As Heley suggests, there's more to raves and house than meets the eye. Coming to an understanding of the house phenomenon requires a working knowledge of the new technology, science, and drugs that shape Cyberia, as well as an awareness of the new spiritual dimension (or perhaps archaic spiritual revival) arising out them. Just as the new, quantum sciences and chaos mathematics developed out of the inability of materialist models to effectively map our reality, house is meant as a final reaction to the failings of a work ethic – based, overindustrialized culture.
The ravers see themselves and the creation of their subculture as part of the overall fractal equation for the postmodern experience. One of the principles of chaos math, for example, is phase-locking, which is what allows the various cells of an organism to work harmoniously or causes a group of women living together to synchronize their menstrual cycles. Phase-locking brings the participants – be they atoms, cells, or human beings – into linked cycles that promote the creation of a single, interdependent organism where feedback and iteration can take place immediately and effectively. A phase-locked group begins to take on the look of a fractal equation, where each tiny part reflects the nature and shape of the larger ones.
Members of rave culture phase-locked by changing their circadian rhythms. They self-consciously changed their basic relationship to the planet's movements by sleeping during the day and partying all night. As Heley says in defiance: ''It's in the face of the network that tells you seven to eight-thirty is prime time. You sleep during prime time. You share the same place physically as that society, but you're actually moving into a different dimension by shifting through the hours. It's an opportunity to break out from all the dualistic things.''
Of course, sleeping days and partying nights is just as dualistic as working days and sleeping nights, but the point here is that the ''dualistic things'' considered important by mainstream culture are not hard realities, and they are certainly not the "best'' realities. Ravers were able to create a subculture different from the work-a-day society in which they had felt so helpless. They used to be the victims of a top-down hierarchy. As the poor workers to a mean boss or the powerless kids to a domineering father or even the working class to a rigid monarchy, they were just numbers in an old-style linear math equation. Now, phase-locked as part of a living, breathing fractal equation, they feel more directly involved in the creation of reality.
''When you move away from a massive guilt trip in which there is a direct hierarchy, you suddenly find that it doesn't matter a fuck what your boss or the authorities think of you. You're creating yourself moment by moment in an environment that is created by people who are like-minded. It's a liberation, and it's completely in the face of twentieth-century society.''
The ultimate phase-locking occurs in the dance itself, where thousands of these ''like-minded'' young people play out house culture's tribal ceremony. The dance links everyone together in a synchronous moment. They're on the same drugs, in the same circadian rhythm, dancing to the same 120-beat-per-minute soundtrack. They are fully synchronized. It's at these moments that the new reality is spontaneously developed.
''The dance empowers you. It reintegrates you. And then you can start again. It's an ancient, spiritual thing. It's where we have always communicated to each other on the fullest level. Instead of being in this extremely cerebral, narrow-bandwidth-television society, people learn instead to communicate with their bodies. They don't need to say anything. There is just a bond with everyone around them. A love, an openness. If you look at a society as repressed as England, you see how much impact that can have.''
The various forms of social repression in England, along with its own deeply rooted pagan history, made it the most fertile soil in which house could grow. As Heley shares: ''I felt it was slipping out of history. That this was an alternative history.''
House became massive in England. News of raves was always spread precariously by word of mouth or tiny flyers, but somehow everyone who needed to know what was happening and where, found out. Either one knew what was happening or one didn't. It was as simple as that. By the end of the 1980s, house was everywhere in the United Kingdom, but it had never seen the light of day. Tens of thousands of kids were partying every weekend. Mainstream culture was not even aware of their existence. By the time the tabloids caught on and published their headlines proclaiming the arrival of house, the ravers had realized they'd gone off the map altogether.
Off the Map and into the Counterculture
Today, the English house scene still defines the pulse for other house-infected cities. Whether through the brain-drain of emigrees like Heley or the exportation of London-mixed dance tracks, Great Britain still holds the most coherently articulated expression of the house ethic. While there's less technology, fewer gays, and fewer smart chemicals at London clubs, there's a much clearer sense of house's role as a countercultural agent.
Some argue that this is because London's morphogenetic field of counterculture is more developed than America's. London's pagan cultures have endured centuries of repression and distillation. Their phase-locking was probably achieved somewhere in the twelfth century. Symbols and even personalities from ancient pagan times still live in London house.
One such pagan hero is Fraser Clark, a self-proclaimed psychedelic warrior from the 1960s who began Encyclopaedia Psychedelica magazine, which has since mutated into London house culture's `zine Evolution. At his London flat, which he shares with two or three students half his age, the long-haired Welshman rolls some sort of cigarette and explains to me what's happening. From the British perspective, this is a historical battle for religious freedom.
''A kid grows up in a Christian culture and thinks he's probably the only one questioning these ideas. When he comes to house,'' the English are found of using the word alone like that, as if it's a religion, "he suddenly realizes he's got a whole alternative history. He might get into UFOs or whatever there is – drugs, witches, it's all in there.''
And all quite accessible. To participate in this experience of resonance, each participant must feel like part of the source of the event. Where a traditional Christian ritual is dominated by a priest who dictates the ceremony to a crowd of followers, pagan rituals are free-for-alls created by a group of equals. For house events to provide the same kinds of experiences, they had to abandon even traditional rock and roll concert ethos, which pedestals a particular artist and falls into the duality of audience and performer, observer and object. The house scene liberates the dancers into total participation. Fraser, whose new club UFO opens tonight, explains the advantages of a no-star system:
''Nobody is that much better than the next guy that he needs a whole stage and twenty thousand people fillin' up a stadium to see him. Nobody's that much better than the audience. We don't need that and people don't want it anymore. A lot of the music you'll hear tonight is never gonna be on a record. Kids just mix it the week before and play it that one night.''