Australian Dance Culture

by Michael Park

"Everyone's talking about the death of the rave scene and warehouse parties and the like, but the point people seem to be missing is that warehouse parties never really existed in Australia in the first place. The rave scene, ripped from overseas, was never really a true rave scene in the original meaning of the term" - DJ Angus, 1994.¹

He's right, of course. The rave scene as it existed even in its peak in Australia barely resembled the word-of-mouth tribal gatherings occurring in England's "Summer of Love" in 1988. What follows is an account of the progression of Australian dance culture, up to its current state of flux. Is it simply a pale imitation of those overseas, copying and borrowing their trends so we're always one step behind? Or is it a progressive scene with its own independent character? And, more to the point, is an accusation of 'global imitation' irrelevant to a culture which celebrates internationalism?

PREVIOUS ASSIMILATIONS

Australian culture is notorious for its veritable lack of culture, of its pandering to overseas influences, from the 'mother country' and more recently from America. This 'cultural cringe' outlook is exaggerated on many levels, and its unfortunate effect is to discredit highly ingenious and innovative Australian art. However the point remains that throughout Australia's history it has remained "a compilation culture of borrowed fragments, stray reproductions, and alienated memories"². Musically, with the globalisation (Americanisation?) of mass consumer society in the West which began in the 50's, the local scene inevitably suffered - "but then that whole early Australian rock scene seemed out of place. Displaced. Everyone knew they were just imitating the American rock n' roll stars. We preferred the originals, pushing them to the top of the hit parades: the Aussies just seemed like clones".³ It is obvious that it was manifest that Australian artists were not seen as 'the real thing' - and this assumption is still prevalent in 1996. With the onset of Beatlemania in the early 60's, one could see that Australia, perhaps more than any other nation, was willing to embrace overseas popular culture. The crowd that greeted the Beatles in Adelaide was the biggest ever that the Beatles would attract on their travels. Similar stories could be told of the influx of psychedelia and punk in the late 60's and late 70's respectively - both stemmed from overseas and Australian artists within the genre were somehow considered 'inauthentic', merely jumping on the cultural bandwagon and copying their overseas idols. The 90's, rock-wise, seems no different - in 1992 we receive the influx of Seattle bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Suddenly everyone has formed a grunge group and goes 'alternative' - silverchair appear in 1994. Never leading, never even keeping up, but always lagging behind.

However dance culture has operated along very different lines to those mentioned above. There is no question of it being derivative - as will be mentioned in detail, the entire mythology of the scene has been borrowed from overseas. However musically and ethically there are important differences. The reason being that while the previous movements from overseas, such as punk, could be likened to an invasion of culture from abroad, the dance movement operates on a more utopian ethical level. Dance music and rave culture presents itself as being about unity - at a base level 'having a good time' - it's an incorporation of the loss of self and formation of a group consciousness. This notion is mimicked in the act of the dance itself - gone are the self-conscious 80's nightclubs where friends danced in groups - everyone dances alone, but at the same time together, usually facing the DJ (this phenomenon has spread from raves to the clubs). Thus while punk was invading, dance is accepting. In the world of the dance culture, nationalistic barriers are all but broken down - it doesn't matter where you're from. Thus claims that Australian dance culture is a cheap imitation can fall down in the face of this 'unified whole' as such. The dance culture here is part of a thriving global network which reiterates and feeds off itself - techno is perhaps the first musical movement to truly capture this feeling which the Internet has done so much to achieve - the veritable 'global community'. The facelessness of techno has destroyed the idol-worshipping syndrome of the over-blown rock personality - the tracks that you're listening to at a rave could be coming from anywhere - and it doesn't really matter where. Specificity and it's trappings (video-clips, appearances on album covers, etc) has largely been overridden, and thus while it's possible to eventually find out where a track comes from, the whole process has so completely negated the image-bombardment of commercial rock that the reason for purchasing is less image-driven. This concurrent notion of the 'loss of self' is linked to the concept of 'global unity' as an innocent ideal of the techno ethos (or is it pure hype? - see later 'Global as Western').

