Integrations No. 1: Panorama Bar, Sunday, Nov. 19, 2023
An ongoing account of my experiences as a DJ and dancer.
I sometimes struggle to integrate my rave experiences into my everyday life. Some experiences are so personal and subjective that I actually sometimes feel more alone after a rave. Much has been written about the togetherness we experience at parties but what about how we feel when we find ourselves alone Monday morning? Maya says that usually we experience at best “fleeting moments of freedom” and I think she’s right. Maybe we wake up into a job we feel unsatisfied with. Maybe we wake up in an unhappy relationship. Maybe we wake up missing the feelings of excitement and activation that we experience in altered states. This constant push-pull between the sometimes utopian experience of a party versus the harsh reality of everyday life is jarring at best and really problematic at worst. If we fail to integrate we risk feeling that parties are our only refuge. I’ve felt this way at times and about 10 years ago it led me to a serious drug problem, an unhealthy set of relationships, and a deep sadness about my then job and life prospects. Being transgender and not addressing it in my everyday life was an additional layer. I’ve worked through a lot of that and while I still have some bad days and anxiety, I finally found ways to integrate the experiences I’ve had into what feels like a less fractured sense of identity and self. I’ll get more into integration techniques in a future edition of the Raver’s Toolkit, but for now it suffices to say that writing about my experiences and talking about them with others during times away from the dancefloor has helped me to process my experiences, form an epistemology of raving, and find a deeper sense of purpose/self. I started in some sense publishing my integrations in 2017 after really intense experiences playing at Tuf in Seattle, Campout in Pennsylvania, Mamba Negra in Brazil and Panorama Bar in Germany. Within a few days of each set I would sit down, write about the event and share the note on my socials.
Last night I played my last European set for six months at Panorama Bar. Today is Tuesday. I am sitting on a flight home and working on a now familiar task, my integration writing.
I played 2 days ago at Panorama Bar from 8pm to midnight, a cherished time slot. I call it “Sunday Service” because it feels like church to me; we gather together with intentions to have a powerful experience of something difficult to put into words—a kind of collective celebration and confrontation with music, hope and fear.
Virginia ended her set at 127 BPM so I kept that pulsation for the first hour. House and breaks sound so heavy and powerful at that tempo and I didn’t want to break the gentle heaving she had coalesced in the dancers. Too often people equate tempo with energy which I think is a seductive fallacy. I love fast music, but I love mid tempo and down tempo too. The energy comes from rhythm and pulsation, not just tempo.
I started with “Excuse Me” by Direct 2 Disc. It is one of my favorite tracks ever and is what my friend and manager Alex calls “a classic Eris tune.” After the set he reminded me that he first heard my DJing when Honcho published my mix on their podcast back in 2017. “Excuse Me” was on that mix so hearing it reminded him of ‘the beginning’ (our beginning). For me personally it also reminds me of the time period just before I started touring. It puts me back in that special time when I was just starting to talk openly about the connection between raving, music and the concept of an enchanted world. There is something declaratory about the track—-it is like a warning shot. “Excuse Me” states the voice on the record, as if to say: We are about to enter the hallowed halls of the Motherbeat, prepare yourself.
As the beat kicked in I pulled out of my purse a very special mushroom capsule. It was grown by a Portuguese woman who has been cultivating for decades. We call these capsules “Grandma Strength” in her honor, because even a small dose packs a punch. Believe it or not, .25 grams of these mushrooms in my body along with the synergistic effect of the music, the dancers, the heat, the energy of the club, the volume, and the deck playing, produce a full visual trip with a peak. For anyone not familiar, .25 grams of a typical mushroom will often be a true “microdose” producing no immediately noticeable or mystical effects.
The decks were giving me hell for the first 30 minutes. Every time I would try to ride the pitch to do a long mix my micro adjustments would skip the needle. It is hard to stay in my heart when this is happening. But Maya helped me to sort it out. The cap for the pitch shift was pushed down very tightly so my movements were torquing the entire deck and thus skipping the tone arm. By the time I played “Let’s Rock the Planet” the set was starting to take shape and the issues had been resolved.
My first musical peak was with a remix of a very well known Goldfrapp song by legendary hip hop pioneer Mantronix. I found this white label pre-release promo at a shop in Amsterdam a few weeks ago and was delighted because the promo version contains a sax sample that was stripped from the “official release.” For me the magic of this remix is in this classic hip hop sample which fits perfectly with her strong vocal and turns an otherwise simple club mix into an uncanny Discordian gem. It reminds me of the KLF’s approach in a really nice way. This is speculation but I assume Mute Records couldn’t properly clear the sample contained in the remix so the official release had to omit it.
