intense and ongoing. The techno beats also signify a sonic transcendence, a uniting
of primal drumming with digital waveforms. Drum-dominated music therefore
plays an important ritual role in Burning Man, as it does in post-rave. It grounds
techno in the primitive, energizing the modern by rooting it in a tribal past.
In another part of his online recounting, Alexander describes the music as the
“spacey sound of techno music” which adds to “the surreal ambiance of this strange
new world.” His use of the term “spacey” is doubly fitting. For music, by its sonic
nature, defines a particular space. Multiple musics demarcate, blend, and merge on
geographic boundaries, spilling into one another. At Burning Man, music defines
and is owned, pooling into pure concentrations near encamped banks of speakers.
Techno music’s drum and bass heavy pulsing also has reputed abilities to induce
altered states in listeners, creating a sensation of floating in space. Adding to the
vastness of Burning Man’s desert setting, dominated by sand, wind, and sky the
loud, pulsating music can seem to push the horizon—communal, geographical, and
personal—to infinity.
The “techno” culture explored in this volume relates directly to the meanings and
rituals of youth milieus orbiting around styles of music often referred to as “techno”
or “electronica,” manifesting in, for example, house, hard house, trip hop, trance,
happy hardcore, drum ‘n’ bass, big beat and speed garage. This music is as
unavoidable at Burning Man as it is at any dance party. Techno is the soundtrack to
many Burning Man experiences, the unifying soundscape auguring the breakdown
of old divisions and ringing in new forms of communality. Music is a key element in
the expression of identity, and in the intensification of ecstatic sacred moments at
Burning Man—as it is at neo-pagan festivals (Pike 2001:5) and raves.
As with these other gatherings, Burning Man participants—especially those in the
many drum circles and at the multitudinous dance camps—often “immerse
themselves in the performance of dancing and drumming, releasing their bodies in
ways unique to the festival setting” (ibid.: 191). Music also has deep ties to the
sacred, existing in a timeless biocultural nexus where popular culture, emotion, and
bio-basic responses collide. It is from this position in the ancient, embodied, and
transcendent realm of music that we launch into an exploration of Burning Man’s
sacred elements, the commonalities with post-rave, and what these might illuminate
about other events. Throughout the chapter we explore the common elements of
Burning Man and rave culture, in particular focusing on the construction of the
sacred, its therapeutics, and its relation to neo-pagan, New Age, and techno-pagan
practices and discourses.^4
Spirit healingLet’s begin this analysis as good folklorists and ethnographers would, by listening to
a story of an inhabitant of this place. The place that we refer to is a
little problematic here, since Burning Man is not a permanent location, its residents
are not permanent citizens, and pseudonymous-but-expressive names are used
through the event as a form of decoration or expression. In addition, this story was
EXPLORING THE SACRED AT BURNING MAN 287