Banshee

In the earliest hours of 6 November 2022, I made my way toward an abandoned warehouse in Montréal for an illegal rave organised by two members of the local rave scene. This rave, an event called Banshee, was not a commercial nightlife production nor was it sponsored by corporate interests; it was a DIY (do-it-yourself) operation meant to remain undetectable to mainstream culture (as well as law enforcement authorities) and to cater to a very specific subsect of Montréal’s ‘party scene’—if there is such an amorphous thing—that is largely anglophone, queer, racially diverse but predominantly white, ostensibly working class, and broadly comprised of self-identified ‘creatives.’

However, despite Banshee’s DIY overtones, it was clear that this event was a massive undertaking with a line-up of thirteen DJs (including a flown-in international one), five visual and installation artists, a volunteer crew of almost one hundred people, and a budget of approximately $15 000, complete with trendy branding through a website, social media, and physical flyers. The rave was ultimately shut down by police mere hours after it began, but this festive site remains fertile for a sensory ethnographic investigation as a multisensorial experience co-created through a collective vision to subvert hegemonic socio-cultural relations and normalised parameters of reality.

For my examination of Banshee, I attended (or rather, attempted to attend) the event myself, as well as conducted three interviews with the two organisers, one of the installation artists, and one of the DJs, respectively. These interviews each took place within several weeks following the event and were designed as multisensorial modes of research: I met the DJ in their music studio in which they showed me their equipment and played music they had been working on, I spoke with the installation artist at their art studio surrounded by creative materials, and I toured the abandoned warehouse with the organisers as they revisited the event and its production.

Examining the rave as a genre of ‘festival’ is especially significant since “The electronic and rhythmically repetitive nature of the music, the long hours of dancing, the semi-legal secret location and the ingestion of psychoactive substances are what distinguish raves from other youth parties,” as well as from other types of music festivals that feature numerous artists, environments, and sensory experiences (Takahashi, 2004, p. 144). Here, I am interested in exploring how the rave, as a festive subculture of the music festival, is constitutive of spiritual and transcendent rituals that are seemingly fuelled by recreational drug use but that are, in actuality, representative of community-fostering and world-building practices. In this regard, I conceptualise the rave not only as a site for spiritual and transcendent community experience, but as a communal ‘technology of transcendence’ itself.

The Site

Located in Montréal’s Southwest borough along the historic Lachine Canal, the roughly 10 000 square metre warehouse in which Banshee took place was originally a shipping factory, famously producing vessels for the Second World War effort (Doyon, 2013). Having lived many lives, the building—now a heritage site—has sat empty and derelict since the 2013 eviction of over a dozen artists who had studios there after the municipal government expropriated the warehouse from a private owner in order to use it as storage space. In recent years, the 28 000 square metre site on which the warehouse sits has been the subject of much media attention as the city hosted an international competition for urban development of the space (Stouhi, 2021). In the meantime, the warehouse-cum-municipal-storage-space has been ostensibly ‘abandoned,’ save for whatever the city has chosen to stash inside of it. Lately, according to the organisers and the installation artist I spoke with, it’s been unused compost bins.

Despite my interviewees assertions that the city is, indeed, using it as a storage space, the warehouse looks outright abandoned. Even in broad daylight, the warehouse appears mostly in greyscale. It’s a chilly afternoon in mid-December 2022, a month and a half since Banshee took place. I have arrived at the site to do ethnography; my guides, the two organisers, have been informed about my project and are eager to show me around. They also need an extra pair of hands to help disassemble a large wooden shelving unit inside to bring the lumber home for their personal use. The meeting is a mutually beneficial one.

