An interview with Sebastian Vaughan aka 69db of Spiral Tribe. Live discussion recorded in July 2024 at V23 System Dystopia micro festival, Belgium. Hosted by El Bickers and Floyd Verbruggen.
Sebastian Vaughan: The mystery is there's no mystery…
El Bickers: All right, well, thanks everyone, as we take a bit of a break from the music. We're here today with Sebastian Vaughan, and we would say he needs a little introduction. He's a pioneering force in the free party movement since the early 90s, as part of the legendary Spiral Tribe. We're ecstatic to have him join us for a discussion about his involvement in free parties and his evolution as an artist that spans more than 30 years. Sebastian is better known under his solo moniker 69db, his live improvisation project with Simon Carter as R-ZAC, the anonymous SP23 project under Spiral Tribe sub-labels Network 23 and Stormcore. More recently, he performs as Wave Arising alongside Kynsie, which is a live project exploring the relationship between music and movement. In today's discussion, we will cover a brief history of Spiral Tribe, the social politics of free parties, the history of free tekno, music production, and some contemporary iterations of the free party movement. So we have a lot of information to cover.
We'll definitely save some time at the end if any of you have some questions. And I think Sebastian is pretty keen for people to get involved in the discussion as we go through. I know we're quite far away from everyone, but if anyone does want to come up and say something, then we're happy to pass the mic. So yeah, Sebastian, first, how are you doing? How have you been enjoying the weekend?
SV: I've really been having a great time. Thank you so much for your energy, everyone. It's so nice to be back in a place where all of the music's good. I'm just saying that because the dilemma you have when you are forced to try and make a living from music is that you have to take everything that comes your way, quite simply to survive. One of the strangest things about my journey in the free party scene was how, in the 1990s, the emphasis was on psychedelic beats, and there was a very strong improvisational angle in the actual free party scene, especially Mononom, Curley, Unit Moebius, and the French side of the free party with all the different sound systems that were around there. Pretty much every free party sound system in the late 90s was dealing with improvised techno, which was quite a special thing.
In Jamaica, they say that reggae is the telephone of the island. Because if something needs to be talked about, an MC will talk about it, and everyone will get to hear about it. Then another MC will answer it.
However, we will always be subservient to the popular vote. And that's what I'm hoping to get on the table around here, is that we've all got a part to share in what happens in the scene we're in. If 80% of the party vote ketamine, well, we're going to be in a ketamine world. And the 20% who maybe don't feel that have just got to accept it. Then you hopefully have a conversation about why. But that's another reason why we feel that, this kind of experience of stopping the music for a small amount of time, just get to know each other is especially important in a scene which is based on instrumental music. In Jamaica, they say that reggae is the telephone of the island. Because if something needs to be talked about, an MC will talk about it, and everyone will get to hear about it. Then another MC will answer it. It's the same thing in hip hop.
However, in this scene, I've noticed there's rarely a moment when the music stops. And there's rarely a moment when you have a collective conversation. The problem with that is when you get things like 80% of the public voting ketamine, or you get a free party teknival that's supposed to be representing freedom, but 99.9% of the sound systems are playing frenchcore - it's like, hang on?
The first thing I do if I go to someone's house is look at their record collection. If I can only see one style of music, my initial reaction is that this isn't a very open-minded person. So the absolute paradox of a free event that's supposed to be for freedom playing one fucking music on 50 sound systems is maybe something we should talk about. Because if we just let it roll, these things snowball. And the thing that's worrying about that is the younger people who come in are looking up to us and trying to fit in. Because it's quite a hostile place if you're not like everybody, which is another paradox about the free scene.
“Oh, you got to look a certain way to be free, right? I have to wear a certain kind of clothing to be free. Oh, I'm free now, am I?”
One of the most impressive things I found over the last five years since I've been trying to work towards this idea of ‘give to the sound system”, is that I have received major kickback from people. We started the teknival, we were the ones who made it in the first place. So if someone's got a problem with what I'm saying, I've got a bit more weight, right? It doesn't win, though, because I still get people getting angry with me. I've seen other people try, and it's a massacre. So what the fuck's going on where a simple thing like “give to the sound system” becomes an issue that you get slagged off for talking about it?
With 8,000 people at a party where everyone takes one pill, that's 80,000 euros. If everybody at an 8,000 person party takes one gram of cocaine, well, I'll let you do the math. I think there's a real conversation to be had. So hopefully, once we finish ranting a bit, I'd really love it if we can share this conversation: what are we doing here? Why are we doing this? What's good about us and what’s bad about us? After all these years, can we look in the mirror?
EB: Some things really resonated with me that you said about going exploring people's record collections, and if they have one style of music, it doesn't seem like they're open-minded enough or the way people dress when they go to free parties or the music all being Frenchcore or all sounding the same. How do you define this concept of being free within the movement? Are we truly free?
You have to be very careful how you treat the data and make sure the respect is there. The message is I am responding, not appropriating. That's very important and we really need to remember that.
SV: Wow. I don't know about you, but the thing that got me to dedicate all my time and energy to this is two things. First, African diaspora music, be it soul, funk, reggae, rock, blues or straight from Africa like Afrobeat. I'm quite simply here because of that, no other reason. I do my best to try and differentiate between appropriation and response. I truly feel that there's been an amazing transformation of culture since rock and roll. Quite simply, rock and roll generated the concept of a rebellious youth in European culture. The blues and the gospel are the bottom line of everything we're doing. This music comes from people who were oppressed. This music comes from people who lived a hard reality and overcame it through music and dance. So that is something to remember and something to respect as much as you possibly can. Nobody's perfect and there's obviously a fine line sometimes when you're sampling something or when you're moving towards a style that's coming from those traditions, you have to be very careful how you treat the data and make sure the respect is there. The message is I am responding, not appropriating. That's very important and we really need to remember that.