So while it is in effect redundant to accuse a vital organ of a central system of being some sort of 'cheap imitation', it is pertinent to observe how much the organ relies on the other elements to keep itself going. This is where Australia has probably fallen slightly - not a 'cheap imitation', but a 'dependent organ' nevertheless.

THE SCENE

Since the late 80's the development of dance culture in Australia has evolved from and relied on changes occurring overseas. It has its own intricacies (e.g. the evolution of the 'Vibe Tribe' parties) and internal history (the subsequent fragmenting of the scene), but nothing to really distinguish itself from developments overseas. In fact, developments in Australia have faithfully and predictably copied those of overseas - everything seems to happen here months later though! (this problem is mimicked in the techno available on vinyl in the record stores, which arrives all on import months after their initial release overseas - always behind). Our physical distance as a nation from the rest of the world can be seen as a factor here. The English dance magazine Mixmag wrote up a tourists overview of the Sydney dance scene, snidely commenting "Sydney……where happy hardcore is still huge and jungle is just about set to explode"⁴. The snideness in this comment would be obvious to the English reader - happy hardcore had subsided over there a long time ago, while jungle had been absolutely massive in the UK for at least more than a year. Sydney was caricatured as cultural backwater reliant on changes and progressions emanating from the UK and Europe, which, if we were smart enough, we would eventually pick up on.

While the English rave culture stemmed from an island off the coast of Spain called Ibiza - "everyone goes there on holiday, does ecstasy, and stays up all night. We got back to England and decided we didn't want to give it up and started raving on weekends"⁵, Sydney's (concentrating on Sydney as the dance capital of Australia) rave culture came from a slightly different angle - emanating mainly from a combination of the infamous dance parties at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney, and drawing a lot on the inner-city avant-garde crowd and the gay community. Once the Hordern had been ruled by the authorities off limits as a venue (an indication of things to come with the rave scene), the rave scene became fully-fledged (while the gay community branched off) in the early 90's.

"The 'heterosexualising' of dance music came to the fore around 1991-2 with the emergence of a strong heterosexual and at times homophobic rave scene brought by English tourists and ex-pats. The focus of the parties shifted from a 'community event' to the 'music'. Gay music culture in Sydney became stereotyped along very traditional mainstream Oz lines - 'they like disco and girly house', whilst techno became the 'new music'".⁶

There are ravers still going left from the Hordern days - Alexandra, 25, continued raving until the end of 1995 - "the great thing about the RAT parties and the Hordern was the people. Everyone was welcome and we had the best time every weekend……there was just this amazing feeling of ……being part of something special". This attitude certainly reflects those of the rave scenes throughout the world in their embryonic state, before the divisions and splits by musical genre so apparent in today's scene, or, as Alexandra put it, before "everyone got serious". But on further questioning Alexandra revealed that those Sydney parties might not have been as all-encompassing and welcoming along class and geographical lines as, for example, England's 'Summer of Love' - "yeah, I guess it was a bit cliquey - most of the people were from the inner-city or the North Shore". This is an important point - rave culture for a long while was off limits to those in the western suburbs. Which is somewhat ironic when seen in the light of the utopian spiel which ravers like to partake in. Sydney's early rave scene was inherently exclusive, much more than overseas dance centres such as London and San Francisco. Of course the western suburbs had its own exclusivity in the formation of the hip-hop scene, however this only became surrounded in a quagmire of contradictions when it gained popularity with kids from the wider middle class. The rave scene however discriminated strongly, if not willingly. The fact that an average weekend for a raver costs around $100 (drugs, travel, party ticket) straight away formed a barrier for poorer kids to make their way in. It should however be noted that the rave ethos does not view capitalism as an evil - in order to achieve what it has done it must work within the confines. It's not just another step in youth culture's bowing to late capitalism, but instead it's a global virus which operates within it. The clothes, image, music, etc are of course unadulterated and at times heavily marketed product - but beyond this is the feeling which the raver gets at around 2am in the midst of the party, where the ultimate 'phase-locking' occurs, in the dance itself - where up to thousands of like-minded young people play out rave culture's tribal ceremony, the dance linking everyone together in a synchronous moment. They're all on the same drugs, listening to the same soundtrack, in the same rhythm.

