first ever live performance at my first experience of this festival in 2013. This memory resonates particularly in the last set I hear this year, a Dutch

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band Nusquama playing black metal, guitarist’s foot on the stage monitors just as I remember Eikenaar’s posture on this same stage on the final day six years ago. Reflecting on this is not to glorify death nor speciously imply some ‘sacrifice’ of health for metal, but simply to acknowledge the reality of death at the festival. Beyond conviviality and intoxication, the festival is a site where seriousness and commitment are memorialised where their importance is collectively recognised.

Trivial in comparison, but sacrifice arises too in physical, temporal and economic forms for each person: their time, money and energy expended in festive excess, standing, waiting, drinking, staying up late and, for campers, enduring bitter cold. This temporary sacrifice traces a broader sacrifice, of time and intensity poured into these musical cultures over years. The seriousness of death is at the extreme end of this chain of evocations and channelings of violence and noise. Eikenaar is mourned and celebrated through witnessing how his music was a channel, a meditation on darkness and struggle, and a turning towards death, an acceptance of its reality. In an online posting, Eikenaar’s bandmate Vince Koreman marks respect for the man and his family before announcing that an album they were working on will never be completed, that ‘those recordings will join him in the great beyond’, the missive ending with the words ‘Burn the candle, raise the chalice, wield the scythe.’ Congruent with other depictions in this culture of noise and metal, Nihill’s music foreshadows death in its ritual engagement with darkness, its skulls and funereal iconography, and its raging noise, an uncomprehending gaze at the supposed order of life and a meditation on the chaos of annihilation.

Photograph 15. Nusquama live at Roadburn.

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But the festival evades any clear logic of sacrifice. Instead, a mosaic of instances of repetition connect violence, noise and ritual in sound, imagination and social practice. The dizzying imaginary network of all the repetitions of all the riffs in all the instances of listening for all the participants in all their separate worlds is only a vague model of the festival’s intricate intersecting flows of abstract violence and sacrifice between levels of representation and manifestation. Each person may attempt conscious management of their participation in such mechanisms, but in the festival at large all is absorbed into an elusive, joyously opaque totality.

Alongside some tapes and stickers, the most personally resonant material thing I take away from this year’s festival is a small image of a laughing skull, imprinted sketchily in purple ink on a piece of waste cardboard (appropriately, given the rites of intoxication here, a scrap from a box of painkillers). Not at the official show of music-related prints, it is strewn among promo flyers, presumably intended like them to be randomly picked up and dispersed. The image fits the metal aesthetic of skeletons and death, but unlike the flyers that encourage future listening (as well as monetary exchange), this image links to no website nor social media page, refers to no discernible band, album, label or event. This skull appears as a gesture of expenditure, an image of death and laughter reverberating out of the random chaos of the festival’s effervescent social and material repetitions and circulations.

An artistic impression repeating the aesthetics of a marginal culture. A gift freely given, a strange token gladly collected. A gleeful screeching representation of initiatory death. A sacrifice.

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Owen Coggins researches ritual and mysticism in audience cultures, especially in relation to extreme music. His doctoral project studied drone metal and a subsequent book, Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) won the 2019 IASPM Book Prize. He recently worked as a Researcher for a music therapy charity, and co-runs the drone record label and registered environmental charity Oaken Palace. Owen continues to investigate extreme music as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Politics at Brunel University London.

References Adorno, T. (1992), ‘The Natural History of the Theatre’, in Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. R. Livingston, London: Verso, 65-77.

Attali, J. (1985), Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bakhtin, M. (1968), Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky, Boston: MIT Press.Bataille, G. (1989), Theory of Religion, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Zone Books.

Bataille, G. (1991), The Accursed Share, An Essay on General Economy Volume 1: Consumption, trans. R. Hurley, New York: Zone Books.

Caillois, R. (2018) ‘The Theory of the Festival’, trans. M. Barash, in G. Bataille, ed. M Galletti and A. Brotchie, The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology, London: Atlas Press, 383-406.

Coggins, O. (2015), ‘The Invocation at Tilburg: Mysticism, Implicit Religion and Gravetemple’s Drone Metal’, Implicit Religion, 18 (2), 209-31.Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, London & New York: Continuum.

Douglas, M. (1966), Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Girard, R. (1977), Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Kahn-Harris, K. (2007), Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge, New York: Berg.

Novak, D. (2013), Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation, Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Serres, M. (2007), The Parasite, trans. L. R. Schehr, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.

Turner, V. (1969), The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Van Gennep, A. (1960), The Rites of Passage, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Experimental writing on popular music Riffs: Experimental writing on popular music is an innovative and challenging journal based at and funded by the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) at Birmingham City University. Riffs provides a platform for the publication of experimental pieces on popular music and was launched in February 2017. The contributions are made available Open Access through the journal website (www.riffsjournal.org) and a limited edition print run.

Riffs has a strong DIY and experimental ethos. We aim to push the boundaries of popular music research, communication, and publishing. The next step for the editorial board at Riffs is to develop a creative and experimental space for not only publishing finished pieces, but also offering an online forum for thinking through the ways in which we analyse, understand, and communicate.

As one of the largest centres for popular music research, the BCMCR at Birmingham City University offers a wealth of global networks and potential readership. Our editorial team and wider researcher community expand our reach further, with active participation in a range of international research networks to include IASPM, MeCCSA, the Punk Scholars Network, Subcultures Network and the Jazz Research Network. Beyond academia, Riffs is keen to develop relationships with industry, particularly in Birmingham, through events and collaborations. Through these connections, we aim to develop an international and active readership.

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Contributor Guidelines

Riffs: Experimental research on popular music welcomes pieces from all disciplines and from contributors from academic, industry, or creative backgrounds. Each issue will be based on a prompt, but responses can vary depending upon the contributor’s interest and experience. As the journal title suggests, we are most interested in pieces that take an experimental approach to the consideration of popular music. For examples of previous interpretations, please visit our journal website.

Abstracts submitted to Riffs will be considered by the editorial board, with full submissions subject to peer review.

Word Limit: 2,000-4,000 (excluding references) Please do not submit full dissertations or theses. All contributions should respond to the prompt and take an experimental approach to undertaking and/or communicating research on popular music. We also welcome shorter written pieces, audio, and visual pieces to include photo essays.

Abstract: Please provide an informal, blog-style abstract (under 300 words) and a profile picture. This abstract will be hosted on our journal website and social media platforms. As ever, links to external websites and the use of images, audio and video clips are also welcome, subject to guidance which will be issued at the point that your abstract is accepted.

Format: Please email submissions as attachments to the editorial contact given below. All articles should be provided as a .doc or .docx file. All images and web-ready audio or video clips should also be emailed as separate files, or through a file-sharing platform such as WeTransfer or Dropbox.

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Submission: Abstracts for our bi-annual prompts should be emailed to info@riffsjournal.org Please note: Riffs shall be entitled to first use of the contribution in all the journal’s different forms, but the author remains the copyright owner and can re-publish their contribution without seeking the journal’s permission. Riffs reserve the right to decline to publish contributions if they are submitted after the agreed deadline and without the assigned editor being informed (and agreeing to) a new submission date.