Number two is psychedelics. The problem here is I can't be in your head. I'm never going to be in anyone else's head, I'm in my own head. I could try and explain to you what happened to me. But the problem is that I'm telling you words. Just like if I had a dream and I was going to say to you, look, I had this dream. It was amazing. And I tell you the dream and you're going, all right, you had a dream and you heard the words. But you're interpreting the words. You don't see the dream, you'll never know the dream. We are all alone in our heads, and we're all opening.
So, to come back to your question, what is all this about? This is all about deconstruction. First thing is you're born, and you don't know why the fuck you're born. But the moment you're born, you're getting solicited by people who are trying to convince you that you're this and you're that, bumping into all this propaganda coming from different sources. Until by the time you're 16, you're completely fucked up. You think you're British. I'm a British person, but hang on…no, you're not? What is Britain? How long has Britain existed? Not that long, right? If you want to go deeply into it, you're just a human. I'm here on planet Eartha, and I'm living. So why was the psychedelic thing important in the rave? Because it helped me deconstruct all that shit.
Suddenly, with this incredibly beautiful Afro-American music, which was leading me into a trance, there came a moment of pure psychedelic meltdown, where I suddenly saw through to the electromagnetic spectrum in the deeper sense, beyond the five senses. I guess some of you might know what I'm talking about. In chemical politics, we've all had our little wake-up time when we got into this. Most of us hold on to that. It was the best fucking moment. And we keep going back to try and find that, I guess. But that's in a dysfunctional rave scene. We shouldn't have to keep going back to try to find that initial hit. We should generate it and amplify it. Instead, we've all dropped the ball. We could make it so much deeper and so much more powerful.
The problem we have is that the cops have sussed us out. I'm talking about the free party scene. For example, in France today, when you come out of a free party, most people have to pay 135 euros to the government. You can lose your driving licence. In the meantime, when people are going there, they're spending hundreds of thousands of euros on drugs. Is that really what we wanted? Was that what that initial psychedelic wave was all about? 30 years later, spending 135 euros to the government and getting yourself hooked up on some kind of never-ending cycle of feeling good by paying loads of money to dealers.
EB: I'd love to circle this round to when you first met the Spiral Tribe and how this kind of philosophy and ideals you carry helped in your awakening as part of this collective. So could you talk about at what time in your life you met Spiral Tribe? What was going on musically and personally for you, and why did you join the collective?
SV: We'd just come out of the initial Acid House ‘88-’89 thing, and in ‘89 the British government passed the legislation against paid illegal parties. Suddenly, it became very dangerous for people to run a paid illegal party. The initial Orbital raves were mega raves. They were massively capitalist. People paid money to get in, and ecstasy was 25 quid. I’d never had ecstasy. I was 17. I had no money. I couldn't afford ecstasy. I took acid. But the point is that you had these mega raves going on for about two years around London, and they were making some serious cash. So the government brought in this law to stop it. The people who were making the money started going towards clubs and paid raves and all that kind of stuff. But we were the ravers who didn’t want to go to a club. I want to be in the warehouse where this Acid House music makes the most sense.
There was also another watershed moment at Glastonbury 1990, where they still had a traveller's side to Glastonbury. That was where all the ravers were with DiY sound system and some others. That was a real meeting point for pretty much everyone who then became the free party scene in England. But beyond that, chance had it that when I left Scotland to come to London, I was with my band and we squatted a place in northwest London near Kilburn. That just so happened to be where most of the Spiral Tribe had also landed. We wound up taking acid together at parties, and it naturally made sense. Then they did the very first Spiral Tribe party. At that point, music had started to shift from Acid House towards happy hardcore, breakbeat, Detroit techno, European techno, that kind of stuff. But that very first Spiral Tribe party was Acid House central. I think they even had a DJ from The Shaman who was playing pure psychedelic acid music. And I was loving it because that was the music I liked more.
From that moment, I realised it wasn't just the music, it was the energy between the people making the party. There wasn't this big cash grab going on. This was just a bunch of people having a rave. What really gelled it was the psychedelic awakenings that were happening all around us. All of us collectively, like popcorn, were just waking up to the electromagnetic spectrum and realising that there was this deep consciousness that's all around us, and it is us. So I think the parts of the tribe who really felt that really bonded around the idea that this was a doorway that was opening, and we were going to defend that doorway and create a space where people could open and have these connections.
EB: To connect that thought to this music and to the sound specifically, in a previous documentary, you discussed the change in sound being about frequency rather than pitch. Can you explain this in more detail, and how this shift inspired how you approached making music?
SV: At the time of the very first Spiral Tribe party, I had managed to get into Leeds College of Music to study jazz drumming. I went off during the week to learn about jazz drumming, then would come back for the weekend to help them with a party. I paid for the whole thing by busking on the London underground.
One day at the end of my class in Leeds College of Music, the teacher came up to me and put a book on the table. He said, "read this book". To this day, I don't know why he chose me. The book was called “The Secret Power of Music” by David Tame. It's very academic and quite nerdy, exploring the idea of the harmony of spheres, ratios and frequencies and all that kind of stuff that went completely over my head. But I got the gist of it. Ok, that's the reason why you chose those frequencies. There's a lot of logic behind it, and you can hear it - whole tones, dissonance, consonance. But the question of dissonance and consonance is very dependent on tradition. Every tradition has a different relationship with dissonance and consonance. Some of the notes that some people find dirty, other people find beautiful. I mean, the Catholic Church spent years and years trying to control that shit. Luckily, they failed.
