My first club was immediately followed by a first rave. They weren’t the same, but for a while, they were inseparable. For some of us, one place was an excuse to get to the other. There were those who knew how to call it a night after that first dance. There were also those who never set foot in a club, before or after a rave. They refused to pay for dancing, for reasons tied to personal finances, a critique of partying as a commodity, or a kind of hedonism without schedules, external rules, or bouncers. Some of us were drawn to the shift in scale: how night was turning into day during the rave, with speakers, sneakers, and gestures coated in dust, dancing to BPMs hard to find inside a club. Not knowing when we’d make it home was part of our excess and undisciplined distraction.
After better sound and disco lights came the next adventure. We followed instructions from worn-out flyers passed from hand to hand, or directions passed from mouth to mouth. Exit the highway, take a back road, reach a crossroads, turn left, follow hand-painted arrows, and trace distant sounds. If we got lost, there was always a number to call. Once we arrived, the delirium began—one that sounded like rah-beh, not rave. We weren’t ravers, either. We were raveros, rehearsing again and again a post-apocalyptic scene with punk roots and Mad Max aesthetics—in forests, wastelands, bridges, and abandoned factories.
Our non-future of fast-paced rhythms without lyrics unfolded both in the sound to come and on the fringes of stories of progress and economic growth in a century that had barely begun. Our disobedience, like so many things that happened there, was relative. After the rave, we were faced with hangovers, weekly routines, and a willpower torn between staying in and chasing the next party. Like electronic music, we lived inside a loop.
While we danced non-stop and without much political awareness, in the early 2000s the first histories of techno and dance music began to be translated into Spanish. Among them was Altered States: The History of Ecstasy and Acid House, a now out-of-print book by Matthew Collin that I would read many years later—and in English. Amid all the first-hand accounts from the British scene, there are anecdotes about spontaneous, massive raves that took dance floors—and the authorities—out of the cities and into the countryside. Laws like the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act were introduced to criminalize outdoor gatherings with repetitive beats, followed by similar, though less explicit, regulations in other countries.
In Catalonia, under the pretext of civic responsibility and noise pollution, a 2006 ordinance allowed the confiscation of sound systems and the banning of parties that previously slipped through the cracks of the law. In 2018, Matthew Collin published Rave On, with a chapter on Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ) in France, where teknivals drew thousands of people to dance for days. It was there that Spiral Tribe arrived with their nomadic sound systems, spreading across Europe what the UK had forbidden them: turning raves into a way of being in the world, and into a place for political imagination. Among their many forms of dissent was a rejection of the settled logic of the nation-state and of silence in nature.
Spiral Tribe are the direct ancestors of a culture that moves forward by going back, insisting on myth as history. Although their defense of noise echoed most strongly in France, any ravero with even a hint of curiosity knew about their existence. It might even be that the only teknival I ever went to was organised by them. Hard to say—rave memory is as slippery as its history. While the sparse historiography of rave culture goes back again and again to its spectacular, media-driven moments, its entropy was also made up of small parties where we all knew each other, moving around an uneven map of usual locations.
If clubs allowed us to get lost in the grooves of sound, raves were a chance to dance with the bare minimum. With no money or entry policies, the dynamic itself welcomed and rejected. When something went wrong, we organised ourselves to fix it. Absorbed in the music, in front of a wall of speakers, it really didn’t matter what was playing or who was djing. As the hours passed, the group’s exuberance would give way to individual apathy. Our presence was more bodily than anything else. After the initial fascination, it was common to drift away from the scene after a while. At the rave, we didn’t just practise forms of civil disobedience; we also rehearsed feelings of dystopia in our enthusiasm for the continuous present.
Although raves disobeyed their own theories and praises, Hakim Bey’s ideas danced with us. Aware or not, we were a paradigmatic example of Temporary Autonomous Zones. Some of us searched for meaning in our disorientation through pleasure. Others didn’t need any extra rhetoric to dance between factory shifts. Unlike clubs and festivals, raves had conversations, codes, and working-class generosity. Made without permission, without a fixed time or place, TAZs reorganize life differently—with their own structures, distancing themselves from the power dynamics handed down to us. More than just places, they’re states of mind shaped by those who take part in them.
Alien to raves, Gilles Clément’s “third landscape” still flirts with them. Not just because of the illusion landscapes evoke, but above all because they are residual spaces between utilitarian zones—waiting for something to happen, with no clear function. Many raves took place—and will continue to take place—in these kinds of spaces, bringing weeds together with more weeds. But, as with any weeds, when they grow too much, they get cut down. That’s why it was important to be careful not to talk too much about what we were doing. We answered yes to the question that opens Xanaé Bové’s documentary Ex-Taz: What if our last freedom were invisibility?
Those were different times. We danced with no photos, no social media, no symbolic capital—getting nothing in return, but gaining so much. I admit I don’t really know what raves are like nowadays, but I often miss the spirit of that time. I’m not sure if what we need right now is more parties, but we definitely need a lot more civil disobedience. Just as we need a political struggle that feels like that way of dancing: without thinking so much about ourselves, our image, or our reputation.
Originally published in Spanish in El Diario as “Un lugar sin reglas para el baile y la imaginación política: la memoria escurridiza de las raves.”