Sunday, October 07, 2007
More Dead by Dawn
John Eden has pointed me in the direction of Controlled Weirdness's Unearthly Records site, where there are some more Dead by Dawn flyers - from where I sourced the following:
A short history of Dead by Dawn (Praxis Newsletter, August 1994)
'We would like to set the facts straight for those Cultural Studies students who intend to write their dissertations about us. This is our story so far.
A chance meeting on Blackfriars Bridge between a member of the Praxis DJ team and a senior executive of the 121 Centre Management Committee, revealed a shared interest in the dark secrets of Freemasonry (top Vatican banker Roberto Calvi was found hanged beneath Blackfriars Bridge in 1984, £23 grand in various currencies stuffed in his pockets, believed to have been a victim of the forces of Masonic mind control).
Well anyway, a subsequent chat over chips and beans revealed that these rogues had far more in common than just an unhealthy obsession with conspiracy theory. They both felt a desparate need to wreak havoc on the jaded and boring London club scene. Soon plans were afoot to do a once-a-month techno all-nighter at the 121 Centre in Brixton, to create an experience that would reflect the energy and experimentation of the music they both so dearly loved.
The idea is so simple, but very effective. An evening of noises that assault the mind and body, kicking off with a talk/discussion for the party-goers to digest and then the hardest, fastest, weirdest techno available on vinyl, mixed together, at no expense spared, by the wickedest DJs in London.
Also supplied for spiritual refreshment during the evening is an electronic disturbance zone and anti-ambient space. Records, zines, free information and other weapons are available and a cheap bar for people to blow their giros on.
So what have the talks been about? Well, so far we've had - Advance Party and Squash giving detailed information about the Government's plans for universal conformity with their Criminal Justice Bill and its attacks on ravers and squatters; the London Psychogeographical Association explaining how chaos theory is a ruling class conspiracy; the Lesbian and Gay Freedom Movement discussing what sex would be like in an anarchist society; the editors of Underground, the London-based filthy free newspaper for the demolition of serious culture, demonstrating the possibilities of electronic art, encouraging us to make love to computers and conceive an army of bastard cyborgs, as well as revealing plans for the transmission of strange signals on the Fast Breeder computer bulletin board; and an evening with Stewart Home, chatting about his life, work, techniques for psychological warfare on the ruling class and why he wants to smash the literary establishment.
So this project continues: Dead by Dawn on the first Saturday of the month, operating beneath the underground, inciting the invisible insurrection of a million minds.
John has also gone to the trouble of digitalising some sections from the Dead by Dawn album, released on vinyl at the 23rd and final party in 1996. As well as tracks by various people who played at DbD, the album includes short recordings of people chatting at the parties and other background noise (as well as someone talking about DbD on a London pirate station). This makes it quite a unique audio document - it's rare for there to be any record of the conversations people have in clubs, in all their stoned/intense glory. Check it out: Download Dead by Dawn samples (MP3)
Saturday, February 15, 2020
Poll Tax Archive (3): Community Resistance Against the Poll Tax
Fight the poll tax
The demonstrations at town halls in March have shown just how much anger there is against the poll tax. It’s obvious that, no matter what anyone says, mass non-payment is becoming a reality. The reason is simple – millions simply can’t afford to pay, millions more don’t want to.
But we can’t defeat this horrible new tax without organisation. All over the place you meet people who are saying “I’m not paying, I don’t care what they threaten me with“. This is great, but in a few months time any of these people could have been worn down by the massive campaign of lies that there will be in the media about how many people are paying, by well-publicised threats of court action by councils, by council snoopers hunting for those who haven’t registered, by the feeling that perhaps they will be among the unlucky few that the council has got the resources to chase up. No doubt there will be no shortage of ‘advice’ available from central and local government about how to tighten our belts to pay our poll tax and how to claim the pathetic rebates that are on offer. Any of us could become “waiverers” if we remain isolated.
We can’t expect “friends in high places” such as councillors or MPs to fight the tax for us. It’s up to us. Labour Party leaders call it “Maggie‘s tax“ but the real position on it was recently summed up by the shadow environment secretary, Bryan Gould, who said “we say pay the bill. However difficult and unpleasant and objectionable it may be..". The experience of Scotland, where the tax has been introduced a year earlier, has shown that Labour councils are just as enthusiastic about sending in the bailiffs against non-payers as their Tory friends are. But in Scotland people have resisted, there has still not been a single successful “warrant sale“ of non-payers possessions. This is because the bailiffs have been physically resisted by large crowds.