"The circuits of the brain which mediate alarm, fear, fight, lust, and territorial paranoia are temporarily disconnected. You see everything with total clarity, undistorted by animalistic urges. You have reached a state which the ancients have called nirvana, all seeing bliss"⁷

This is something beyond, out of the reach of capitalism, and not just another variant on popular culture youth rebellion which began in the 50's. It's important to see though how rave culture beats the system by infiltrating the system rather than opposing it. The word 'cultural virus' could never be more appropriate - 'global imitation' is in fact the lifeblood of the movement.

Back to Sydney - and by 1992 the rave scene had exploded. 1992 is regarded by all who were there, and even by those who weren't there and joined the scene later, as the 'peak' of the rave scene. When interviewing DJ Jim Jams, who is one of the few DJ's to still remain in the scene throughout the last 5-6 years, we encountered both nostalgia and bitterness towards the past - "1992 was the year of the 0055……(referring to the phone lines ravers had to ring up to find out the locations of the parties)……it was a fantastic time but people have got to realise it's over and it's not going to come back, stop complaining about the present condition and try to move in new directions - or just shut up". Parties in 1992 such as Happy Valley, Ecology, Prodigy and Aztec are now part of rave folklore. Apparently, both the production, the people (and no doubt the drugs) were second to none. In the very names of the parties themselves there is blatant global imitation - they are simply ripped off from overseas parties. Is Australian dance culture really so unimaginative as to be incapable of thinking up names for its parties? Or is it conscious imitation on the part of the promoters in search of the biggest crowd they can get, aware of their audiences idolisation of UK and European dance culture? In any case the parties were extremely popular while still retaining that feeling of being 'underground' and subversive. However inevitable media attention arose. A number of ravers driving back from Happy Valley 2, which was put on down the south coast, were involved in fatal car accidents. The media leapt upon the incidents, and this signaled the start of a hostile relationship between the media and raves. It was also the first time that wider society in Australia found about the term 'rave' and the sub-culture which went with it (years later than in the UK). What had not been mentioned in the press was that the police had closed down the party extremely early, and this resulted in people still being 'off their heads' when driving back.

With the emergence of this media attention, the rave scene both simultaneously shrunk and grew in 1993/94. In the words of Jim Jams - "there remained the core of the rave scene, probably about 1000 people, who would attend the small parties every week, and then there were the extra 3000 or so people who came to the big parties like Prodigy and Colossus. A lot of those people annoyed the hardcore ravers, you know, they didn't really know anything about it". The rave scene reached it's peak (crowd-wise) with the Colossus party in 1994, with an estimated 5000 people in attendance.

The commercialism of the scene had begun in full force, and imitated what had happened in Europe on a much wider scale (raves attracting 30000 people) a few years earlier. In Britain in 1994 the Criminal Justice Bill was passed which effectively outlawed the concept of the outdoor party (and simply resulted in dance fans taking their drugs inside instead of outside, and the corresponding emergence of huge 'superclubs' such as The Ministry of Sound). This hostility towards dance culture by the government was imitated to a lesser extent in Australia through NSW Premier Bob Carr's knee jerk reaction to the death of 15-year-old Anna Wood (see later). An important break occurred in 1994 with the house scene branching off from raves. House, of course, was the original 'rave' music, but with the emergence of happy hardcore and nu nrg, both faster and more suited to the rave audience which was getting ever younger, the 'old skool' formed a new scene for themselves in the clubs (of course, this had happened in Britain two years earlier).