That was quite a big part of the learning experience that had been going on. And then after two years of being at music school and learning about this aspect of music, I was at this party by Bedlam sound system in Park Royal. I take an acid, and I'm about to go into it. I know it's going wrong, I'm about to go into a bad one. I put my hand out like - this - and it landed on Simon, who became my future partner in music. I said, Simon, can you maybe come with me because I feel I'm going to go a bit weird. He took me outside, and suddenly everything I’d been learning over the last two years about music just came out. Poor Simon. Ever since that day, I've been able to communicate with music. After that moment, suddenly, there was a connection, and something wanted to come through.
Fast forward to the time I was performing in Berlin in 1994, I'm coming up on acid, and the DJ's record was spinning out. And suddenly, I'm like, what note? Why play a note? What frequency? Why play a frequency? Why the fuck? What kind of ratio should I be dealing with here? So the DJ record goes out. I push play on the live set. And I go from the lowest frequency on the midsweep, slowly on a loop, all the way to the top. Then I pull back, sit down, and start meditating. Then I got up, walked out and went home. The point of all of that was - why choose a frequency? One of the things I've learned about Liveset Improvisation and playing on a Liveset is the fact that you're dealing with samples. Samples are strange things because sometimes they've got a certain tonality all of themselves, where two samples might seem like they want to go together, but they totally don't. However, if you leave them in the loop, suddenly they do. We play with that a lot in techno, the idea of some kind of dissonance that suddenly becomes a consonance, like a mistake. A mistake on a live set when you're improvising is a dissonance. But you can resolve it into a consonance by flipping it into something that makes sense. A mistake is not something to be frightened of. In fact, the fear of making mistakes has put so many genres of music in boxes.
So coming back to your question about frequencies, my whole thing in the end was I'm just going to trust it. If I'm thinking, I'm presupposing I know more than the source, when I don't! My music comes from the source because I've never, ever thought about what I'm doing. I don't prepare a set; I jump on stage, and I trust. If we all trust, we're all going to get it because it's inside all of us. It comes through any creative process you want to choose. So find your passion and develop towards it, and it will come to you. I can guarantee it.
That's the conversation we can have, as once it’s communicating to us, and we've liberated and deconstructed ourselves from the illusions that have been pumped into us by a selfish system that’s destroying everything, we might actually reconnect properly. That connection is what rave is all about for me.
EB: I'm really intrigued by your journey musically with Simon Carter. For the audience, Simon Carter is Crystal Distortion, and also performed with Sebastian as R-ZAC. And yeah, you were telling us that you met whilst you were on a psychedelic trip that went a bit west. What happened after that? Can you summarise your musical journey together?
SV: The first thing after that trip is I ran around to Mark [Angelo-Harrison] and went, ‘if they know what we know, and we know what they know, and they know that we know, then this will kick off!’ We were really brought together because after a lot of bad shit, we got very lucky.
He was on the same level anyway, totally into psychedelics, totally into rave, totally Spiral.
We had just finished Castle Morton, and the sound system had been taken by the police. I remember previously that in Acton Lane, when the police smashed through the wall with JCBs and smashed everybody and the equipment, Spiral Tribe at that point had no equipment. When Castle Morton was announced, we had to borrow equipment for the festival because we had no stuff; the police had smashed it. We did nothing more or less for Castle Morton than any other sound system, other than being the last people to leave, so we got the rap for it.
At the same time, one of our friends Lol connected us with Youth from Killing Joke, who ran Butterfly and Dragonfly Records, who's one of the originators of trance. He saw us and agreed to get us signed. We got enough money to buy a recording studio. I had done some studio work in Leeds, but outside of that, none of us knew how to work it. So Simon Carter, Crystal Distortion, who had also famously made the track “No Idea” with Earth Leakage Trip, that goes ‘the doors are where the windows should be and the windows are where the doors should be’. That track had been the track that blew us away. We're all going, who the fuck is this? It turned out to be Simon Carter. He did the very first Moving Shadow record but got no money. He did the Rising High record but got no money. So he's getting ripped badly, just for the right to make a track! He met Debbie in Camden and said we had a studio, and for him he was on the same level anyway, totally into psychedelics, totally into rave, totally Spiral. It was a match made in wherever.
We were the only two people in the Spirals who had any knowledge on how to make electronic music, so we had the job of making the studio work. If people wanted to know how to make music, we would bring them in. That's where Ixy and Kaos came in, who were the ones who really took it forward. We also had this incredible experience with Persons Unknown, who should absolutely be remembered. They chose the right name, Persons Unknown, I mean, what more do you want to know? We went down to this squat and saw them with an MMT8 sequencer and a Mirage sampler, and they were jamming tracks. They did 10 tracks in the night, and we did one. So we were like, what the fuck is this?
There's also Orbital, Psychick Warriors ov Gaia, Octave One, and Eat Static who are very important people who've been tinkering in this direction of improvisation with machines. So when Simon and I saw that, it just so happened that there was a club called Knowledge in London, and Earth Leakage Trip, which was the group that Simon came from, had been booked, but his partner didn't want to go. So we said, fuck it, we'll do the Spiral Tribe Liveset. We brought our studio down to Knowledge, went on stage, and we hadn't got a fucking clue. We had no idea what we were doing. And the weirdest thing is, after three quarters of an hour of just tweaking, we got a standing ovation. It was a sign of the times. Techno was so young, so new, that you could actually go on stage and not know what you're doing and just do whatever happened!
As a little reference for people coming up today, we had it a lot easier. Although don't forget that the medium is the message. I don't know if you've heard that expression by Marshall McLuhan. It's like the electric guitar generated rock and roll, the electric blues, and many other genres of music. It's the medium that created it. It's also interesting when mediums come, how a certain drug arrives at the same time. For example, when the home studio became accessible to ordinary people, ecstasy showed up and LSD came back. What I'm trying to talk about here is the fact that when the home studio was given to normal people who didn't have big budgets, suddenly, there was a wide open territory to discover all of those sub-genres that we all live and go through today. But at that point, there was acid house, house, hip house, hip hop, then the beginnings of breakbeat. Then goa trance and so on. It was the medium and the fact that we were there at the beginning that gave us that possibility to explore.
