Image 1: Taken from Instagram account @da.u.ra, November 2022)

Next to the bar and near the room’s entrance from the dim hallway, ravers passed a three-dimensional multimedia sculpture resembling a fantastical, monstrous beast—the Banshee. Black netting filled with colourful balloons and emblazoned with chimeric faces, suspended from the low ceiling of this antechamber, extended horizontally for the length of a couple metres. On either end of the sculpture were long, flexible tubing materials styled as tentacles cascading to the floor. The sculpture was accentuated with ultraviolet paint that glowed beneath suspended ultraviolet lights. On the day of our visit, the sculpture remains, albeit somewhat weathered. On the Raveyard’s dancefloor itself, a VJ (visual jockey) commanded the visual sensorium with another installations. The artwork was a mobile digital video projector that was programmed for real-time projection mapping of the various graffiti pieces covering the walls. It was a modular installation commandeered by the artist who moved the projector throughout the space.

Image 2: Taken from Instagram account, @da.u.ra November 2022

Next, the organisers lead me to a darker room more modest in size—the Lair. On the way, we pass through hallways which contain vestiges of another installation artist’s work. Small piles of tempered glass, arranged neatly along the walls, were adorned with the tiny flames of tea light candles, serving as an illuminated pathway between spaces. The organisers boast that hundreds of these candles had filled the space and that the police had been particularly impressed by their fire safety protocol. This second main zone, the Lair, as mentioned previously, featured drum and bass sounds. Here, the visual centrepieces were a large lightbox constructed from a wood frame and covered in plastic white sheets, with a strobe light placed inside, as well as overheard neon lights controlled manually by a lighting artist.

Moving through the warehouse, we enter another cavernous room that had been devoted entirely to an interactive art installation, a collaboration between a local university professor and Organiser 1’s father. Here the electronic artists made use of an electrical panel, removing the breakers inside and replacing them with sequencers that were attached to switches. With these switches, ravers were invited to choose sequences that were based on audio beats. Once a sequence was chosen using the switches, electrical signals were transmitted to solenoid motors that would then tap on plastic and metal to produce LED flashes throughout the room.

We weave through junk-strewn hallways to yet another massive, heigh-ceilinged room. It is clear that the organisers know the space well as they navigate effortlessly through its many maze-like twists, passages, and makeshift doorways. The focal point for this space had been an altar installation, created by the artist I interviewed—the same artist behind the illuminated pathways of candles and glass. A large circle drawn carefully from tempered glass remains on the floor, slightly dishevelled. In the centre of the circle is a small mound of more glass shards, broken cinderblocks, and a dismembered lighting fixture. On the night of the rave, a tall candle had topped the altar’s centre.

Finally, we reach the third main zone and last portion of our tour of the Banshee ravescape: the Crypt. Housed in the smallest room of all of the event’s spaces, the Crypt functioned as a ‘chillout room’— a peaceful sanctuary with benches set up like church pews. During the rave, the Crypt was ethereal and spotlessly clean, the organisers tell me, with a table of free snacks and coffee and people chatting quietly. DJs played relaxing, ambient music here in a booth set up artfully behind a chain-link fence.

Image 5: Taken from Instagram account, @irlhuman, November 2022

The Making of Banshee

Each of these art installations were creative collaborations between the artists and the organisers, sharing their visions of transforming and mutating the space with one another. The organisers discuss that some people in the local party scene had criticised their immersive and interactive vision for the rave, claiming that it was unnecessary and all the is required for a good time is an empty space, speakers, a set of simple string lights, and some drugs (Marlot, 2022a). “But that’s another thing. That’s not what we’re doing” (Organiser 1, personal communication, December 16, 2022). How, then, can this difference be articulated, between partying in an unaltered abandoned warehouse versus partying in an abandoned warehouse with immersive and interactive audio-visual installations?

For the installation artist, what is at stake is not only creative autonomy and possibility, but also, as the organisers continually stressed, the merging of different actors within a community:

It just seems so obvious as to why you would bring visuals into it. And it is to create something distinct and to create a memory, something memorable, something that's not just four walls and an LED, and [is] interactive and collaborative and experimental and free—not in a monetary sense, but without bounds. In what other gallery setting could I line the halls with glass and flames?...You have so many limitations on stuff when you're doing it in other venues. And I think it's actually a conversation. I think that there's a lot of question marks around how to cinch a visual art community with [a] ‘going out and party life’ community (personal communication, November 18, 2022).

