Deep, Deep Inside

An insight into emotional and mental processes experienced on the dancefloor.

When speaking about dance music events the description provided generally touches upon only external stimuli. The venue, the DJ, the crowd, the energy, and the queue. Understandable. The reality is that anyone who has been attending parties for a substantial enough time realises that the experience which far outweighs this is what happens internally within you. The experience of thoughts and emotions set against the backdrop of the party landscape are the elements that will stay with you much longer after the experience has ended. When it's discussed this normally touches on cathartics. Dance music will allow for cathartic experiences to blossom but it’s not always that grand. The emotional spectrum has a wide range and thus many experiences of varying weight are open for an individual to travel through. The more time you spend in the space the more opportunity you have to visit each one.

Dancing to techno is an independent act that can bring solitude. It’s highly personal, despite the group surroundings we mainly dance by ourselves for a long period rendering us free from our distractions. This on paper doesn’t make the most sense, the venue and the experience are the distraction, right? Well yes and no, the experience is a distraction and escapism from the real world of course, you choose to remove yourself from the social cues of regular existence and dive into a world that doesn’t operate on these norms. But it’s within this experience you remove all the weight of real distractions around you. Phones, screens, timetables, meetings, work, and responsibilities have no place here. Independence from these is liberating if only for a limited window. The main function of these items is to steal your focus. We are all guilty of avoiding complex emotions by pulling out the phone and shoving our heads in the metaphorical sand pit of the 6.5-inch display because it's easy. The power we give these items is removed because we change our environment to one that doesn't tolerate them. Without these as a coping mechanism, the mind is allowed to work as it's supposed to, if anything reignite with the built-up thoughts dwelling in your subconscious just waiting to get out.

Thoughts and reflection operate in a different form on the dancefloor than the experience outside it for example on a walk where you prioritise them. For that experience, the thought process occurs like an inner monologue that talks through a situation or experience. It’s logical to an extent and at least attempts to ponder from all angles to see the full experience. Thinking when it occurs on the dancefloor floats in waves of understanding and imagery that arrive into your mind unannounced but demand recognition for their clarity. This is not talking and teasing your thoughts out to arrive at an answer, this is awareness. From the seemingly mundane to the bigger aspects of our subconscious awareness does not have to have a resolution, it’s simply part of the ongoing nature of self-discovery. All it wants to be is heard. Give it a chance.

One of the most known representations of thinking within a club space shown through music can be found in The Streets, Blinded By The Lights. In the track, Mike Skinner presents his thought processes as they occur over the course of a night out where he over-consumes ecstasy. Skinner's thoughts rush in and leave quickly jumping from one immediacy to the next as he attempts to navigate a night out that doesn’t appear to be going his way. This is echoed through the music with a pristine vocal that’s soft and fragile summarising the vulnerable state he’s created for himself. While the monologue is necessary for the music's styling and to get across the message to the audience, the scatteredness of his mind frame and vividness of the experience is undeniably authentic. This take is melancholic, wrapped in a blanket of 2000’s English nostalgia it paints a messy discombobulated world of overconsumption and escapism. While this is real and resonates with a large audience it’s not every experience. Eris Drew writes of “fleeting moments of freedom” in The Journal of Motherbeat.

What starts as just blackness and sound soon transforms. Psyche comes to the forefront. You might start to think about the past. You might start to process your emotions. Recursive thoughts may fade as the intensity of the subjective moment takes over. You might move through negative feelings or forgive someone. And you might start to see things.

Knowing this is occurring in both yourself and in those around you broadens the understanding of a dancefloor into something far more substantial than a place to take drugs and listen to music.

Seeking separation within the party is a normal aspect of the culture whether to have the ability to think or to simply embrace your surroundings by yourself. Techno of all music has the power to keep a listener engaged with its charm for an excess of an average concert or show without the need to be in a group. Being solitary at other types of live music events is neither a problem either but these performances don’t lend themselves towards a space that can allow someone a space for reflection or pondering. They are spaces for spectacle where observation and undivided attention to the artist are the norm. What has occurred since the rise in popularity of techno music post-Covid and somewhat before has been an increase of visitors whose understanding of a party is so far removed from a space where this can exist that it's chipping away at the foundations that hold the party up. Introvertedness has been going hand in hand with dance music since its inception. It shouldn’t have to fight to exist amongst swarms of people who can’t feel comfortable unless surrounded by groups of friends and extended friends whose only goal is to treat the dancefloor as some sort of social marketplace. This is regular nightclub culture leaking in and leaving stains on everything it touches.

