SXSW might be the best festival ever for scoring random free shit—and I’m saying this as a professional swag bag schemer. The music, film and tech gathering has been gradually cannibalized by corporate interests since it began in 1987, going from a scrappy showcase of Austin’s music scene to a networking bonanza for tech founders and angel investors raising millions on LinkedIn.

Sure, there’s still some cool music sprinkled into the mix—shoutout to Diles Que No Me Maten, a psychedelic post-rock band from Mexico City whose freewheeling excursions into saxophone-tinged free jazz and spoken word carried the punky zing of their home city. But such discoveries feel like sideshows, and for the most part, SXSW’s subject position resides squarely within the machine.

This was my first time at SXSW, and I scrolled through hundreds of panels, networking sessions, pitch competitions, and sponsored lounges on the conference’s app, desperately trying to find programming that didn’t feel like it was trying to sell me something. Quickly, I realized that SXSW is the eyeroll-free safe space where marketing gurus learn about the “four types of attention” they must master for effective campaigns; tech bros pick up “skills to succeed in an AI-powered world;” and Spotify’s new CEO plugs the company’s mission of “delivering creativity to the world.”

The irony of company representatives embracing the ethos of Big Tech and Big Pharma while simultaneously claiming to be “changing the game” was so soul-deadening that I had no choice but to surrender to the base, craven part of my soul that delights in collecting junk food, plastic tchotchkes, and reusable tote bags bequeathed by random acts of corporate largesse. SXSW is known for attracting big brands competing to outdo each other with their glossiest approximations of culture, and while marketing budgets were supposedly smaller this year, the decentralized format of the conference, which took place in dozens of event venues and hotels all over downtown Austin, created even more opportunities for sponsored activations and “immersive experiences.”

“What kinds of free shit will I fill my tote bag with today?” I asked myself every morning, as I joined the slipstream of tech bros and music executives flowing down Congress Ave. Redistributing the wealth of foam plushies and free barbecue sponsored by some pharmaceutical company to my friends who couldn’t afford $1995 festival passes thus became more than a little game to keep myself sane—it was praxis. While most of the freebies will probably end up as landfill, a couple items were admittedly pretty cool.

Here is all the free shit I scored at SXSW, ranked from least to most cursed:

MDMA SUPPLEMENTS 😈

Biohacking bros have an extreme nerdiness around neurochemistry that comes in handy for recreational drug users interested in frying their brains responsibly. Third Wave podcaster Paul Austin introduced me to Vessel, a company selling supplement stacks to counteract MDMA’s neurotoxic effects. The elaborate protocol, which is so over-the-top it borders on absurd, costs $100 for two trips’ worth of supplements, and is split into six batches that must be taken one hour before ingesting MDMA, then 12, 24, 36, 48, and 60-hours after. (The MDMA itself is not included.) Ingredients include some usual suspects (magnesium, Lion’s Mane, L-theanine, ashwaganda), but also lots of deeper cuts that I’ve never heard of and are probably a bitch to source yourself. NGL, I kinda love this.

PROTEST FLYER 😈😈

On the first morning of SXSW, I came across five people standing outside the JW Marriott, holding up signs and waving a Palestinian flag. Most passers-by were ignoring them, and when I grabbed one of their fliers, a protestor turned to me with surprise and shouted “THANK YOU,” his eyes hungrily locking into mine.

Turns out the demonstrators were with the advocacy group United Musicians and Allied Workers, and were trying to draw attention to SXSW's continued ties to the military industrial complex. The backstory: in 2024, over 80 artists dropped out of SXSW to protest sponsorship from the literal US Army; in response to the backlash, the festival announced it would cut ties with defense contractors going forward. This year, that promise was quietly removed from its website, and SXSW partnered with a local startup incubator whose clients include defense contractors Palantir and BAE Systems.

This protest flier is slightly cursed because it points to an interesting complexity, especially in this era of escalating global warfare: as Texas Monthly pointed out, “the part of tech that actually is booming—military innovation—is exactly the part SXSW badge holders seem least comfortable embracing.”

QUESTIONABLY LEGAL WEED DRINKS FROM OUT OF OFFICE / TENUR 😈😈😈

Something weird and kind of lit is happening in Texas right now with weed. Even though cannabis is still illegal in the state, super cute dispensaries and smoke lounges are popping up all over Austin, selling hemp-derived edibles, vapes, and buds through a legal loophole in the 2018 Farm Bill. That loophole is closing as regulators actively crack down on these products, but during SXSW, it was still giving grey-market golden era.

One afternoon, I pulled up to a house party hosted by Tenur, an AI-powered social networking app for “the ones who know their network is their greatest asset.” The crowd was mostly 40-somethings with snatched surgeries and sunburnt tans frolicking in a pool; I hid under an umbrella and dissociated while sipping this sparkling THC drink from a brand called Out of Office. The high is always kind of mid with these alt-cannabinoids, which make you feel kind of blunted without the radiant full-spectrum stoned experience—but the taste was surprisingly refreshing.

GARNIER’S MAKEUP REMOVER AND BOOTLEG SMOOTHIES 😈😈😈😈

Rolling Stone’s Future of Music showcase was purportedly the place to check out rising talents, so on the night that Lola Young was playing, I got in line at The Moody Theater behind a bunch of burly German music executives wearing white button-downs. In the lobby, a brand rep was giving out bottles of Garnier’s micellar makeup remover—a product you might recognize from the discount bin at CVS—which was inexplicably paired with a smoothie in a strange shade of off-white, the cheap plastic bottle emblazoned with a sad little sticker in the shape of Garnier’s logo. Not sure what the ROI was for a multi-billion dollar beauty company giving people bootleg smoothies to drink while watching a band, but there’s definitely a spreadsheet out there justifying this confusingly cursed pairing.

PROTEIN PASTA, FANCY CHIPS, AND A GOLF POLO SHIRT FROM ULTRANATIVE x ARENA HALL 😈😈😈😈😈

Ultranative is an Austin-based private equity firm that invests in psychedelic startups and alternative health companies. A while ago, I wrote about their attempt to create a plant-based MDMA pipeline for DoubleBlind’s (paywalled) newsletter last year, so when a calendar invitation popped up on my phone, reminding me that their SXSW day party was ending in 15 minutes, I jumped on a scooter and raced over to Arena Hall—a new members club for “influential builders and thought leaders”—to see what’s up with them.

The venue was teeming with young professionals who looked like they had invested wisely in diversified portfolios. (Overheard: “I had a meeting with Spotify’s CEO this morning…. they can’t afford me.”) The healthy slop bowls were overflowing, and a table was stacked with giveaways of polo shirts for golfers. In the outdoor patio, someone sitting on a panel conversation on the science of sugar was wearing a MAHA hat, and when an audience member chimed in, he referenced something that had the approval of “Bobby”… yes, that would be RFK Jr.

When I peeked into the swag bag, I noticed it contained a bunch of food you might find in the aisles of an Erewhon— a box of protein pasta, a giant bag of gourmet chips, an almond flour cookie, a nut butter brownie. That’s when I realized I’d made it to the tip of the political horseshoe, where California’s wellness influencers meet Austin’s MAHA-adjacent techies.

GODREJ AER’S DISGUSTING AIR FRESHENER

“This will change your life, sis,” a smiling woman said, reaching into a cooler and handing me two plastic packets as I walked through the streets. If I looked closer, I might have seen her fangs. Instead I received the gifts with gratitude, thinking they were innocent little face wipes to combat the 90-degree heat. Alas, I had accidentally welcomed into my sphere one of the most cursed items of the week—air fresheners whose sickening scent would haunt my every waking move, sticking to my skin like some abominable demon. I placed this product in my friend’s bathroom, and as soon as I opened the plastic, a nauseating, stomach-curdling stench flooded the entire house, as if someone had used toxic-grade cleaning products to mask the smell of a rotting corpse. When I threw it into the trash minutes later, the nightmare didn’t end, instead continuing to seep out of the trash can for days. Even the cat yowled and hissed, as if she knew that something unholy had been unleashed.

BOTTLE OF WATER FROM TESLA’S ROBOT

One afternoon, after watching a panel where Serena Williams touted her investments into woman and minority-run health companies, I wandered into a parking lot where a huge crowd was gathered around a Tesla cybertruck. At first, I assumed some lame celebrity was making an appearance, then realized this audience was gathered to witness something far weirder: a live demo of Optimus, the company’s humanoid robot, which is still in beta testing and slated for slated for sale in 2027. Smug-looking Tesla employees ushered dozens of humans willing to wait in a long line to interact with a robot stationed behind a bar. After handing over a bottle of water, the robot flexed its creepily dexterous hands into a peace sign, as if anticipating the barrage of excited photos and selfies.

It was unclear if this robot was being controlled remotely by AI or some underpaid operator in a third-world country—a similar demo in Miami sparked an online debate after a robot fell backwards, and made a motion as if removing a VR headset. All I know is that I’m tired of billionaire man-children bringing to life their sci-fi fantasies. This corny Daft Punk-looking ass is the future of robotics? It even had the nerve to ask for tips.

Jeff Mills is playing in San Francisco this weekend, at a very special double-header where he will celebrate the 30th anniversary of his iconic Liquid Room, Tokyo mix at 1015 Folsom, and perform his 2023 live score of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on March 7 at Palace of Fine Arts. The shows are part of a yearlong series of events celebrating Detroit’s originators presented by local promoter As You Like It. Tickets and info here. LA heads can also catch him playing with Developer on Sunday at Work.

Techno Wizard Jeff Mills beamed into the simulation known as “Earth” on a laser, piercing through the clouds through a hole in the sky and taking in the possible utopia surrounding him with unblinking, amphibious eyelids. Perhaps the DMT entities who watch over this god-forsaken realm sensed that the earthlings needed something different amid the dust of collapse. So they gave us techno, an immaculate technology manufactured at the nexus of the ancient-future, and appointed The Wizard as one of its storied keepers. At least I think that’s how the mythos goes.

Even as he coasted through 80s Detroit on a skateboard, raising his fist with Underground Resistance, and absorbing the synth disco, cosmic funk, and proto-electro on The Electrifying Mojo’s airwaves, The Wizard hovered in a threshold outside of time. While peers looked to submerged civilizations and cybernetics for inspiration, The Wizard spoke to the stars, his antennae permanently tuned towards the frequencies of the future, his mind spinning through the rings of Saturn. Here was a man with an extraordinary talent: the ability to jump between timelines and intercept otherworldly transmissions.

Listen to Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo, enshrined as the greatest DJ mix of all time. In that seventh-floor club under the seedy neon of Shinjuku, The Wizard flexed with a raw manic energy so pure that he had the crowd on their knees as records flew to the floor, scratching and twisting and teetering on the verge of collapse as he tore open wormholes in search of communion with the machines. As the needle slid across the surfaces of the discs, motorik rhythms driving against whiplash backspins, propelling forward before bringing it all back, the precarity of it all became a metaphor for the frailty of information transmission—and the insistence that we persevere when it all goes wrong. The Wizard’s undying desire to go beyond merges sci-fi and fantasy to conjure sounds we’ve yet to feel—if you wanted to believe in something, why not believe in this.

But even as he probed the impossible, the Wizard gazed into the dark halls where he presided night after night, and saw inside the dancing bodies a decay caused by wanton hedonism without direction—a rigidity of the mind that needed to be further coaxed open, towards the limitless possibilities beyond the decadence of the dancefloor. The membrane between this world and the next was thin, but few dared to walk in. Instead they shuddered at the thought of it, closed their eyes, or held up their phone screens. Still, the Wizard refused to retreat into the gilded memory palace of nostalgia, or the bloated inertia of success, ascending into his role as an elder statesman without ever losing his cool. He stretched the elastic skin of techno over new forms—orchestras, spiritual jazz, psychedelic scores to silent films—and never stopped preaching his prayer of techno-optimism.

But as Big Tech’s oligarchs tightened their grips of enslavement by algorithm, some wondered if The Wizard had become an avatar for a future forestalled. Can the speculative Afrofuturism of the techno elders still be a counterweight to the grim reality of digital feudalism? How quickly have the instruments of our promised liberation turned into the tools of our surveillance. Even the machines know we are lost. As I wandered through the mist wondering how to download the reality upgrade, a disembodied voice suddenly emerged from a black screen. From behind the veil The Wizard granted me a few moments to hack his mind, and learn how he’s thinking about some of the most pressing questions of our time.

Jeff Mills is playing in San Francisco this weekend, at a very special double-header where he will celebrate the 30th anniversary of his iconic Liquid Room, Tokyo mix at 1015 Folsom, and perform his 2023 live score of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on March 7 at Palace of Fine Arts. The shows are part of a yearlong series of events celebrating Detroit’s originators presented by local promoter As You Like It. Tickets and info here. LA heads can also catch him playing with Developer on Sunday at Work.

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🎙️ As a bonus for paid subscribers, the audio version of this interview is available at the bottom of this post! Also a reminder that our first subscriber hang is today at 4:20pm PST, details here.

Michelle Lhooq: Hi Jeff, I wanted to start with kind of a fun question. Whether it’s through dreams or mind-expanding psychoactives or spirituality or even direct experience, I was wondering if you’ve ever had a compelling alien encounter?

Jeff Mills: [laughs] No, no… I’ve never had a compelling encounter.

Not even in the subconscious mind?