Simon and I bonded on one very important issue, which was this question of appropriation. Being massive fans of Detroit techno and Chicago Acid, Tyree Cooper, Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, DJ Pierre, Phuture, Jeff Mills, the list is very long. We really loved that music, but we didn't want to copy it; we wanted to respond to it. So we were like, what can we do to bring our version of what they have put on the table? We realised that there's two key rhythms, two claves. One is the disco clave. The other is the James Brown (Clyde Stubblefield) clave. You've got these two polarities. If you look at the world of rave, how it evolved around those two key rhythms, you can dress up pretty much everything from hip hop to Metalheads, drum and bass, with James Brown’s beat being either distorted, not distorted, broken up into pieces, with a bass line, without a bass line, all those different combinations. But especially the tempo. Tempo changes everything. That's why the original Gabber was called Gabber House I guess. But the rhythm's Disco, that's a very important fact. So me and Simon were like, well, what one did we like? Well, we liked hip house, because hip house was an attempt to bring hip hop and house to the same place through peace and love. Unfortunately, Cool Rock Steady was a bit too mouthy, apparently. And he pissed off the New York rappers, so the story goes. So Hip House only lasted a few years.
We decided to take the disco beat with the James Brown rhythm as in Hip House, but we're going to speed it up to 160. At that time, 160 was radical. Our little cherry on the cake was to put a delay on the kick. We were like, let's make it roll. In those days, no one was doing it. So that's where the Network 23 / Spiral Tribe sound came from. Kaos at that time would put Relief Records on 45 minus eight. So they were no longer house tempo, they were around 160 BPM like that. And the other thing is when you do that to a record, you toughen up the kick, and it becomes more powerful. So the DJs were anticipating what we called hard and funky. Which was Chicago and Detroit rhythms faster, with a delay on the kick and a breakbeat. So that's why me and Simon really bonded and, I guess, will be bonded for eternity because of that. And the love like brothers is there even though we aren’t brothers.
Floyd Verbruggen: Speaking of the medium is the message. Nowadays, you also use your laptop more for live improvisation. Do you think it provides another sort of mind state during improvising and taking your whole home studio with you on the road?
There's a lot of reasons why I wound up in digital because I was the last person in Spiral Tribe to flip. I really resisted. I went through all the 2000s when you only had the Korg MX, the Korg SX, which were groove boxes, and you had the Roland groove box. But it was like a desert from 2000 to 2010. Today, there's loads of little machines. It's amazing. When the computer became all powerful, the industry backed away and only the main players like Korg and Roland decided to carry on with these groove boxes. So I had a Mackie 1402 mixer and I had these groove boxes which were very limited 32 megabytes of sample time, and just a couple of filters and one oscillator or maybe two oscillators, but really simplistic stuff. I had a little Waldorf synthesiser, chaos pads and a couple of effects pedals, which was enough, I could do my shit with it.
With analogue systems, you're only as good as the weakest link. You might have the best synthesiser in the world, but if you're going to go through a Mackie preamp, you're going to sound shit. It's not your fault, it's just the preamps are not designed like an SSL or a NEVE or any of these posh things. When I was younger, just before Spiral Tribe, my house was robbed, and I got some insurance money. I bought the very first DAT machine from Sony, a little portable thing. So when I got involved in Spiral Tribe, I had a portable recorder, which was the best move I ever made, because I could record everything. And I've recorded pretty much 90% of everything we've ever played.
I was trying to digitise it from DAT and Minidisc, all these different formats that came through the 90s. I was putting it into the computer, and it took me three months of constantly turning it on to get it all over. But listening through it, it was obvious that the 1990s were really dirty and punk. But the 2000s, man, with these groove boxes sound terrible. I'm really embarrassed. I was like, my God, what was I doing? And then in 2010, I flipped to Ableton. By that point, plugins had changed everything - Universal Audio, SSL, Plugin Alliance, these plugins are bringing you top quality sound in a box. So would you like to sound like shit? Or would you like to sound good?
As a live set, there's another question. Am I going to compromise improvisation? Because I would prefer to sound shit and improvise, than sound good and not improvise. So I realised that with Ableton and the NI Machine, you've got two brains. Machine has got a whole bunch of patterns and loops. Ableton's got a whole bunch of patterns and loops. So it's like a carousel, and you've got no idea how it's going to meet. So you would be well advised to try and tune everything to the same key and choose your scale. I personally choose the E blues scale, because it's the one that changed my life. But if you can, tuning everything to the same frequency gives you ultimate freedom. If you've done enough in the background to make sure that your stuff's tuned, suddenly you've got thousands of meeting points that can just come out at random whenever you go and play. So Ableton and machine gave me the freedom and the absolute possibility to improvise for hours, but also gave me the quality of sound that is just way better. So it was a no-brainer in the end.
Also the other thing is when the police come, you just grab the fucking computer and run, right? When you've got a live set, you're like, oh, fuck the cables in the bag. Well, you should hopefully have a good crew.
EB: You've discussed really nicely the evolution of the equipment and the machines, but then also the influence of the black transatlantic sound, disco, jazz, how that fed into Chicago house, Detroit techno, and how that inspired how you made music. We can see that early Spiral Tribe sounds were characterised by Breakbeat, Acid House, Rave, and then it started moving into this faster, darker, more hypnotic territory. Why did the sound evolve in this way?
Waking up is not easy when you're comfortably numb.
SV: The drugs? I don't know, that's a bit deadpan. But I think it was a natural exploration of something. Because every drug is different, right? They all bring you a different chemical politic. You, as an individual, are entering into your system a particular frequency bandwidth that you are going to evolve through. It's either going to be an ego trip, making you feel good, nice, and wonderful. Or it's going to be a hideaway in this little place over there. Or it's going to be oh my fucking God, you know, it's going to be one of those kind of things. Waking up is not easy when you're comfortably numb.
