Rave Culture and Religion

Contrary to the intentions of alternative cultural events, in the very act of
interacting with surfaces of entities in this way, ravers are perhaps engaging in a very
mainstream kind of behavior. Turkle (1997) describes a current psychosocial
operative mode in which representations—rather than transparent entities—are
sufficient for interacting with the world. It is often claimed that there is an increased
tendency within postmodern industrial culture for one to be satisfied with surface-
only knowledge of, or relationships with, cultural items that make up one’s
“idioverse” and contribute to identity construction. Hopefully without appearing to
accept wholesale a totalistic concept of postmodernism, I suggest that the gamelan’s
appropriation into a context (such as rave) in which it functions as a more or less
origin-free entity speaks to this claim.

Conclusion

My intent was to consider how and why a Balinese gamelan could have made its way
to the foothills of the Sierra mountains in the summer of 1997 and, in doing so,
contribute to the discussion of local rave culture in the U.S. via electronically
produced sensory experience, community in virtual space, and attributing cosmic
significance to modern technology, San Francisco rave is an alternative cultural
performance firmly located in the technocultural present. In an interpretation of
rave’s appropriation of a gamelan ensemble, I considered two possibilities: a
similarity in musical structure within rave music and traditional gamelan music, and
the ensemble’s absorption as a tool of authentication for rave participants. It is likely
that both possibilities possess merit. Through a simultaneous embrace of the
modern technological revolution and a redeeming, nostalgic identification with the
“primitive,” I argued, a seemingly contradictory techno-primitive ideology has been
constructed. An examination of techno-primitive practice revealed how disembodied
cultural entities may be mixed and matched in such a way that genuine differences are
eradicated, and how a resulting generic ethnic-ness (conflated with primitive-ness)
serves as an authenticating agent. The agent in this case is the Balinese gamelan.
Additional studies of the means by which representations of homogenized ethnic-
ness, in the form of live “world” musics or instruments, are incorporated into other
alternative cultural events may further illuminate processes inherent in subcultural
identity formation.

Notes

1 This chapter is an abridged and edited version of an article published online in ECHO

3, spring 2001. I thank the editors of ECHO for graciously allowing me to publish the

abridged version that appears here. The original expanded article (“We thank the

Technology Goddess for giving us the ability to rave: gamelan, techno-primitivism and

the San Francisco rave scene”), including musical and video examples, is available at:

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/echo/volume3-issuel/Table-of-Contents/Table-of-

Contents.html.

GAMELAN AND TECHNO-PRIMITIVISM IN SAN FRANCISCO 205