Well, in my youth, a few strange things happened. But… I think that those were more dreams than anything else.

[laughs] I believe in dream visitations.

Well, actually, a few years ago, I’ve seen something quite interesting on a flight. You know, looking out the window, something clearly was at an angle going up into the atmosphere, not that far from our plane, that was a brownish, grayish color. And it was at an angle that was definitely not an airplane. But I think that’s kind of common now, right? I think that many people are seeing things like this, even more so now.

Well in the age of SpaceX, I think it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish.

I mean, if you run the numbers and you do the calculations, chances are great that we’re not alone. That’s for sure.

So I was watching Metropolis the other night and it struck me that the speculative vision of the future that the film presents has in many ways already arrived. I’m curious, as so many advances that once seemed like science fiction become real, how has your vision of the future shifted from back when you were thinking about this in the 80s and 90s?

I’m getting more and more excited, actually, as time moves on. I like to look back to compare say, 100 years ago, 1926 to 2026, looking at similarities between what was happening then and what’s happening now, in order to be able to have some type of idea of what may be happening in 100 years from now, and how we’ll get there. And it’s kind of interesting to look at the signs, you know, the signals and the signs.

The signs of what?

Well, 100 years ago, we were in the Industrial Age—that ended around 1950 after the war and the Computer Age started. It’s looking very likely that the same thing is going to happen. The Computer Age is going to end around mid-century and we’ll move on to the next boom. And I think that might have something to do with telepathy. I think that either our senses will be enhanced, or we will gain more [senses]. Or technology will allow us to be able to do things in those types of directions, with that type of skill. So reading someone’s thoughts and reading someone’s mind and feeling and sensing and understanding things non-verbally and things like that, I think might have something to do with the latter part of this century.

“The Computer Age is going to end around mid-century and we’ll move on to the next boom. And I think that might have something to do with telepathy.”

That’s fascinating. So you think we’re going into a post-verbal paradigm.

I see the signs of it now, with AI and what we may need advanced technology for. So, protecting ourselves from nature, and making ourselves live longer, and be more healthy, and learning more, and experiencing things that we physically would not normally be able to experience.

Right now, if you want to go to Chile or Italy, you have to get on a plane to do that, and you have to experience it [by] walking around. But I think that by [the latter half of the century], the simulation of it will be so advanced that basically you’ll be able to experience and feel everything that you would normally feel if you were physically there.

That shift that you’re talking about is one that’s based from language to feeling, right? Telepathy implies some kind of intuitive sense, rather than direct communication. It’s the realm of psychic connection and feeling.

I think that either by consequence or by choice, we will have to change as well. My sense is what’s coming is going to require us to change the way that we think about certain things, in order to be able to go a bit beyond history, and go a bit beyond mathematics, and go a bit beyond science, into things that we probably never thought that we would be thinking or exploring. But I see the signs of that now, actually.

I wanted to talk to you a little bit about AI. It’s obviously been such a mind-bending shift for all of us in this era, and it’s making a lot of people think about things like the consciousness of machines, the ethics of machine-human relationships, and things like that. I’m curious how this AI era has altered your thinking on our relationships to synthetic consciousness, or synthetic agents?

The creation of AI isn’t something that just popped up. We have been thinking towards this type of existence for quite a long time. In this film Metropolis, the character creates the robot, and the robot transforms into an unrecognizable form, and people are fooled by this robot. I think that we’ve been wishing to have this for a very long time. So I think that AI is something that we’ve all worked towards: technology to the point that it becomes our best friend and our helper and our assistant. It can solve problems that we can’t solve, and can see things that we can’t see. I’m actually quite optimistic about it. The discussions around AI remind me of the discussions leading up to the change of the century, Y2K, when people were panicking about all the computers crashing. Because no one figured out how to make the dates change or something like that. So this panic is valid, but I think that the benefits and the rewards of how it’s going to help us outweigh and overshadow the fears that we have now, right?

“The discussions around AI remind me of the discussions leading up to the change of the century, Y2K, when people were panicking about all the computers crashing.”

I guess the big difference though is that when the Y2k thing happened, everyone could see that it was much ado about nothing, whereas we’re already seeing examples of real world harms that are being caused by AI. But I’m curious—

—I just have to add, it’s not like we did not have opportunities and chances to create safeguards so that people can save their jobs, right? And still, for some reason, we’re letting it evolve in this direction where people are going to be allowed to fire massive numbers of workers, and the society—we are letting this happen. So like I said, we have been working towards this for quite a long time, and there are things that we can do: we can really press our politicians and our government to actually do something about it. But I don’t know. In my opinion, we’re a bit too passive about it. So I just have to assume that we’re on some course [that] everybody is wishing to have.

There’s a big debate right now within the music world, too, about working with AI. Obviously Bandcamp caused a lot of drama by banning music that uses AI. Have you experimented with using AI and producing music? Or are you interested in doing that?

No, I haven’t. I haven’t made an effort to, really. The way I produce music is still very… it’s the old way. It’s connecting one machine to the next machine. There’s no computer in my studio. It’s very old fashioned, and it’s very hands on. But I’m waiting for the moment where, even in my small little studio, I can have this assistant that can do things for me and work on things while I’m working on other things, and and someone that I can speak to and throw ideas at, and those ideas could be kicked around. I look forward to situations like that. But yeah, I like options when I’m in the studio. I don’t record music really in one particular way. So for very complex things, for instance, if I’m working on a conceptual album and it’s on the subject of something that is just a bit beyond my knowledge, or just beyond understanding it, AI might be able to rationalize certain things to make sense [of it]. I might be able to sit down and compose music, for instance, [about] traveling through a black hole, and what that could feel like physically—if that were possible. You know, thinking about things like that. So I can see myself using [AI] at some point.

I love your optimism around all of this, but sometimes I find it a little bit hard to connect with, because I think that as people living in this technocratic hellscape that seems to be the present, there’s this feeling that the system is really closing in, and that the scale of technological greatness that’s so magnificent to behold is also being gate kept by the elites. Even the counterculture of raving and these tools of our liberation, like psychedelic drugs, they’re all being co-opted and commercialized and used against us.

You know, I hear you. But I just understand that the people have the power. The power is with the people. It’s not what politicians or…

It’s all so lethargic, and it feels like what you said before: there’s barely any pushback. How do we reclaim some of this agency?

I don’t know. But we have the power, we can change things when we want, and I think that the world is the way it is, because we allow things to happen. When we don’t want things to happen, we change them. I think people are thinking maybe more about the consequences of what it may take to be able to change things, and put things in the right direction. Maybe that is creating the reluctance to get out into the street and shut the country down and shut it down, right? We have what we have, because this is what we’re allowing ourselves to deal with. But I never forget this point: the power is always with the people. It’s always been that way, no matter what it looks like, or what it seems like—trillionaires and billionaires controlling everything. But they can’t do anything without people, right? That’s just how I feel, and I don’t know why we don’t shut it down. At times I think we should, I think it’s necessary, but I don’t know why.

“I never forget this point: the power is always with the people. It’s always been that way, no matter what it looks like, or what it seems like.”

Well, I think partly it’s a crisis of imagination. And you’ve spoken about this a lot: about how the techno scene suffers from this lack of imagination, to come up with a vision of a future that isn’t based in hedonism and nostalgia and escapism. Do you feel like the rave can come up with the new vision of the future that fits the needs of today?

Sure, sure. I think so, and I think that there are enough people thinking in that direction to make it happen. But will they do it? Will they say, OK, enough is enough. We want something that we can really be proud of, and we can hand down to generations, and they can practice this art form and and be able to live a normal life, and send their kids to college. I mean, we can do that. It’s always been this possibility to have discussions about certain things that we could be doing to make things better for us in the music industry. But people would prefer to go to Ibiza instead, and just party and not think about things like that. So I hear what you’re saying, but in the back of my head, no one’s controlling what I do with music. I have an incredible amount of freedom of what I can do in my own studio. I just need electricity and a little bit of time and ideas and dreams, and that’s all, really, that I need. Everyone that produces music in this industry has the same situation.

So it raises the question, why don’t we have a large variety of different types of ideas, and reasons why we were making this music is? It’s by choice. People are choosing to not do certain things, not use music for certain reasons, by choice. We’ve been working for this world that we’re living in right now for quite a while. And many of us, like myself, are shocked to see the way that it is, and how people are getting away with doing all these crazy things. But we definitely have the override switch. The people have that. I don’t know why we don’t use it. It’s a mystery.

Thank you for the reminder that we have this override switch and it’s time for us to push the button. All right. Thanks so much, Jeff. I’ll talk to you later.

Thanks, Michelle

🎙️ Wanna listen to the silky smooth baritone of The Wizard as he fields Michelle’s questions? Subscribe to Rave New World!

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Hey everyone <3

It’s been six (!) years since I started Rave New World, and the community meetups for this newsletter’s readership have taken many forms: mushroom parties, early morning ambient performances in the park, weed raves on Zoom, group microdosing journeys… it’s been an amazing ride.

Moving ahead into 2026, I’m excited to engage with the suppo…

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In June 2023, I attended Psychedelic Science, the largest psychedelic conference in the world. The five-day event took place in a sprawling convention center in downtown Denver, attracting 12,000 attendees from 52 countries, including not just the biggest scientific experts, but also random celebrities, politicians, and billionaires who’d decided to attach their brands to tripping.

On the main stage, nepo baby Jaden Smith, NFL player Aaron Rodgers, and Boomer rockstar Melissa Etheridge yapped about how much ayahuasca had changed their lives, while in the side rooms, wiley entrepreneurs hustled to raise Series A funding while the money spigot from deep-pocketed investors like soap mogul Dr Bronner and tech bro Christian Angermayer was still flowing. In the fluorescent-lit, carpeted halls, briefcase-toting Pharma investors sipped kava mocktails next to rat-tailed hippies, while buttoned-up therapists snapped selfies with feathered shamans, and DMT-vaping psychonauts swapped esoteric trip reports with galaxy brain researchers. Even though direct sales of psychedelics was still illegal in Colorado, vendors in the exhibition hall still hawked pounds of shrooms wrapped in giant plastic bags, while offering samples of LSD microdoses to passersby.

It was a surreal scene that spoke to the power of MAPS—the influential psychedelic advocacy organization behind the conference—as well as its charismatic, 69-year-old founder Rick Doblin, who I would often spot heading out to the Burner-inflected afterparties as I returned to the hotel at 2am, joint dangling from his lips. The psychedelic industry had hit a high point in the hype cycle, buoyed by early clinical trial results in the 2010s that demonstrated how psychedelics are effective for mental health disorders such as depression and PTSD. Emerging from the shadows of prohibition, these substances were quickly shedding their reputations for decadence and delinquency—instead being cast as a paradigm shift in mental health care. Everyone expected that Lykos, the for-profit Pharma arm of MAPS, would fulfill its promise to get FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy within the next year or two. In this window of time, it was like the industry was holding its breath, and everything felt possible—as long as you believed.

In the summer of 2025, I returned to Denver for the next edition of Psychedelic Science. Only 8,000 people were in attendance this time, and the previous edition’s atmosphere of frenzied excitement had dissipated from the building. In the two long years, since the last conference, the dream of psychedelic legalization had been dashed after the FDA rejected Lykos’ application for MDMA-assisted therapy, citing insufficient data, issues with clinical trial design, and a host of other concerns—including whether the drug’s euphoric effects could lead to addiction. Sexual misconduct by a pair of therapists who participated in the trial also led to intense public scrutiny on the ethics of psychedelic therapy, and Psymposia, the leftist watchdog group that aggressively amplified these concerns, was blamed for torpedoing MAPS/Lykos’ efforts and sowing division.

As legalization stalled, funding dried up and stocks collapsed, leading to several high-profile psychedelic startups like Field Trip Health and Silo Wellness to shut down and file for bankruptcy. Industry-wide turbulence seemed to suggest cracks in the dominant systems that were struggling to integrate these powerful tools. Was it even possible for clinical trials to measure the totality of the psychedelic experience? As companies tried to turn these slippery substances into ordinary medicines backed by insurance and co-pays, it seemed like they were also revealing the contradictions in capitalism, as well as cultural fears around pleasure and dependency.

At the conference, founders of psychedelic companies spoke candidly on panels about their failures, including how they had overestimated the public’s desire for expensive psychedelic treatments—leading to the closure of luxury ketamine clinics once hyped as the future of medicine. Some of these CEOs also admitted that investing in social reciprocity programs with indigenous communities were “distractions”—mistakes that detracted from their profit-seeking goals. Many conversations, both on and off stage, revolved around the dark side of ketamine, with the lack of proper regulatory oversight and potential for addiction leading many to wonder if ketamine clinics were a preview of what could go wrong if other psychedelics are commercialized too quickly.

Even the exhibition hall that previously felt like an open-air drug market had been cleaned up, with vendors no longer openly selling psychedelics; indigenous shamans offering sniffs of hapé (sacred tobacco snuff) even got in trouble with security. While the adrenaline rush of unadulterated hope had been neutered by the collective comedown, in many ways, the atmosphere also felt more grounded and connected to reality.. There was no longer a sense that anyone could start a psychedelic company with a pitch deck and a dream.