What the DJ emphasises, however, is the impact of attempting such projects on the collective imagination of the community:

I think it's gonna go down in our memory of this post-pandemic year as a very sick proposition and proposal that a lot of people had a sick part in actually making and setting the foundation for happening…hopefully [it] does leave the seed of the imagination of the process [that] could be done, whether or not it's in an industrial building that's abandoned and is trespassing. But the process of wide throw, lots of different people involved, [and] crazy installations [is] a crazy rave proposition for the scene. And trying to make it more than just the bare minimum sound system and lighting arrangement, which will get people to pay the bare minimum to bring the big headliner from out of town to play downtown, which is like a lot of the other parties. This is a totally different proposal for what the rave could be. So it's important in itself for that reason (personal communication, November 17, 2022).

What all of these reflections ultimately point to is the value and necessity of co-creation between ravers, artists, organisers, and other behind-the-scenes people in the building and maintenance of a thriving community.

Co-creation, or the process by which something is created by multiple parties in collaboration with one another, is essential in this context for producing spaces that feel authentic (Szmigin et al., 2017, p. 1). It is this very practice of co-creation that has been appropriated and commodified by corporate festivals to generate an atmosphere of authenticity by obscuring the economic relations between producer and consumer through the staging of “spontaneous performances and impromptu entertainment” (Szmigin et al., 2017, p. 6). However, in the case of DIY raves such as Banshee, the co-creation is not only located in the spontaneity of the engagement with immersive spaces and interactive installations, but also in a very deliberate construction of the event itself through community participation and creative input. In fact, it is through literally building an event that community is built, in a metaphorical sense (St. John, 2004).

Such co-creation is based on participatory ethics and practices of care and giving that seek to oppose “authoritarian market logics” (St. John, 2004, p. 298). Nevertheless, we do ‘live in an economy’ and things still do cost money. Banshee was, indeed, operating on a $15 000 budget and had promised different sums of money to different people (for reference, most DIY raves in Montréal and similar places operate on a tenth of that, if not less; corporate raves and those parties now sanctioned and sponsored by the City of Montréal in a recent nightlife initiative operate on significantly more). Banshee’s financial commitments and economic entanglements not only became the object of public critique in the community before, during, and after the event took place, but threatened to rupture the social relations the organisers sought to reinforce. The DJ noted that:

A lot of people were involved in it in other ways. But that's also, I think, one of the things that was complicated and ambitious about this style of organisation. It was a sort of hybrid [in which] there was a lot of community, volunteer, paid, invested, and committed support staff… And if the consequences of being found out [by the police] make for a super difficult social circumstance between people and create bad will, the only thing I'm worried about is [that] it can just really tear scenes apart that have spent time getting close to each other (personal communication, November 17, 2022).

The installation artist, moreover, recognised the discord created in the community between those who had been involved in the co-creation and those who had not:

Because it's a party that like needs so many volunteers and free labour from community members in order to pull it off [and] because people are getting their hands dirty with it, you create attachment to it. People feel invested because they have invested. So I think this is another conversation [about] why fallout from this party became really divisive between people who worked on it, or [who] were inside, and people who were left out of it. And it's because of that attachment [which] you create by inviting people to contribute to it (personal communication, November 18, 2022).

What was not visible to those on the outside, those not involved in the planning and realisation of the event itself, was the sheer amount of resources, time, and labour that were required in its production. The organisers had first conceived of the event in July, four months before Banshee was scheduled to take place. During our site visit, they tell me that the first few weeks of planning in July consisted of site visits with the artists and sound designers. This was followed by three months of preparation, including brainstorming ideas with the artists, systematic observation of the warehouse to determine the security guard’s schedule, and meticulous measurements of the entire building to draft detailed blueprints.

Two weeks before the event, they brought in teams of roughly one hundred volunteers in total to clean and secure the space, to build infrastructure, and to assist the artists with their installations. These teams boarded up most windows and access to the street, removing dangling poles from the ceilings, constructing furniture from found wood and junk materials, cutting metal pipes through which to weave extension cords between rooms, amongst other laborious tasks. These volunteers, notes the installation artist, were not professionals nor did they have adequate training, which raised safety concerns—they were simply “Queers poking around in the dark with power drills” (personal communication, November 18, 2022). Fortunately, no one suffered any injuries, save for minor cuts and scrapes.

