looks good :)

till 3 or more?

yeah stereo is pretty cool even though i dont like house that much

*grabs both your pants and runs away*

ET N'OUBLIEZ PAS VOTRE BONNE HUMEUR CHEZ VOUS BIEN SUR

actually I've been (that makes 3!) and guess what I even downloaded some of the mixes hehe good stuff

Come check out Atomic Hooligan, straight from the UK live in Montreal!
Ils ont gagné le prix pour le meilleur 'Breakbeat' album de l'année pour 2006 (Breakspoll Awards)

All night long party at Cetre Fractal
7240 Clark - à 2 pas du Metro Jean Talon!
Avec:
Spacekadet
Somsay
Pinky38
Kai
Murdock
et Breakswarriaz Crew

Billets $10 à l'avance, $15 à la porte. Billets disponible en pré-vente chez DNA et Boutique FLY. Recevez un mix gratiut avec l'achat d'un billet.

"what made those old raves SoOooo great?"

well that's the whole focus of this thread. that's why I posted the original article, because it basically describes the early rave scene and outlines some of the characteristics that did indeed make it great, and if you read my previous posts on this thread I attempted to summarize some of the points and also add my own perception. But I'd also like to stress that the whole reason for this thread is simply to get us to think about what raves can be, not just what they were in the past, but also the hopes we carry for the future

2 DAYS!!!!

by the way, just a small question, the flyer kinda confused me bout where Holly Schwartz is from, cause the bio on the flyer says he's Israeli, but the flag on the front is definetly not israel (Japan?) just wondering if anyone knows

neoform....

maybe u just refuse to accept the fact early raves were a much more profound experience than most of what exists today. i'm not knocking the fact that u have a good time at commercialised raves today, cause hell I do too in many cases..I'm just trying to spread awareness of a concept that u seem to be either ignoring or in denial of. and if ur gonna label me a hippie now whatever, if u actually knew me you'd know thats the furthest from the truth, but to discredit what someone has to say by just labelling them a hippie is just plain closed minded

well I guess I'm a borderline pedo so u might have to kick me out

lol j/k

if raves were just about music, then why not just buy some CD's and listen at home? and the purpose of this thread is not to bitch about how the scene is dead or how much raves suck nowadays, matter of fact I have not been to a rave that I did not enjoy. the purpose of this thread is to discuss what raves can be in their ideal state, and strive to achieve this however possible

ok time for me to add my 2 cents (again)...

first of all I'm not an 'elitist raver' at all, or jaded, or anything like that, and I agree with eliot that perspective is cruicial, well heres mine: if I go to rave and simply enjoy the night, have a fun time, or however u like to put it, then that's great. at the same time though I beleive a rave can be more, that it has the capacity to affect its participants deeply on an emotional level, maybe even perhaps a spiritual one. It's not about politics, its about thinking of raves in higher as terms as having the capacity to affect us more than a form of entertainment. Personally I don't think the number of size of parties is the most important factor, I'd rather have one great event a month than a decent one every weekend, but that's just me...

wellll not quite...
MDMA is the active chemical which most people expect to be found in an ecstacy tablet (around 80-120 mg for good quality) but in reality many many ecstacy tablets contain a MDMA/MDEA or MDMA/MDA combination, or sometimes no MDMA at all. MDEA and MDA both have similar effects to MDMA except neither result in the empathic effect of MDMA. MDA lasts longer than MDMA and has a 'speedier' edge. Also, ecstacy tablets often contain speed, LSD, or a slew of other chemicals....

well thats why i'm still trying to find a trustworthy supplier and not buying some random pill hehe

welll I'm not quite sure I would go so far as to say the drug doesn't exist anymore but I agree that the whole ecstacy culture has overshadowed the actual drug

my teacher keeps talking about e-commerce and e-business hehe gotta restrain myself from making a bad joke in class :)

I would like to take the oppurtunity to respond to DJ Neoform's comments...

Yes, I agree with you the raves were at one point "cool" and "underground". If the appeal of early raves was based primariy on their underground nature, then of course it is inevitable that word spreads, more people start showing up, then commercial promoters start arriving up to 'duplicate' the rave experience and in effect commercialising it. However, the article and me beleive that early raves weren't just "underground parties", but in effect idealogical bubbles in which utopian ideals of economics and community could flourish...(more on this after)

You raise the issue that if raves are fun, that is enough. Well I thow that statement back to you: exactly what is a rave, and why is it fun? Is a rave just a club with extended hours, more drugs, and people wearing ridiculous clothes? Indeed, many people might consider that fun, but I think there are also many, many people who hope for a rave to be something more, even if they're not sure what. If that were not the case, then we'd all just be heading to Dome (hell we'd be saving money on tickets and could buy even more drugs). The article and others point to the rave (in its ideal form) as a manifestation of an alternate reality, based on a utopian set of principles, including: freedom from the economics of society and its culture of consumerism, promotion of empathy for one another (whether or not e-induced), abolishment of competition (as opposed to clubs with their emphasis on sexual competition), and perhaps most importantly, the cultivation of communal bonds between all participants. However, in the process of the commercialization of raves, many of these principles have been eroded, and all too often, the principles and realities of everyday life (competition, isolationalism, etc) enter the realm of the rave. So it is really up to us to decide what is really important: are we just looking for 'fun', whatever that may mean, or is there something deeper invovled?

