Rave, p.1
Rave, page 1
‘Goetz’s writing is a kind of dancing. Each sentence, fragment, captures the essence of what it’s like to live inside the spaces of techno music. Thoughts come and go, and return louder, later in the text, with an urgent rhythm that makes the cumulative case for the transformative power of the dance floor. This is writing of and from the body, hot, sweaty, dazed, decadent, and ultimately life-affirming.’
— Julia Bell, author of The Dark Light
‘To sample an old saying: if you can remember the nineties, you weren’t there. Rainald Goetz was there, and found a form in which to summon the sensations and sounds, the highs and the bass, of techno culture. This is a classic cut from a fabled era that will enrich the mix of today’s rave culture – and fills in the memory hole for some of us old-timers’
— McKenzie Wark, author of The Beach Beneath the Street
‘This time it’s not blood dripping on his text, but the nocturnal sweat of the techno dancer. Goetz’s great achievement is, above all, to have translated the thudding rhythm of this new music into rhythmic language’
— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
‘The stories this book tells… are not stories as such, but stages of a ritual that conjures up, and attempts to reproduce in writing, the sacred, soulful state of being-in-music.’
— Berliner Zeitung
‘A must-read.’
— Vogue
‘Goetz is capable like none other of drawing on distinct registers that enable him to speak without intellectual aloofness from inside this unique world while at the same time interpreting it theoretically.’
— Frankfurter Rundschau
RAVE
RAINALD GOETZ
Translated by
ADRIAN NATHAN WEST
BAM BAM BAM
Westbam
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
BAM BAM BAM
I: COLLAPSE
II: SUN BOOBS HAMMER
III: DESTROYED
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
COPYRIGHT
I
COLLAPSE
‘The collapse begins.’
… and came up to me in slow motion. I looked, longed, walked, and thought.
I had a feeling of lightness.
Maybe I could make a decision.
‘The driver’s licence is gone now, now I’ll write the book fast.’
Wirr: there I was standing in the middle of the music. – Thrust.
Right away Laarman had secured the film rights for the Schütte saga for some fantastical sum. The money was gone, the accounts closed, the cards cancelled.
I saw him, how he stood there with a young woman behind the pillar, and suddenly he looked to me like a giant. He talked with her, talked past her: really they were talking over one another. Everything friendly, warm, roused.
My face was soaking wet already too.
We went to the other room in the back.
SWEET CONFUSION
You’ve got to imagine so-and-so as a happy person.
Who was that again?
We looked around and laughed. Dope music now.
‘Hey! Look!’
I had the sixteenth notes popping superlight in my fingertips, arms thrown out wide. Them too, teeny tiny glittering forward, up, down, cool.
The glistening jewellery shimmered silver.
Schütte to Wirr: ‘Where?’
When a person said the toilets, they didn’t necessarily mean somewhere else. The searcher was calm, even when speaking, interpreter in the wordlessness of faces or gazes. The searcher is there, searching for signs.
Who’s taking what?
Who’s still got some?
Who can still make something happen?
Who’s there?
It was the time of the linden blossoms.
Then Mark heard someone close by say the words: ‘The state prosecutor is now investigating on suspicion of breach of confidentiality.’
And right away I thought: ‘Fantastic.’
And I had Albert’s truth-testaments, his drawings, I mean, which were a visible manifestation, from oblique angles, of the collision of temporal planes.
Pausing and pounding.
Then I saw how she –
And turned –
And new glances all round. I laughed, because –
I don’t exactly know –
And turned. ‘What’s up.’
Ah, right, sure. Cool.
OK.
Behind, above, around: enormous now, the supremacies of sound had risen up, giant machines, bigger than a person, that shot thunder through to his insides. He looked up, nodded, and felt like an idea borne of the boom-boom-boom of the beat. And the immense boom-boom said: one one one –
and one and one and –
one one one –
and –
cool cool cool cool cool…
He saw Hardy and Leksie, faces and eyes, hurtled, scrambled, shoved, shaken in the midst of the rhythm. Saw broken and blessed, trusting and tender, myriad signs, quick, terse, plain, each blotted out by the next in waves of sympathy. He looked and danced and saw beauty.
From the margins came legs and light, feet, flashes, paces and bass, surfaces and murmurs, equivalencies and functions of a higher mathematics.
He himself was the music.
Then there was a quick cascade of steps, almost tumbling, somehow, from within the rhythms and sounds.
A cascade of nouns,
pertaining to the curtailment and velocity of thoughts correlated to music, with that feeling of contrary facets in aggregate, with the total mental perspective in this moment of simultaneity and the solace of the automaticity of internal processes.