I cannot blame the warehouse too much for its monochromatic demeanour as the sky itself is a flat tableau of diffused grey—outside everything is bathed in the same grey and snowflakes cascade steadily, adding to a substantial layer that already covers the ground. After breaking into the building with bolt-cutters, only to realise afterward that the lock on the door was the same that the organisers themselves had installed weeks prior and that a key would have been sufficient, we begin our guided tour. Inside the darkened entrance, our headlamps and phones illuminate the space. The paints is peeling excessively from the walls and there is rubble everywhere: broken glass, concrete, drywall, and other building materials which have mostly been pushed into the corners. The air is frigid and damp and shallow puddles of water mark extend across the floor. One of the organisers waves a cigarette around as they speak, suffusing the dusty, industrial smell of the air with its smoke. Everything is eerily quiet, punctured by the crunch of rubble beneath our feet and our chatter which echoes throughout the building’s indeterminate chambers.

We step out of the narrow hallway and into a cavernous atrium flooded with light from the clerestory windows. Remnants of the rave—a large sculpture, a bar constructed from wood boards, alcoholic beverage cans, a custom-built seating platform, and piles of dirt marked with makeshift wooden crosses (this room was playfully designated as the ‘Raveyard’)—still occupy the space, albeit notably marred by graffiti. I’ve been here before, but in the dark and under different psychological circumstances. Despite Banshee being shut down, I still managed to make my way inside the warehouse that night in a desperate attempt to grasp some of the magic, to sense the experience for myself.

Images 1 and 2: Photos by Leona Nikolić, December 2022

Now, a dusting of fresh snow coats the floor in spots underneath broken windows and our breathing is visible as we speak. If the city is actively using this building, it is certainly not apparent from the junk haphazardly scattered throughout this room and the rest of the warehouse: broken fluorescent lighting units, a discarded car seat, dismembered plastic folding chairs, empty cans of wall paint, a messy pile of used tires and cinderblocks, the odd trampled blue latex glove, lopsided park benches, an old shoe here and there, at least one rusty steel drum, all sorts of unidentifiable scraps, and, most vexingly, the isolation pods—perhaps the kind used as sensory deprivation tanks for therapeutic purposes. The ‘vibe’ is certainly a forsaken one.

However, like most ‘abandoned’ spaces, it has not been unoccupied or disused, as such. If you talk to locals, you may discover that more surreptitious activities continue to take place in such sites (Bernal, 2022; Garrett, 2014; Kërçuku, 2022; Piazza, 2018). In this warehouse, that much is clear as unofficial-looking trash litters the space and colourful graffiti—a break from the monochrome—cover the walls, ceiling, and any other available surface. Others have been here since the rave. As Organiser 1 notes, “we cleaned up everything for the event, but now it's kind of back to chaos” (personal communication, December 16, 2022). And, according to all four of my interviewees, Banshee was not the first rave to take place inside the space, at least one of which had been organised by these same organisers in the summer just months before Banshee. That one, however, was much more low-key and had functioned as a sort of test-run for this larger-scale production. So why do people want to risk police intervention to party in a grimy and treacherous space with no plumbing rather than going to a licensed dancing club?

The Vision: Interactivity, Immersion and Multisensoriality

For many, including myself, the illicit and dangerous nature of the activity is certainly part of the allure (Wark, 2023). And it is precisely these concepts that informed the design of the promotional materials for Banshee. The digital ‘flyer,’ circulated on Instagram by those involved, was an eye-catching combination of grey and red—a vaguely spooky aesthetic for the Halloween theme. The posts, variations of both videos and images, featured blurry greyscale scenes of an abandoned building interior with crumpled looseleaf graphics, flashing lights, rippling visual effects, and techno music.

Images 3 and 4: Images from Instagram account @__em.forgues, October 2022)

The website, too, offered a chaotically multisensorial experience, with the wailing noise of what I presumed was intended to be a Banshee, playing in the background. The audio-visual elements of the promotional materials generated a palpable sense of mystery around this event—what exactly was it and where would it be taking place? As is standard in many rave scenes, the location would not be revealed until the night of the event. However, many of us attending already knew where it was as these details do not remain secret for long if one knows anyone in the scene. Yet, with all the promotional hype about the multisensorial transformation of the space, this rave seemed like a special one, the once-in-a-year kind where organisers pull out all the stops to produce a spectacle, to create a rich and vivid and, most importantly, unusual experience.