The night before the event, the organisers had their ‘Building Consultant’ stake out the warehouse in order to open all of the pre-planned emergency exits and to install their own locks on them. The next day, several hours before the event, it was time to load in the rental truck. To do this without attracting attention to their operation, the organisers stationed five team members at five different surrounding street intersections, all communicating live with one another by phone call to determine the moment at which it was safe to proceed.

Structures of Sensory Privilege

So how did this massive undertaking by amateur rave organisers and inexperienced volunteers manage to go undetected for so long? According to the installation artist, it did not:

Despite all of the all of the precautions and work going into trying to soundproof things and create a shuttling system, even when there were just eight people in the space [setting up], there were Montréal city security cars parked outside. And they clearly knew that people were going in there. And it was clear that this building is very watched by the city. So, as we approached [the event], I knew that it wasn't an ‘if’ the cops would shut it down; it was a situation of ‘when’ (personal communication, November 18, 2022).

When I later ask the organisers if they had any idea or indications that it would get shut down, they reply diplomatically that having an illegal party on even the smallest scale is a risk; therefore, Banshee presented an exponentially greater risk.

Perhaps their lack of concern with the impending certainty of police presence had to do with a long history of police presence at such events, to which both organisers and party-goers had been accustomed (John, 2015; Reynolds, 2012a; St. John, 2004; Wark, 2023). In my own experience of attending illegal parties in Montréal for the past several years, I can attest to the regularity of police presence at such events—it is a predictable part of the night, one from which we are only occasionally spared. Sometimes, party organisers have even managed to prevail in stand-offs against police. As the DJ elaborates, “I've seen Québecois rave organisers do this successfully. And the two cops eventually just [say], ‘turn the bass down’ and leave. And the party never gets shut down” (personal communication, November 17, 2022).

Perhaps the Banshee organisers’ nonchalant attitude was the result of a local history of years of violence enacted by Montréal’s police force against the city’s young people which has bred much defiance amongst the latter. The DJ reminisces about the 2012 Québec student protests against government tuitions hikes, which resulted in bloody battles on the street between students and police officers: “We got really good at that stuff then, because we were used to hiding from, running from, and fighting with cops” (personal communication, November 17, 2022). Yet, perhaps, as many of the organisers’ critics (Marlot, 2022a, 2022b) would argue, their casual disposition had to do with their privileged societal positioning as white, straight- and cis-passing, and, importantly in a Québecois context, francophone individuals.

When the police finally did arrive, at approximately 1:30am, only three hours since the event had started and before most ticketholders had arrived, they were, according to my interviewees “chill” and “curious” (Organisers 1 &2, personal communication, December 16, 2022; Installation Artist, personal communication, November 18, 2022; DJ, personal communication, November 17, 2022). The organisers recall how the officers were mainly asking them questions about how they planned and realised everything and were impressed with their various safety protocols and logistical prowess. They even note that one of their main collaborators, who had curated the Crypt, had charmed one of the police officers as they toured the warehouse together and chatted like friends. According the organisers’ story, as their collaborator and the police officer eventually stumbled upon the hidden stash of alcohol for illegal sale, the officer simply quipped, “I wasn’t supposed to see that, was I?” and told them to pack it up into their truck (personal communication, December 16, 2022). The ravers had left quietly, no equipment or alcohol was confiscated, and no fines were issued.

Many of us, on a global scale, are by this point in time well aware of the privileges that whiteness, straightness, maleness, and other vectors of dominant identity afford some over others in virtually all realms of life (e.g., Crenshaw, 1991). However, what do identity politics and privilege, along with the history and memory that come with it, have to do with how one perceives and experiences the world through their senses? Just as there is no universal experience of existence, there is no universal mode of sensing (Low, 2015; Wynter, 1992). Moreover, sensory experience is intimately entwined with power, as hegemonic relations and constructs not only dictate which sensory experiences are normal and abnormal, but also restrict the sensorium to a sense-scape that caters to and represents “the lived experience of the western European and now, more generally, the ‘developed’ world's middle classes, as the experience of the generic human subject of aesthetic experience” (Wynter, 1992, p. 249).

