(Hutson 1999), a status earlier conferred upon disco and house legends like Larry
Levan and Frankie Knuckles, or are perhaps more accurately master drummers who,
as in Santeria, keep the beat for the dancers while always remaining sober, never
possessed (Twist 1999:107). The contemporary technicians of the self (including
VJs and multimedia installation artists), manipulate an assemblage of
‘psychotechnologies’ (Ross 1992:539–40), sampling art like that of
visionary transformational artist Alex Grey, facilitating vision quests and self-
revelations, opening crown chakras and portals to the transcendent, enabling
collective consciousness. To take one example, for self-styled ‘trancetheologian’ Ray
Castle, ‘it’s like psychic surgery’: the party raises ‘the kundalini serpent energy in the
body’s chakra system’, and with the right setting and sonic progression ‘you reach a
crown-chakra-type unfolding’ (Castle, in ENRG 2001:161–2).
Breakbeat scientists and practitioners of the electronic healing arts apply that
which Kodwo Eshun calls the ‘science of sensory engineering’ to harness the
‘mythillogical principles’ of sound, rhythm and vision technologies, repurposed to
intensify sensations and abduct the Self to cosmic dimensions—propagating in a
fashion ‘new sensory lifeforms’ (1998:177, 185). And, as post-ravers testify to their
apparent achievement of Zen-like states, familiarity with the Cosmic Christ, the
release of anxieties, the generation of ‘sympathetic resonance’, and the channelling of
energy to engender spiritual growth and healing (Hutson 2000), discourses of
consciousness expansion, self-empowerment and metamorphosis pervade the rave
imaginary. Castle again: ‘The dance cathexis—a group cathartic psychodrama—on
tribal, techno, beats, offers a potent temenos (sacred space) for reintegration of
disconnected parts of the Self, which becomes a therapeutic sonic homeopathy of
sorts’ (Castle, in ENRG 2001:164). In such text, post-rave appears consanguineous
with the esoteric and therapeutic proclivities of alternative spiritual paradigms,
remastering and amplifying the individualistic ethos of the latter. According to
Sutcliffe (1998:38), the inward turn of the New Age is a ‘hermeneutic turn’ where
the Millennium no longer awaits external catastrophe—the Apocalypse—for ‘the
New Dispensation’ follows the private apocalypse of self-realization.
Post-rave may be one among many lifestyle options, workshops, spaces,
techniques sampled in the quest to maximize human potential. Indeed, psychedelic-
oriented events themselves often possess the character of a spiritual supermarket or a
festival of alternative religiosities. With its smorgasbord of modalities from West
African drumming to Kinesiology and ‘Trance Dance’, the global event Earthdance,
for instance, reconfigures the methods and constituency of the Healing Arts Festival
and esoteric showcases like the Festival for Mind-Body-Spirit. Other events are
known to mine the Mayan calendar or Hopi prophecy for signals of our coming
transition to a new world, the birth of our ‘higher selves’, or a momentous merging
of disparate ‘tribes’. On a wider scale, programmed with a code of self-
responsibility, and provided with a range of options, inhabitants of the global party
sometimes referred to as ‘electro’ are incited to work their bodies, expand their
minds and free their spirit. Impelled to upgrade their ‘wetware’ consciousness
through aggregating electronic and computer hardware, downloading all the latest
22 GRAHAM ST JOHN