Another important occurrence in 1994 in the dance scene was the intrusion of 'undesirables', hinted at by Jim Jams. These 'undesirables' were, of course, youth largely from the western suburbs. The great raver-homeboy clashes had begun, and opened up an unsolved ethical problem for the scene. Weren't ravers supposed to accept all into their scene and their music? Yet 3D World was littered with letters complaining about homeboys and their 'attitude' and warnings for them to 'stay out of our scene'. In 1995 the rave scene was getting bigger again, but the homeboy 'problem' grew steadily worse. Flocks of ravers left the scene, their cultural elitism dampened. In May '95 a teenager was shot at a party called Raveland, bringing raves back in the media spotlight, but worse was to come - the death of Anna Wood in Oct '95 from (allegedly) taking an ecstasy tablet. The scene in many ways has never quite recovered from the adverse reaction to this incident - it was months before another large rave was held, due to venue owners fears of being vilified by the media and the government for holding a rave.

THE MUSIC

Australia has a rich tradition in making techno and dance music, but only since 91/92 (again, it seemingly took a few years for artists to catch onto overseas trends). Itch-e and Scratch-e were the first dance act to encounter mainstream success and recognition, and along with acts such as Southend, Boxcar, Vision 4/5 and Infusion have brought Australian techno to the forefront of current music industry consciousness, to the extent that now the rock-dominated Aria awards now have Dance category. However the suspicion remains that many of these acts are simply copying overseas styles and sounds. If this is perhaps a bit too strong a remark, it at least can be agreed upon that Australian dance music lacks a sense of a cohesive movement - i.e. there is nothing distinguishable in the dance music we make as a whole, and while this hasn't been helped by lack of an adequate industry infrastructure, it still hails back to the 'global imitation' adage. A trained techno ear can instantly make geographical assumptions when they hear a track - i.e. "that sounds like German nu nrg", or "that sounds Goa trance", or "that sounds like American deep house" - there is nothing you could hear which would make someone think "that sounds like Australian techno". Looking at our most recent international success story in dance music, the signing of the Aswan Transmissions to the React label (probably the world's largest dance label), one can see on listening to their EP that it sounds distinctly German. Indeed, React have placed one of their tracks on their best-selling compilations of German trance and nu nrg, "Reactivate".

The situation seems to be that there are independent pockets of enormously talented techno artists in Australia, but there is no sense of unity between them or in the Australian dance scene, but rather there is a sense of unity on a global scale. There is much techno being written locally yet perhaps less than one percent ever gets released for two reasons: Australia has not a single vinyl pressing plant which enable quick, cheap releases, pressing twenty copies off a dubplate in a day that can then instantly hit the clubs that night (one means of release in the UK), and our population is too small to support a local industry as such with it being difficult and not commercially worthwhile to even sell three to four hundred copies Australia-wide⁸ (Clan Analogue see vast potential the Internet as a viable independent means of distribution); Australia is still a stronghold of the rock music we imitate from elsewhere e.g. the recent country and western, boot scootin' craze is a perfect example. Due to these factors, the locally created techno remains the realm of DATs, Cds, records and live PAs but due to logistical constraints regarding time and money, organisers tend to dislike the whole process of setting up and soundchecking; some tracks (even some acts like Aswan Transmissions) are sent overseas and trickle back into Australia under the guise of an overseas import.⁹ Ultimately, given the independent and anti-corporatist ethos that supposedly lies at the heart of the dance culture, perhaps it is not desirable that a cultural practice gets turned into an industry with all its profit and greed connotations; in fact Australia is said to do quite well in terms of "non-monetary techno trade" with Europe and USA.¹⁰