Now that MDMA was no longer the frontrunner for FDA approval, the industry’s attention shifted towards ibogaine, a South African shrub known to be particularly effective as a treatment for addiction. Just a few days before the conference, Texas Governor Greg Abbott had signed Senate Bill 2308, allocating $50 million in public funding to study ibogaine as a treatment for opioid use disorder and other mental health conditions. Seemingly overnight, Texas became the biggest government funder for psychedelic research, with conservative politicians like ex-governor Rick Perry now these drugs’ biggest proponents. War veterans, who suffer from suicide and addiction at outsized rates, were now the moral center of the psychedelic movement’s more militarized and MAHA direction—strategically highlighted in fundraising, lobbying, and PR efforts because of their bipartisan appeal. Who could be so heartless as to deny life-saving care to vets?

I wandered around the conference in a miasma of increasing confusion and dread. Psychedelics have historical ties to the hippies, draft dodgers, and anti-war movement, but in this befuddling new era, they were being championed by Navy SEALS, Republican legislators, and military vets who spoke about healing the trauma of warfare as a patriotic duty. Meanwhile, MAPS’ attempt to legalize MDMA-assisted psychotherapy had seemingly failed in part because they failed a leftist group’s purity test, but the companies poised to become the new front-runners, Compass and AtaiBeckley, are venture-backed biotech companies with ruthlessly commercial and IP-driven strategies that leave little regard for public benefit. Psychedelic legalization seemed closer than ever to gaining bipartisan, institutional support—but at what cost?

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The Rave Discourse™ is always shifting as it percolates through the after-dark antechambers and digital echo chambers where the raveheads gather to gab. Over the past few years, it feels like the collective consensus has been complexifying, as the conversation turns from celebrating rave culture’s radical potential, to mulling over the limits of raving as a political force—a shift that mirrors the culture’s increasing co-optation and commercialization in the age of Burning Man hegemony and Instagram DJs.

Most of my pontifications on The Sorry State of the Dancefloor happens on this very platform (shoutout to the subs!), but I was recently invited to speak in an ongoing conversation series between psychedelic writers and artists, co-curated by Stephanie Young and Ramsey McGlazer, titled Poetics and Plant Medicine. Held in the cozy confines of Bathers Library—a super cute members-only library in downtown Oakland—the inaugural event that I participated in was called “States of Euphoria,” and centered on rave culture. As Young wrote in the event description:

“The liberatory promises of the rave sit uneasily alongside its entanglements with capitalism, colonialism, and state violence. The party has always been part of the world it seeks to escape. What forms of political desire emerge, or falter, when the rave confronts the conditions it inhabits?”

My fellow panelists were Hannah Baer—a writer, psychoanalyst and meme lord whose barbed insights on raving and revolution are sharpened from sweaty experience as a New York nightlife party girl; as well as Arun Saldanha, an academic whose canonical book Psychedelic White examined the Goa trance scene through a critical race theory lens (the book was also an invaluable source for my essay, “A Post-Colonial History of Psychedelic Trance.”)

Our conversation with each other, and later with the audience, ended up circling many of the most pressing questions and concerns facing rave culture and psychedelics today—it was like a hive mind took over, and everyone was relieved to have the chance to work some shit out, together. I’m excited to share it with you guys below.

(Bay Area folks, don’t miss the rest of the series, which includes upcoming conversations and reading groups on psychedelic tourism, time travel, and Black/indigenous healing practices. More info here!)

Hannah Baer: I was curious how both of you hold this complexity around parties as liberatory experiences, in contrast with more difficult, objectionable, or hegemonic parts of these spaces.

Michelle Lhooq: People look towards raving for the same reason they look towards religion: we’re all looking for some kind of compass. Raving is a way to imagine a more utopian way of being. But I feel the same way about rave culture as I do about psychedelics, where I’m having a personal reckoning over the realization that they are not inherently liberatory. I drank the Kool Aid for a really long time about both, so the trough of disillusionment has been quite intense, and even more so by what we’re seeing today with the militarization of both psychedelics and raving, which complicates a lot of the epistemics that allowed me to go full force into these subcultures.

Arun Saldanha: Maybe this is a cop-out because it’s a little too neat, but I follow Alain Badiou, a Marxist philosopher, and he has these four true procedures. There’s art, politics, science, and love, and all four of them are equally important for human beings to experience. But you can’t expect one to be substituted for another. So in that way, the rave is extremely important as an enlarging of the sensorium. But whether it allows for people to prefigure something like communism is a political question. It would be great if everyone going to rave becomes a communist, but it’s definitely not stamped with the experience.

“The rave is extremely important as an enlarging of the sensorium.”

ML: Arun, you said something earlier, referencing Guattari’s concept of microfascism1, about how the “againstness” of counterculture, and the intensity of it, can be co-opted to make the culture more saleable. That reminded me of how the right wing is now the counterculture, and they’re using psychedelics to engineer some kind of self-healing. These politics confuse me, because the conservatives are also interested in environmentalism and psychedelic therapy… and yet! Their values seem so reactionary.

AS: There’s a very masculinist, eugenic way of thinking about the enhanced body—kind of like Robocop—where drugs have become like a technology to expand, on a superhero level, the capacity to control and to also have self-control. That goes together with this whole reinvention of stoicism. Of course, stoicism doesn’t sit well together with hedonism, but it all becomes this macho post-human mishmash.

HB: Raving, or ketamine therapy, is like a technology that can be used, but doesn’t have an intrinsically political quality to it. Having been in a political moment where it was sort of countercultural is actually a bit arbitrary. I’m attached to an idea that there could be an intrinsically radical social form, and then I’m like, oh, but the Nazis loved nudity. You can always find a right wing person who has a whacked out left wing-coded thing that they love. Maybe it’s actually that the aesthetics are always arbitrary. And actually the Badiou distinction is, the clarity of it is also quite true. But it’s sad for me to be like post-modernism is right and all of your aesthetics are kind of arbitrary.

“Having been in a political moment where raving was sort of countercultural is actually a bit arbitrary.”

ML: There’s an interesting relation between stoicism and raving. Both raving and psychedelics engender this sense of estrangement, and I feel like having this possibility of escape, of otherness, also allows you to kind of hold yourself in a non-reactive state to the world, in a time where we’re being asked constantly to escalate and react to endless meme-driven warfare. There’s something to being cool and unflappable as a stance that raving engenders.

AS: Gilles Deleuze has a line that he picked from Henry Miller, where he says that he loves to get drunk on water. There’s a radicalization of the whole Timothy Leary thing of set and setting, where you agree that an altered state is beneficial to enlarging your subjectivity, and perhaps, forcing a hinge point in your life, but it’s not necessarily through the drug itself. You don’t have to actually ingest something to feel the changing power. LSD really changed visual culture and music, and not everyone was doing LSD to feel that creative pulse.

HB: You said something, Arun, about euphoria itself being a state with borders that could be policed with an in-crowd or an out-crowd. It made me wonder whether the ideal liberatory space would be a space where there was no power differential or authority.

AS: This goes to the old question of anarchism versus communism. Capitalism is a global system, so it is possible to create what Hakim Bey famously called Temporary Autonomous Zones. But capital is intrinsically globalizing, and the power of money is such that it can just be scooped up again for further commercialization. It sounds super pessimistic, and I have a lot of respect for the anarchist tradition, but I don’t think a space without hierarchy is possible. It’s very clear that there’s always going to be incipient state formations in any kind of social situation. So any countercultural or spiritual movement will have something like a desire for a state coming up. That’s just part of how human culture works. But that shouldn’t stop people from trying, I guess!

ML: During the pandemic, I actually went to a lot of autonomous zones that were springing up in places like Minneapolis and Seattle, and I was attracted to them because people kept telling me that they felt like music festivals. I noticed over and over that the euphoria that people were having in these spaces—the fact that people were drinking and doing drugs—was constantly used to belittle them, and to reduce their political seriousness [in the media]. It reminds me of how recreational psychedelic use is also really frowned upon in the psychedelic industry, and it’s this hypocritical double standard. It’s like, “euphoria for me, but not for thee.”

Dig into Rave New World’s past reporting on temporary autonomous zones in Minneapolis, LA, Seattle, Philadelphia, and more:

After the paywall: Hannah, Arun and I chew into some meaty questions from the audience about where the next wave of psychedelic culture is going, the function of narcotic states in today’s attention economy, and how to expand counterculture into new modes of subversion…

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All photos by Peter Tomka / via New Theater Hollywood

On a rainy Sunday in January, anti-ICE activists with walkie-talkies and megaphones slung from their hips patrolled the sidewalk outside New Theater Hollywood, squinting into the mist. The 49-seat black box theater usually stages experimental and one-off shows; its founders Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff previously ran a divey watering hole in Berlin called TV Bar, and have similarly turned New Theater into a critical convergence point where the audience is always a scene. Previous productions have starred queer filmmaker Leilah Weinraub, virtuosic vocalist Colin Self, and nepo baby Kaia Gerber, with casts of it girls and artists performing mostly for their friends.

“The boundaries between truth and fiction are slimmer in a small theater,” said Henkel. She and Pitegoff practically live at the venue, and that afternoon, they were up in the rafters, adjusting a projector light that displayed subtitles for the upcoming show. “The actors are often people you know or care about, and there is a built-in empathy to who is in front of you,” Henkel continued. “You are forced to listen. To be present together. It is very close to love.”

That weekend’s play, titled “La Madre Patria,” (or “Motherland”) centered on themes of motherhood, ancestry, and resilience. It featured a cast of ten Mexican and Indigenous women, many of whom spend their days cleaning houses and working on farms in Sonoma County, a fertile region in Northern California equally known for its vineyards and history of labor organizing. The women are part of a theater collective called Teatro Almas Libres that tells immigrant stories from their own perspectives; plays are often rehearsed in public parks, office spaces, or friends’ garages, and created collaboratively with Jackie Katz, a drama teacher who has been directing their works since 2022.

“ICE arrested and detailed someone a block away from here yesterday,” said Katz, explaining why volunteers were stationed outside the theater. Katz noted that some of the theater collective’s members are undocumented workers, and staging this play in LA, a “hot” city where ICE has had a heavy presence for the last eight months, was no small task. “We didn’t even want to advertise this play on social media too much,” she said. “These women are taking on a lot of risk to be here.”

Katz led me backstage where the women were getting ready, clutching worn copies of scripts while muttering lines to themselves. Their young daughters, who had come with them to participate in the play, swished around in wide ruffled dresses while weaving ribbons into their hair. Socorro Draz, a member of the collective, told me that many women have not seen their mothers in over two decades—ever since they chose to walk over the border. Enacting parts of their lives on stage, she explained, constituted a “healing process” that allowed them to express feelings long buried by the immigrant experience.

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While the anti-immigrant crackdown in the US continues to escalate following the killing of Renee Good, inside the theater’s walls, the atmosphere felt warm and almost sacred. Flowers and medicinal plants like sage and rosemary lined the room, while giant portraits of the women’s mothers hung on the walls like altars. Backstage, the women stood in a circle as Katz led a prayer, chanting “Sí, se puede!”—a common rallying cry for labor unions and civil rights organizations that means “Yes, you can!”—as the lights dimmed.

The play began with the children performing traditional folkoric dances, ruffled skirts flashing in blurs of turquoise and red. Then the women took turns dedicating emotional homages to their mothers, some breaking down in tears of gratitude and longing. In one climatic scene, a cast member draped herself in the bulleted vest of Adela Velarde Pérez, a famous soldadera who fought and supported troops in the Mexican Revolution, while saluting her as a symbol of female strength. Then the women brought out a giant puppet used in Oaxaca and Michoacan folk traditions to bring happiness in times of darkness, gleefully waving its hands with wooden stilts.

In the audience, many people sang along to familiar songs in Spanish, while hooting and cheering for the women at every opportunity. Activist Jesse Sanes from the LA Tenants Union told me that at the previous day’s show, some members of the crowd included Mexican laborers from a nearby Home Depot, who’d heard about the play and been given free tickets. Sanders said that “La Madre Patria” reminded him of similar grassroots efforts, such as film workshops and communal lunches, that have sprung up at Home Depot parking lots and other frontlines of LA’s ICE raids. “These are ways for workers at the front lines to claim and assert power over their territories,” he said. “A lot of self-reflection happens here.”

Katz situated the group’s work within the longer tradition of theater as a tool for raising political consciousness, drawing parallels to Soviet communist agitprop and Italian street theatre in the 1600s, and framing “La Madre Patria” as a contemporary response to Trump’s immigration crackdowns. Constructing a scene, she said, requires examining how to quickly communicate and convince the audience of a message—and get people to truly listen. Quoting Augosto Boal, the Brazilian pioneer of political theater, she said, “Theater is not the revolution. It is a rehearsal for the revolution.”

POETICS AND PLANT MEDICINE: STATES OF EUPHORIA

I am in the Bay Area this week to speak at the inaugural edition of Poetics and Plant Medicine, a series of conversations between writers, scholars, journalists, and artists that interrogates the psychedelic experience beyond familiar narratives and pure advocacy. Co-curated by Stephanie Young and Ramsey McGlazer, and supported by the University of Berkeley, part one is titled “States of Euphoria,” and will take place at 7pm on Thursday, Jan 15 at Bathers Library in Oakland. I am joined by my sis hannah baer—a meme lord who is one of my favorite queer rave writers—as well as scholar Arun Saldhana, whose canonical book Psychedelic White unpicked the racist undercurrents behind the Goa trance scene, and was a foundational text behind my essay “A Post-Colonial History of Psychedelic Trance.”