Some of my personal thoughts on this article:

Even though I am new to the rave scene I think I have tasted the different forms that a rave can manifest itself. I have experienced moments (free of the influence of drugs I might add) where I felt a deep sense of connection to everyone else at a rave, indeed, the sense of community discussed in the article. At the same time, I've also experienced moments when I felt like just another consumer of a commercial, manufactured environment, where people basically go spend money, get high, and leave without any feeling more profound than a vague sense of having had a (drug induced) good time. However, I believe that as long as people remember the feeling of an ideal rave, there will always be people who strive to achieve this ideal, and not settle for the idea of a rave as a weekend diversion. It is when we accept the idea of a rave as a form of entertainment, that indeed the movement is dead.

i'm sure alot of u may have seen this article on another rave-related message board, but I'm posting it here anyway because its probably the best written material on raves I have read

Losing the Plot
How Utopia became Business
by Douglas Rushkoff

My first exposure to rave culture, back in 1988, was perhaps the most significant dose of pure possibility I had experienced since my psychedelic initiation ten years earlier. Too young to have any direct contact with whatever the 1960's may have heralded, I was convinced we had stumbled upon something truly novel: a social scene capable of transforming the greater world around it.

In a room or field with no agenda other than a 120 beat-per-minute pulse, a few thousand intimates could liberate ourselves from conventional closed-mindedness and aspiration-induced unconsciousness for long enough to touch something else. While we had many names for this "other" -- from the strange attractor to God herself -- it all boiled down to experiencing ourselves and one another in a new way: as a collective, in motion, and evolving. Blindly but boldly, we would go where no man or woman had gone before -- save, maybe, some indigenous tribe that didn't have the electronic gear to broadcast their findings, or the presses to provide a map point to others.

Somewhere along the way, it seems, we lost the plot. Except for the few places around the world where rave is still brand new, the vast majority parties I've been to in the past several years have lacked the cohesive and unifying spirit that defined the "movement" when it began. Whither the heart?

I resisted even mentioning my suspicions for several years. How dare I? I remember so well the ex-60's who stood on the periphery of my own first raves, complaining that we were a mere carbon copy of the *real* drive for group consciousness that they had launched decades earlier. If the raves of the late 90's didn't meet up with my expectations for what a rave *should* be, I thought it best to keep my mouth shut. Everyone gets the party he or she needs, and who am I to tell them they're not doing it right?

I withdrew and started a novel instead. The Ecstasy Club was to be an indication of the road home. I wanted to create characters so earnest in their efforts to forge a new template for our culture that they wouldn't fail the same way we had. But the characters wrote another story. They showed me how such a scene can only implode when it doesn't have a clear sense of the values it hopes to impart.

See, the beauty of the ecstatic experience, whether you're using Ecstasy MDMA) or not, is the very freedom it offers from value systems. On E, everything is delightfully up for grabs. What distinguished the 90's Ecstasy kids from the 60's acid generation was just this. The hippies picked up signs and fought the war, their parents, and the system. The "man" was seen as real, and someone who needed to be brought down. Fight the power. Make love not war.

By the 1990's, and perhaps thanks in part to the efforts of the love generation, these enemies could no longer be held as real. In the United States, the president that most of us grew up with actually resigned his office in disgrace. In the UK, well, the monarchy had been deconstructed by Monty Python and then reassembled using bits of their own illicit phone conversations in the tabloid press. It seemed as if the establishment's faulty foundations would crumble under their own weight. Just turn up the bass a little to speed up the process.

All we had to do is dance, and the rest would take care of itself. As we told ourselves with our music, everybody's free to feel good. We believed in the power of love, and cheered as watched everything from the Berlin Wall to apartheid topple in its wake.

So much for letting us middle class white kids run the show. The problem with having no agenda is two-fold. First, you have no way to gauge your progress. Liberation of neither the soul nor the oppressed comes as surely as dawn does at the end of the party. We'd have these terrific times, and mean truly terrific times, but it wouldn't add up to much except an occasional knowing wink in the street from a kid who you saw at that great party last week. Second, and worse, you're open to the agendas of others. The scene can be co-opted.