Tracks like this typify something I think is essential about my approach and about the Motherbeat. I think of one of my “jobs” as a DJ this way: my work is to dissolve the genres which reduce music to categories and instead hear the music as an underlying set of pulsations, resonances, rhythms and narratives. After the set, someone said to me that they liked the set, it was the first time they heard me play, and they were under the false impression that I play “only” house. The truth is that if you wanted to buy all the records I played during my 4 hour set in a record store you would need to dig in the following sections:
1. House 2. Deep House/Vocal House/Dub House/Disco House 3. Club Tracks 4. Techno 5. Trance 6. Garage/UKG 7. Progressive House 8. Bass Music 9. Florida Breaks 10. West Coast Breaks 11. Nu School Breaks 12. Big Beat 13. 90’s Hardcore Techno 14. Synth Pop 15. Hip Hop 16. Edits 17. DJ Tools/scratch records 18. Field recordings 19. Hardcore Punk
A number of people commented that the set felt a bit like “trance” which I think is fair because I was really trying to create a hip-house-trance sound in the sense of the word “trance” as an adjective not as a noun. This resulted in a sort of ritualistic entrancing proto-trance set made out of fragments. Maya and I call this sound of the Motherbeat simply “The Mystery.”
I took my shirt off during the track “Take Me” which was not coincidental. I hesitate to share this because it is personal and likely to be misunderstood but I feel that during my deepest sets I have to make myself vulnerable and to in some sense offer myself to the beat.
The act is symbolic in another sense as well. People with breasts are rarely in spaces where it is socially sanctioned to take off our shirts unless we are doing so as objects of desire. I didn’t do it to feel sexy or be hot or something like that. I did it to share my power and my embodiment with a community of people—to give permission to be myself to myself and maybe to others as well. One of the primary roles of the artist in society is to give permission to others to simply be themselves and to break social constructions.
My friend commented with some hesitation that the act felt like a warrior preparing herself. We both tried to find a better analogy because of course we have the privilege to lead mostly peaceful lives. There is a drop/scratch I did in the set from an old hardcore punk record meant to acknowledge this: “Peace, it’s your choice” (emphasis on “your”). What I mean with that drop is that we should all reflect that the relative peace we experience in the world is a choice we may have that not all people have. This drop is a reflection on the situation many find themselves in where they must fight to protect their freedom and their right to self-determination. It also reflects on the situation where people find themselves embedded into violence they cannot stop or control. I am a deeply pacifistic person but I try to remind myself as often as I can that I have the privilege of a peaceful life. Is peace a choice for the Palestinian people or the people of Ukraine? Of course not.
Another friend commented that I must be feeling “happy” in life because the set was so soft and focused on beauty and togetherness. I appreciated the chance to process with her. I told her that I felt a happiness after the set but that I have felt for months a deep turning anxiety and exhaustion because of world events including all the death in Palestine and Israel, the ongoing war in Ukraine, the possible second presidency of Trump, the systematic destruction of the environment, and most people’s cruel indifference to animal life and the rights of animals as living sentient beings.
I always bring the outside world with me into these sets. The music is not meant as an escape, false utopia or expression of happiness. It is meant to conjure feelings of connection to the earth and each other which I think we need to internalize to be motivated to heal ourselves and to feel a direct responsibility to try to address the world’s problems. The music is to create that which can be referred to as a “pause”—a moment to stop yelling at each other and realize how precious our lives are; to recall the powerful togetherness we can experience as people capable of expressing and embodying pure unconditional love; and to suggest possibility.
Maya and I went to the Louvre earlier in the week with her Mom, who was visiting France with a close friend. We spent much of the time in the Antiquities, specifically the sections for Greek and Roman art. While Maya and Cormac were dancing next to me, shirts off and fully ecstatic, I couldn't help but think of the mythological statues. I was tripping hard and really getting into the idea that they were protecting me and acting as centurions of the Motherbeat.