Community Resistance against the Poll Tax is a group of people who live in the Brixton/Clapham/Stockwell/Vauxhall area. We are trying to break down isolation and support anybody who refuses to pay. We intend to resist the councils, the bailiffs and the media liars. We don’t want people to be martyrs who suffer for their principles. If we are organised it will be the implementers of the tax who will be sick with worry, not us. Lots of things could happen in the next year or so. They could get rid of Thatcher , they could call a general election… anything to make people think “we don’t have to fight now, things will be OK“. But we can’t feel safe until this evil tax has been made completely unworkable and the government and councils give up trying to implement it.
We want to:
1. encourage as many people as possible not to pay. We will do this by means of public meetings, street stalls and the distribution of leaflets and newsletters to keep everyone informed. We have already been doing this kind of thing for well over a year. We need as much information as possible about what the councils are up to. If you know anything interesting… Get in touch!
2. encourage the formation of other local anti-poll tax groups. If you know someone who is thinking of setting up a group in another area put them in touch with us. We can help with organising public meetings, getting stuff printed etc
3. organise well-publicised acts of mass defiance against the tax, such as burning payment books
4. Exercise disruptive pressure against offices involved in implementation of the tax by means of demonstrations, pickets and occupations. We would also like to put similar pressure on employers who deduct payments from the wages of employees refusing to pay the tax, as the courts can require them to do.
5. Make links with workers who are in a position to directly disrupt implementation, either through open strike action or just through being “difficult". If you work locally in the workplacess involved in poll-tax implementation (e.g. DSS, council, company supplying services to the council…) and you think there is some potential for resistance or you think you can feed us useful information, come along to one of our meetings. You will be very welcome.
6. Do anything else we can think off to frustrate the tax.
We hold meetings on alternate Wednesdays at Clapham Baths, Clapham Manor Street at 7:30 pm. The next few meetings are on the following dates: 4th April, 18th April, 2nd May, 16 May. We also sometimes have a public meetings at other venues in the area – look out for flyposting.
We are not paying
[as stated here, Community Resistance held meetings in Clapham; they also held regular cafe nights at the community cafe in Bonnington Square, Vauxhall. Original leaflet A4 printed on white paper]
More on the poll tax:
Poll Tax Archive (1): Hospital workers say: 'we're not paying': North Middlesex Hospital anti-poll tax leaflet, 1990
Poll Tax Archive (2): St Valentines Day 1991 - Massacre the poll tax (in Lambeth)
Trafalgar Square Poll Tax Riot Memories
'Mobs riot in the West End': Poll Tax Riot press coverage
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Grayson Perry on punk and performance
Grayson Perry's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl' (2007) is his memoir of the period before he became a successful artist, as related to his friend Wendy Jones.
Perry recalls growing up in 1960s/70s Essex with a taste for dressing up in women's clothes, before moving on to study art in Portsmouth and early 1980s performance art in London. He's a bit older than me, but like me and many others he was first exposed to punk as a paper boy:
'One Sunday morning I was delivering the newspapers when I saw the front cover of a supplement with a photograph of punks at a Sex Pistols concert. I was amazed by it, I though, 'Fucking Hell" This is good!'. I decided there and then I wanted to be a punk rocker'.
He went to see bands like The Vibrators, Boomtown Rats and Crispy Ambulance in Chelmsford, and attended the infamous debacle of the 1977 punk festival at Chelmsford Football Club, headlined by the Damned. The event was a flop with Perry opining that 'the most punk rock thing of the whole day' was when the scaffolder, furious at not being paid, began dismantling the stage while the bands were still playing.
A punk leather jacket included by Perry in his exhibition last year at Manchester Art Gallery (photo from http://ohdearthea.tumblr.com/) |
After leaving college in 1982 he moved to London where he was part of the post-New Romantic/Blitz kids scene. He lived in the basement of a squat in Crowndale Road next to the Camden Palace, with Marilyn (soon to be a short-lived popstar) living upstairs. Perry 'used to go to the Taboo nightclub in a black suit with skin-tight Lycra trousers and a jacket two sizes too small... I put sunburn-coloured make-up on my face and left white rings round my eyes, like ski goggle marks... And I had a tail. It was a stiff, furry dog's tail'.