Here’s the organizers’ description of the event:

“Long imagined as a site of utopian possibility, the dance floor offers a fleeting glimpse of freedom and psychedelic transcendence—if only for the night. As these three writers show, the liberatory promises of the rave sit uneasily alongside its entanglements with capitalism, colonialism, and state violence. The party has always been part of the world it seeks to escape. What forms of political desire emerge, or falter, when the rave confronts the conditions it inhabits? As baer writes: “If we agree that we do not like the way things are, we must ask over and over again, are we subverting them?”

If you’re in the Bay Area, come through! The event is free, and you don’t need to RSVP—just make sure to come early, as space is limited.

The freaks in Singapore are lying low, explained a friend, smoking a cigarette outside an Italian deli fronting for a champagne bar speakeasy in Chinatown. It was my last night in town, and he’d met me in a suit from his corporate job—a grind that allowed him to throw parties that were like gifts to the scene. While we stood in an alleyway, under a horizon of twinkling skyscrapers, he gestured to the shophouses around us, which stood silently in the shadows with their hatches batten down. “A few years ago, right after the pandemic, man—these streets were full of club kids going from one party to the next!” he said, listing the short list of venues that make up Singapore’s underground nightlife circuit. He took another glum drag and continued. “People just aren’t going out like that anymore. The financial anxiety you guys have been feeling in the States, it’s just starting to hit us here now. And if people like me are starting to give up, man… I just don’t know.”

At these parting words, I felt a profound hopelessness. Stories like this are too familiar, and I was unable to envision a way for the Singapore scene to prevail against the forces mounting against it: the real estate squeeze, closures of spaces that once felt like home, lack of late-night public infrastructure, the soaring costs of everything, police crackdowns, increased surveillance, and a general anhedonia borne from the anxieties mentioned above. Even though I know that nightlife ebbs and flows in cycles, it was as if the way forward was narrowing into a dead end. I had an overwhelming sense that the dominant system of capital and order was once again tightening its grip.

Electronic music has always looked at a world in flames, and in the burning horizon seen the inevitability of radical change. When I first started chronicling this subculture in the Obama years, a new wave of techno-feminism and post-Black Lives Matter political consciousness infused dancefloors with an exhilarating sense that collective liberation was just around the corner. This was music “that brings the hardest hit of futurity, the most jolting break with tradition,” as critic Simon Reynolds put it in Futuromania. But these days, a real rave revolution has begun to seem to me like a lie—or more like a vision that shines brilliantly for a brief burst, before it collapses under the weight of its dreams.

Just two years ago, I had been enraptured in the Singapore underground’s dream of blasphemy, as I witnessed—and then chronicled in a short documentary—a new wave of queer parties popping up in abandoned tunnels, movie theaters, and bank buildings across the island, fusing noisy, technofuturistic sounds with Southeast Asian folklore and spiritual traditions. A yearning for a tropical rave tradition connected to the soil of my ancestors had been answered by an incoming generation bold enough to build altars in the blind spots of global capital, and the satisfaction I felt moving next to bodies that looked like kin was distinct. I wished the story didn’t always go like this: a revelatory moment that turns out to be a flash already fading; maybe I would have danced harder if I’d known.

Earlier in the trip, I’d stopped by a cute bar frequented by artists and musicians. The rave circuit had been quiet during this trip, and I was hoping to run into some friends. The bar sometimes hosted DJ nights and was a good place to pick up local gossip; about a year ago, while chatting with a local chef in the smoking zone, I’d first heard about blackmarket drug vapes called “kpods” that were being sold on Telegram. “You never really know what’s in them because it’s usually a mix of stuff, including ketamine,” he said, explaining why they were called kpods. “What does it actually feel like?” I asked. But he’d never tried it, and neither had anyone else I spoke to in the electronic music scene.

I learned that k-pod’s typical consumers were not from the underground club world; rather, they tended to be teenage students who got into vaping from candy-flavored nicotine, as well as hardcore drug users who might also be into meth or heroin. Sprinkled into this spectrum were adult professionals with stressful jobs, “uncles” who typically crush beers at karaoke bars, and other random normies. It was shocking to discover that such a wide swath of Singapore’s population was flouting the country’s strict drug laws—the relative accessibility of vaping, and the veneer of safety around this mode of drug consumption, had created a rift in the sober social order through which they had fallen in.

When I walked into the bar this time, the CDJs in the DJ booth were missing. The speakers were pushed against the wall, like silent witnesses of better days that lingered in the imprints of the plush velvet sofas. A handful of people sipped beers on the patio, but I recognized no one except for a DJ-friend in his 30s who sometimes worked there. We sat down at a table, and he proceeded to tell me about the bar’s recent misfortune: police officers had recently raided the place in search of people smoking vapes—the latest crackdown in an all-out War on Vaping that the government had launched earlier this year.

The kpod loophole in the country’s zero-tolerance drug prohibition had been discovered, and etomidate, the main psychoactive substance in kpods, was reclassified as an illegal drug, meaning that dealers were now jailed and caned. Nicotine vapes have actually been illegal in Singapore since 2018, but in the past, the police tended to look the other way. These days, owning any type of vape resulted in steep fines, and possibly getting shipped away to a mandatory “rehab” program in jail-like conditions. Vaping, in effect, was now criminalized as a drug offense.

I asked my DJ-friend if people were smoking kpods at the bar, and he shook his head. “Nobody lah! But people were stuffing their vapes down their bras and underwear, trying to hide them,” he said. “A few unlucky ones got caught, and they kena $700 fines.” The War on Vaping also led to the bar catching some stray fire: when the cops saw the DJ booth, they warned that spinning records was considered “live music,” which required a permit. Other venues in the circuit had been given the same warning, resulting in a general hushing of the electronic music scene, which had already been under strain. In a way, the crackdown was working. “No one is vaping anymore,” my friend said, taking a drag of his cig. “We’ve all gone back to analogs.”

There were more signs that Singapore’s anti-drug efforts are intensifying. A public hotline has been set up, with citizens encouraged to record videos of people vaping in public and report them to the police—even if they are underage teens. Throughout my trip, I’d also noticed the posters blanketing MRT stations, bus stops, park billboards, and other public spaces that warned about the dangers of vape addiction. In addition to advisories about the higher penalties, the campaign questioned if vapes are really a safer alternative to cigarettes, arguing that many users get addicted to both.

I went home from the bar and started reading everything I could find about etomidate, the main synthetic chemical compound in kpods. The popularity of etomidate vapes, I learned, was not limited to Singapore—the internet was full of concerned media reports from across Asia, where the drug has been given various street names like “space oil” in Hong Kong, and “zombie cigarettes” in Japan. Much of the online reporting highlighted how the legal grey area that etomidate has so far existed in has accelerated its spread as authorities scramble to catch up. The reports also frequently mentioned a particularly disturbing side effect of the drug: erratic physical behavior that one woman in Okinawa compared to “an insect writhing after being sprayed with insecticide.”

This explained the videos I found on TikTok of people purportedly fucked up on etomidate: a teenager falling sideways to a train station floor like a felled tree; two men staggering across a plaza, limbs swinging at sharp angles, heads collapsing toward their knees. Shot from a distance by strangers who’d seized on their bizarre behavior, these clips were often folded into news segments warning of the drug’s dangers. There was something lurid about this “gotcha” footage that filled me with voyeuristic fascination and second-hand shame as I consumed the familiar spectacle of public debasement, reframed through the increasingly normalized practice of citizen surveillance. Even as I resisted the media’s scaremongering, it was hard not to feel like the drug’s effects had crossed into something supernatural and truly zombie-like.

The stuttering, mechanical motions also reminded me of the “tranq walk” associated with xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer saturating the United States opioid supply. The resemblance suggested that these were not typical recreational drugs, but poisons of last resort. In these videos, users seemed to stumble past the threshold of weird-but-harmless intoxication into some disturbing hinterland—an unholy place of oblivion the body visibly resists. What, exactly, was going on with this new drug of the moment? And if the side effects were this brutal, what was drawing so many people into its grip? The further I went down this dark rabbit hole, the more I realized that zombie vapes aren’t just a weird trend. They represent a broader shift in drug culture—a shift that’s already been happening for decades, and whose deadening effects are really starting to hit.

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Consider the wook: a much-reviled dance music archetype that first emerged, in a snarl of matted dreadlocks, in the parking lots of Grateful Dead shows. Dressed in drop-cotch harem pants, wire-wrapped crystal necklaces, and hooded hemp ponchos, wooks wander barefoot, trying to trade shroom chocolates for free concert tickets. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, many wooks migrated to the dubstep scene, replacing their devotion to jangly guitars with a love for the wub. Festivals like Lightning in a Bottle, Desert Hearts, and Shambalah are now festering grounds for the contemporary wookie, and where you’re most likely to catch them six tabs deep, spinning poi to “sacred bass.”

In the 2000s, wook culture became the hairy butts of endless memes in the dance music scene. Our distaste for their feral, drug-addled lifestyles might stem from a deeper wound: wooks force us to confront the long shadow of psychedelia—its anti-capitalist spirit boiled down to opportunistic mooching, psychonaut experimentalism devolved into brain-fried stupidity, countercultural resistance cross-faded into pseudo-spirituality. These grimy drug goblins particularly plague festivals on the North American West Coast, where the underground often cannot escape the twin blades of New Age cheese and Burning Man cringe.

I was skeptical when I first heard whispers in the rave network that something interesting was happening in Oregon. The granola-ass state is the perfect petri dish for wooks to self-replicate, and has a hard time shaking off its reputation for whitewashed woo-woo. Then friends told me about Osmosis, a psychedelic music festival connected to Portland’s electronic music scene. I was curious about the West Coast network that Osmosis is both drawing from and actively building; many of their DJs come from Vancouver, Portland, Seattle, and the Bay Area—cities with vibrant but chronically under-documented rave undergrounds.

It was at Osmosis, surrounded by horses and pot farms as cybernetic basslines shook the pines, where I first heard the term: neo-wook. The phrase was circulating around the festival like an inside joke, because it so perfectly captured the subcultural flavors converging there into something familiar, yet new. “Neo-wook” forced me to contemplate questions that had never before crossed my narrow, wook-hating mind: What if the wook psyche holds a secret to resisting the logic of late-capitalism? Can wooks mutate from goofy caricature to an updated psychedelic archetype that fits this era of global club culture, post-ironic memes, and cybersigil spiritualism? Wait—am I a neo-wook too?

Osmosis happens deep in Oregon’s weed country, in an artist colony called Takilma nestled on the edge of the Sisiyou Mountains. Locals consider this region the northern tip of the Emerald Triangle, where the nation’s best cannabis has been cultivated for generations. Takilma’s original pot farmers are earthy, back-to-the-landers who fled cities like San Francisco in the 60s and 70s, in search of an Eden far from the surveillance state. These hippies were the spiritual predecessors of the wooks—staunchly anti-authoritarian, and a little rough around the edges—and the bassbin ravers of Osmosis are the latest pilgrims seeking escape from technofeudal hell.

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Today’s hot tips include: new wave weed drinks, soft clubbing at LA’s ambient tea parties, the rebranding of ketamine as a lifestyle cheat code, and decoding the psychedelic guru Terence McKenna.

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Everyone in LA is gabbing about a polarizing new theater performance called The Cortege. Ads for the show created by artist Jeff Hull and his team of collaborators are blanketing our feeds, promising a “festival funeral” that weaves together folklore, pageantry, and ritual in service of communal grief. On the surface, it looks sick. The soundtrack features titans like Jean-Michel Jarre, Air, and Andrew Bird, and trailers reveal snippets of mysterious characters in billowing beige robes, towering monsters that resemble giant mops, and a swarm of drones twinkling against the night sky.

Unfortunately, after watching the show last weekend, I regret to inform you that The Cortege fails to live up to the sum of its intriguing parts, serving up instead an empty spectacle thread together by an almost comically confusing storyline.

The constellation of concepts and artists The Cortege reaches for are part of an emerging zeitgeist in today’s darkening world. In the early 90s, rave culture’s favorite psychedelic sage Terence McKenna famously prophesied the “archaic revival”—a return to ancient knowledge systems to address the contemporary existential crisis. As it becomes increasingly evident that we are living in the worst possible version of the reality simulation, the mainstreaming of psychedelics, ritual practices, and other ancient knowledge systems are evidence of humanity’s last-ditch attempt at self-healing. The Cortege is drumming up excitement partly because it responds to the palpable urgency for communal experiences that process our deteriorating conditions. I especially resonated with its tagline, which positioned public grief as a form of renewal. It read: “Before we are able to welcome a new era, we must mourn the loss of the world we knew.”

the_cortege

A post shared by @the_cortege

So how did this show, with its grand ambitions and bonkers production budget, ultimately fall flat? A lot of ya’ll have been asking for the tea, so let’s get into what fucked—and what flopped.

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Thank you to everyone who responded to our first reader survey! You guys are funny and smart :) Building out Rave New World outside of social media has become even more critical in light of the events below. Please take a moment to fill out the survey if you haven’t already! Then come with me as I descend into into the liminal space of Instagram and Facebook suspensions, where we will encounter digital ghosts, a therapist specializing in online grief, and thousands of desperate people whose accounts have been chopped by the bots.