I kept thinking of a stone fragment at the Louvre which depicted an initiation into one of Greece’s many Mystery Religions. These religions were composed of the varied spiritual pagan and early Christian practices which proliferated openly until they were practically wiped-out by the ascendance of the Roman Catholic Church. Are we a special group like this, with untold Mysteries operating outside of the dominant culture and very much vulnerable to its predilection towards dominion? It sounds strange, maybe even off-putting at first, but consider this…
The Mystery at Eleusis, a.k.a. the Elucinian Mystery, was a festival that was held for well over a 1,000 years before the Roman emperor Theodosius I closed the Elucinian sanctuaries by decree in the name of the Christian god. The most significant rule for anyone attending the festival was that the Mystery rite itself (the ceremony and substance consumed there) could never be shared or talked about. I can’t help but draw a parallel to Panorama Bar since the main prohibition at the club is to never take a photo and share it with anyone. It is an implicit promise we all make when we decide to walk through the door to gather and do the things we do there.
As the set progressed my heart opened more and more. My visuals became strong and my emotions started to almost overwhelm me. I’d been waiting for months to find the perfect moment to play “Late Night Love” by Maya (Octo Octa). I started my last hour with the track very intentionally. I have limited my sets to two hours solo and three hours with Octa since my ear injury a year ago. I accepted the offer to play 4 hours in Panorama Bar because I miss doing extended sets and simply felt the risk was worth it. I ended hour three with 3 tracks I love closing my sets with and then played “Late Night Love.” My idea was that the last hour would go into a special place that I can’t often reach - an epilogue of sorts; a continuation into something deeper; a hidden chapter. The last hour reflected a level of vulnerability and softness that I would only share at a very special and intentional gathering of souls.
The last vocal track I played was “Heart on the Line'' by the 1990’s synth-rave band Fortran 5. My friend, the Chicago DJ Justin Aulis Long, and I were talking about the song a few weeks before I left for tour (he loves the Voodoo Child version). I found it covered in dust at a record store roughly a week before my set at Panorama Bar. I decided that the synchronicity was something I should honor and respond to. Unwittingly, the song, my slowest of the set, became a metaphorical manifesto for what the set—and this writing—were ultimately about for me.
Here are the lyrics:
I took my chance before it passed Not knowing if it would last I trusted as I will again Hoping that you felt the same Another day, another dawn I wake to find you gone A scribbled note, the only sign That I laid my heart on the line It was a risk I didn't have to take It was a move I didn't think I'd make I wasn't sure if you changed your mind Once that I'd laid my heart on the line Laid my heart on the line I took my chance before it passed Not knowing if it would last I trusted, as I will again Hoping that you felt the same Another day, another dawn I wake to find you gone A scribbled note, the only sign How many times have we done this before? And after me will there be more? If it's just a thing, tell me in time Before I go, and lay my heart on the line Lay my heart on the line I took my chance before it passed Not knowing that it would last I trusted, as I will again Hoping that you felt the same Another day, another dawn I wake to find you gone A scribbled note, the only sign That I laid my heart on the line It was a risk I didn't have to take It was a move I didn't think I'd make I wasn't sure if you changed your mind Once that I'd laid my heart on the line Laid my heart on the line
As the set closed I experienced something like an out-of-body moment. Everyone was yelling and I was overwhelmed with gratitude. I said in an internal voice “I can’t believe this is my life. How lucky am I to be in this place, with these people, sharing music and my techniques without compromise.” In moments like these I’ve never felt so alive and utterly invested in the present moment.
An extra special thanks goes out to the artist UFO Space who came to the club to meet me for the first time. His gorgeous track, which reminds me of early Jark Prongo, is called “Rainbow Abduction” and it deeply moved me and the dancers. Also a big thanks to my pal Bonner who is an amazing DJ and friend. They travel with me a lot and I was delighted to play a special Youth ”Pure Trance” version of “Chorus” by Erasure for them, which led to one of the most gorgeous moments on the floor and some tears (“And they covered up the sun. Until the birds had flown away. And the fishes in the sea. Had gone to sleep...”). Another huge thanks also goes out to Eoin DJ who gave me a wonderful test press of their new record at last week’s Temple of Dreams in London. They are the only artist I played two songs by. I slowed their tracks down from 142/140 to 135 and got to experience the music for the first time in the most visceral way.
And finally and most importantly a huge thanks to the dancers and friends who showed up and truly put their hearts on the line.
Your scribbler - Eris Drew
"One of the primary roles of the artist in society is to give permission to others to simply be themselves and to break social constructions."
🪷🪷🪷
Love you so much Eris.. this set was such an education, and its really always a privilege to spend time with you and Maya..
"Eris drew and the Pillars of Protection"
x
cormac & betty