He also got involved with the Neo-Naturists, a performance art troupe who performed naked with paint on their bodies. They played at places like Notre Dame Church Hall (Leicester Square), Heaven, the Camden Palace. the Fridge (Brixton) and an anarchist centre:
'we were booked to do a Neo-Naturist performance in Brixton at the Spanish Anarchists Association, which was similar to a working men's club, an extremely anachronistic place that had become somehow hop because of punk's associations with anarchy. As it was May Fiona though we should do a Communist, May Day-themed cabaret. Cerith [Wyn Evans], Fiona, Jen, Angela and I all had identical Communist uniforms body painted on to us with khaki paint and we decorated oursevles with big red five-pointed stars... There were around a hundred anarchists in the audience as well as some punks and they all hated it, not one of them clapped, the room was dead quiet'.
I think Perry may have got two different places mixed up here - the 121 centre in Brixton opened in 1981, but the Spanish anarchists' place was Centro Iberico (421 Harrow Road), a squatted school where various punk gigs and other events took place (incidentally producer William Orbit started out with a studio here). The Neo-Naturists site mentions them playing a 1982 May Day event at 'Spanish anarchist centre, Harrow Road' so assume this was what Perry remembered (maybe he went to 121 another time).
Photo from the Kill Your Pet Puppy archive |
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Stop the City, London, March 1984
'Protest and Carnival against War, Oppression and Exploitation' |
'Stop the City - People not Profit' |
- J18 Carnival Against Capital, 1999
[post originally written in 2011 as the Occupy Stock Exchange London protest camped out by St Paul's in the same area targeted by Stop the City. Updated September 2023 with flyers and press cuttings]
A Lambeth Stop the City planning meeting at 121 Railton Road in March 1984 |
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Gaddafi Occupations 1986 and 2011
Put me in mind of an earlier occupation, the squatting of the abandoned Libyan People's Bureau(an Embassy building), initiated by people around anarcho-punk prankster band God Told Me To Do It in 1986. There's a nice account of the squatting of the place - and expropriation of its contents - by Anna Marrian at Animal Farm:
'We secure the door and explore the building, staying away from the windows. It’s four floors of 30-foot ceilings, ballroom sized rooms with plush carpeting and heavy velvet curtains, mahogany desks, button-backed leather sofas and office equipment stacked up in the end of each room. A shroud of dust everywhere... I get everyone from the St. John’s Street squat and drive back to the Libyan People’s Bureau intact. It’s dark and the side street is deserted. Andy and the others disappear inside and reappear thirty minutes later carrying one of the green leather sofas out the back door. This is followed by several photocopiers, curtains, fax machines, telex machines, leather executive office chairs, handfuls of books written in Arabic. The van is stuffed to the ceiling'.
Also came across this account: 'It had been vacant after someone inside the embassy fired on a group of demonstrators and killed a policewoman. After that, the whole staff refused to cooperate in any investigation and returned to Libya, leaving the building vacant. Enter squatters. I went to one of their parties. I remember one skinhead girl trying to balance as many copies as possible of Quadaffi's Little Green Book on her head'.
Of course in those days, Libya was a pariah state following the shooting dead of PC Yvonne Fletcher in 1984, as Embassy staff opened fire on anti-Gaddafi demonstrators in London. Since then, without any change in regime, Gaddafi has acquired quite a fan club - shaking hands with Tony Blair and his son Saif feted at the London School of Economics and by the British Royal Family. Everybody from Anthony Giddens (social democratic theorist of the Third Way), the National Front (current BNP leader Nick Griffin travelled to Tripoli in 1986), the Workers Revolutionary Party and the Nation of Islam have sung his praises. Was there ever a dictator with such a disparate group of supporters from far right to far left via every shade of mainstream governmental opinion?