TELL ME WHATS GOOD

Something strange happened to me recently when I woke up and popped open my Instagram —a hard-to-break habit as reflexive as yawning. Instead of the usual bubbles of messages that reassure me that I am indeed a desired person, my eyes, still soft from sleep, slowly settled on a white screen. “We suspended your account,” read the voice of the Meta God. “You have 180 days to disagree or we’ll permanently disable your account.”

The room around me disappeared as my physical senses withdrew into the data vacuum where my digital avatar once lived. I read and re-read the stern pronouncement, whose cruelty was sharpened by the scarcity of information about why, exactly, I had been banned. The peepholes into my friends’ lives had snapped closed, and out of fondness and weakness, I desperately wanted to cling to the content I had been cut off from. All those messages, memes, posts, and photos that had constituted my online life—poof! Gone in an instant, banished to the invisible realm of the unarchived self.

Worse of all, there was no way to tell everyone that I had departed from our shared space in a premature demise akin to cyber necrosis. Suspended in the bardo between digital death and rebirth, I felt like a powerless and pissed-off ghost, shocked at how much of my life I had given up to the whims of these motherfuckers.

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Just a quick note to let ya’ll know that I am going to be in Berkeley on Wednesday, August 6 to speak at a livestreamed psychedelic salon hosted at the Berkeley Alembic—a new center for consciousness culture founded by writer Erik Davis, meditation guru Michael Taft, and neuroscientist Kathryn Devaney that’s definitely worth checking out.

Many of you know Erik as one of the foremost scholars of the weird. His books Techgnosis and High Weirdness are canonical reading for anyone interested in esoterica, cyber/counter-culture, and psychedelics, and I’ve long admired his ability to carve out a career more rooted in underground community than the mainstream media establishment. When I found out that he’d created a physical space—a zen zone where dharma talks live alongside mystical Sufi dervish dancing classes, a class on “feeding your demons,” and drone concerts—it made a lot of sense. I was also stoked to find out that tickets to this event (and many others) are donation-based / no one turned away for lack of funds, since psychedelic education is increasingly gatekept (I mean, have you seen how much it costs to sleep in a bunk bed at Esalen?!)

The event is part of the Chalice, a monthly series on psychedelic culture that skips the usual (boring) discussions of clinical trials and legal frameworks, and instead focuses on what it means to be “psychedelic people” — spanning poetry, spirituality, mystery, and high weirdness. Instead of a straight-ahead lecture, the event was described to me as a “jam sesh,” which means that I’ll be chopping it up with Erik, fellow counterculture scholar Christian Greer, and psychedelic researcher/midwife Maria Mangini—whose takes will no doubt be both fun and edifying.

I will be sharing insights from all my latest reporting in the worlds of drugs and raving, including: the sorry/scary state of the psychedelic movement, the nightlife vibe drought, the ancient goddesses of cannabis culture, and the weirder sides of tripping out, including my current obsession: entity possessions during ayahuasca trips. That portal may also lead us into the worlds of spiritual channeling on TikTok, Indonesian ritual trance states, and what the hell “light language” even is… let’s find out!

🎟️ Tickets are here, which also includes access to the livestream. Please support them if you can.

OUR FIRST READER SURVEY!!!

Speaking of ~community~ I’ve been thinking a lot about how many cool, thoughtful people subscribe to Rave New World, many of whom I’ve met on dancefloors around the world. Now that we’ve hit 15k subscribers (!) I’d like to engage more directly with you all, and create opportunities for ya’ll to connect with each other as well. I have a lot of ideas—ranging from IRL meetups, collective microdosing journeys, to a group Signal chat—and would love your input on what you’d like best.

To that end, please take this quick reader survey (I promise it’s fun) to tell me more about you, what kinds of stories you like, and what kinds of hangouts we should plan. Thanks!

Take me to the survey

I’m doing yoga on a sun-kissed Monday morning in Los Angeles when the radio blares that another ICE raid is going down. The target of this latest political theater is MacArthur Park—a 145-year-old public park in Westlake, a neighborhood home to a large Central American community that’s a stone’s throw from downtown. Abandoning my pigeon pose and hopping on X, I scroll through videos of federal officers charging through the park on horseback like unhinged calvary, flanked by gun-toting armed troops and military humvees—an increasingly familiar sight in a city besieged by Trump’s goons.

I start texting friends who live near the park, asking for eyewitness reports. “Choppers still hovering… It sounds like war from here,” reports a friend who runs an art gallery a few blocks from the park. Another homie texts: “A few min ago I saw a lady who looked Central American with her young daughter sprinting.” “Ooh sis, I’d be v careful,” warns a friend who has been organizing against ICE raids in his neighborhood. He tells me that ICE has been targeting Asians, and the local news confirms that even legal Asian immigrants are staying home. For a few minutes, I deliberate if it’s safe for me to venture outside—I am neither a US citizen or green card holder, and am working in this country on the Melania visa. It might sound insane to get deported for covering a protest on Substack, this has literally happened to foreign reporters unluckier than me.

Even if I did stay home, it’s impossible to avoid the emotional toll that compounding crises—first the fires, now ICE—are having on LA. For the last few weeks, the streets and public plazas have been ghostly quiet, all kinds of immigrant people taking cover from the masked men snatching up bodies in broad daylight. There’s a real boogeyman quality to these attacks; my reporter friend tells me horror tales of taco trucks getting raided, meat still sizzling on the grill but no one left to flip it. Over the weekend, at a rave called “Fuck the Fourth,” everyone knew that America was cancelled, and barely anyone was dancing. “I’ve been stuck in a psychic swamp,” said a friend who didn’t make it out. Even the smoky haze that drifted over the city from the fireworks felt lethargic.

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This month I’m bringing you a series of stories from the psychedelic frontier, as the industry barrels into what you could call the “Elon era” of right-wing psychedelia. Much of this reporting will be from Psychedelic Science, a massive conference that takes place every two years in Denver. Since pretty much everyone who’s anyone in psychedelics comes to this conference, there was no better place to get a sense of the trends and conversations driving the industry. These posts are for paid subscribers—THANK YOU for making this reporting possible!

The sun was setting behind the Rocky Mountains when I touched down at Denver International Airport, orange beams breaking through the clouds to cast a faint rainbow over the parking lot. The distant, rippling silhouettes of the mountains hugging the deep, bright sky gives Colorado a touch of majesty; it’s a place where you can feel the land’s dignity just by gazing out of a Lyft window. No wonder this is one of the first states in America where mushroom therapy is legal. In November 2022, a bill called Prop 122 decriminalized all plant medicines for personal use, while allowing adults to take shrooms at licensed healing centers. Technically, the retail sale of psychedelics is still illegal, but that hasn’t stopped a greymarket from thriving.

Walking to my hotel, I pass a sign for a vape shop openly advertising shroom chocolates right next to the conference convention center. While shops like these are popping up across America, the impunity with which they operate from the law is what stands out in Denver.

Conferences are invariably stuffy, soulless occasions, with long days spent in air-conditioned quarters listening to self-important figureheads drone on about their work. I’d rather be in the mountains, holding court with the bison and pine trees, but there I was, trekking across downtown Denver while on a mission: to take the temperature of a movement that seems to be losing its way. With the FDA’s recent rejection of MDMA therapy, Elon’s ketamine addiction driving his catfight with Trump, and RFK Jr. pushing for psychedelic legalization, it is getting pretty spooky out here in the psychedelic space—so what’s the tea?

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I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with my friend and fellow rave-cellectual Emily Witt to present our thoughts on the nightlife discourse at Demo Fest—the New Museum/New Inc’s annual festival on art and technology in New York City. Our jump-off point was my recent essay on the nightlife Vibe Drought—a concept that I was tickled to hear has already permeated New York’s hyper-networked party circles and become the term du jour.

But one of the things about a good collaboration is the way ideas can reflect and refract off each other. Mind-melding with Emily—one of the greatest cultural critics of our generation (follwq her coverage on the ground in Los Angeles of the ICE protests rn)—stretched my critique of nightlife into new directions, while circling back to the central question: why bother? In other words, if a lot of things suck right now (but a couple things don’t), why bother trying to maintain an underground?

What we believe is that the rave, at its best, counters the reigning logic of the world we live in—a logic that is materialistic, self-promotional, advertorial, motivated by profit rather than sustenance, and equates style with status. We need places that challenge that logic a little bit, or we will lose our minds.

In order to not fall in the “whining elder complaining about how things used to be so much better” trope, Emily and I also identified five elements of what makes a good party—the secret sauce, so to speak. You can watch our presentation (which begins around 2:14:19) below:

Next week, I will be attending the world’s largest psychedelic conference, MAPS’ Psychedelic Science in Denver. For those of you who will also be there, I’m speaking/moderating a couple panels that will go deep into the challenges facing the worlds of psychedelic raving and the media respectively:

• Thu Jun 19 at 11:40 AM: Rave as Ritual, Festival as Ceremony: Ecstatic Frequencies of Dance, Music & Community — joined by a group of academics, healers, and party organizers, this panel will focus on a pretty controversial topic: the blurred line between recreational and therapeutic psychedelic use

• Friday Jun at 12:15 PM: The Dark Side of Psychedelics: The Media's Role in Confronting Shadows — three other investigative journalists (Rachel Nuwer, Mattha Busby, John Semly) and I will be discussing the media’s role in the psychedelics hype vs backlash cycle that’s currently playing out, as well as bad shamans, abusive leaders, and unhinged watchdog groups… it will get spicy!

Beyond these two panels, I am looking forward to taking the temperature of the psychedelic industry at large. It’s a strange time for the scene: a decades-long movement to legalize psychedelics took a huge blow recently when the FDA decided to reject therapeutic MDMA, and many are wondering what comes next, and whether new strategies are needed.

Right-wing politicians and business leaders are also becoming increasingly dominant in the psychedelic space—many believe that legalization will happen under RFK. Will these political forces have more visibility at the conference too?

I’m also dying to know what people are thinking and feeling about the Elon Musk drug addiction bombshell story—which has definitely been a PR disaster for ketamine. Is this an instance of public drug shaming, or a valuable chance to educate the wider public on the dangers of ketamine?

I’m sure everyone is going to be talking about all of the above—and more—and I’m going to do my best to bring you the news scoops and juicy goss from on-the-ground. My dispatches from the conference and its surrounding afterparties will be for paid subscribers only, so please smash the sub button if you want to be in the loop!

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The streets in LA are buzzing about Another Castle’s Cuntillion this weekend—a decadent ball running from midnight to noon (!), and featuring a dazzling lineup of techno and ambient music all-stars. It’s going to be major, and if you’re in town, I highly recommended snagging a discounted ticket before the prices go up again!

I’ve been put in charge of the chill-out room—a task that has tickled my growing interest in curating spaces designed for softness, introspection, and psychedelic journeying… you could call it “soft clubbing.” As such, I’ve invited a cast of colorful characters plucked from the forests and dark warehouses of Los Angeles and Berlin, where they have been playing soul-stirring music made with everything from field recordings of raindrops to classical Turkish lutes. The conversations I had with them are like road maps to some of the most amazing ambient-adjacent music and happenings around right now… Dive into it below.

ELIJAH BADUA — SC / Spotify / IG

Track that reminds you of your earliest rave days:

It’s hard to even remember who was playing my earliest rave days. I was literally a rave baby, the first warehouse I lived in was in Oakland when I was six years old, with my mother who was a touring musician and artist and her friends. There was a wall dividing my bedroom and where they’d play everything from psytrance to happy hardcore til there was one guy left dancing his ass off in the morning.

I grew up going to shows and festivals with her while she toured, and was exposed to a lot of music. I honestly didn’t start paying attention to techno or artists in the rave scene though until I went to Europe, in particular one cold Berlin evening where I encountered DJ Stingray, and by effect Drexciya for the first time. I think hearing it there really put the music into context for me. It felt like a visceral response to the harsh realities of war and trying to cope with the mind boggling pace of post war technological and social change.

Best album/mix to play for a friend who wants to go deep and introspective on a psychedelic trip:

Most unlikely inspiration source recently:

Just, the ground. Sometimes I look at the ground, kind of space out on the cracks in cement or different particles of sand where I find my thoughts. Pattern recognition is a kind of game I play that conjures ideas running parallel with each other, some of them musical.

You just got back from an Asia tour. What excites you about the underground scenes you experienced there?

China is a trip, I’ve experienced probably the most contrast between futuristic and ancient here then any single place I could say I’ve been. Chengdu took us in like it was home, it just happened. It’s like the precious cradle of creativity, you could be in a rave 30 floors high one night and the next in a cave near the Tibetan plateau. It’s a true melting pot for the world, no wonder they eat so much hot pot.

Tell us about the tanbur, the instrument that you are playing during your set at Cuntillion

Yaylı tanbur is the recently invented (hundred or so years) bowed variant of the mizraplı (plucked) tanbur from ottoman times in Turkey, a classical instrument played in the courts of sultans, as well as dergah’s which are the tombs of passed Sufi saints and ceremonial meeting places for those that pay respects to them.

Saddest sound you’ve ever heard:

My ravanhattha teacher, Ramlal Bhopa’s fiddle playing. He was a Romani from Rajasthan, India, the last of a generation of oral storytelling priest musicians from a 2000 year old clan called Bhopa with no place in today’s society after the partition of India in 1947. He was illiterate but knew days worth of songs and would teach them to me crying because he knew there’s some that would die with him. I could not keep my tears back. He died from throat cancer smoking beedis since he was two years old.