In this direction there would –
A sort of equipoise of contradictions, which without –
And overwrought –
So time, processes, remained intact then. And the conceptual union of opposites: like how before the creation of the world, the so-called spirit of God…
But that, alas, is unthinkable.
And he saw that it was good.
CALLIGRAPHY
When the music, once more for Wirr distinct from –. Not at all. It’s just all of a sudden I was thinking: What was that, then? I recognize that. What is that blazing track?
So clear, as though I’d just woken up. For a moment, I found that odd.
I was standing on the dance floor barely moving. Amid the music, I felt a clear connection between hearing and the body that led me automatically inwards, down into the depths. In that instant everything had been foreseen.
Strangely, the back door was closed. Following the lights led again to the floor.
I walked, I stood.
I saw Fabian’s face, inquisitive, irritated, maybe.
I gestured, responsive, self-interrogating.
Open situation, new people, T-shirts with text.
I stooped, flicked the lighter.
‘Got the time?’
Wirr: at the same time, the question of where I am now in dosage-technical terms.
And I thought: ‘Look for Sigi’
We walked down below the DJ. Feelings of gratitude danced before me.
All the years –
This argumentation with records –
Felix nodded at me, elated.
I forgot how to talk
how to walk and speak
and I am toward
flying into the air
raving
‘Techno and hardcore bear the burden of the luminous years of ’91 and ’92.’ Quote.
We would talk about that later, but not now. We were talking about sentences and things.
All that still to come.
Wild feeling.
I thought a moment about Maxim Biller’s hate-columns. Then about Diedrich’s War and Peace in Spex way back when. Some kind of breakdown-mechanism brought every back in the day to mind, it seemed loathsome, horrible, and tragic, somehow.
And the back in the day always vanished every time the bass hit.
‘Bass,’ I said to Sigi, ‘bass, bass, bass.’
The Schütte saga could start that way too, with the boom of bass from afar, through the walls, before the party, with bass, with promise: the party’s starting now, big-time.
ENTER THE ARENA
Amid the thudding bass Wirr heard all the bass he’d ever heard in all the life he’d lived up to now, party-panic, break. Then the bass was gone.
No bass.
The bass is gone.
The cessation of the titanic bass, a shoving, a waiting, a holding of breath. Is this some kind of birth canal?
And when the bass dropped back into the beat, a thousand-throated scream rose up.
The people shouted: ‘Killer!’
The bass is back.
And they danced and jumped like savages, and a massive monstrous voice said: ‘ENTER THE ARENA.’
Enter the arena.
Yeah, cool, definitely, thanks.
Thanks a million.
I’m in. Me too. Me too.
From then on Dark toyed with the idea of reconciling Luhmann’s The Art of Society with Adorno’s posthumous book on Beethoven in his own dissertation on Basic TV.
Dark had short blond hair and was allegedly the personification of something truly evil.
But what was that about?
Harmony lessons, Friday 28.06.1996.
Locus of longing, logos: wordmachine.
Now two dancers with arms flailing high revealed the pale patches of their armpits, and duly the air grew fragrant.
I walked over and danced along. I understood certain secrets about women that one of the two dancers disclosed to me with flippant movements. We looked each other in the eyes and laughed. We danced close to each other; she was wearing a teeny fur. It was easy, light, too. Now and then we touched each other’s hands.
I thought about our techno comic. The techno comic atmosphere had to be cool throughout. The plan was a couple of years old now. We wanted to make a film about our lives, partying, music, what things were really like.
But what were things like, really?
I can still see myself sitting there at Wolli’s, banging out our lists and ideas one page at a time into the computer – but we always got stuck on two things and couldn’t make it any further. And in the end, that was what caused the whole film to flop: the story and the drugs.
There was no story. That was the joke.
Through dancing, I came to think of sexuality.
And then: how once upon a time I wanted to write something about love, maybe a study of Proust, something along those lines, and I would call it Proust Enhanced. If you ask me, Proust’s notion of love, however much it is revered, however lofty the style of its execution, is really just as obtuse as the worldview of a little miss editor at Elle or Brigitte, sorry not sorry.
I let the bass line push me again. It was soft and clear. Then, just like that, it faded away.
Assyrian in wei ge sie te –
And said to Sigi: ‘My travels in –’
One time when I was at a Westbam party, that was at the old Halle, outside in Weissensee, maybe even the first May Day –
SEXUALITY
Schütte had ordered a little package from Dark. Now the equipment was set up in the corner, and the camera assistants were there next to it in the dark, up high, nostrils sniffly and flittering.
I walked up to Schmalschleger, who clutched my face in his giant wet hands and kissed my hair. I ought to sniff some out of the other woman’s hands, that would be dope.
I was talking with Laarmann and was also taking these gigantic deep draws of breath. And it felt absolutely fantastic. Laarman was talking about the plan for the techno TV thing.
