and produce ‘better’ events in the future; attending events provides journalists and
photographers with potentially valuable content for publication (which, in turn,
serves reflectively to contextualize past performances); and informal business dealings
enable entrepreneurs to perpetuate the ritual project as one which, if it is to
continue, must confront the realities of event organization, commerce and the
concerns of local law enforcement. As brokers of what is variously labelled ‘the
scene’, ‘the culture’ and/or ‘the community’, one might even suggest that, following
Victor Turner’s (1979a) characteristics of normative communitas, VIPs acts as
representatives (to the outside world) of a new social structure. This is particularly
the case if one considers how promoters, DJs, club owners and media collaborate in
contextualizing and disseminating the reformative paradigm(s) of raving and
clubbing to the everyday world.^4
The central paradigm rave and club cultures offer to the everyday world is
liminality itself. Occurring record by record and interaction by interaction,
liminality is presented and promoted as a transformational experience realized
through music and dance. In order to illustrate this phenomenon it is necessary to
consider underground dance music both as an event which occurs through the
programming and mixing of vinyl records^5 by DJs for a dance floor, and as a variety
of recorded music genres available on both vinyl records and CD. Both contexts
reveal that liminality is the central aesthetic feature of underground dance music.
Techniques of liminalityAs a recorded medium, underground dance music has been subject to a number of
postmodernist investigations which marginally inform a discussion of liminality.
Following Hebdige’s (1987) analysis of the intersemiotic nature of sampling and
pastiche in rap music, other scholars have pursued similar investigations into how
techniques of composition locate underground dance music betwixt and between
high and low culture, real and hyperreal music, black and white identity, and
masculine and feminine subjectivity (Bradby 1993; Tagg 1994; Noys 1995;
Thornton 1996; Rietveld 1998; Hutson 1999). For participants engaged in
performances, however, there are less theoretical, more relevant features which
directly evoke liminality. Because most dance music records are produced by DJs
primarily for their consumption by other DJs, reading underground dance music as
a static text defeats the purpose of the music which, ultimately, is to structure
performances through vinyl records. That is, house, techno and drum ‘n’ bass
records work as tools DJs employ in the programming and mixing of sets. If one
were to speak of emotion and meaning in house music, liminal features in
underground dance music provide the most relevant starting point for
understanding how DJs collaborate with participants to construct successful events.
During Tim Patrick’s performance at Turbo, I observed four techniques of
liminality as they occurred in both the records in his programme and the techniques
he used to play them: filtering and looping, EQing and mixing. As the first DJ of
the evening, Patrick’s set began at 10.30 p.m. to an empty club. Twenty minutes
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