PRESENT AND FUTURE SITUATION

RAVE SCENE '96

As shown above, the rave scene has gone through some dramatic changes, both musically (from house to happy hardcore / pure hardcore), fashion wise (from colourful and shiny wear to Adidas tracksuits), and people-wise (from inner city and North Shore trendies to teenagers, largely from the Western Suburbs). The scene has shrunk dramatically and most within it complain about its current state. Parties are smaller and promoters find it extremely hard to find adequate venues (the only major party in '96 was Field of Dreams 4, which was more of a 'retro' rave). The scene abounds with parties claiming to return you 'to the good old days". The music has got faster and faster to the point of ridiculousness. Rave Cd's now have covers which look more like death metal cd's - there is a distinct aggressiveness to the scene and the music. Indeed, in a serious discussion about the dance scene in 1996, the rave scene should almost be overlooked. The physical location of dance culture is now concentrated in the clubs. Raves are now considered by most figures in our dance culture as its embarrassing offshoot - dodgy parties with 'bad' music littered with drug-addled 16-year-olds. Of course, in both UK and Europe raves had diminished to this state and lost their cultural credibility years ago.

Australian dance culture has been forced to crack open and branch off into its genres and subgenres. Money-hungry promoters jumped on the happy-hardcore bandwagon, setting up parties in big warehouse venues, charging around fifty dollars a ticket and packing as many people in as possible. Having been driven back into the clubs, the house scene has probably drawn the greatest diversity of people ranging from the gay community of the inner city to Western Sydney and non-Anglo/European communities.¹¹ They are held in the best clubs, like Sublime (see below), where fashion and socialising are of primary importance. The house seen is still viewed as being too commercial by cohorts of the expanding ('expanding' in the sense of itself becoming more commercial) underground acid trance (now doof/jungle punk) scene which has drawn out the 'ferals' of Surry Hills and Newtown. Fast jungle and the slower, deeper bass'n'drums, which emerged through the Suburban Bass label from the suburbs of London around 1994, has hit the "Eastern suburbs post-acid jazz and deep house crowd - Bondi as home of British tourists etc"¹². Who are these infamous 'British tourists' who seem to be a recurrent theme in the development of Australian dance culture?

SUBLIME, HOUSE & THE 'SUPERCLUB'

On July 19th 1996 in Sydney, Australia's first 'superclub' opened. 'Superclubs' had of course eventuated in Britain years earlier as a reaction to the Criminal Justice Bill and the ever burgeoning house scene. The concept of the superclub was that not only was it large, and built specifically for dance music, but the club itself was not restricted to its physical location, but was an entity which could 'tour'. Superclubs from the UK such as Cream have already 'toured' Australia. The opening of Sublime represents the first club in Australia built for dance music, and also is an indication of the decline of raves. Most people within the house scene, which has grown enormously over the past year, are ex-ravers. As if to show that the Australian scene isn't a pale copy of overseas, Sublime even have a regular night called "Homegrown" which features Australian DJ's only - yet the music is, of course, all from overseas, so this seems somewhat ridiculous and hypocritical.

"some times you've got to go a long way to realise what you've got"

VIBE TRIBE, FLURODELIA PSYCHOTROPIC¹³

The now defunct Vibe Tribe were a community of people who in the 1992 started to set up bush and inner city parties as an alternative to the established rave and club scenes. The punks of the inner city emerged with 'weird' acid trance parties like "Airspace" at the Community Arts building in Redfern¹⁴. The bush parties made sure that everyone who travelled the many kilometres to get to the party were there for the right reason - more avoidance of the homeboy element. Vibe Tribes were forced out of the city by the South Sydney Council's commitment to stop dance parties, so they went up the coast and organised parties in and around Northern NSW in 1995, in July 1996, they even put a party on in Darwin. "Our main policy and biggest bone of contention is our 'no personal profit' motto"¹⁵. At Field of dreams 4, the coming of 'doof' was announced, the flyer read: "Elipse at Orb is good is god is art is doof is! Soon." Vibe Tribe as a party organisation disbanded and now branched off, putting on jungle punk and doof parties like Hugga Bugga at the Rooftop and Mystic Masquerade at the Skygarden, more mainstream venues usually reserved for the house patronage. 'Scott' says that these parties made alot of money and that they were now seeing the potential of the better, established party venues.¹⁶ Hugga Bugga was an interesting experiment in mixing hard-core industrial, thrash and punk bands on one floor, with acid trance and jungle on the next as if to recombine the elements that created the doof scene in the beginning. Having started as small groups of people putting on small parties for free, it is a measure of how fast interest in this acid trance scene has grown in the last few years that Vibe Tribe people can now host parties in mainstream venues. The techno ideal of unity under music was realised in its original conception but was lost to the mainstream, as Yellow Peril says