While I do not have the data to determine what the sensory experience of Banshee was for a comprehensive range of identities and individuals, this is simply a disclaimer that sensory descriptions here are limited by and rooted in colonial, capitalist, and hetero-patriarchal frameworks of sensing. Here, I refer not only to the harder, more material senses that engage with external stimuli, but also to the softer, more atmospheric and affective senses that pertain to structures of feeling (Williams, 1958, 1961) or to ‘vibe’ (Garcia, 2020; Grietzer, 2017b; James, 2022). These latter senses—sense of safety, sense of power, sense of belonging, sense of community, sense of optimism, sense of uninhibitedness, for example—inform which kinds of (material) sensory experiences are palatable, desirable, and even possible, as well as how we sensorially engage with our environments. In the case of Banshee, even that a sense of danger and unpredictability itself is desirable is a mark of the sense-ibilities of the embodiment of dominant identity and the forms of sensory design it engenders.

Bodies in Space & Time

So what was it like being inside on the night of the event before the police shut it down? What was the vibe? When asked this question my interviewees default to describing the bodies within the space. The organisers, who were too busy to take in much of the experience for themselves, describe ravers moving between the various rooms before choosing where to remain for a while. The DJ, too, echoes this, explaining that the labyrinthine nature of the space produced a flow of bodies in exploration, guided by arrows and sparse lights in an otherwise dark space:

There [were] a bunch of different spots on the map [that] you could wind your way through—weird storylines between different zones. There [were] cool installations everywhere. [The installation artist’s] altars were wild. There [were] little intentional pieces of care around…It really felt like a whole labyrinth and kind of like [a] sandbox playground (personal communication, November 17, 2022).

Of their own experience in the space, the DJ reminisces about entering the room they were scheduled to perform in after an extended period of wandering around the warehouse and hearing, for the first time, the sound system their friend had been working on tirelessly for Banshee:

Okay, this is actually dope. This room is gonna be a party. The sound system sounds great. It was the first time [redacted] had his kit running, tuned and crossed over correctly with his new processor. So it sounded very good for the first time and I've been waiting for that sound system to get sounding really good. So I was really excited (personal communication, November 17, 2022).

Here, in the Lair, the DJ continues, people were talking enthusiastically with one another and some were dancing while another DJ played music. Another room which was particularly memorable to them, they add, was the one with the interactive art installation made from the modified electrical panel:

The room had all [these] sculptures on pieces of crazy, clang-y metal and stuff around the warehouse with solenoids, hitting things that they were programming. And so there was this rhythm, this technoid rhythm going on in the hall that was being made of the hall's own rattling bones. And they were controlling wirelessly via Ableton Link on a laptop in the middle of this huge fucking room. It was very cool, I wanted to hang out in there…I was excited [about this] really experimentative, weird portion [of the event] (personal communication, November 17, 2022).

The space was still rather empty, the DJ notes, as over half of the ravers had yet to arrive. “I thought it had the potential to but it didn't get happening” (personal communication, November 17, 2022). And for the installation artist, the sensory experience was tainted with the foreshadowing of police intervention and became simply about getting more bodies inside to witness the space:

I had gotten to a point where I was so nervous about the fact that it was gonna end. The bar for me became [about] getting anyone in there to see it, anyone out there that was not a part of the decoration team because it could have been shut down at any point…So that's how it felt to me (personal communication, November 18, 2022).

What both the DJ and the installation artist do not explicitly say, but intuitively imply, is that the presence of bodies within a space is essential to the vibe. Luis-Manuel Garcia (2020), from within the globally-diffused contemporary electronic dance music scene, discerns vibe as a communal experience co-created by mutual actors within a shared sensory context that reinforces the group’s intimacy and identity. As the installation artist recalls, once ravers were inside, their lively bodies occupying the space, excitement ensued:

People were so stoked. Oh, my god, they were like, ‘This is so cool.’ I think people were really stoked. And they were like, ‘This is incredible’ and [were] taking pictures. Honestly, it was really magical. We did a big thing and it was special and will be remembered in many different directions (personal communication, November 18, 2022).

Before the articulation of vibes, Garcia (2020) notes, “music’s capacity to provide a socially binding, affective experience was rooted in an ontology of vibration and resonance” (p. 29) in which “vibrations were imagined to be an invisible linking force between participants, promising to forge bonds through sound that would overcome the hierarchies and antagonisms of hegemonic culture” (p. 28).