A musician that has deeply influenced your work:

My dear friend Yaarrohs, who just recently passed away. She helped me find my voice, my musical identity, and is one of my biggest inspirations as an artist. She was so gifted, like magically. I really cherish the time we spent together, her insights were some of the most meaningful anyone’s ever imparted, not just to me.

Fantasy chill-out room of your dreams:

Hot sexy penguin pile.

Recent photo from your camera roll:

011668 - website / IG / BC

What inspired you to start the Church of Toyota?

My family, starting with my grandmother, was part of a church called Seicho No Ie, a non-denominational church that was influenced by a mixture of christian, buddhist, and shinto elements. The church says that all religions emanate from one universal source, and each religion differs because of cultural, historical, and environmental influences.

My grandmother also passed down a Toyota vehicle to me. I thought that the Toyota logo evoked the feeling of a venn diagram, or the overlapping beliefs between multiple religions. It reminded me of all the religions that currently coexist in the USA. All of these religions are also in conversation with Christianity, since America was "founded"/settled upon Christian ideals. Every household has its own unique blend of spiritual beliefs.

With all of these things in mind, I decided to use the Toyota logo as a placeholder for my personal religious experience, one that is definitely influenced by industry, capitalism, and car culture.

Most sacred site in LA:

The LA River - Arroyo Seco Confluence is my favorite place in LA. This area has been officially designated as the First Temple of Toyota in Los Angeles. I enjoy coming here to watch birds, listen to the train pass, and think about the passage of time. According to New Toyota Theory, the LA River will break apart in the year 2378 and I believe that the next God will rise from beneath it. According to the book of Exodus, God occasionally lives on Earth within a tabernacle for 440 years at a time. The LA River was paved in a tabernacl shape (inverted trapezoid) in 1938.

Ideal DJ mix/album to trip to:

Malibu - One Life, Bon Iver - Bon Iver, Ariana Grande - Eternal Sunshine

Most unlikely recent inspiration source:

Food, specifically soup broths, have been my most recent fascination. They remind me of the formation of the Earth, and ancestral memories.

Craziest/spookiest/coolest place you’ve thrown a rave:

Dockweiler Beach.

Song playing as you die and are reincarnated into the next life:

Three performance artists that have had a deep influence on your work:

1. My grandmother loved Cirque du Soleil. I loved the acrobat/juggler Viktor Kee in Dralion.

2. The first Butoh dancer I saw was called Yokko. I saw her perform in Hollywood sometime in 2018-19ish. I had already been touching on butoh elements but this was my first introduction to butoh as a style. From there I started to research more.

3. Lunice.

Fantasy chill-out room of your dreams:

Cement floor, empty room with a tatami mat, pond or lazy river, speakers, skylight, cool temperature lights

Recent photo from your camera roll:

DJ TY — IG / SC / radio show

Song that reminds you of your childhood:

It's a cheese track, sure, but my earliest memories at Hollywood YMCA's daycare are full of excitement for when this song would play on the little boombox they had in there.

Best album to play while tripping on mescaline in the desert:

Most unlikely inspiration source recently:

This was a bedroom production by two high school kids in the 80s. It has seen vast recycling into the purgatorial zones of corporate hold music. It also happens to be a downtempo banger.

What excites you about the underground in LA? What do you want to see more of?

LA is actually a raw and chaotic city, and that rawness is nowhere more honestly distilled than into the venues we use. Our warehouses are our imploding temples. I would love to see more unexpected collaborations between crews that promote very different types of music. I am easily bored by pretentiously singular lineups and moods.

California DJs or rave collectives that have inspired your sound:

Bay Area's Wicked is a point of origin for me. Also Kandel's Exist Dance era. Inner Sunset Recordings. Modularz.

It's 6am on a beach in Croatia, the sunlight is breaking through the clouds as you emerge from the ocean after dancing all night at a beach rave. What do you want to hear?

Pretty much any Pete Namlook and Mixmaster Morris collab.

A DJ who has deeply influenced your style:

DJ Marcelle. Her mixes are creative in the strictest sense, abstractly fusing disparate elements into a new rhythmic unity.

Fantasy chill-out room of your dreams:

It would probably have a wide spectrum cushioned floors/pillows - but there would also be a lot of scrap metal at perhaps dangerous orthogonality from the floor. Also a sandbox on one side of the room and some sort of silent stretching session. Perfect speaker coverage and tuning. Minimally visible DJ.

Recent photo from your camera roll:

JAKE MUIR - website / BC / SC / IG

Fave secret nature spot in LA:

For a long time I would regularly hike the eastern section of Temescal canyon. The trail started up some steps behind the community center building at the parking lot. I'm not sure if any of it is left from the fires... I should go check it out. It was less maintained than the main trail on the left side of the park and barely had any traffic. It also had some very lush sections and these narrow ridge parts that would plant you in the middle of this canyon. All of that made you feel pretty removed from the city.

Describe an ideal DJ mix:

One of my favorites is this heater from Keith Fullerton Whitman:

Not a "Greatest Hit" per se, but easily my favorite (early) Mac song, edited across multiple versions & fidelities to play somewhat seamlessly for over 2 hours, with the mix slowly being eroded by a cavernous echo that is being gated by the dynamics of the dry signal.

Most unlikely inspiration source recently:

I never thought I’d end up in Berlin making an album about church bell ringing, but here we are!

What excites you about Berlin’s experimental music scene right now?

Unlike most cities, Berlin is lucky to have multiple spaces that host nights on this axis, on a regular basis; KM28, Silent Green, Morphine Raum, 90mil, Arkaoda, Bar Neun, plus others like Panke here and there. I've seen some great performances at these places. When it comes to ambient music specifically though, I find that whether it's Berlin or somewhere else, not many risks are being taken.

Gayest sound you’ve ever heard?

*Censored*

Artist or field recordist that has deeply influenced your work:

The Voigt brothers [Wolfgang & Reinhard], Marina Rosenfeld, DJ Olive, DJ Spooky, Philip Jeck and Janek Schaefer’s collective efforts in abstract sampling and turntablism have had the biggest impact on my work. I was drawn to their productions over others as I found them to be more conventionally psychedelic sounding; I've never really enjoyed the noisier and highly cut up end of turntablism/sampling music.

Hearing how they processed and collaged together existing music really unlocked something in my brain. I guess it showed me there was a way to structurally make the music that I like the most, using the kinds of materials that hip hop was made with. I also came across their music before I stumbled upon musique concrète composers like Michel Redolfi, whose work has been an influence in recent times. I started messing around with samples and field recordings in May of 2013 and I've never looked back.

Fantasy chill-out room of your dreams:

I think my ideal chill out room would be a combination of: the layout of Light & Sound Design (LSD) in NYC, the environment of the Absurd Lustre events at Arkaoda in Berlin, and the visual work by the Groupwork crew in Buffalo; shout out Frankie. LSD has a Moroccan lounge aesthetic that I like w/ the rugs and different kinds of seating, Absurd Lustre had loads of plants which felt inviting, and the light work from the Groupwork show I played last summer was very tasteful and trippy; Draped cloth hanging from the ceiling with visuals projected onto it. All of that mixing together would be a big vibe.

Recent photo from your camera roll:

NINA KEITH - BC / IG / Spotify

What have you been working on lately?

I built this sound sculpture recently called Periphone that was displayed on the roof of the Printed Matter Art Book Fair. It involved rain water, an Ableton-rigged system, and metallaphone bars. One day I’d like to build a version that’s 12 feet tall, with a bunk bed that’s the size of my body next to it. I would be lying on this structure eight feet in the air, with a bunch of EKGs hooked up to my head, which goes to the computer, which dictates what the water is doing.

I like the idea of being able to control it posthumously, like a haunted water avatar that I can step into. I’m just trying to figure out the right way to present it, so that it’s like a shitty gay miracle.

Give me a shitty gay miracle in the form of a song:

I was obsessed with this song for years now, specifically this unreleased YouTube version. She has this insane quote where she's like, I wrote this song about being a trans woman.

We're doing this interview while walking by LA River at sunset. What’s a song that conjures the vibe of this place?

You co-run the outdoor ambient music series Living Earth. What’s the coolest / craziest / spookiest place that you guys have done a concert?

A graffiti-adorned water tower in Malibu Creek State Park.

A song of yours with a hidden field recording:

In the very first second of it starting, you can, hear a child screaming 300 feet away. I am obsessed spaces in general, and the way field recordings do something different to the way you remember stuff. I feel like music that contains more of the energy of a physical space gets stored in your brain in a much different way than like electronic music recorded in a studio or something. Walking around with a field recorder, I create this romantic way of living with this musical practice where I can reference magical pieces of time.

Song playing in the background as you do a rain dance:

Recent photo from your camera roll:

🚨ATTENTION RAVERS: THIS IS AN EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM 🚨

An extreme vibe drought has struck parties from New York to Berlin, with clubbers facing an increasing scarcity of actual dancing on the dancefloor. The warmth of true feeling—that pulsing life force that pre-dated this drought and dictated the realest expression of raving—is being sucked dry by a scourge of cellphone-wielding content-chasers, gundled gay zombies, and performative party parasites.

Industry watchdogs believe the drought began in 2021, as COVID restrictions loosened and long-shuttered nightclubs flickered back to life. As the doors re-opened, a wave of unhinged hedonism washed over clubland, powered by eager hordes of neophytes converted to the cult of raving through their worship of designer fashion, influencer DJs, “therapeutic” ketamine, and other false idols.

At first, the heavy showers of popular attention were welcomed by the residents of clubland, who have endured decades of dismissiveness and demonization. The technocratic oligarchs who’d seized control of the kingdom offered a devil’s bargain: sell your soul to your algorithm, and tomorrow you could be touring Japan. DJs began preening behind the decks like pouting puppets, perfecting the cringe art of “dancing like everyone is watching” as they cloutmaxxed on The Lot Radio while practicing their best camera angles for Boiler Room. In their competitive quests for attention, some turned to the dark arts—performing ritual sacrifices amidst the jaundiced tiles of Berlin bathrooms, and cutting off the heads off horses to wear on radio streams.

An unsettling reality is setting in: amidst the chorus of sunglasses-wearing Charli clones shouting “that’s so brat” over a hardstyle remix of Kings of Leon at Bossa Nova Civic Club, an eerie atmosphere of deadness has permeated the deepest core of the dancefloor. A certain lifelessness lingers behind the eyes of those jostling to be snapped by bloghouse-era photographers revived from irrelevance to haunt the coke dens of Dimes Square. Raves today have entered the sphere of simulation, populated by those who look the part but lack the ethos and etiquette; like the French in Brooklyn, they desire a vibey environment without integrating.

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Picture this: it’s 8:30 pm and you’re whipping down Sunset Boulevard in a Tesla with a hyperpop Barbie and her 88-year-old sugar daddy. The destination: the Hollywood Palladium to see BRUTALISMUS 3000—a dance music duo from Berlin with a name somewhere between an energy drink and a sneaker company. As the car glides up to the parking lot, you pass a line snaking down Hollywood’s piss-covered streets, catching glimpses of girlies in Miu Miu-esque miniskirts shivering in their furry boots. You pull on Barbie’s elbow and hiss, “let’s cut in through the guestlist…”

So sugar daddy slips the valet $50 and the three of you snake around the barricades, security waving you towards a waiting area that resembles a pig pen illuminated by grim spotlights. The guards usher you through metal detectors, rifle through your bags, run their hands over every potential drug-stashing crevice of your body, and finally, confiscate a pack of gum from your pocket, plus a box of cigs from Barbie’s. It’s giving prison yard pussy pat-down.

It strikes you that this level of surveillance is the darkly comedic result of rave culture subsumed to corporate insurance policies. In 2010, a 15-year-old girl died after doing ecstasy at America’s largest EDM bonanza, Electric Daisy Carnival. Ever since, the festival’s promoter Insomniac—who is also behind tonight’s concert—began to performatively distance itself from ecstasy culture while also being symbiotically intertwined with it. The cognitive dissonance is so crazy that according to a Byzantine door policy, items like tampons and gum are considered “contraband” if the packaging is unsealed, because—god forbid!—there might be a naughty pill or baggie stashed inside. Should we ban socks next?

The BRUTALISMUS 3000 show is extremely sold out, and, miss thing, sugar daddy is not on the guestlist, tonight. Bored on a Friday night and curious about what the children are up to, he’d decided to join you and Barbie at the last minute. You’d assumed that when there’s a wad of cash, there’d be a way, but looking around now at the people pressing towards the entrance with sparkly-eyed excitement, there’s not a scalper in sight. You spot a friend working the event, give him a kiss on the cheek, and ask if there’s a way to slip sugar daddy through the door—but even he is unable to pull strings. “I’m not sure how we’re going to get you in, babe,” murmurs hyperpop Barbie to daddy, who is starting to pout.

You leave the lovers at the door to sort out their fate. Through the entrance, the room opens up to a standing-room-only dancefloor thronging with a 4,000-strong crowd. Many of the attendees jostling for space next to you look like they just graduated from college, went to Hard Festival, then discovered techno during the pandemic on Boiler Room. There is a sort of mimetic, play-by-numbers quality to their looks: wraparound sunglasses: check. All-black athletic wear: check. You could call it the Balenciaga effect on techno.