No part of the political spectrum seems to have been immune from this nonsense. In the early 1990s I took part in the International Infoshop gathering in London, bringing together people involved in radical social centres and book shops from across Europe. The event was hosted by two London infoshops, the 56a Infoshop at Elephant and Castle (which still exists) and the 121 Centre in Brixton's Railton Road (which was evicited in 1999).Those of us at the London end were mostly from a broadly anarchist background of hostility to all states. We seemed to have plenty in common with the comrades from Germany and Scandinavia with their focus on housing struggles (squatting), militant anti-fascism and autonomous movements. However when it came to talking about stuff outside of Europe it was a different story. We were horrified when the proposal was put forward that we should take part in an 'anti-imperialist solidarity camp' in Libya to show our support for the Gadaffi regime's stand against the US and Europe!
Amongst parts of the 'anti-impi' autonomist left this kind of support for all kinds of dubious regimes and stalinist 'liberation movement' rackets was commonplace - seemingly in Europe, autonomy and new forms of emancipatory politics was on the agenda, the rest of the world could make do with personality cults and militarist dictatorships.
Sunday, June 11, 2023
Tales from a Disappearing City
Friday, December 04, 2020
Everybody is a Star! - Disconaut Association of Autonomous Astronauts (numbers one and two)
Once upon a time I was Neil Disconaut, with my partner Juleigh Disconaut we constituted the Disconaut node of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts (1995-2000). The premise of the AAA was a global network committed to the state and corporate monopoly of space through the development of community-based space exploration programmes. Activities included music (raves in space), three sided football, talks, writing, protests and some actual engagement with space researchers. There were groups in England, Scotland, Wales, France, Italy, Holland, Austria, Canada, USA, New Zealand among other places, each with their own particular interests. Within this network, Disconaut AAA focused on dance music as a vehicle for space exploration.
Everybody is a Star! was the newsletter of Disconaut AAA, of which four photocopied issues were produced between 1996 and 1999. Here's issues One and Two.
Everybody is a Star! Number One, Winter 1996/97
Disconauts are go!
Forget Apollo, NASA and the Space Shuttle... the most exciting explorations of space in the last 30 years have been carried out through music.
Emerging on the radical fringes of jazz in the 1950s, Sun Ra (1914-1993) and his Intergalactic Research Arkestra (as his band was later known) set the space vibe in motion with interstellar explorations like “Space Jazz Reverie”, “Love in Outer Space”, “Disco 3000" and the film “Space is the place” .
Described by one critic as a “comic strip version of Sun Ra”, George Clinton developed his own funky cosmic Afronaut mythology in the 1970s through his work with Funkadelic and Parliament. For instance the album “Mothership Connection” (1975) is based around the concept of aliens visiting earth to take the funk back to their own planet.
Sun Ra and Clinton’s work can be read as a sort of sci-fi take on Marcus Garvey. While Garvey dreamt of Black Star Liners shipping black people from slavery across the ocean to an African utopia, they leave the planet behind altogether.
Space continued to be a preoccupation during the 1970s disco boom. Derided by rock critics for its lack of serious content, disco had a distinct utopian element. In disco, the intensity of pleasure on the dancefloor was reimagined as an ideal for living rather than just a Saturday night release. The implicit fantasy was of a “Boogie Wonderland” where music, dancing and sex were organising principles, rather than work and the economy. “Lost in music, feel so alive, I quit my nine to five” as Sister Sledge put it.
In the unpromising social climate of the 1970s, this wonderland was sometimes projected into space. Earth, Wind and Fire (who recorded Boogie Wonderland) combined elements of Egyptology and sci-fi with albums like “Head for the Sky” (1973) and All n All (1977) with its cover pic of a rocket taking off from a pyramid. In the late 1970s there was a rash of space themed disco hits like Sheila B. Devotion’s “Spacer” and Slick’s “(Everybody goes to the) Space base” (1979), the latter imagining the space base as disco and social centre rather than military-industrial installation.
Some of these space records can be viewed as simple cash-ins on the popularity of Star Wars and similar films of this period, but was there something deeper going on? While the sale of disco records reaped big profits for the record companies, the logic of the dancefloor was potentially at odds with the society of domination. On the floor, pleasure was elevated above the puritan work ethic and hierarchies of class, race, gender and sexuality were (sometimes) dissolved.