Transgression as Meaning-Making

Despite the secrecy regarding the location, the website was thorough in detail with regard to the logistics of the event. The information outlined that this was obviously an illegal rave, that it would be taking place in an abandoned warehouse, and that there would be a cash bar and BYOB (bring your own beverage) permitted. It revealed that to reduce the risk of the party being shut down by police, a special escort system would be in place, with volunteers leading ravers by foot from an assigned meeting location to the warehouse itself. “The meeting place is like a decoy party. Come find our check-in staff when you arrive, but relax with your friends and pretend you're at a little party on the canal! There will be chips and bluetooth tunes” (personal communication, November 5, 2022). The organisers placed great emphasis on the fact that this would be in an abandoned warehouse in which ravers would be entering and congregating illegally and, thus, that there was a high risk of police intervention.

Moreover, the safety of the building was discussed: while the organisers insisted that they were taking necessary safety precautions to create fire escape plans, have first aid responders and a harm reduction team on site, and to clear as much debris as possible from the dance spaces, they also insisted that this was an ‘enter-at-your-own-risk’ situation. They advised ravers to wear sensible shoes and warm clothes that could potentially get dirty or damaged and to bring headlamps and water. As for the toilet situation, they would have makeshift toilets for any solid waste, but that any urinating should be done in a deserted corner of the warehouse (just as one would outdoors).

The organisers did not guarantee comfort nor a smooth, police-free event. Yet it was the promise-slash-caution of debris and broken glass, lack of amenities, the transgression—that was, for me, the appeal of the whole thing. More specifically, it was the abandoned warehouse venue that was of greatest intrigue for me and likely for many other ravers. As Simon Reynolds writes in an initiatory review blurb for McKenzie Wark’s Raving (2023):

…the rave [is] a construction site for transitory kinship structures—a pocket in timespace that is a haven for fugitives from consensus banality—a miniature home world for the aliens already on this planet. Ravers occupy the city’s abandoned places and turn them into zones of abandon, where identities dissolve, where you can lose yourself and find yourself (para. 2).

It is in these abandoned spaces where the high predictability of a licenced venue and its codified norms of social behaviour may be subverted as a means by which to heighten unexpected and exciting variables—to transform one’s reality.

Yet there is another significant function of the abandoned space in rave culture. Since the inception of rave culture in the UK acid scene of the late 1980s, abandoned spaces such as outdoor fields and forests, hangars, factories, and other industrial venues have been operationalised as political statements about the necessity of “autonomous zones” (Ingham et al., 1999, p. 291), the de- and re-territorialisation of private property through “the right to peaceful assembly” (Reynolds, 2012a, p. 536), and the significance of imagining utopian sites for shunning biopolitical “moral regulation” (John, 2015, p. 176). However, Reynolds (2012a) notes that this politicisation of raving was a reluctant one that arose from the simple need to find a space for ravers to do whatever they wanted to do—unbothered and unregulated—and is a logical consequence of a “non-ideological disobedience [that was] closer to criminality than to anarchism” (p. 536).

During our interview, the DJ asks me if I have read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021). I have not and prompt them to tell me more. A rave academic themselves, the DJ passionately expounds the book’s concepts on the origins and development of civilisations and humanity over the course of millennia:

They, in part, are talking about festivals. They're talking about play governments. Basically a festival [was originally a] time where a fake king and queen [would] be appointed and for the day [and] they're the ones who [would] rule the town or whatever. And this kind of playful act of reimagining societies actually predates a lot of the actualised and calcified forms of oppressive governance that actually did emerge on a global scale somehow in the last couple hundred years. They're saying [that] there's thirty to forty thousand years where there [were] different weird types of oppressive relationships but also they got fucked with, experimented with, reappropriated, de-turned, made fun of, [and] revolutions were fought against them for a long period of time—but we didn't get stuck in this tragic end-of-the-world situation that we're in [now] with global governance.