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Many stoner archetypes have emerged over the illustrious history of cannabis: the tie-dye wearing hippie, the blunt-blowing mogul, the blowtorch-waving dab bro, the spiritualist seeker… the stereotypes go on and on. But the weed aunty, I’d argue, is the most representative of contemporary weed culture’s shift away from the stoney-baloney slacker towards to the mystical feminine: she’s a middle-aged woman, high but in a wholesome way, and more likely to be dabbing CBD oil on her temples than passed out on the couch. Sure, she’s constantly sneaking outside to puff joints at the family reunion dinner, but all that weed also seems to have made her… hotter and wiser?

So on the eve of 4/20, the highest of all holidays, I’m bringing you a sweet interview with my favorite weed aunties: Christina Wong and Wendy Zeng. Christina and Wendy are mainstays in LA’s tight knit cannabis scene, and are known for throwing cannabis dining events under the name Mogu Magu.

In fact, “Magu” (麻姑) translates to “hemp goddess,” and is the name of a Taoist deity associated with cannabis—a sacred plant in ancient China. Chinese shamanism and herbalism has a long history with weed; cannabis is included in the oldest Chinese pharmacopeia, and ancient Taoists believed that consuming the plant with ginseng could give one prophetic powers.

While much of these folk traditions have been buried under prohibition, Magu—known for her long, talon-like nails and hemp-based healing elixirs—is becoming a bit of a cult figure amongst the new wave of Asian-Americans determined to claw back their culture from the War on Drugs.

Reclaiming Asian weed culture through food is Mogu Magu’s mission. They’ve thrown epic dinner parties towards this cause, including a four-course feast last February that explored the complexity of spicy flavors in Asian cuisine, with each course paired with a different strain of hash. (Cannabis was part of the Silk Road!) They’ve also done hot pot parties with infused hot sauce, a “Diwali and dabs” celebration, and dumpling-making workshops.

This Saturday (4/19), Mogu Magu is hosting a comedy show + tasting event called Bad Asians—a “criticism-free” zone where the only judgement will be a competition overseen by a drag queen Kimchi involving comedians testing out terpenes and giving their tasting notes. If you’re in LA and wanna hang with the stoner slaysians (or just wanna lurk on the livestream), come thru!

I spoke to Christina and Wendy on a recent, beautiful spring afternoon, while they were prepping for the event. While sharing a joint and getting progressively baked, they exuded their sparkling weed aunty auras while discussing some of the craziest dishes they’ve ever cooked together. Our conversation spanned everything from the delights of mapo tofu bolognese and infused Pocky sticks, to why the next wave of cannabis culture is about making people who don’t smoke weed feel welcome. Check out the video above, and cop tickets to Bad Asians here.

Michelle: Hi Wendy, Hi Christina! Happy 420 I know we wanted to start this interview at 4:20pm. We had a little bit of tech delays, but you know, we can still think of it as 4:20.

Christina: Why not? It's always 4:20 around here.

Michelle: So I'm really excited to chat with you guys, because I've been wanting to for a while talk to you about the work that you're doing within the intersection of cannabis and Asian stoner culture, which the upcoming 420 holiday is the perfect time to kind of celebrate. So why don't we kind of start by explaining what Mogu Magu is.

Wendy: So “mogu” means mushroom, and “magu” means the hemp goddess of longevity. She's a deity in Taoism. But gu also means auntie. So together, it actually means your weed mushroom auntie. That's what we wanted to feel like in all of our gatherings: what would it be like to go to that kind of familial, comforting environment, like an auntie's house, except she's got mushrooms and weed for you.

Christina: It's really evolved from us hanging out, hosting gatherings into an AAPI culture food and cannabis collective. And as we started to learn more and uncover more stories about this Taoist deity Magu, we started finding more inspiration. If we were really embodied your rad mushroom weed auntie, who would that person be? What are these kinds of events? We try to bring together these familial cultural elements, with our favorite foods, along with cannabis, to help to destigmatize and show cannabis and culture side by side, and showing it in a different way, in more positive associations.

Wendy: And we're not the only aunties. The more that we explore this Magu figure, the more we notice how there's weed mushroom aunties all around us. Like you're kind of a cool weed mushroom aunty.

Michelle: I feel like there's this new stoner archetype of the weed auntie that's developing. I mean, obviously she's been around for a long time, but by naming it and kind of giving it space to bloom, I feel like we're starting to see a lot more older women step into… I mean, not to say we're old, but you know what I mean?

Christina: What it helped me embrace was like, I'm like, stepping into my auntie era. And it also reminds me of the importance of having aunties in our life, right? Like our parents aren't able to understand us, or give us support in this particular way that an auntie can. I wish I had cooler aunties, but they're not either. Sometimes we have to find or make our own. I didn't even know that this was something I needed in my life until we met Ophelia, and it was just like, holy shit. I didn't know I needed this person in my life. The first time, she was just like, I'm so proud of you, I love you. I was like, oh my god. I don't even know what to do with that information, because it just felt so right? My parents, I know they are [proud], but they don't get it, and having somebody who gets it makes such a big difference.

That's why it's healing ourselves and each other, because as we get high, as we talk, and we work through all of our things, that there's so much healing to be had. So that's what Mogu Magu is really about. Yes, there's this very aesthetic stoner core culture that we're creating, but also it's about: how can we heal our own traumas, and heal ourselves, and be the person that we want to be and shed this intergenerational trauma that we carry by exploring cannabis.

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In 2023, when I decided to film the pilot of Rave New World’s docuseries on global rave culture in Singapore, my home country, everyone said that my film crew should shoot the scene at Bussy Temple. So we did, and the results were finally cut into an mini-documentary that we screened last month in Singapore, at a chic new club called Rasa (which itself is an interesting story that you can read about here).

After the screening, I had the chance to sit down with two members of the Bussy Temple collective, resident DJ Bruce (aka howrøng), and Jo Ho in front of a live audience. We talked about queer cybernetic theory and how it relates to Singapore’s technocratic state, how they got away with throwing a renegade, and why there’s a bit of a lull in the country’s rave scene right now.

In the second half of the conversation (around 24:44), Bruce plays and discusses a couple tracks that have been in heavy rotation at the party, giving us a taste of the hardcore sounds of Southeast Asia’s underground.

Check it out, and if you like this video format and want to see more conversations like this, please hit the “like” button and consider bumping up to a paid subscription—as always, THANK YOU for being here!!

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Michelle Lhooq: Hi everyone. So we're here today with Bruce aka howrøng and Joho, co-organizers of Bussy Temple, these incredible cyberpunk, brave, queer, fabulous festivities happening in Singapore. We wanted to talk a bit more about the complexities of throwing a rave in Singapore, as well as get into some really interesting theory behind the party around… let's call it queer, cybernetic transhumanism. And then Bruce is going to play us some songs that represent the sounds of Singapore and Southeast Asia's Underground. So it's going to be really fun.

I wanted to start by reading the introduction to the party that Rave New World's documentary was about, called Xenoflesh. It happened in December 2023, and it really caught my attention, because you don't find screeds this on Eventbrite very often:

i dream of a blasphemy. we come from surrogate wombs, gestated by our own hands. the haraway cyborg emerging beyond holy dualisms now archaic: i am nature-machine-human-animal-the ideal-the material.

metamorphosis is moot, change is our only god. our limbs detachable, pharmaco-interventions abound. synapses rush thoughts from the other side of the net into our consciousness.

in me is the universe, delivered through data. our bodies an altar, a home for multiplicities: embodying i—you—networks—pulses—what has been—what will be—an infinite interflow of subjectivities…a mutant queer future

I mean, that is rave poetry. Did you write that, Jo?

Jo Ho: We all write the initial concept together. And then Minsoo, who actually is a writer, comes in and edits our ideas and phrases into something more poetic and narrative. But I haven't heard this in so long, a year. It's crazy.

Lhooq: So tell me about the concept of the party, Xenoflesh. What is this text about? What are you trying to gesture at?

Jo Ho: Maybe I can paint a picture of the collective's vibe and the greater community's vibe at that time, and then I'm actually going to read something that Minsoo wrote for us because she couldn't be here. She's in New York, and she saw the first premiere [of the Rave New World documentary on Singapore there].

During this time, we were doing a lot of raves that were very hard, and it's about the release of energy. Xenoflesh was our conclusion to this streak of rebellion in expression, right? Expressing ourselves as much as we want within the space and trying to integrate different types of self expressions. We always integrate using tech to increase empathy between each other, or connect with each other in different ways. We have our phones, we’re basically (already) connected to tech, connecting to each other.

I think I'll just briefly read what Minsoo wrote for us regarding the theory of the Cyborg Manifesto, othering, and cybernetic utopias:

“The concept for Xenoflesh departed from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, a seminal feminist text that inspired the xeno-feminist school of thought, where the party name is partly from. In it, she employs the cyborg as a means of turning away from the constant creation of the “other,” the “other” meaning the thing that's assumed not to be the subject. So the way that subjugation and antagonism, whether towards women or nature or anything else that we regard as the “other,” comes to be justified—she proposes a blending of boundaries instead. So also Bussy Temple, we're all about the in-between. It's not boy, it's not pussy, it's bussy. It's not girl, it's not boy, it's non-binary. We always want to live in the in-between.

Through this concept, we also wanted to explore the role of technology and utopian imaginations, which we always do with all of our parties. We write narratives for them, and we try to build a piece of that world within the narrative. Tech is often employed to enable an escapist alternate reality—fantasy as an answer to dystopia. What if it could be imagined as a thing that makes us one? Thoughts and emotions of millions of subjectivities coursing through data with consciousness, uniting us, breathing in one. Technology as a means to ultimate, visceral oneness, blurring of boundaries. Taken to its extreme, technology facilitating empathy, rather than a disparate, disassociated escapism.”

So I think Xenoflesh also harks back to the fact that we're visceral beings, and we have to live in the bodies that were given. How do we make the most of it? Do we connect with tech more? Do we connect with each other more? How do we hybridize all of these formats? Xenoflesh is a very, very big concept. And of course, anyone can interpret it in the way that they want to read it based on their own experiences.

Lhooq: I love how intellectual the concept of this party is. It feels very Singaporean, actually, , , over-conceptualizing everything. We're hyper-educated… but still cunty. I love this idea of the mutant queer futures that you talk about in the description, and I'm curious about how you see the relationship between mutant cyborgian identity as well as queerness—is that connected to you?

Jo Ho: Just in your documentary, a lot of people from our community feel very alien here, in this normcore society, where any expression that deviates from the norm can be seen as weird. Why did you bleach your eyebrow? Why did you do that? Why this? Why that? So I think expressing yourself and celebrating a mutant form is something that we really try to push. I mean, you can also come as your normcore self. That's fine, too. That's also a look. But I think we really celebrate that alien energy, celebrate you for who what makes you unique.

As for more theory on cyborgism, or the Cyborg Manifesto, I don't know how else to describe it. I think Minsoo is more of the theorist here. All I can say is, we just want to celebrate that experimentation, going past the boundaries, going past the skin, or going past tech to connect.

Lhooq: I also feel it's a way to get past certain sticky issues around identity politics. It’s like we're pushing past gay, straight, trans, whatever. We're just mutants.

Jo Ho: We always say we're the plus in LGBTQIA+.

Lhooq: I love that. Your party was the first time that I've seen young trans people hanging out together, and that was really powerful to observe in Singapore. When you started the party, were there other queer or trans forward events happening that you took inspiration from? Or were you creating something because you felt there was a vacuum?

Jo Ho: Maybe Bruce can speak on this, because Bruce was in Bussy before I joined.

Bruce: The queer and trans community has always been in Singapore. It's not something new. There's always been events, it's just that they maybe couldn't be so public. And then for Bussy Temple, the lore is that Minsoo and Zenon, aka Metamoksha, used to live together. They were , what should we call our place? Then brainstormed, and I think they got some inspiration from this collective called Pussy Palace. But they were , you know, what should we call it? Maybe it's a temple. So then they thought, oh, BUSSY, BUSSY, PUSSY temple. So it started more , finding a place just to be. It was just a gathering. But then we did our first rave in a tunnel. And I think that that was when it really started. I'm going away from the question, but basically there are queer and trans events, but not raves that played hardcore music, techno or harder forms. So I think in that sense, it was new. At least I didn't know of any other collectives that were queer and trans-forward and also playing hard music.

Lhooq: I’m glad that you brought up the tunnel rave, because that's such a key part of the party's lore. Again, another first for me. I've never heard of anyone throwing a renegade rave in Singapore. Actually, that's not true. Someone told me one time that they went to a rave in an empty swimming pool, which sounded really cool, but it almost feels a myth, right? How is this even possible? How do you get away with it in Singapore, which is so small and so tightly surveilled. I think that people who live outside of Singapore might not understand that it's a really tiny island country, and so it is possible to actually have every single square inch surveilled by cameras. So how did you do that? And were you afraid?

Bruce: Definitely we were scared, but it was a small group, I think that was the first thing. And back then, there wasn't so much attention on raves, because I think in early 2022 there were waves, but it wasn't so, , a TikTok thing, , oh my god, rave, Tiktok, let's go. No, it's just a group of friends. It was really sending this badly made poster with our names on it to our friends through WhatsApp. And then I had to bring my JBL speaker down that muddy hill. It was a whole thing. Because it was so small and tight, we didn't have to worry about word getting out, and we just had some rules, , don't post it online until after. And we had people check because it's a secluded area of Singapore. I'm not going to say where, but it was near a highway and not near any major residences. So that's pretty much how we got away with it.