Most people don’t have a clue about what kind of guy Laarmann actually is. Laarman snorts and fantasizes and starts rowing his arms. A slightly thinner person can just lean on Laarmann and feel good in his cushiness. And for a second, I did just that.
One time we were sitting on this riverbank in Berlin, in ’91 maybe, in front or out back of the old Planet, I think. I still had a crumb of hash left and I rolled a mini-joint, and he and I smoked it together. His girlfriend was there, too. He looked so cute to me, with those blond shocks of hair.
Another time we just sat for four hours in a dark room here in Munich, on the street behind the old patent office. That was dope, too, but not the same way. Mammoth discussions of essential matters, with Kerstin mainly, with Mops. At the end, a few hours where we couldn’t say anything more. We sat there, thought a lot, paranoid stuff above all, about the fact of sitting there in such quiet silence, obviously, and no-one said a word. Now and then a question was uttered, to replenish things. Tough stuff, sure.
But cool somehow, too.
Then the woman from before came back from the toilets and the three of us walked to the bar and drank Averna. The woman was chill, the way she moved was crazy chill, laid-back, easy-going. With her sweet little woman’s moustache, she was talking to Laarman about basic problems in ethics or logic, anyway that’s what I got out of it. Stellar, obviously. Long thick black hair, boyish habitus, funny what with her kinda broad butt stuffed in those low-hanging workers’ jeans, cool.
‘The happiest moments of my life I have lived in these situations, in these places.’
SLEEP? WHY?
And I saw William opening his arms and shouting:
‘Hwill! Hey, Hwill! How’s it going?’
‘Great! You?’
‘Same!’
And I told him about the sentence I’d just thought up.
Him: ‘WHAT?’
It was too loud, whatever. We hopped around a bit, one in front of the other, there was a warm feeling, the shared experience of the experience of friendship, then we drifted joyfully apart.
Later she got worried.
They’d already gone on ahead.
Far below, in the shadowy shaft of the riverside, in the roiling and rumbling, peace-making. He lay there asleep.
Desperate wriggling –
A bunch of girls –
I will absolutely do no such thing.
She had seen a friend, a girl, over by the door, totally open, but earlier.
Just that the opportunity never arose.
She didn’t know anything about all that.
Maybe just a hint for him –
She’d –
Was he already drunk?
Hardy shouted: ‘SLEEPING IS COMMERCE.’
We toasted. Hardy said how he was going to tell all in the Lupo book he was going to write next. He wanted to call this book, which he would think up and write himself, The Lupo Book. Everyone laughed, of course they were all into the idea.
Schütte: ‘What?’
Wirr thought of the words: ‘One of my clients was talking about himself, he said he’d sacrificed his benevolent smile.’
Dark thought of the sentence: ‘Every trace of my participation must be erased.’
What held us together was the drugs, to cite Thompson’s lawyer Duke. The day after, early morning, the duel.
He was taking care of the soul side of things: quote unquote.
You play the music –
I’ll write the book.
Olaf said: ‘We were prisoners of the island’s drug baron.’
I shouted: ‘Yeah!’ and laughed.
Then someone said: ‘That girl from before was just here again.’
‘Really?’
And I said to Hardy: ‘So the –’
‘Hey!’
‘What?’
‘Good.’
Max said: ‘Good, good, good.’
And repeated that directly: ‘Good, good, good.’
Cheer, laughter etc. etc. –
We were in the back again walking to the other bar.
I stood there a while and looked ahead and listened.
I went back.
To the music. Even today, you can’t just put this down and say: Yeah, totally cool, I was there… – but increasingly that was the way these thoughts did float up inside me –
And it was –
And I was like –
And it occurred to me, but not urgently, that I was excited to know whether tomorrow I –
etc. etc. –
There was this sentence one morning or one night on Viva or MTV in some pop or rock song from the ’80s or ’90s, for some reason I suddenly recalled it, but not why or where I’d got it from, where I wrote it down or why exactly, and so on and so forth.
They were passing a joint, I looked around. I heard something. Wirr was bopping his head. Max was chatting with some big fat foreign guy. Dark had a pack of smokes in his hand. The bass and the brightening lights brought new messages. ‘Whatsup?’ I turned back. Hardy was talking with Sue, Sue with Cora, Cora motioned to the bar girl, the bar girl nodded. I raised my hand, opened my mouth. The bartender opened the tap, turned her back, bounced on her feet. One of Hardy’s homeboys ordered schnapps. Armin came from behind, greetings all round. Where’s Schütte? Laarman laughed with a sweeping gesture. William appeared to be in deep agreement with some idea or other. Fabian was standing next to the young woman from last night. She shook her wonderful dark hair.