So as an inflection point, that's the entry point where I think you can make a cogent argument for this dissolution of the fixed or regimented [or] economically operative, if you want to make it [about the] political economy—but in that case, you'd have to really ask the question about how money relates to it. But regardless, there's an argument, I think, to be made [that] these spaces have the potential to be generative beds [for] roots of real collective action, even politics (personal communication, November 17, 2022).

Autonomy & Play

For the organisers of the rave, the autonomy they sought in the abandoned warehouse for Banshee has a great deal to do with their visions for creative expression and community nurturing. “We can do anything—we can break the fucking walls, like, we can do whatever we want with this space,” Organiser 2 enthuses (personal communication, December 16, 2022). Organiser 1 is quick to amend that assertion, clarifying that “it was also important for us to not disturb [those] living in abandoned spaces...because there are people that squat here” (personal communication, December 16, 2022). Likewise, there is only so much one can creatively reconfigure an outdoor space, at least in a physical sense, without damaging the environment. An abandoned structure, in this way, functions as a site for uninhibited creation, destruction, and other acts of meaning-making that are limited both outdoors and in inhabited places, as well as in licensed venues.

When I ask the installation artist what is meaningful about having illegal events in abandoned spaces such as this one, they explain that “you get the opportunity to use the space exactly [how] you want and without limitations. And I think that's what [the organisers] were trying to bring into it” (personal communication, November 18, 2022). Furthermore, speaking specifically in regard to their artistic practice, they reflect on the possibilities of subverting the institutional relationship between art and its audience: “I really like doing these installations in these forms because I want people to be naughty with them in a way that isn't accessible in art gallery spaces…we were doing ketamine on the mirrors and people were drinking around [the installation]” (Installation Artist, personal communication, November 18, 2022).

Whether or not one is recreationally consuming psychoactive drugs, the radical reimagining of social relations that rave organisers, artists, and their community attempt to enact in these often illicit and abandoned sites is nevertheless associated with druggy thinking. For Wark (2023), ketamine is particularly potent for thinking through such relations and the potentialities afforded by raving:

 …k is a dissociative drug. Self and world disappear, and with them the friction between self and world, merging into the sonic shimmer mix… The space of radical possibility might actually be with us vampires and other monsters in the k-time of the night (pp. 29–32).

Wark (2023) dubs this line of thinking ‘ketamine femmunism,’ paying homage to Mark Fisher’s (2020) ‘acid communism.’ Whereas Fisher (2020) draws from an acid-infused psychedelia that facilitates a blurring of the boundaries of reality and dream to call for a revolutionary redefinition of wealth not as capital but as speculative desire that must contend with the disturbing in order to enable pleasure, Wark (2023) calls for an elimination of desire in favour of dissociative states of being in which body and mind can negotiate time and space sideways to “ressocitate” as novel configurations (p. 29). Both, however, call for an inherently playful experimentation. Or, as the installation artist succinctly muses, “How do you ‘open’ a space for people to play in?” (personal communication, November 18, 2022).

The bigger challenge is simply finding a space to play in. An issue that each of the interviewees addressed during our respective interviews is that Montréal has a severe shortage of spaces in which people can gather, be creative, and dance in an unregulated manner. In my personal experience, having lived in the city for over seven years, there has been a sharp decline of the kinds of spaces in which these often-illicit DIY gatherings can take place. The DJ echoes my sentiment:

We are in a weaker position than we've been in a long time [in a] collectively, underground capacity to have spots and spaces where people can party or just be loud or just be together that aren't people's houses and that are not licenced venues or bars and [that] are away from a lot of houses or constant noise complaints or close neighbours [and] that aren't constrained. We used to have a lot more places where wild shit could happen and it really didn't raise any eyebrows or noise complaints and the cops just wouldn't come through because there was nothing going on from the outside on the street ever.