We're all nice and comfortable here in Europe, to a certain degree. So I think you have to ask, what was the driving force behind all of those different currents? Why did a united scene around hip house, house, techno, hip hop, very united in the beginning, suddenly go sectarian? Well, the sectarian-ness of it came down to those individual journeys. So if you want to know the answer to that question, what made sense to you? Why did you choose to go where you chose to go? There's no blame, there's no judgement, everyone does what they got to do. We're all here to make our mistakes. From those mistakes, we learn. So in one sense, you've got this growing desire for something more street and more urban, which is where drum and bass and dubstep come in. But there is a more intensified approach in the repetitive loop. The music evolved when Simon and I got the hardcore influence and added that into the mix of our African American influences.
Talking about frequency and rhythm again, this is when the language of percussion went centre stage. Nothing got more stripped down to the bone than acid house. Rhythm and frequency, simple.
In the beginning, machines moulded the music. When you take your original sampler from the late 80s, early 90s, if you're lucky, you have 30 seconds of sample time. If you want to do a Liveset that's going to last for two hours, with 30 seconds of sample time, you're going to have to make short, simple loops. So the machine gives birth to the one bar loop, like the one bar loop, because it's the only way you can actively do it. There's no other choice. The Roland 808 and 303, had a very simple message of short loops. Talking about frequency and rhythm again, this is when the language of percussion went centre stage. Nothing got more stripped down to the bone than acid house. Rhythm and frequency, simple.
The language of percussion is trance. Percussion trances you. You listen to a drum circle, you're going to trance. It's in the on-off-ness of it; these instruments take you out there. So the point is that when the bigger samplers came along with more time, I started to experiment with longer loops. I suddenly realised, one bar is the key. So, why? Because I'm a particular person who had a particular experience. I went for the acid, I went for the psychedelics, I didn't do the coke, I didn't do the ketamine, I didn't do the speed, I didn't do any of that. I did ecstasy and acid. So I was like, I want loops. We all developed that way.
You could argue, I guess in Holland, because of the access to great speed, gabber was an obvious one, a no-brainer. That's got a symbiosis. And that's not to say that you have to take these things. But, the popular vote seems to suggest that most people feel they do need to. No blame again. That's what happened. It is what it is.
FV: I hear that. If I may cite you, the future of rave is on the dance floor. What do you think we can learn from the dance floor nowadays?
SV: That was Jeff 23 who said that. The answer is on the dance floor. Well, if the answer is on the dance floor, what's the answer? Because we've all been on the dance floor. Once again, that is for us all to answer. I can only give you my point of view, you can only ever just talk from yourself.
I like to cut the crap. I've been involved with meditation experiences where we do retreats. And they're always using words like dharma and dana, and things that come from somewhere, where the guy says, "we would like you to give us some dana". And everyone's got a big question mark above their head. He goes, this is the Indian word for donation. And I was like, well, why didn't you just say donation then? Why do we have to call it dana? That's absolutely not in disrespect to the people of India whose natural way of talking about donation is dana. It's just, I think we should be talking from ourselves. You've really got to do it in the most respectful, deepest sense of the word, because quite simply, you can't talk for anyone else. You're not in anyone else's head.
The most important sign that someone is on the right path is in their ability to share and their ability to be generous, which is why, coming back to the beginning of this conversation, I started to talk about this idea of ‘give to the sound system’. Why is it so difficult to understand the fact that people who are in front of you are working really hard for you, and they're doing it for free. They've all let you come in, they've not asked you for money. Why doesn't it come into our sphere of thinking to go up to the sound system and give them five euros. That should just come from the heart. No one should even have to ask you. Look, what a great experience we're having here. A whole weekend for free, and I've just spent fucking 200 euros on coke. If you've got 8,000 people that all give 10 euros, that gives the sound system money to defend. In the old days, sound systems had to survive by doing business. But that was in the good old days when the police were scratching their heads. The problem is, today, the police are fucking aware of what's going on.
So we as people have to change our tactics. If you're going to be a clandestine person, you cannot stop still. You cannot just have one plan. Your plan must be in constant evolution. I would say the best plan we could have is one of generosity. If we generate a feeling of generosity between us, we can only win. Who knows what direction that might take? But it's got to be better than a direction where the DJs play for free, the sound systems suffer, and the coke dealer makes a million. It's got to be better than that. A sound system today is supposed to be defending the people. When the police come, they're the first to go down and say, hello, what's going on? They need to do that job. So, do you really think that they need to be compromised? Well done, the underground. We're really fucking strong because we've got a massive Achilles heel.
Look at the generosity of the sound systems and musicians for 35 years. So it stands to reason that the most obvious solution to change our scene and move forward is a generosity that we should not even ask for, it should just come. So spread the fucking word, make everybody understand, because if it's understood collectively as a group, it will be an incredible source of power for us as a scene. If you can imagine every single raver who ever went to a free party, giving five euros to the Fonds de Soutien Juridique des Sons, which is an association in France that defends sound systems who get into trouble with the police, we would have at least half a million. And if we had half a million and we had those lawyers who've already been working for five years for free to help sound systems. If we backed them up with a five-euro donation, we could go straight to the European courts and sort this out. That's how powerful it could be. I'm not saying that's the only answer, but it shows you what could happen with that tiny little participation that we all give.
That's the kind of thing we need to take on board as a scene, because if we do it that way, then the artists won't have to fuck off to the clubs, because that was the saddest thing for me. I had to go and play in the clubs, because in the scene that I helped build, musicians, VJs, Artists, Dancers can’t make a living. The moment I talked about money, it was like, oh, you're a sellout, you're a commercial, you want to be a star. It’s crazy when most free party musicians just want to survive and be a part of the community.