I understand why we strove for rave not to be about anything in particular. If it got too grounded in one or another brand of politics or religion, the scene would lose its healing levity. Besides, politics and social issues were all part of the fixed and needlessly heavy scene that had trapped our forefathers. None of the distinctions -- right left, rich poor, black white, gay straight -- were even real. The sooner we understood that, the better for all.

Government cast itself as the enemy to our intentions, ill-defined though they were. The Criminal Justice Act in the UK and over-zealous police forces in the US made it clear to us that the people who make the laws were the most threatened by our dissolution of their arbitrary absolutes. Although we had a sense that it would diminish a certain something, we took our parties indoors to commercial venues. Who cares, I remember thinking, as long we have the music and the people? A few extra bucks to the police let us keep the right chemicals in the mix, and a few more to the club owners kept the power on through morning.

But now we were becoming part of the system we had so successfully evaded for so long. When we were off the map, we could keep our bearings. Traveling three hours to a rave and having to spend the night in an open field forces an intentionality all its own. The trip requires a commitment, and the event itself is a tribute to pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

Today, you can find something calling itself a rave almost every night of the week at a pub within walking distance. Some of these parties are taking place in the very same rooms where your parents went every Friday night after a long week of work to let off steam -- with booze and boogie instead of tryptamines and Tricky. By current estimates, a million hits of E are consumed every weekend in the UK. If that's really true, then why is club culture so devoid of everything that E appeared to herald?

For one, because E just doesn't work if you take it every week. Sure, the chemical has effect. But when taken in weekly doses, the empathic qualities quickly give way to simple stimulation. There's simply not enough serotonin in the brain to support this much induced bliss. The drug tends to act more like speed, provoking the same sorts of hooliganism that everyone else succumbs to on their weekend binges.

More significantly, rave deteriorated because we allowed the movement to become part of business as usual: a weekend release, no different from the pub crawls that characterize the experience of any other worker who, given a break to blow off some steam, can go back to work on Monday morning without complaining.

No, it wasn't entirely our fault. Even in America we were getting busted for throwing parties anywhere but in a sanctioned club. Mainstream culture did not have the apparatus for dealing with a non-commercial social phenomenon as big as rave was getting. But we are all to blame for ailing to figure out exactly which parts of the rave experience were most important to bring indoors.

Rave parties had been part of what could only be considered a gift economy. Collectives would form spontaneously, collecting enough money to rent a sound system and print up some flyers. If there were extra cash from a successful event, the money would go to pay for a few meals for the organizers and the rest towards the next party.

While the cops and government officials hated the idea of kids doing drugs and making noise in abandoned spaces and remote fields, business hated it even more. The young people who should be buying alcohol, top-forty records, and paying for admittance to the disco were instead participating in an alternative economy -- dropping psychedelics, exchanging remix tapes, and driving to the country.

When rave became a club event, it merged this gift economy with the business of nightclubbing -- and this is where it all went bad. We all know the story by now. Clubs make money selling drinks, but kids at a rave ingest E, not booze. The solution? Sell bottled water to the dehydrated trippers. To insure this lucrative business, club owners began confiscating any water that the kids brought themselves, and shutting off the water in the bathroom. Thus, the first vastly publicized deaths due to "ecstasy overdoses," which were really just cases of simple dehydration. The kids weren't killed by the drugs, but by the water sellers.

The rise of the commercial rave also compromised the very real but unstated ethic of the gift economy that had ruled until then. Rave promoters, initially forced to raise their prices to pay for venues, learned that a few more dollars added to the price of ticket could yield tremendous profit. Promoters who were used to breaking even found themselves tens of thousands of pounds or dollars richer by morning. This drew new legions of would-be promoters into the ring, whose glossy flyers would compete with one another for attention at the record shop.

What had been a spontaneous expression of community turned into good old-fashioned American free market competition. With five or more separate clubs competing for the same audiences on the same nights of the week, distrust and ill-will between rave posses ruled. DJ's who used to be anonymous became headliners, who performed on stage under spotlights. The number of gigawatts of bass became an advertising pitch. Promoters worked hard to prove through their graphics and slogans that they were the exclusive purveyors of the "original" integrity that defined the great raves of '88. But no matter how good the sound, the lights, the DJ, or the drugs, the commercial parties were missing the ingredient that used to hold it all together: community.

By reducing its participants to mere consumers, rave lost its claim to the sacred. As economic and business forces became the driving force of the culture, the imperative to have profound experiences was replaced by a financial imperative to sell more tickets in less time to more people. We no longer took weeks to prepare both practically and mentally for the ritual. As with psychedelics, this lack of preparation reduced sacred experiences to mere entertainments -- appropriately listed alongside concerts and movies in the weekend newspaper.