This association of vibes with audio frequencies, tactile vibration, and sonic affect is phenomenologically inextricable from collective embodiment within material space. As Julien Henriques (2010) reminds us, rhythms are material. Rhythm, as the “energetic patterning of frequencies,” (Henriques, 2010, p. 58) is a non-linear and inexplicable energetic relation between embodiment, sound, and the kinetic movement of people within a space that produces communal sensations. Moreover, for Henriques (2010), the intensities and flow of such energetic relations within dance music spaces produce libidinal economies in which vibes are traded as affective currency across beats and bodies. The vibe, as a musical descendent of vibration, is wholly contingent on social presence to enact sensory significance.

In Search of Transcendence

Outside, as my friends and I arrive at the meeting spot on the canal around 1:00 am, the vibes are tense. There are probably a hundred or so people gathered, sitting in clusters on the grass. The scene seems pleasant enough, but the atmosphere is thick with anticipation as everyone is waiting for something to happen. My friends and I find the ‘registration’ picnic table where another friend of mine taking names and stamping wrists tells me the police have already arrived and that we are all waiting to see what will happen. They check off my name on their list and press the stamp onto my outstretched wrist.

We can see the police cars parked down the road in front of the warehouse, beaming lights up to the windows at the top of the building. My friend working at the picnic table tells me that the police have not yet entered the building as the organisers have locked it from the inside according to their pre-planned strategy. I am immediately disappointed, but I do not lose hope. For the moment, however, I am told that the music and lights inside have been turned off. As we leave the picnic table to find a spot to sit on the grass, I run into another friend who is volunteering for the rave. They tell me that the organisers have started to evacuate the warehouse. The first groups of people are leaving, the police are inside. It’s over, they tell me.

The curse of global warming has blessed us with an unusually balmy early November night. It is twenty degrees Celsius and it feels like summer—the perfect temperature for a semi-outdoor party. My friends want to leave, but I convince them to stay. All of these hundreds of people here are not going home, I tell them. Something is going to happen and we need to stay to find out what that is. “It’s not cold, it’s a beautiful night, let’s just chill” (personal communication, November 6, 2022). I remind them, as people who do not go to raves often, that this is how raves work: no one ever gives up or goes to the bar or goes home after an early police bust. Everyone is already intoxicated and, most importantly, determined. I am especially determined to get into the warehouse. I want the full sensory experience.

Walking around the groups gathered on the grass next to the canal, I run into the DJ. They tell me that they’ve just come from inside the warehouse. Everything is fine, the police are chill, the organisers and their team are packing everything up and loading it into the truck. I see my opportunity to get inside the warehouse and ask if they need any help. The DJ tells me that help would be great. I gather my friends and one of the volunteers leads us to the abandoned warehouse. After walking for a few minutes on the footpath past others who had just exited, we arrive at an inconspicuous-looking door on the side of the building. We pull out our smartphone flashlights and step into the grimy, musty darkness.

Almost immediately, we lose sight of my volunteer friend in the low light. Excitement takes over as our eyes begin to adjust and we start to take in our environment. There is  broken glass on the floor arranged in neat patterns and accented with candles, graffitied three-legged and headless mannequins arranged in dynamic poses (apparently these had already been in the space, the organisers later tell me), a large neon sculptural piece, fairy lights, and endless piles of debris. We ask a few people how we can help, but no one has any tasks for us. Everything has already been loaded out—the bar, the equipment, the people. We walk through the empty rooms, taking photos. Police officers casually walk past us and we avoid eye contact with one another. The air feels and smells stale and dusty. Although the space feels vast and airy, a certain dampness seeps through. I do not dare touch anything. Only the sounds of people shuffling around and speaking casually to one another remain. Our excited screams and giggles reverberate through the space as we explore.

I had been determined to get inside, even though the rave had been fully shut down, evacuated, and packed up, because I was seeking the elusive feeling of transcendence. Outside, on the canal, I had experienced a communal reckoning moment with everyone else waiting to get inside—we could see the police cars, people were texting their friends inside, and we were all coming to terms with the reality that we would not be reaching the transcendence we longed for. Yet, I had been excessively optimistic, despite the police presence on arrival, because I was not willing to accept that I had missed the magical experience of multisensorial exploration, escapism, and embodied connection that had been promised. This quest for transcendence is not only ‘routinised’ in rave culture as an expected outcome, but is spiritual by nature and has been repeatedly likened to religious rituals and practices (Reynolds, 2012a). Raves, Reynolds (2012a) contends, are “spiritualized evasions of political reality, as attempts to transcend the messy and profane realm of History and Materiality in the quest for the ‘timeless’ and territorially unbounded” (p. 221)