We've seen what happens, because you've got the anarchist revolution in Barcelona in the 1930s, where the anarchists and the communists got together and they had a people’s revolution. The problem was the money ran out, and the communists could go to Stalin and borrow money, so the anarchists wound up in prison. That’s very simplified of course, but it illustrates what happens when you throw away money in front of a world dominated by systems that are monetary. At the very least there seems to be a need for an easing process that has to take place, you can't do it in one go.
I think it was 2001, Loire Mariani, the French. They took the Teknival from Spiral Tribe. Sarkozy, the French, you know, Minister of Interior at that time. They had it for 13 years, pretty much. I went to one of those, and it was like going to that film District 9, you know, where you’ve got the aliens on the inside, and all the police on the outside, and a big barrier around it. They had a fence all the way around. Can you imagine what it's like if you trip and you're blocked in this fucking pen. There was more violence. There were more fights. There were more people disrespecting each other. Because when something is state-owned, it's not people-owned. In 2016, when the people took the Teknival back, it was in a forest. There were people all over the place, no barriers. There was love, there was connection. Why? Because it was the people's party. It was owned by us. And that changes everything.
So the authorities need to wake the fuck up. Because they had their chance, and it wasn't better. You still get crushes at football matches. You still get people dying in legal festivals. You still get problems. The problem we have is that we have all the arguments, but we don't have the money to present them. When you've got 200 euros in your pocket, and you're at a free party, is it too much to just put five euros to help your brothers and sisters? I think this is a really important question and something that we need to reflect on.
EB: Do you truly think that free parties can be sustainable for organisers? I know you've discussed this a bit already, but how could this look?
The first thing is donations, getting that message out. The other thing is collective conversations. One of the things I learned from meditation retreats is the end circle. Before everyone leaves, you all come together , you get in a circle, and you have a sharing experience, and you talk about what's just happened, the experience and what it's meant to you and how things are, and you share. You put in a rule that people can talk, but no one can answer back, because it can degenerate quite quickly if everyone's on a free-for-all. But as long as you respect the right to express yourself, I think that's a really great point to build things from, because it's the one thing missing from the party scene, which is that all the people fuck off and the sound system crew are left on their own.
Those who are left, the hardcore, can sit down and have a chat. That would go a long way to building things, because it's not one person who's going to have an idea here, it's all of us.
EB: So when you're looking back in time, what elements of free party culture have stayed, what elements are lost, and is it for the better, maybe?
SV: That's a loaded question. To be really honest with you, I haven't been to that many free parties recently. I go to Dropping Caravan, Trackers, Kernel Panic, because they're about my age group, and they've got a music policy that's not Frenchcore. I really love the DJ Beatum, who's from Dropping Caravan. I think his DJing is unbelievable. Really a pioneer in the free party, bringing very special music into a scene that is primarily either Frenchcore or tech house. I've had my fill of tech house, I just can't handle it anymore. It's not that it's bad music; it's just that I've heard it. It's really important to try and not be too judgmental, as if people like it, who am I to criticise, but I think I am allowed to exit stage left if I don’t like the music myself.
If your party is all looking the same, and you're only playing one type of music, ask yourself a question, because you're more of a sect than a free-minded, open, loving community.
It's like that question some people ask me: was it better in the 90s? And I'd say, do you know what? I'd have had to go to every single party that ever existed to make a response to that question. How can I answer that question? Because I missed hundreds of thousands of parties literally. So what do I know? I can say that in the 90s I was young, and I had this psychedelic experience with Spiral Tribe that was very special, and touched me deeply and profoundly, and will do so to the end of my life. But that doesn't mean to say that was better than anyone else.
The important thing is, it's down to us to make it happen. Be the good party. The key is generosity, love, sharing, and acceptance. If your party is all looking the same, and you're only playing one type of music, ask yourself a question, because you're more of a sect than a free-minded, open, loving community. But that's not to say that sometimes people don’t have to go into those places. Sometimes groups do need to group around certain things, because they're the only people who understand each other.
I think bringing the question to free parties, two things at this stage are really honest truths. I had to go elsewhere to survive. I could not survive in the free party scene as a musician, and I gave 10 years of my life to doing free parties. I was working for free, and I suddenly realised that I had no truck, no driving license, nowhere to live, and I was making music whilst other people were buying trucks, and were buying a whole bunch of shit, because they were making money, and I wasn't. So at that moment, as much as I loved the free party scene, the clubs are where I'm going to make my money. I don't see a revolution, because a revolution is when we're all equal. The free party is not equal as the cocaine dealer is at the top and the sound system at the bottom. So I ended up doing fewer free parties out of necessity to survive. Even though every time you wind up at a free party, playing as a musician, you go, this is the fucking shit, this is the place to be, because it is. It's such a shame.
I think it's disgusting to stop or prevent individuals from finding that balance if there's no community support. The two things that are difficult about free parties are that they are not an equal playing field. Certainly not financially. And it's not a place where you can develop as an artist. You can get your first foot in the door, but you can't develop as an artist in a free party. In fact, sticking true to the free party ethos, you will go out of business. And if you have kids, you're gonna have to go and get a job. That's our reality. They're the two things that pushed me further away from the free party today.
I only really picked up the mic today when I saw the guy in France lose his hand, and the French guy Steve who died at the hands of the CRS, because he was at a party. When we saw that happening in Spiral Tribe, we thought we've got to do something. What can we do? We don't have a sound system, we're not out doing free parties anymore. What can we actually do? So we re-released Forward the Revolution and gave all the money to the sound systems to help. And I decided I was going to pick up the fucking mic and start talking so that we could have a discussion to see if we could collectively work something out.