The spaces that are sort of left are, like, tiny corners of like buildings that used to have huge spaces that were like [Banshee], like at the [redacted] building where there's still like at least a couple, few studios that people have and sometimes parties happen there. And sometimes those are great and feel really like, literally 10 years ago. But 10 years ago, it was [happening] in those spaces which were adjacent to the ones we're in now and are literally ten or twenty times bigger. So that was a real difference (personal communication, November 17, 2022).

The size of the spaces in which ravers can gather is not without relevance. While small spaces can still permit transgression and transformation, the scope of creative exploration and community engagement may be limited or simply different. It is the size of a space, whether indoors or outdoors, which determines the physical limitations of how bodies can be configured in three-dimensional space and, thus, how bodies can sense one another and that which exists between and in relation to one another in a given space.

Sensing the Vibes

In decentring our understanding of what happens in a space from the predominantly visual or visible, it is also the way in which sound permeates subjects and objects, how rhythmic consensus reshapes individual bodies into communal bodies, and how tactile and other sensory exchanges and perceptions are generated (Garcia, 2020; Henriques, 2010; Ingham et al., 1999). The bodily capacity of a space can alter its “function and meaning” and determine “the  extent  to which places are, in and of themselves, by varying degrees discontinuous, dynamic, and  heterotopic” (Ingham et al., 1999, pp. 287–288). For Landau (2004), referring to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theorisations on the cognitive differences between thinking and feeling, “if ecstatic raving is indeed an unravelling of the thematic, Cartesian cogito, then in phenomenological terms it can be read as a return to the tacit cogito” (p. 116). To rave is as about feeling—sensing by any and by all means—and it is the physical and logistical parameters of a space which inform how ravers, as spatial agents, will both consciously and subconsciously produce and engage in (multi-) sensorial dimensions of experience. 

While it is certainly the sense of vision that many sensory ethnographers (Edensor & Sumartojo, 2015; Howes, 2022; Ingham et al., 1999; Pink, 2015) and other scholars (e.g., Daston & Galison, 2007) argue is privileged in Western modes of perception and of thinking about perception, for the organisers of Banshee, this rave represented their ambition for the decentring of sound—of the DJs and the musical elements—which have come to dominate their local rave scene and party culture on a global scale (Reynolds, 2012b; Rietveld, 2013). For example:

In a study of New York City’s underground dance DJ practices, Fikentscher (2000, p. 23) confirms that the ‘disco environment … prioritizes the aural dimension at the expense of the visual … the visual sense is lessened through the use of (relative) darkness, while auditory perception is drastically heightened, through the constant presence of music at a high volume and a wide frequency spectrum’ (Rietveld, 2013, pp. 81–82).

As DJs themselves, the Banshee organisers strive to challenge this normalised notion that the DJ must sell the party, be the face of the party, and that only the DJ deserves to be paid a larger sum of money. In their opinion, it should be about everyone involved, from the artists to the organisers to the volunteers. They note that even DIY spaces ascribe to this hierarchy as much as clubs, rendering much of the labour that goes into nightlife unseen. Organiser 2 declares, “I want to do raves with no [musical] line-up. Just trust that the music is going to be good and come for the experience” (Organiser 2, personal communication, December 16, 2022).

In this way, Banshee was an attempt at sensorially re-envisioning what the rave had become and what it could be, at least in the Montréal scene, by rebuilding its conceptual framework to centre community through communal experience and collective involvement. They advertised an extensive line-up of music al and visual artists as well as eclectic and immersive and experiences. It was not advertised as a festival, but the organisers acknowledge that it functioned as such. They added, “We’ve never seen something like this, nor have we ever organised something like this” (Organiser 2, personal communication, December 16, 2022). Powered by four generators, there would be thirteen DJs and musicians and five visual artists spread across multiple rooms and three themed zones—the Lair, the Raveyard, and the Crypt, each with a different ‘vibe.’