Dancing and rhythm are your two best friends in all of this. I don’t feel I need to speak about the joys of repetitive loops sitting snuggly on top of each other that’s why we're all here (isn’t it?). There’s a warm full-body sensation of being locked into a repetitive set of motions for hours. It’s comfort and ease almost like returning to your house or apartment after a long day in the cold. That sensation from a different perspective can also be attached to a venue. For many people that feeling of home is so special and is the primary reason why people are protective of their parties and spaces to an extreme. Behaviour on dancefloors is a discourse that is never going to end on or offline. We expect people to behave accordingly in a space that has connotations of home. In Mckenzie Warks book Raving she points out the fundamental difference of being on a dancefloor with seasoned veterans versus people who are not as experienced.

You can feel a viscosity when you wind your way through. An inexperienced or drunk crowd will be stiff, unaware of your presence, and hard to navigate. A seasoned crowd is easy to flow through even when densely packed.

This understanding of the space of bodies around you is vital to the experience of dance music, your movement and experience is always on the backfoot until you can navigate properly.

Emotional resonance is accessed through the mind-body connection. We dance in repetitive motions each of us in our own little way. How you move is irrelevant, while I admit that seeing people who have an innate understanding of dance is truly spectacular the movements of someone with little to no rhythm are just as relevant to the space. It’s your experience, not a competition. The premise is still the same for both parties, you will repeat these same movements again and again sometimes on a weekly basis. As these moves become second nature this allows you clarity in your thoughts and feelings. Your body begins to instinctively go about what you know to do, and your cognitive observant mind becomes less relevant over time. Movement is reflective of the way you are feeling deep down inside. These small physical confessions decorate dancefloors with small mostly unobserved acts of honesty. How cute.

Enjoyment and pure bliss should be a shared experience for everyone who regularly attends parties. Friends, good music, exploration, anticipation, and excitement spread out across an extended time frame are the ideal weapons of choice for a night out. We all know those exact parties where this experience is at its peak. Each of them personal for different reasons, it’s something you can look back on with fondness, a memory to keep you warm at night. Joy at parties is taken to a much further height than I have ever experienced outside of the dancefloor. The experience when you think back and reflect on feeling that incredible within this dark, sweaty, complicated space is, to be honest bizarre how a feeling of such a strong nature can be created by something so simple. Drugs of course are going to aid you in the process of getting to this position but it's important to be able to differentiate the feeling of being high from the feeling of alignment and ecstasy that can come with listening to techno. If you fail to differentiate between these you're in for some difficult times.

Pure joy is a larger-than-life experience. It creeps and rises slowly from within gradually opening in time with your moves. Dance music has the unique factor that this feeling can be coaxed out of you over an extended period of time. With the right DJ, the right storytelling and the right space little by little over the hours the feeling builds just waiting for that correct track to kick in. It’s always worth sticking around for. It's never been a thought process with this one, it’s always been a whole-body experience. Narration from your mind would almost tinge the experience, it’s your body doing the talking for you and when it’s time to let it have its moment be sure to shut up. Sublime occurrences like this don’t exist within the everyday. The architecture of our reality doesn’t want you to feel this way. But the club does. While this experience is preferred it also can’t be forced. It has to grace its presence on you when the time is right. It makes sense, joy and ecstasy are emotions that have more value due to scarcity.

One of the peak emotional experiences of techno is the prominence of undulating energy that can appear at certain times to never end. This is going back to being mentally locked into the groove. The speed and tempo of the music will not define how much your character is dialled in. High tempos always gonna promote faster dancing but that's not what I speak about when I’m considering this. How much concentrated energy is simply defined by your engagement with the experience. I suppose on the emotional wheel this feeling is going to sit somewhere between energetic, eagerness and awe. A phenomenal blend of all three this is something you wish you could bottle and take home with you. It’s far more common and certainly more accessible than joy and ecstasy.

Energetic, Eager, and Awe of course are placed at front left on the emotional wheel.

I’ve spoken previously about the warped nature of time at techno parties, this experience is the easiest way to render time irrelevant. Attending Takaaki Itoh on the Friday morning of the now-deceased Freqs of Nature festival I experienced a set that although four hours long seemingly sat on the precipices of something that stretched forever and ended in a blink of an eye. Not once did I consider leaving the sun-scorched dusty sandpit of a stage where Itoh's signature style of psychedelically haunting, stretched sounds built an environment that raised two fingers to the calm and sunny weather existing in its own unique bubble of controlled chaos. Despite the lack of sleep from the night before and the baking sun that extracted every bit of hydration from my body I never felt more present. Not a feeling of joy or happiness just one of truly being alive marvelling at the wonders he was launching at the crowd and anticipating what was coming next.