Discos (like today’s dance spaces) could have been the launchpad for explorations of different worlds on earth and beyond, powered by the Dance Disco Heat energy generated on the floor. In this light the disco icon par excellence, the glittering mirror ball, has to be re-evaluated. Detailed archaeological investigations of the alignment of these spheres of light suspended high above the dancefloor will doubtless reveal that they were installed to equip dancers with a rudimentary astronomical knowledge to help them find their way around the universe.
They never reached the moon!
The Apollo ‘moon landings’ between 1969 and 1972 are presented by NASA as the highest point of the space programme, and as a model for all future adventures. In reality nothing better demonstrates why it is unfit to explore anything more exciting than the inside of the Science Museum.
A favourite question for conspiracy theorists worldwide is whether the moon landings actually happened or whether the whole thing was faked in a TV studio like in the film Capricorn One. If we give NASA the benefit of the doubt and allow that it may have sent a rocket somewhere it is clear that they never reached the moon, or at least not the moon as it has been known through the ages.
This was not the moon of heretics, pagans, lovers or night-time revellers. The moon of tides, madness, goddesses, rituals of drink, drugs and dancing. Neil Armstrong and his mates did not have the imagination for the kind of space travel needed to reach this moon. All they were able to reach was a lump of rock somewhere - possibly in orbit, possibly in New Mexico somewhere.
How did they mark the momentous occasion of the first landing on July 21 1969? The first thing they did was plant an American flag like it was just another piece of imperial real estate. By 1969 there were very few places left in the world where it was safe to do so. Losing the war in Vietnam and with flags burning everywhere else, perhaps the whole space programme was an attempt to find a place where the Stars and Stripes could fly unmolested.
The Apollo 14 ‘moonlanding’ in 1971 witnessed another amazing leap of fantasy and imagination when Alan Shepard became the world’s first lunar golfer. Billions of pounds and years of effort culminated in the staging of the first lunar open. All over the world, people are being uprooted and ecosystems bulldozed to build golf courses, sanitised homogenous outdoor playgrounds for the rich. Judging by the Apollo programme a similar fate awaits the whole universe if NASA have their way.
The Apollo programme shows that no matter how many miles NASAnauts may travel they will never get anywhere because in their heads they will still be in the suburbs of white middle class america, travelling across the universe opening golf courses and fly-through Macdonalds.
“I wanted to dance as I had never yet danced: I wanted to dance beyond all heavens” (Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra)
In the summer of 1995 I had the pleasure of spending a day in Space. Thousands of people from all over the world have journeyed to Space in recent years. This legendary dance club in Ibiza provides an excellent illustration of the possibilities and limitations of dance cultures as a means of leaving this world behind.
Clubs in Britain tend to be confined indoors at night. Space turns this on its head, opening in the day and with an outside dancefloor. We turned up at about 11 am after a very pleasant breakfast of coffee, croissants and speed. Some people had come straight from a hard night’s dancing elsewhere, many of them crashed out on cushions in the corner or on wicker chairs on the outside terrace. Much of Ibiza is Brit-dominated, but here there was a better mix of nationalities and sexualities than on the Starship Enterprise.
The ceiling inside the dark interior of the club is decorated with stars - a map of our destination? Further evidence of the club’s potential is found on the edge of the outside dancefloor, where there are several giant propellers. People danced in front of them to keep cool, but there is little doubt that as well functioning as air conditioning fans these machines could be used as starting motors to help propel Space into space.
The music was wall to wall anthems, like Todd Terry’s Weekend and, the Hardfloor remix of Mory Kante’s Yeke Yeke. The atmosphere never reached fever pitch, but there was an intimation of that feeling - the disordering of the senses, waves of noise and light flowing over and through the body... That feeling in the centre of the floor, where the outside world has already been left behind and it is easy to believe that the whole place could take off and never come back.
In view of this potential it is not surprizing that the state takes various measures to contain dancing and prevent us reaching the stars.
In many countries only approved businessmen get permission to run clubs. The high prices they charge - some clubs in Ibiza charge £30 a ticket, with small bottles of water costing £3 a bottle in Space - effectively rations dancing, limiting the amount of time people spend dancing, and the amount of people dancing at any one time. The hours people can dance are confined, by rules which state that clubs have to shut at particular times. Within the clubs enemy agents patrol to sabotage preparations for flight - in Space the security wore police style uniforms and patrolled with truncheons.