"Techno as a musical style has become co-opted into the mainstream. As it becomes more locked into the consumption patterns of rock music ... then the less 'radical' it will become. Formerly techno has had the ability to turn listeners/consumers into producers through stimulating dancing and a community 'vibe' - contrast the Punk's Picnic in Sydney Park with the early Vibe Tribe parties there. VT parties were open-ended and invitational (in that passers-by were free to join in) whereas the punk's picnics were comparatively 'closed' and 'confrontationalist' despite many of the same key people being involved"¹⁷

If the ideal is the attainment of that autonomous, all-embracing unified vibe of UK's Summer of Love that sits at the throne of techno-folklore, these early parties seemed to have achieved a similar microcosmic nirvana. Does Australian dance culture gain more credibility if it has? Is it that imitation is no longer the issue with the recreation of techno-heaven being the ultimate goal of the culture?

CLAN ANALOGUE: TECHNO AS A SOURCE OF ARTISTIC INNOVATION

"Clan Analogue is a non-profit collective of electronic musicians, video artists, DJ's, writers and computer artists. Our members work in a diverse range of media, style and interests. Clan aims to promote and develop innovation within electronic music and art, and facilitates interesting exchanges of thoughts, ideas and work....[We are] about encouraging innovation and experimentation in the electronic arts, particularly in the nexus where music, video and other media meet in live performance"¹⁸

The Clan are a collective, much in the same ideological vain as Vibe Tribers with their decentralised, anti-authoritarian/hierarchy stance. Yet they appear more structured and oriented towards promoting experimentation and diversity in an open forum of autonomous resources for creative individuals free of the constraints of the commercial industry; Thom McIntyre, a member of Clan claims they are a little more intellectual and better trained than the reactionary Vibe Tribe communities.¹⁹ He posits the 'underground' scene as a space unfettered by social norms, emphasising personal liberation and an alternative community to produce some psychedelically subversive effects. Adrian (DJ) Black and Sub Bass Snarl exemplify Clan's commitment to supporting innovative artists. Black points to the salience of techno as a world cultural movement with its non-narrative, simple and evocative soundscapes that allows individual interpretation of the unified whole.²⁰ He sees techno as the product of the natural evolution of music since it began with the heartbeat; moreover, any dance culture is about getting in touch with the body and historically, most of them have resulted in the birth of theatrical movements with music having the capacity to break cultural barriers. It is for these reasons that he is playing ambient listening gigs with didgeridoo and bass players; and also a three-day theatrical sci-fi piece that will attempt to meld theatre with contemporary ritual dances. Similarly, Sub Bass Snarl have been experimenting with the idea of multi-media performances through their "chill out project", 'Cryogenesis', where they improvise live soundtracks to films such as 'Apocalypse Now', 'Baraka' and 'Moon Warriers'.²¹ Their main aim is to attempt a fusion between the autonomous space of underground trance and techno of the city jungle punks with the political concerns of Western Sydney's hip hop subculture:

"Underground movements are doomed if their exclusiveness prohibits continual mutation and hence growth, and the subcultural differences between Sydney's hip hop and techno undergrounds have often stood in the way of musical development and hybridisation. Underground hip hop brings with it an array of vital political concerns and demands for social change and equality, relevant especially to the increasingly divided, racist, patriarchal, homophobic society that Australia seems intent on becoming under the slash and burn tactics of the conservative government, whilst techno's ability to create autonomous communal listening and dancing spaces offers the perfect environment in which to trial alternatives."²²

It is precisely this sort of innovation-with-purpose that truly heralds the cultural significance of techno. The acclaimed techno ethos of blissful harmony and global unification becomes a joke when you look at how Sydney's dance culture is fragmented by the genre of music. But that is the hype to get the mainstream money sucked in, while the undergound operates to subvert these genre differentiations by being at the cutting edge of morphing subcultures together. 'Unification' is achieved through the music when the affluent Northern Beaches and the working class Western Suburbs people can simultaneously 'go off' to the same track - that is what its all about, bringing people together in true harmony regardless of race, class or sexuality. Thus techno could be beneficial for Australian culture and this is where its value lies, in the formation of organisations such as Clan Analogue who provide the autonomous space for intelligent artists to experiment.