On the night of Banshee, I had desperately wanted to attain an otherworldly encounter beyond my normal reality and was grasping at any means by which to do so. The installation artist reminds me that regardless of my successful efforts to enter the abandoned warehouse—to check off a symbolic act of transcendence on my list—“It's not the same thing. It's not. You [were] robbed of the opportunity to see the thing. And there was no world in which they could have let everyone in on it” (personal communication, November 18, 2022). The DJ, too, emphasises that “Most of the unknowns that were still in people's minds before the party are still in people's minds because it was stopped before the core of the energy even [started] spinning around anything” (personal communication, November 17, 2022). For the DJ, this transcendental energy is conceptualised as a ‘bubble.’

What happens is [that] there's the bubble of the dance floor reaching the ecstatic, transcendent alchemical thing… The room feels good to dance in, the music feels immersive, and you can turn off some of your brain and feel safe to even do that. And [you can] let your body be moved by the music and the sights and sounds and let your brain just [swim] in it. [You] find some sort of flow state, which makes for magic and memorable times… [For this] good, rave-y, immersive hypnagogia there can't be [any] rough edges [as] reminders of all the other shit sticking out into the bubble that you're trying to hold afloat together (personal communication, November 17, 2022).

Just as a mixture of soap and water can create bubbles, the transcendental bubble requires a precise but unpredictable mixture of duration and momentum generated by the ravers, the DJs and artists, the organisers, the sound system, the physical space and its sensory transformation, and the collective intentions of everyone involved. “It is not something that any one person can do, but has to happen inside of a common space—a common intention—between a bunch of individuals” (personal communication, November 17, 2022). Banshee certainly had all of the ingredients for producing this bubble, the DJ notes, but any potential bubblings had been cut short at the germination stage.

Pharmacology & Aesthetics

But what about the role of drug use in the making of the bubble, or, in the quest for transcendence? It is no secret that events which centre around music and dancing, such as parties at clubs, concerts, and music festivals, function as spaces in which drug use is common, expected, or even welcomed, despite any official regulations or rhetoric regarding the matter (Dilkes-Frayne, 2016; Fox et al., 2018; Gjersing et al., 2019; Lim et al., 2008; Palamar et al., 2017; Reynolds, 2012b; St. John, 2004; Turner, 2018; Van Havere et al., 2011; Wark, 2023). Raves, in particular, have been, since their inception nearly four decades ago, publicly notorious for high rates of drug use amongst young people in particular. Such drugs (aside from alcohol, a depressant) may include hallucinogens such as marijuana, LSD, or psilocybin mushrooms; stimulants such as cocaine or MDMA; and dissociative anaesthetics such as ketamine. For many ravers these psychoactive substances can function as spiritual technologies for the transcendence of the mind beyond the earthly bounds of the body and of reality (Kyriakopoulos, 2019; Wark, 2023). As the installation artist explains:

I love getting really high and going dancing. It's really therapeutic for me… Personally, getting into my own zone and exercising and using the energy of a dance floor to send up [magic] spells is a new part of my practice that I've been doing. There's all this collective energy here… I use [drugs] to enhance [my experience] because I want to be looser. When you do stuff like that, things get funnier and wigglier, you get looser, your mind gets looser, and you're allowed by drugs to go places that you wouldn't necessarily be able to if you were sober (personal communication, November 18, 2022).

While the installation artist corroborates scholarly perspectives such as Leandros Kyriakopoulos’ (2019) postulate that raves are spaces in which bodily “expenditure through drug consumption and exhausting dancing…is regarded as both a way to highlight the desire to get wasted and an analytical tool to critique an ordinary, normative or disenchanted society” (pp. 70–85), they also insist that drug use is by no means the only path, nor even the primary one, for the experience of transcendence at such events:

I know a lot of people who are sober ravers and I think that they [go to raves] because raves are such a great space to feel a lot of energy, whether you're on substances or not. They're dynamic and exciting…but it's not to say that drugs aren't a part of it (personal communication, November 18, 2022).