Above all great efforts have been expended to prevent people dancing under the stars themselves, the ideal conditions for spaceflight. In the UK It is virtually impossible to get official permission to dance outside at night, and non-commercial parties have been targeted by legislation such as the Criminal Justice Act.
Ibiza is different to Britain in that people can and do dance all day and all night (if they can afford it) , and the normal relations of night, day, work and play are suspended. But this is confined as a temporary holiday experience, which most people only experience for a week or two.
All this prevents the energy generated on the dancefloor from reaching the critical mass necessary for space flight, as well as preventing a terminal drain of the energy needed to sustain the global system of profit, production and domination.
It was for this reason that on this occasion Space failed to take off and on leaving the club we found ourselves wandering down a beautiful beach in the sun rather than walking on the moon. Still it definitely beat the Holloway Road at 4 am...
Disconaut AAA
AAA was launched in April 1995 as a non-hierarchical network of local, community-based space exploration programmes. Here Comes Everybody!, the first annual report of the AAA, details some of the activities of the many AAA groups worldwide (available for £2.50 from Inner City AAA, BM Jed, London WC1N 3XX).
Disconaut AAA (c/o Practical History, 121 Railton Road, London SE24) will be focusing on developing the potential of dance cultures for the exploration of space. Everybody is a star! is named after a 1979 track by Sylvester (1946-1988), also responsible for such otherworld explorations as "Dance Disco Heat", "Do you wanna funk" and "You make me feel mighty real".
[original printed on white paper, 4 pages A5. Just to be clear, we never subscribed to the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked - the article 'They never reached the moon' was a play on Leonard Cohen's 'they'll never ever reach the moon, At least not the one that we're after'. The physical moon was reached but not the one of imagination]
Take a dancing flight
Exactly 30 years after NASA launched the Apollo space programme, Disconaut AAA has unveiled its own Dionysus Programme.
When Apollo One caught fire on the launch pad in 1967 it marked the start of the US government's biggest ever space effort. But why Apollo? If pagan deities was the name of the game there were plenty of others to choose from. To answer this we have to turn to Fred Nietzsche, 19th century German philosopher and dance enthusiast.
In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche identified two antagonistic cultural tendencies with the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo was associated with restraint, control, order and rationality. The rituals of Dionysus on the other hand involved music, passion, wine, intoxication, and the dissolving of boundaries.
As part of the military industrial complex, seeking to extend the control of the imperial order through the conquest of space, NASA’s programme could only be the Apollonian. The Dionysus Programme has been launched in direct opposition to Apollo and its successors, to put into practice Disconaut AAA's mission to explore the potential of dance cultures for the exploration of space.
The starting point for the Dionysus Programme is Nietzsche’s description of “the glowing life of the Dionysian revellers”: "In song and in dance man [sic] expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak; he is about to take a dancing flight into the air... He feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy... He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art". Phew, all this without MDMA.
Disconaut AAA are attempting to apply this insight into the links between dance, ecstasy and flight as we leave the twentieth century. For some years experiments have been carried out in a global network of underground laboratories of pleasure. We can now report some of our preliminary findings:
The Dionysus Programme has accumulated extensive evidence of near-flight experiences on the dancefloor. Participants typically report sensations of 'rushing', of accelerating velocity, of the body tracing a line of flight and of leaving behind 'the real world' and establishing a direct connection with the wider universe. There are clear parallels here with the effects on the body and the euphoric feelings of escaping gravity associated with 'lift off' by more traditional means.
In the Dionysus Programme we have tried to break the tyranny of liquid-fuel rocket propulsion and to identify alternative fuel sources and means of transport. In the process we have experimented with a range of easily ingested chemicals, some of them derived from plants, others artificially manufactured. These substances have contributed some invaluable insights and certainly have a role, particularly in maintaining the stamina needed for long flights. However we have to report that several of our experimental human probes which were successfully blasted beyond the atmosphere with chemical propulsion quickly crashed down to earth and vanished without trace, while others are now drifting aimlessly in space circumscribing ever decreasing circles around their own navels.
The Dionysus Programme has conducted a whole range of tests with extremely high tempo electronic sounds. Our hypothesis was that a continual acceleration in beats per minute would enable us to reach earth's escape velocity and take off. Unfortunately after prolonged uninterrupted exposure to these tests the ship began to break up and several participants showed signs of exhaustion and in some cases nausea. Future experiments will attempt to reduce the risk of side effects by introducing greater variety and rhythmic complexity.
