(Un)threading Rhythms: On Affect and Vibe in a Rave

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Toronto, raves arise across large nightclubs, DIY venues and outdoors, despite changing regulations that have further arranged and narrowed their possibility in the past 4 years. Following a rave in Toronto, this work explores ways that potentialities and affects emerge in a single night, through my entry of taking part in dancing and tearing down materials. In recent anthropological works on raves, authors tend to highlight altered states and how transformative experiences are intentionally prepared. Yet there is space to discuss surprises and improvization throughout a night, questioning intention and transformation as a given. Informed by a Deleuzo‐Guattarian framework, I suggest that raves can create affects in indeterminate ways while still attending to excess or incoherency. In this vein, I conceptualize affects in relation to chaos: as intensities in indeterminate becomings, capable of taking on their own rhythms and cutting across bodies and sensations. Drawing from journal notes of the rave, I write through points of gaps, awkwardness, and incoherencies that follow along stories of coming together and coming undone in broader rhythms. Tactile and sonorous experiences of attaching cables or swaying my neck to metallic snares come up against moments I acknowledge are ineffable, or that I cannot be attentive to. A sound may resonate with a rise in intensity, or be unnoticed, or change entirely in timbre. In exploring indeterminacy, I recall moments of catching a breath in the crowd, or when the dancefloor and music seem to exhale passingly into step or chaotic stupor. Through my positioning in equipment disassembly and dancing in a night, this work hopes to offer an unsettling approach.