Freqs offered a unique blend of well-selected techno coupled with high-octane Psytrance and HI-Tech. A combination rarely married together since.

A lot of us feel stifled we feel stuck in terms of our daily energy use as we often find ourselves stuck in a routine that leaves no room for a flow state or the complete release of energy. This oddly has the impact of further laziness on us in a truly awful self-defeating cycle. Yes, I understand that taking some exercise is what you should be doing but the experience of dancing is always going to be better than going to the gym for an hour. This experience is the essence of rawness and complete immersion in the music. It has a wildness to it but not that it’s uncontrollable if anything it's something you’re firmly aware you’re in the driving seat for dialled into the lightning that's coursing through your body. It has to go somewhere and releasing it back out onto the dancefloor is usually the option.

The experience of modern club spaces that lean into bigger events and stereotypical problematic club culture are anti-intuitive towards any type of emotional or mental experience on the dancefloor. It is extremely difficult to be connected to yourself inside what is a large corporate venture. Large crowds, navigation, and a less-than-comfortable dancefloor experience mean you can never truly let yourself go despite the pounding of the sound system. This is less than ideal. It’s strange, numbness is a sensation that guides most people's daily existence. Ironically this numbness can find a place here in the spaces that sell themselves as a place to be alive. Operating almost like a defence mechanism to block out the triviality and annoyance of the whole experience it seems self-defeating to even attend these events unless your only goal is to see an artist listed on the lineup.

Their focus on a bigger is better ethos loses anything of intrinsic value within the party. It’s a pity that for some people depending on where they live these types of events will be their only experience of dance music. They won’t be presented in another way and maybe won't get to have the experience of anything other than the cliche money-grab warehouse party. The idea of dancing while glued to the DJ as if they’re some sort of extension of the screens we surround ourselves with halts the listener connecting on the experience on anything other than a spectacle. Re-designing the experience hasn’t done dance music any favours when it comes to the on dancefloor experience and it can appear that something has gone missing.

Previously an Ikea, Drumsheds offers currently offers an experience about as soulless as the furniture once sold on the property.

There’s an importance to the reflection of both the mundane and the larger aspects of your existence on the dancefloor however, it’s the processing of any form of trauma that is by far one of the most impactful experiences that can affect a person. Reflection on difficult events in your life will arrive at unexpected and usually the most inconvenient times. While your mind can achieve wonderful things it also tends to pull the rug from underneath you when you get the chance. Mentally working through previously traumatic experiences while dancing is a strange, difficult but extremely liberating experience. It’s natural to want to avoid this, it’s not exactly top of everyone's to-do list especially when Kyle Geigers closing. Running for the nearest exit whether that’s through conversation or another line is instinctive. You can think you're not in an ideal setting to tolerate it but here’s the thing, the dancefloor should be a space of comfort and if you’re lucky enough to be on one that you consider a cherished space for yourself then letting yourself go to this experience might be the best thing you can do for yourself. Dancing in repetitive motions mulling over past, present and potential future suffering in your life is the greatest pursuit of cathartic release. It can feel like you are trying to force out something buried inside of you like it's stuck and can’t be unwedged until you’ve done some specific set of actions you are not aware of. Like anything in life if it's too easy it probably isn’t worth doing.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the understanding that blossoms from this experience in the form of a resounding sense of relief with a physical sensation of lightness. Not every one of these journeys is a life-changing experience but it is a reflection your psyche deems necessary and that is always valid. The dancefloor is the ideal space for body and mind connection, each motion you make can chip away at the dissociation that remains from previously harmful experiences bringing you closer on a path towards yourself. Without the pressure of verbal communication, you're allowed to communicate outwards to the space and be heard. You have every right to be.

The range of emotional experiences I have gone through by allowing myself to be vulnerable to sound systems and the energy of the dancefloor around me is the higher purpose of dance music. Partying on paper is simply about having fun, but boxing your experience into just this limits you from experiencing anything further. If you don’t stand in the light you're never going to grow. Vulnerability in whichever mode you see fit allows your emotions to heighten and delve into the possibilities of where the night can take you, all you need to be is curious about what's ahead.