Ill-fitting space suits have been an ongoing problem in the Dionysus Programme. A major difficulty has been the rigid masculine character armour which even some potential astronauts seem unable to discard. Dance cultures provide a space where it is possible to escape the confines of a fixed identity and explore a range of subjectivities and possibilities. Sadly a lot of men in particular seem afraid to appear as anything other than cool, serious and controlled. Clearly this is incompatible with the flexibility required in space. Disconaut AAA are developing fun fur and sequin space suits to help overcome this.
The present efforts of the Dionysus Programme are geared towards the Dreamtime project, through which AAA groups around the world are imagining what life will be like in autonomous communities in space. Dance settings provide a unique opportunity for collective dreaming, not the passive dreams of sleep but the visions of the lived body in perfect motion.
Here we are not only able to think about life in space, but to feel what it will be like to live in an autonomous community. Nietzsche described this sensation: “Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the union between man and man [and woman] reaffirmed, but Nature which has become estranged, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her prodigal son, man.... Now the slave is free; now all the stubborn, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice or ‘shameless fashion’ have erected between man and man, are broken down… Each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, blended with his neighbour, but all as one with him".
By creating autonomous zones in our own parties on earth we can create conditions that prefigure autonomous communities in space. To do this we have to neutralize the negative effects of various black holes which suck energy out of dance cultures, such as commercial promoters and the police. This will be the focus of the next stage of the Dionysus Programme.
Spice in space
“When you go and see a careers officer,” ponders Mel C, “and
you sit down and say, “I want to be a spaceman”, instead of responding ‘Go
study astrophysics’, they go. ‘Yeah, but what do you really want to do?’ That
is so wrong” (Spice Girls, Guardian, May 1997)
Stay up forever
In 'Voyage to the Moon' (1649), Savinien de Cyrano de
Bergerac described an attempt to reach the Moon by tying bottles of dew to the
body. The idea was that when the Sun came out, the dew would rise, taking the
body with it. On the face of it, this looks unlikely but the nocturnal nature
of the Dionysus Programme should make it comparatively easy to test. We will
need:
- a large green open space for dew maximisation;
- proximity to a site of astro-magical significance at a
summer solstice (when the sun's energy is at its height);
- several thousand people prepared to stay up all night and
still have the energy to fly at dawn;
- at least one sound system.
Stonehenge on June 21st has been chosen as the ideal
location. Unfortunately there are indications that the state will attempt to
sabotage the Dionysus Programme by seeking to prevent this experiment, so all
potential astronauts are warned to be ready to defend themselves.
Disconaut AAA
The Association of Autonomous Astronauts is a
non-hierarchical network of local, community-based space exploration programmes.
Dreamtime is upon us, the second annual report of the AAA is available for
£3.00 from Inner City AAA, BM Jed, London WC1N 3XX.
Everybody is a star! is the newsletter of Disconaut AAA (c/o
Practical History, 121 Railton Rd, London SE24). Issue one is still available
with articles on Disco, Ibiza and the Moon. If you want a copy send an SAE.
In issue No.1 we outlined the links between dance music,
radical utopianism and space exploration. We have since become aware of other
publications interested in these connections.
· Ego magazine (80a St Augustines Road, London NW1 9RP)
includes an article Space is the Place which considers funky futurism in the
work of Herbie Hancock, Juan Atkins, the Jedi Knights and many others.
· Rickey Vincent’s excellent history Funk: the music, the
people and the rhythm of the one (New York, 1996) devotes a whole section to George
Clinton and “The metaphysics of P: the Mothership Connection”
[original printed on green paper, 4 pages A5]
'Disconauts are go!' was later reprinted in 'Dreamtime is Upon Us! The Second Annual Report of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts' (1997).
Previous AAA posts:
Summer Solstice 1999: AAA on Parliament Hill
Military out of space - AAA at J18 Carnival Against Capital 1999
AAA at Brixton Reclaim the Streets 1998
Skinheads as Independent Travellers in Space
We were brought up on the space race, now they expect us to clean toilets
Other AAA archive material:
AAA Archive (ex-Parasol AAA)