The organisers, too, acknowledge that drug use is “a big part of it,” but they stress that they had no intention “to base the experience for people on mushrooms” (personal communication, December 16, 2022). Their design of the event was intended to be mind-altering regardless of the ravers’ intoxication or lack thereof—unlike what is commonplace at other festive venues, such as licensed ones. It is in these latter spaces, the installation artist explains, that intoxication generally seems like a prerequisite and social expectation:

There are a lot of spaces like bars that do make me or other people feel like you need to be intoxicated to enjoy them. And I feel like that is really ostracising toward sober rave culture or sober people in general. You can feel really vibe-y and then when you look around in the room, there's nothing there. But you feel great because you're on the brink of a k-hole or something. And I feel like that emphasis [in rave culture] on taking away from that [norm] is just so much more rich, real, and magical… You're sparking something without intoxication. And it's different, it's just different (personal communication, November 18, 2022).

When it comes to envisioning, designing, and experiencing transcendence at raves, it is so-called “psychedelic aesthetics” that take precedence over a reliance on the consumption of psychoactive substances (Kyriakopoulos, 2019, p. 80). The DJ argues that:

The same stuff that's maybe called psychedelic or could be seen as catering to a drug-induced state of listening or experience is probably the same stuff that's interesting [when] sober too. If a rhythm is weird and gets in your brain and might make you trip out if you're on acid, it might make you think really hard if you're [sober] or you might also kind of trip out [because] this stuff is psychedelic. I think that's kind of the point—this stuff's all psychoactive, music is psychoactive, human bodies are fucking psychoactive. And so experimenting with also adding external drugs into your system may help you just dance in a way that you are [otherwise] somehow inhibited from (personal communication, November 17, 2022).

Such psychedelic aesthetics simulate a drug-influenced sensorium by stimulating “the sense of exoticism and Otherness, escapism and adventure, liberation and transcendence” for both sober and intoxicated ravers (Kyriakopoulos, 2019, p. 74). In the case of Banshee, these psychedelic aesthetics manifested not only in the distinct soundscapes and vibes of each of the three curated music rooms, in the interactive and immersive multisensorial art installations, and in the pilgrimage-like passage from the meeting spot to the warehouse itself, but also in the spiritual and ritualistic acts of participatory co-creation between various actors and these elements. As César Lugo-Elías and Pedro Cardoso (2023) note, “the relationship of Design and clubbing is not based exclusively in the physical objects placed within the dance floor, but in the way Design allows the assemblage of material, social and performative elements, providing for the creation of an experience rather than an object or product” (p. 102).

Furthermore, the DJ stresses that whichever aesthetic and experiential visions that organisers or artists may conceptualise for an event, they are never be actualised as such. It is the attendees that are crucial in the “magic trick” of transforming a fantasy into a reality—and that resulting reality is wholly unpredictable and incalculable (personal communication, November 17, 2022). “Do you feel like you achieved the vision that you had in mind?” I ask the organisers as our warehouse tour concludes. “And beyond,” responds Organiser 1. “Of course, I was disappointed by it getting shut down. But seeing what we did, what we accomplished, I was like, ‘I'm happy.’ I'm really happy about what we did” (personal communication, December 16, 2022).

SENSING COMMUNITY, DESIGNING ALTERNATIVE REALITY

For Banshee, the collective and collaborative design of a multisensorial environment was not conceived for the intensification of ravers’ varied states of intoxication, nor for gratuitous sensory inundation, but as a means by which to ‘sense’ community, both in a material and affective manner (St John, 2015b). While this probe does not explicitly address and discuss the explosive controversy surrounding Banshee in the aftermath of the event, in which grievances were aired live on local community radio and included appearances from the organisers themselves (Marlot, 2022a, 2022b), this rave is representative of a real debate regarding the value of multisensorial environments, which types of sensations are palatable or acceptable in a festive context, and which kinds of vibes serve a particular community. Ultimately, the DJ reflects that “We do these experiments to look for potentially operative ways to build capacity, to build resistance, and to build community networks of care or autonomy. I think the rave is this weird, cool play-festival-test-sandbox” (personal communication, November 17, 2022).

If community is sensed through the co-creation of a multi-sensorial environment, then designing for the sensing of community has to do with proposing possible spaces for being together that exists outside of conventional sensory experience. In rave culture—and in the organisers’ vision for the rave scene in Montréal—this necessitates an ethos of design informed by making opportunities for community members to share their ideas, skills, and creativity with one another, as well as making people feel welcomed and invested in the project. In this way, multisensoriality is a means to that end— a transcendental process of creating an alternative reality in which alterity thrives; a signal of the emergence of a different world to temporarily inhabit.

View Part I

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