In retrospect, what made rave so revolutionary was its economics. The reason we felt so removed from the workaday reality is that we had disconnected ourselves from the cycle of consumption and production that degrades and dehumanizes so much of the rest of our daily experience. Just as Wired magazine reduced the community-inspiring Internet to a shopping mall called the World Wide Web, commercial interests reduced the rave movement to an "Electronica" category in the record shop.

It was not our existence outside the law that made rave so special, but our separation from corporate culture and the market economy. Like a Sabbath, the rave was a holy day during which no one bought or sold anything -- and if they did, it was in a manner absolutely at odds with the gross national product.

The absence of an agenda was not our agenda at all. We were positively striving towards a celebration of the sacred. Instinctually, we realized that this sacredness would be compromised by business and politics as they were currently being practiced. Government made our chosen rituals illegal and business made us pay for sacred space.

Business used the power of government's enforcers to drag our parties indoors, and while we managed to hold onto our stashes, we didn't hold onto much else. We simply didn't know enough about what we were doing to fight for the part that mattered.

Make no mistake: there are still parties and posses doing it right, and who care more about the process than the profit. But it's up to us to find them, support them or, if we can't find them, become them.

horny in da jungle :lol

ummm maybe its just me but shouldn't this kinda post be in the 'get 2gether' forum?

when you've all finnally decided on a time/place be sure to post it in the event board!!

k this is a really old book (1994) but is very very good so check it out if you haven't seen it already

[ www.ecstasy.org ]

When I was little I loved NY, I always thought it was the biggest most exciting unpredictable city in the world....then I went to Cairo and that fuckin city makes NY look like a clean, ordinary, quiet, little place. Cairo is da true urban jungle, but I'd never ever wanna live there, just 1.5 weeks and I nearly went insane.

Seriously, anyone who considers the Bible a legitimate source of sexual morality is either ignorant or sick:

"If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay 50 pieces of silver to her father. Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her" (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)

Yes this is a real quote look it up. So, according to the Bible, next time I see a hot chick I should just rape her and then get married..course if I got tired of her I could always get me a few more wives, after all Solomon had 700. So, good religious people, start collecting ur silver!!

I'm going to hell, who's coming wit me??

snow is nice for maybe the first day, after that it sux, winter sux too, lets all move to a tropical climate and not wear clothes either

hehe have any of u seen the doc "Hell House"? It played at cinema du par a few weeks ago, basically the idea was this fundamentalist church in the US makes a haunted house on haloween to scare kids straight..one of the funniest parts was the "rave scene" in the haunted house, hehe i'm not making this up, u gotta check this movie out

Just got back, its 9 and I'm sooo about to pass out....Anyways now that I've been to two IDJ's I can sorta compare them. This one obviously had less of the 'intimate' feel not being in a loft, but forsure the addition of the visuals made up for that (why'd they end so early though?) The chillroom was great, a BIG improvement over last time, real comfy atmostphere and great trippy jungle/abstract beats. More or less all the dj's in the main room were good, but I'm sure I'm not the only one in saying that Ilfingas' set was absolutely incredible. My only complaint was the big stage with the dj booth at the back, personally I like it when the dj & mc are right in the crowds faces, but not a big deal. For me some personal shit hapenned which kinda fucked up the night but of course cant blame da party for that!!! Overall a great event, I'd say even better than the last IDJ I've been to, keep em up!!!!

this test is jokes

hey seb yeah we met once at bluedog 2weeks ago, sorry I couldn't make it had to catch up on zzzz's, catch yah at idj

hey seb where u work?

me2 cant wait to find out the location

even if u want to quit drugs its not just about willpower...its also about being in the type of environment where u won't be tempted to start again, basically the idea behind rehab

Nov 24 is the day after outerspace energy =)
if you make it in the afternoon though I'll come, it should be fun!

cool site

no I don't know what's going on...
but sounds like some egos involved

I've become desensitised to coffee. I'll drink 2-3 cups to stay awake and fall asleep half an hour later.

*pokes out eyes and tears out hair*

According to a column in the Montreal Mirror,

[ www.montrealmirror.com ]

Stereo is closing at the end of November and reopening (hopefully) December 21. Anyone know what's going on with this?

hey lucid....do you know where I should go for info on raves in israel?? I'll be there for new years eve and it would be cool to find one!

I went to gloom and though I had a good time there, it was pretty obvious the organisers dont give a shit about you. For one, they had maybe six buses going there but they all left at the same time (8) and all returned at the same time (12) meaning you pretty much were forced to spend 15 hours there...while I woulda stayed that long anywyas, they should at least give people the option of coming and leaving when they want....also the security was soooo unfriendly. Still it was worth it for Laurent Ho, Manu, and Tonio.

10am to 7am???
yup I agree about removing the alcohol references, maybe throw in some right of assembly stuff but I'm not a lawyer so I don't really know...
great job though

just reading this thread is depressing