we collectively experience and create our culture

Electronic dance music is singular in its ability to produce such different reactions from audiences, from deeply internal personal contemplation to unrestrained sociality and movement. In this way, it can be a means to exploring the connection we have with both our psyche and physicality.

There is a common tendency to think of music objectively; as something unchanging, constant, concrete. We think that a song we hear today will be the same song when we listen to it in ten years’ time. Yet sound changes, and has a dramatically different effect on us depending on where it’s heard, when it’s heard, and how it’s heard. We change too, and this also affects where, when and how we hear.

Electronic dance music and culture underscore the fundamentally subjective disposition of hearing. The connotations of specific spaces — the club, band rooms, lounge rooms, and so on — complexly inform our reading of the music we hear within them. A club will push us to dance, to move, to socialise, to be physical, whereas a more traditional concert space will often impel us to stop and think; to be inside our minds and focus on our internal relationship with the music we are hearing.

In this way electronic dance music illuminates a dualism; the capacity for exaggerated mental and physical states. It throws us back into ourselves, provoking and heightening our awareness of our internality or externality.

But instead of forming a division, this dualism has its own radical potentiality. Club histories tell us how these spaces shape fundamental reconfigurations of the social via the sonic; widening the spotlight beyond the all-night dancefloor, we become aware of how different spaces press upon us differently, inspiring different kinds of listening. Electronic dance music changes in form when heard in a variety of spaces, and shifting and altering the way we connect to it, and to ourselves.

The strength of our culture relies not only on a multitude of musical voices, but also a multitude of platforms from which to listen to, and be with them. And with this array of platforms in play, our minds and bodies are not posited against each other, as opposites, but instead become complementary co-drivers of how we collectively experience and create our culture.

a secret

For information on DUAL II on Fri, 06. Jul 2018 — featuring Unhuman, OPERANT, Eexxppoann, Elisabeth Dixon, Λ / Π, Mariah Sliwczynski — please contact factoidmelbourne@gmail.com