Lhooq: Did any random Singaporeans come across you?

Bruce: There’s a a hiking path there. So I think at one of the raves, there were people coming in. And we were , shit, the cops, let’s get out. Then [the strangers] were , actually, we're here to look for ghosts. Actually, hilarious. We were … we’re the ghosts. Boo! Queer ghosts. I love that.

Lhooq: That's actually perfect, because my next question was gonna be about spirituality. Your name is Bussy temple. Bussy means boy pussy, that's the queer reference. But there's also this temple reference, and one of the things that I loved about your party is that you had an altar with Asian deities and incense, and there was this really spiritual vibe in the midst of crazy hardcore techno. So can you talk more about how you're bringing spirituality into the party?

Jo Ho: In all of our raves, we have a sanctuary space with a shrine. But not only does the sanctuary serve as this makeup space where people can get ready if they can't get ready at home, it also serves as this place where people congregate and meet and talk, or if they don't want to talk, they can just sit there and observe as well. It's adjacent and very important to the rave space. I think our first sanctuary was in Cyber Hell, right? Oh no, no…

Bruce: I think it was in Spectral Mass. There were tarot card readings. That was one of the events at Kult Kafe, which is now gone, so many places in Singapore. But the actual naming of the sanctuary. I remember it was with Kai, one of our members, who's now in Glasgow. The two of us were saying we really want to have a space aside from the dance floor to chill that's not a smoking corner. I think in Berlin there are these spaces, you know, a swing or whatever that you can just hang out at. And I think that's something that doesn't happen here. Even in this club [Rasa, where we are recording], there is some space there to chill, for example, which is nice. But let's say, other clubs in Singapore, it's always mostly the smoking corner where you can go to chill. And then we built upon the sanctuary being a place that we put our altar, and then we have this figure called Whorenacia that's a mannequin. That's our mascot. But I think the spirituality is loose, we just want to make it open to interpretation. It's not like we wanted to focus on any religion but be the opposite. Just be spiritual in whatever way that means to you.Even when we go into spaces, we want to respect that space. So I think even for the tunnel, because when we heard about the ghost thing, we got spooked. So burn incense and we're , okay, spirits don't haunt us, that thing.

Lhooq: I actually think that spirits are at raves, and that there is something very ceremonial about what we're doing on the dance floor when, whether on drugs or not, we go into this deeper brainwave state and feel connected consciously to other people, and open ourselves up to energies. Sometimes, I think people do go into a trance on the dancefloor, and in some cases, maybe even channel certain entities. And I didn't really recognize all of this until I actually went to a real plant medicine ceremony, and there was music and dancing there, and I was , fuck, this feels a rave. So I think there is a lot of overlap, and it's beautiful to be able to create an altar and center that wavelength a little bit more, because we're already doing it. Let's just really recognize that.

Jo Ho: Our purpose is to gather the community, and have this as a meeting place. I've heard from a few people that they come to Bussy Temple parties, not for their raves, but to hang out in the sanctuary, because that's where they get to meet people. They get to talk. The rave dancefloor is a little bit more communal action versus connecting in another way. So I think that's pretty important for our community as well.

Lhooq: It's just so sad that there aren't more spaces like that in Singapore. And I definitely wanted to ask you, why do you think it's so hard to throw raves in Singapore?

Jo Ho: Oh my god, it's so expensive. Xenoflesh was so expensive, it was our most expensive party, but we were , it's okay, we're just gonna do it.

Lhooq: Can you talk to me a little bit more about those numbers? I know both of you apply for licenses for the raves, so it's not a completely illegal party, because you are working with the authorities to keep yourself safe. But how much does applying for a license cost in Singapore?

Jo Ho: Actually, it's pretty affordable. It's SGD $50… $50 to 80 for license and entertainment.

Lhooq: So where are the costs coming from?

Jo Ho: It’s venue costs. Venues are getting so expensive here. I mean, it makes sense, because they have to pay their rent as well. But usually it's always the venue that takes out most of the cut, and then for Xenoflesh, I think we had four international artists, so that was also quite a big cut. And we had never had so many international artists on the lineup before. So I think we also had to pay them their fees.

Lhooq: The venue that you guys did that party at, I believe cost $8,000 to rent out? Something that.

Jo Ho: Something that. But that's , totally normal.

Lhooq: The challenge of throwing a rave in hyper capitalist Singapore, one of the most expensive cities in the world is , you're trying to create an alternative to this capitalist society, but you ultimately still have to engage within it. And it's a huge shame because there's a huge underground here that is just really desperate for these kinds of experiences and community events, but it's so restrictive. It's interesting, because at the time that you threw this party in 2023 the nightlife scene was really exciting. There was a lot of energy. There were a lot of different parties happening. And I felt so inspired. I was , yes, let's go, Singapore on the up! And then I came back during this trip, and now people are telling me, actually, the rave scene is struggling, and there aren't that many parties happening, and there's a bit of a lull, and, you know, there's no more venues to throw these parties at. So it made me realize, growth isn't a strict trajectory upwards. It maybe goes in peaks and dips, and right now, it's a little dispiriting to me that the nightlife scene is not flourishing. What do you think?

Jo Ho: I think you're right. I think it's an ebb and flow of energies. There was a huge surge of energy post pandemic, and I think we rode that wave. When we first had our parties, there were a lot of people who were coming into their adulthood and spending the years before in lockdown. So I think when we came into the scene, there were a lot of people who were desperate to have a space to express and dance and have fun, and then all of these collectives as well. They started to come up here and there, and now we have a pretty solid lineup of collectives, actually. But the energy ebbs and flows, and then I feel there's a little bit of a lull, especially for Bussy Temple. Now we're taking it slow again. There was a lot of push in 2023. I think we did four big parties, right? And it's six of us doing all the work, so we were all burnt out after Xenoflesh.

Lhooq: Being a part of the underground scene here, yes, can be very encouraging, and it gives me life, but it can also fill me with a lot of rage. And I felt this last night, actually, at the party Hyperfocus, where I was just , wow, this underground is so beautiful, and the fact that it's not allowed to flourish even more, and the conditions are so difficult, and these children just want to rave and they can't. It fucking pisses me off. I'm so mad, and so I want to talk about that rage, because I felt a lot of that rage coming through at your party as well. I felt a lot of the artists were screaming. There was a very punk mosh pit energy. I felt it was a place for people to release that anger.

Jo Ho: It was so funny, because that was our only party where I left, bleeding. I bled from Fitness’ set, it was so cathartic. Actually, the mosh pit was cathartic. For Xenoflesh, I wanted to lead the direction for this party. For me, there was a sense of needing some sort of release from other experimental sounds. There was a noise performance, Chau (Chaulichi) was screaming, and she was running around the space. And then there's a lot of bodily performances from Jas Lin, which we saw in your film, with the glowing suit, and then Fitness as well. So there's a lot of restless energy, and we wanted everyone to feel that energy and release that energy collectively.

Lhooq: So speaking of the music at the party, I think this is an excellent transition to move into some of the sounds of Bussy Temple. So Bruce has selected a couple tracks that they're going to play for us. Maybe we can just talk about each one before you play them and discuss? Or should we play it first and then talk?

Bruce: I think I'll say some words. In Singapore, all the collectives have really different soundscapes that they explore. Hyperfocus can tend to be more from hard dance to experimental. There’s some overlap, but I think Bussy Temple is more towards ethereal sounds and hardcore generally. So maybe I'll first play a track that I think was closest to the vibe of the Xenoflesh party, because like you were saying, it's really angry. If you know Kilbourne, she’s this artist that Zenon and I and Jo, we really love. I think a lot of people like this hardcore sound that Kilbourne produces. And it's not just loud, but it's also there's this transcendental synth sound. I'll just play 20 seconds.

Lhooq: I actually remember that song. You played it during sound check! I remember we were moshing to it in the empty club.

Bruce: It’s really interesting, because actually, she sampled this kid, this little girl from, I don't know, Estonia or something around there. She was literally kicking and punching a tree, and she broke it… she's some karate master. And then that's the sound of the thunk thunk thunk. So I think there's a lot of queer rage existing in this society, and you just want to get it out. So I think that's one of the ways we do it, through these soundscapes. But it's not just hard, there's also these introspective moments that you can hear. So that's why, yeah, we really like this music.

Next, I'm gonna play a track by rEmPiT g0dDe$$. She's a Malaysian artist, but I think a lot of people on the scene know her because she used to live in Singapore, and she's played at a couple of our parties. This is from her newest album called Prime Energy.

I feel this music, it's so hard to categorize, right? Could you call it techno? I guess. Another nice thing is that there's a lot of elements going on. We like to say, oh, we don't play 4 x 4 stuff. But, you know, everything exists in 4 x 4 beat, if you want to be really technical. But then there's a lot of different elements playing with different rhythms. So that's nice, too. We in the underground, exploring with sounds, we don't want to just hear vocals all the time, or if we do, it's distorted.

Lhooq: You mentioned rEmPiT g0dDe$$ as someone who you think also really embodies the Southeast Asian scene. Can you talk more about her music in that context?

Bruce: She's been around for a while, and she's played across Southeast Asia. So I think that as well as being one of the few female producers in the underground, she really has made a name for herself, and she's also gone overseas to tour. She actually played last year with [the collective] Endless Return. Zouk is one of the biggest nightclubs in Singapore. It's been around since the 90s, and it was funny, because Endless Return threw an “NPC rave,” and they had a butoh dance, and then Rempit was playing. People showed up because they know her. Should I play one more?

Lhooq: As many as you want, baby!

Bruce: Okay, then two more. Another one is Wanton Witch. She's actually a trans artist, and she's born in Borneo, but she moved to Bangkok, and then she started Non Non Non, which is a harder techno slash harder dance collective in Bangkok. And now she's living in Berlin. I've always loved her productions. It's so good. So I'm playing this from her new album called aku, and the track is called “Empty Spoon.” I just like it because there's so many elements to it: there's strings, there's different rhythms going on. So it's really cool.

Lhooq: I love that you've played three songs by femme hard dance icons.

Bruce: Femmes make the best music. The last one I'm gonna play is quite interesting. I need to pull out my phone, because the details are great. Basically, it's a collaboration between this artist that I love called Slikback and he's actually from Uganda, I think. This track I'm going to play, is a collaboration with Hyph11e, she's a Beijing or Shanghai-based artist. She produces a lot of experimental club. And it's something that both Zenon and I play a lot during the party, so that's why I wanted to play it. I think this is from a release called Slip B, and it's a collaboration between two collectives called Nyege Nyege from Uganda and SVBKLT from Shanghai.

Lhooq: That’s the first song where I thought I could hear maybe Chinese sampled a little bit.

Bruce: Actually, this is a Slikback edit of a Hyph11e track called “Black Pepper.” And that whole album, she explores tribal sounds being sampled, and then creating club music for it. So I think that's also something that we really to play with. We don't want to just sample gamelan and then put it in very superficially. We’re trying to understand it in a context, or using the chance as a way to do ritualistic release. But you really have to dig for these records, because in Southeast Asia, there are really not many people who produce this music. You really have to look.

Lhooq: How important do you think sampling is to creating these Southeast Asian-specific sounds?

Bruce: It doesn't really matter. As long as you get the sounds that you want, you can create it. I mean, I'm not really a producer. But I think it's more about having the vision to what sounds you want to achieve. And then these artists, tthey're so creative. How does the brain come up with that? It's crazy amazing.

Lhooq: Do you want to just say, very quickly, the sounds that you're currently playing? What are your sets shaping up to sound like these days?

Bruce: That's a good question. I'm not sure. Maybe I just summarize for Southeast Asia. I feel there's a lot of experimental club in certain scenes, and then people just want to experiment with the sound. That's why people are bored with techno or house. It's not that we have anything against these genres. It's just that contextually, what is that music to us? You know?

One thing I really wanted to say, which I almost forgot, is, if I don't play these tracks, who's going to do it? Because I don't think in Berghain, people are going to play this. Maybe Wanton Witch, when she plays at Berghain. But we have to play the Southeast Asian tracks by our fellow producers, or whatever, if not nobody else will play it, then it'll never get heard. So I think that's something for me. When I have a DJ set, I always try to put this in.

When I first started, one of these collectives called Fomo Homo. That was one of my first ever big gigs. So I was playing techno and hard groove, which I can't even imagine doing now, but it was because I was worried that people would leave. But now I don't fucking care. I'm just gonna play it. Fire me if you want, I don't get paid that much anyway, so I might as well play what I like. I think that's it… just play what you like, because if you don't enjoy it, you get so bored. People will be able to tell you’re just twisting the knobs and bored. You have to really play what you like. So for me, every set is different, and also contextually, in the party, it is important to know what is the lineup and what you want to play. So my most recent set was at Tuf Club,, but then Pineapple Atsuo Donkey was playing, and he's funny, so I wanted to play something really not serious. So I just did that.

Lhooq: I heard really good reviews of that set, by the way, people said it was sick. Okay, I think that's where we can end. Everyone give it up for Jo and Bruce. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. We're gonna have an after party now outside with wild Pearl DJs, so stick around. Let's hang out. Thank you.