EB: What are the pros and cons of free party music becoming more commonplace in commercial spaces?
There are no pros and cons. It just is what it is. Let's not go into that game of better or worse. I was at Fusion, and it was so amazing to hear all these people playing 160 BPM with the delay on the kick. The music is bigger than all of us. The music's progressing and developing all the time. For the moment, this is where we are. When Spiral Tribe chose 160 BPM, we were way ahead of the game on that. Because on one side, you had the gabber people, 180 and above. Then you had all the Chicago, Detroit-influenced people sticking to 120-140, not much more. So there was this point in the middle, which was the 160 that was inevitably going to get discovered at some point. But you've got to realise that all those scenes had to go through all of that baggage of being a scene and coming through and developing all those different Detroit and Chicago versions, to the point that they've gone around in loops so much that the energy of the moment started to push towards a different signal coming through, a seeking of something else.
So there was a natural connection and feedback to the source that was going. Naturally, people started to play around with tempo, because tempo is king/queen. The same beat at 120 is not the same at 200. Whole musical genres are built out of a change of tempo. It's a natural process. Right now it's so nice to have this kind of psychedelic 90’s Network 23 thing back in the area.
EB: Why do you think Spiral Tribe receives more historical and cultural attention than other free party movements or collectives?
SV: We had Mark, who made incredible symbols, which are very easy to see and connect to. We also had this policy of never turning the music off. We would not stop until the last raver left, and that got us into trouble. When we were at Castlemorton, we were the last people to leave. So we got notoriously done for that. When you get caught by the police, suddenly you get hyped up, you're in all the newspapers and on television. So suddenly, you've got this propaganda machine calling you the most dangerous, evil people in Britain. That's great propaganda, and it boosts your name.
We were also the first to leave Britain properly, where we started Teknivals. The English side of the free party was an equal playing field; everybody was equal in that no one did more than another. It was a shared experience. When Spiral Tribe came to France and started Teknivals, that was us. And when we went to Czech and started Teknivals, that was with Mutoid Waste and Kamikaze as well. We went round Europe pushing the free party thing, and we kicked off scenes everywhere. So we became the central point.
The other thing that was powerful was the fact that we created our own sound. A lot of other sound systems were playing house music or acid. We radically shifted it into Hard-tec Tribe. So not only were we creating festivals called Teknival, doing illegal parties and bringing free party ethos all around Europe, we were doing improvised live Hard-tec / Tribe, which was our own baby. We did Network 23 records, Stormcore records, SP23, Spiral Tribe. Not to mention the mixtapes. “Fuck Techno Import“ had a massive impact in France. Ask any French raver about “Fuck Techno Import”. That mix put Hard-tec on the table. That tape was copied so many times. So we're quite a polyvalent crew. We've got a whole crew organising parties, the artistic side with Mark doing incredibly iconic imagery, and Simon, me, Ixy and Kaos developing this really hard and funky sped up Detroit and Chicago music. So I think those elements have added to the reason why we've been given more exposure.
EB: Going back to when you mentioned Mark and the symbolism that he worked on within the graphics, and how that related to anarchism and rejecting the status quo, has Spiral Tribe always been politically engaged from the start?
SV: I don't know how you can see the other side and not be politically engaged. I mean, there are many ways you can see the other side. If you're massively oppressed, you're completely aware of the stupidity and hypocrisy of the oppressors. But if you've been comfortably numb and growing up in a Babylon urban fucking comfortable zone, getting a heavy dose of psychedelics can really make you see the stupidity of everything.
That's why it was political from the start, because we were really in this intense eye of the storm of new music. Acid House was a year zero in a musical and cultural context.
Also, we were in the crumbling warehouses of an industrial area that had been sold out by the ruling classes, where we were witnessing the crumbling of a proletariat trade union kind of solidarity that was built up in the 20th century through bloodshed, pain and suffering of so many people. So you were standing there in this rave in a symbol of the decline of socialist values that were fought hard for. But at the same time, you were seeing the other side and realising the stupidity of believing that you're just this robot biological thing that's going to go through life, eat and consume as much as you can and then die, and there's nothing. You suddenly became aware that this is not at all the case. There is an eternal us, we are all part of it, and we will transition, we will not die.
I think it's Ibram X, an Afro-American writer, who says racism comes from the fact that one person wants more than another person, so they have to justify why, and it all starts there. It's as simple as that. Are you a sharer or do you want it all for yourself? If you want it all for yourself, you're gonna have to justify that, and that's gonna make you a racist, that's gonna make you selfish, that's gonna make you someone who gets more and more confused.
That's why it was political from the start, because we were really in this intense eye of the storm of new music. Acid House was a year zero in a musical and cultural context. It was like this intense wave that came in, and we were all gonna surf it. I think it was one of those moments where everything became very clear and if you had a heart, you could only stand on the side of political critic and looking for ways to try and reach out and change this: decolonising ourselves, taking off the mask, seeing who we really are, all the way to your nationality, all the way to all of these illusions that they put into you about what you're supposed to be. You're just a human being, and everything else is a construct.
FV: Around the time you were also speaking about a revolution. What do you think it has brought?
SV: I think the most powerful revolution we could have is generosity. When we all step back and go, I don't actually need what you're giving me and what I've got, I will share. There's a kind of process you have to go through to get to a place where that makes real valid sense. They always attack generosity as being utopic. Today, people who want to share are considered by the media to be the most dangerous people in the world. People who protest against Palestine being genocided are considered to be more diabolical than the people doing the genociding. What kind of fucking world is this? This is so fucked. So, I think this is the point, within all of this experience we've had in rave culture, there's this possibility to reach into that really important thing of music and dance to liberate. Or we can just see it as a drug party or a social event. Everyone makes a choice. With the Wave Arising project that we're working on, we're going to try and take it to the music and dance. The silence, the no drugs, no alcohol experiences together where we dance and improvise music as our focus.