A conceptually slippery phenomenon, ‘vibe’ may be loosely defined as a general feeling about the state of things. This nebulous and trendy notion is a contextual language of aesthetics that I propose is at the theoretical nexus of mood (Heidegger, 1962), affect (Massumi, 1995), ambiance (Spitzer, 1942), atmosphere (Böhme, 2018), and aura (Benjamin, 1935) and which can be conceptualised as a collectively informed and embodied vernacular that is both sensory (Garcia, 2020) and rhythmic (Henriques, 2010). In current popular culture, a vibe signifies a certain energy, feeling, or in Allison P. Davis’ words, a “social wavelength” (A. P. Davis, 2022, para. 3).

Peli Grietzer, author of the definitively-titled “A Theory of Vibe” (2017a) insists that a vibe cannot be explained in any logical manner; that it is an ultimately intractable “aesthetic unity of material realities” (para. 3) bound to feeling, mood, atmospheric conditions, and context. However, concordant with Robin James’ (2021, 2022) theorisations, his ultimate thesis is that vibe represents an “ambient meaning” that is determined by “the expression of a structure of the social-affective life (the feelings, drives, affects, imaginations) of the subjects whose collective social performances and cultural productions constitute the social-material world” (Grietzer, 2017b, p. 146). Thus, the social undercurrent of vibe is manifest not as a mere aesthetic corollary of the state of things, but as the fundamental frequency for the production of socio-cultural meaning.

Back to Banshee’s vibes: while the Raveyard would feature techno music and the Lair drum and bass music, the Crypt, for which they entrusted the creative vision and curation to one of their collaborators, was even advertised on the latter’s Instagram story as a “chillout room” with the following description (an excerpt): “We welcome you to feast on our many nightly regals and to indulge in our ‘sensory pattern deformation experiment,’ a one-of-a-kind ‘cervical voyage’…” (Anonymised, Instagram communication, November 5, 2022). As Organiser 1 explains, the importance of having so many different experiences and interactive possibilities was not only that they realised the massive potential of the building, but also that they recognised an abundance of talented people in their social circles for which they wanted to create a venue for creative experimentation beyond music.

Yet, the organisers acknowledge that they are not re-inventing rave culture, but are attempting to bring it back to its roots as a multisensorial affair. “DJs are always the centre of the parties in club culture…but in rave culture, DJs are not the centre” (Organiser 2, personal communication, December 16, 2022). As Hillegonda C. Rietveld explains, in the early 1990s, “the DJ and music producer were (more or less) anonymous” (Rietveld, 2013, p. 80). Reynolds adds that “Right from the early days, there's always been a carnivalesque side to rave culture, from the free party sound systems with names like Circus Warp to the commercial UK raves with their bouncy castles, gyroscope rides, and merry-go-rounds” (Reynolds, 2012b, para. 18). While the DJ I spoke with has not been around long enough to have experienced these early days first-hand, they are well-versed about the culture’s background:

It's an old trend for the real rave crews. That's what it was about from the beginning, if you watch documentaries on the emergent Berlin underground techno scene when techno made its way from Kraftwerk to Detroit and back in, like, 1990 or whatever. All the ravers would get together and fucking spend the spend the time making the places really wild and different than they've ever been before. And then people would play music that no one ever heard before and these places felt like new. So like this space transformation thing, it's a part of, like, No Way Back in Detroit [and] the Interdimensional Transmissions parties that have been going on for decades. It's a part of festival culture to some extent, too, transforming sites and stages whether they're outside or inside. In a way clubs are like a space transformation [too]; Berghain's a space transformation of an industrial architecture, albeit a permanent, designed, and implemented one. But when you just go and rent a corporate party room and put some speakers in it and maybe like a couple LED panels with like a chase on them, you're not really evoking some of this same kind of like, ‘Whoa, what the fuck is this new zone?’ feeling (personal communication, November 17, 2022).

By reintroducing visual and interactive elements as the primary ones in Banshee’s immersive programming and design, the organisers sought to “strengthen affective belonging” and to “re-enchant familiar realms” (Edensor & Sumartojo, 2015, p. 259) in an effort to destabilise the growing sensorial monotony of their local party scene.

Continued in Part II