GLOBAL AS WESTERN²³

Unfortunately, this is rarely the case in the Australian and international dance culture. Much of it is constituted by the mainstream masses of middle-to-wealthy class Westerners, and even in Sydney this is divided into its subcultures by genres - how can this be called a 'global culture'?

Yellow Peril believes the idea of a 'global culture' to mean the wealthy West raping and pillaging the rest of the world's cultural as well as material goods: Goa trance is hailed to have come from the infamous party-place of India, the origin of the psychedelic trance sound that was sampled from sacred Hindu music, written and sold by tourists while the locals were hired to sell drinks; or the tribal beats of jungle and the funk influence on house was a reappropriation of Afro-American culture that exposes a rather shallow understanding of a culture used as a tool to make money.²⁴ With respect to Australia he said: "the techno subcultures are exactly that, subcultures - smaller subsets of a racist, White, homophobic, mainstream Australia however much they beg to differ".²⁵

What is the difference between reappropriating aspects of another (sub)culture and mixing distinct (sub)cultural music styles together? Essentially it comes down to the motivation for the act of reappropriation, is it money or a genuine desire to understand this other (sub)culture? It is a pity money makes the world go round.

Therefore it can be seen how Australia's dance culture is a pale imitation of the international scene but more to the point, this global reproduction is the driving force of the collective-consciousness hype that seems to be pushing techno dance culture into the mainstream. Just as most subversive cultural practices (e.g. punk, grunge) become indoctrinated into the mainstream losing its original appeal as an alternative to society's established rituals, Australian dance culture was fractured by socio-economic status, race and sexuality. In this postmodern age of rampant capitalism, any intrinsically valuable cultural form will inevitable become commodified, structured and massively reproduced; perhaps the underlying reason for techno's international success lies in its capacity for fast and large-scale reproduction which is complimented by its romantic ideological advertising of 'global unity' and 'universal harmony'.

FOOTNOTES

¹ 3D World, Issue 204 Aug 1994

² Morris, 1983

³ McGregor, Craig - "Growing up (uncool): pop music and youth culture in the 50's and 60's"

⁴ Mixmag June 1996

⁵ Rushkoff, David - "Cyberia - Life in the Trenches of Hyberspace"

⁶ Yellow Peril of "Sub Bass Snarl", email interview, 14/11/96.

⁷ Thomas Pynchon, in Bruce Eisner, Ecstasy: The MDMA Story

⁸ Yellow Peril of "Sub Bass Snarl", e-mail interview, 14/15/96.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Vibe Tribe Homepage, 10/11/96.

¹⁴ 'Scott' (anon.), interview with Vibe Tribe member.

¹⁵ Vibe Tribe Homepage 10/11/96.

¹⁶ 'Scott' (anon.), interview with Vibe Tribe member

¹⁷ Yellow Peril interview, email 14/15/96.

¹⁸ Clan Analogue Homepage, "What is Clan Analogue", 10/11/96.

¹⁹ McIntyre, T. interview with Clan Analogue member, 10/11/96.

²⁰ Black, A. interview with Clan Analogue member, 10/11/96.

²¹ Sub Bass Snarl Homepage, 10/11/96.

²² Ibid.

²³ 'Western' should be considered in the economic sense as rich Asian countries like Hong Kong and Japan are also now part of the international scene, e.g. there was recently a three-day party on the top of Mt. Fuji which attracted 20,000 people.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Ibid.

Michael Park 1996.

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