It has revolutionised some minds, but it also seems to have closed some. In reality, its has brought many things, but nothing that truly resembles a collective revolution. We need to meditate on that fact and do better, in my opinion.
FV: Why this combination of music and dance?
SV: Number one, I'm a musician and my partner is a dancer. But also, when I really deeply reflect on why I'm a raver, it's the music and dance. No question, nothing is more important than the music and the dance. For some people, it just means listening to David Guetta. But for other people, it's the electric church. I'm a massive fan of Jimi Hendrix, and I love his idea of the electric church.
I love the idea that there's just a moment when you go into a club or when you go into an event, and for some reason, it's a bit slow in the beginning, but there's a magic moment where time just flies by. I’ll never forget one time I went to see P-Funk, and there was this band playing before, and it took four hours to get to hear P-Funk. We were in the shittiest venue in the world, nowhere to sit down, and my legs were fucking killing me. The first note they played, I forgot everything, and I danced for three hours. Because of the music, it lifted me. You can go to the worst club in the world, put a Bob Marley record on, and the vibe just goes up. The presence of the source is in every one of those actions because if you're making the music or dancing, you're in deep connection with the source. So at the end of the weekend, let's sit down and talk about it. Maybe in that hedonistic experience in the blues, there can be the deepest connections to the source.
I've had some of the most powerful connections through the blues, and it's supposed to be this blues bar dirty kind of music, but it's got the pure fucking love of the source in it, as much as the gospel, which is supposed to be this wonderful religious music. They're equally religious, the bad guy and the good guy and the good guy and the bad guy are interchangeable, and they've all got the source in them. We've all got the source in us, right? And it's there. We will all be visited by ourselves, and we will all connect to that collective us, where there's no up, down, left or right. There's just one. No duality. It comes to us. It's in every one of those moments of creative expression when it's done, and you feel it. Get a group of people together and have an experience, then see where that leads. But allow it to come. Don't get one in the group telling you it's like this or like that, there's no rules, there's just connection.
FV: When you create music for the Wave Rising project, do you feel like it's the same mindset where you improvise in 69db or R-ZAC?
SV: The intention is slightly different because the dynamics are way bigger. As an improviser, you're always about time and place. The pressure when you go into a Saturday night experience is that everyone's had a hard week. Some have been suffering, some have been paying taxes, some have been paying rent, some people can't even afford to get fucking petrol in the car. You know, it's Saturday fucking night, and we've got to feel good! So if you ain't doing it, get the fuck off the stage, we don't have time for anything but feeling good. So, a Saturday night set is very important, because you tune into the collective energy and the connection that's coming through. If you get that right, then you can find beautiful experiences. This source manifests in the room, and you can all feel it. That's the electric church.
The music reflects each event differently and both R-Zac and Wave Arising surf that way.
EB: Was that the generator going off?
SV: It'd be nice if we could hear something. There might be a couple of questions.
EB: Now we're like this, would anyone like to ask a question?
Audience speaker: We all love to be in places like this. We live for this, but it can also have very destructive sides, especially the younger you are and the less experienced you are. Would there be anything specific you would like to give as advice around what has made you come to this position where you feel so well surrounded by everything?
SV: Very great use of the word 'experience'. We need to help each other learn from our experiences and not get so dogmatic about the scene. It is supposed to be a learning space, in my opinion. So yes, you are right, I have this chat at the moment only because I have had nearly 40 years in the scene. There is nothing special about me. As long as we look at the events as a learning place or experience. Then we are on the right track, in my opinion.
On another tip, one of the most important things that just happened to me is that I stopped drinking. I wasn't even thinking about stopping drinking. I was really happy drinking, you know, and it was really weird. I came back from a party, and I had a six-pack of beer, and I'd been on the road for a week, and I had drunk quite a lot, but I put the beer down. Normally, I'd just clean that fucking pack of beer. I didn't see that coming. How the fuck did that happen? It's been two years now, and I don't miss it at all. When I come back from a party, I used to be drunk, so I'd watch Netflix, and now I smoke a little pipe of hash, and I make music - that says everything. What more do you need to know? If I'm pissed, I'm just going to watch fucking Netflix. If I'm high, I'm going to make music. But don't be too hard on yourself. The right time will come.
We're not really all here to change everything, are we? We're having a human experience. This is only a little part of the universe. This is only part of the story, and we're here to learn. Part of the learning is living with fucking idiots - living with evil people. If there weren't evil people, you wouldn't know what evil is. And actually, evil people are a part of the reality experience. Because the moment you open up the Pandora's box of duality, we've all got to make our choices within that.
Some people talk about a door that we all know is there, and it is the way out of the trap. But the closer you go to that door, the harder it gets. But the quicker you go to the door, the quicker it will come to test you because you can only go through that door when you're ready. And you might think you're ready on acid. Well, good luck, because that could be quite a trip. The Taoists say that there are a hundred million ways to climb the mountain - we've all got our own way. So, to be in tune with yourself is the most important thing. Really listen to yourself. Take advice, read books, but trust yourself and your connection to the source because it talks to us. It wants us to fucking wake up - it being all of us.
I think that we should give each other a break and start being a bit nicer with each other. As long as the bullshit is not hurting everyone else. If someone's got a real problem with addiction because they've gone into the dark side of the rave, give them room and give them love. As long as they're not taking the piss. It took me 35 years to suddenly come out of being an alcoholic. What the fuck? I didn't even know that was going to happen. It’s transformed the whole vision of everything for me, because I walked out of one circuit and went into another circuit. And I think we can all relate to that because we've all been in so many different circuits. So, I mean, that's the challenge, isn't it? It's a challenge for all of us. What do we want this to be? What are we doing here, and where are we going as a scene? That's really a big question.