To Have Been A Part (Where We Are Today…)
Sound-work (12’37”) - Car Door, Cables.
The British rave movement, which began in the late 1980s, is generally considered a short-lived phenomenon, cut short by repressive UK Conservative politics of the mid 1990s.
Still, underground raves take place throughout the world, and the echoes of this subversive movement remain a pervasive force in our societies.
Distant reverberations of the origins of the rave-era may be observed within online culture via numerous video-recordings documenting the expressive and liberated parties which took place around the UK at the turn of the decade. The comments beneath these videos offer an intimate view into the historical narrative and perpetual spirit of rave culture through their ecstatic recollections and yearning grief for lost innocence and faded dreams.
This commentary carries an almost folkloric nature, lost raves are remembered and re-lived, commenters list their age, their employment and where they are now, some explain they were too young to experience this time first hand and long to know how it was to be there. These communications express in their reflections a glimpse of what rave stood to mean in its essence, whilst the nuances of this inter-generational discourse offer insight into how the memory may be accessed via nostalgic and hauntological frameworks, and how the manifestation of these memories exist within a state of subjective liminality whether formed through first hand experience or at a meta-level of online interaction.
To Have Been A Part (Where Are We Today....) uses spoken word recordings of a selection of these comments, together with collaged sound and music elements played from a loudspeaker within a suspended car door in the form of a site-specific sound installation.
