Have you ever been at a rave, dancing through the thick of sound, and feel like you’re in the company of a cohort of people that have created something new?
Under the Westgate or a warehouse ceiling, out in the bush or an abandoned building, there’s a special kind of sound thumping against the ground. New ground to some, holy ground to others, it’s nonetheless the foundation of Melbourne’s underground music scene. It beats vibrations into bushes, casts lasers into night skies. It’s a little thing called a rave.
A rave can feel like the invention of something wholly new – of new sounds, new colours, new feelings, new states of mind – but it’s a beat that the city has been dancing to long before 2024.
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Rave awakening
A fever swept through Naarm in the 80s and 90s, and with it came the thirst of new music. The vibrations of the beats being made in the queer Chicago club scene echoed the sounds of acid house out across other cities, other states, other countries. It was only a matter of time before Melbourne came down with the fervour of a new culture being created.
With the thirst for this new sound came with it the search for new spaces people could hear it in. Not only did pubs and clubs not play this kind of electronic music, but they were also places that fostered a kind of culture that was at odds with what this music demanded.
Peace, love, unity, connection – the values of the people that fostered Melbourne’s first wave of raves in the late 80s and 90s was recycled from the counter-culture hippy values of the 60s and 70s. History has a habit of repeating itself.
If you were interested in going somewhere to listen to electronic music in Naarm in the 90s, surrounded by others who felt the same, you had to make your own. So, Melburnians did just that. It would be an environment that brought together the growing interest in technology, art and designer drugs. It would be a place without security or permits or door lists. Raves would become both a means of escape and a space of connection.
From the raving 90s to the roaring twenties
In some ways, the Melbourne rave scene of today isn’t so different from how it began late last century. There’s music, dancing, drugs, semi-secret locations. They’re a way to avoid the over-priced drinks at a club or listening to the same DJs every weekend. It’s still a source of connection, provided you have enough gum to share around. In almost every other way, they’re incomparable.
Swap out the brightly coloured homemade rave outfits of the ‘90s for the Berlin-like all-black get-up. Replace the word-of-mouth invitation with the Instagram story. Add the current accessibility of electronic music wherever one wishes to access it – be it on a streamer, on a community radio station, on vinyl, or at any of the innumerable number of clubs across Naarm that boast the beats of it every weekend.
One of the biggest points of comparison between the rave scene of 90s and the one of today, though, is the role of the internet. Witnessing music at a rave and participating in a community of sound and movement feels like a way to exist within a moment. It demands you to be present to a performance, away from the presence of all the screens that bleed into the rest of our lives. The rave scene of the 90s, however, is a whole other story.
CTRL ATL Rave
Among the lights and colours and music and drugs that drew people to raves back in the early days of its rise in Melbourne, there was one other sticking point that enticed attendees to come to raves: computers with internet.
During an era when home internet access was rare, clubs and raves enticed partygoers to connect to the world wide web. Ravers explored computer terminals as another attraction, alongside the lights, sound and mayhem of the event. It was all part of the sensory experience.
Raves, built on the idea of connecting with others, included computers as a way to enhance human interaction. Event organisers set up computers with text-based chat software, allowing ravers to connect with people from all over the world. Meet and connect with strangers on the dance floor. And then meet and connect with strangers on the internet.
Julian Assange was a secret rave lord
The implementation of this new kind of technology into the underground music scene demanded the need for people who knew how to set up. Of those people – hilariously – was WikiLeaks founder and activist Julian Assange.
Paul Fleckney, author of Techno Shuffle: Rave Culture and the Melbourne Underground, says that Julian went by the alias of Prof. He would set up internet kiosks at clubs for attendees to use, expanding the universe of a party from the immediate room that the music beat through out into the entire world that was suddenly at one’s fingertips.
As someone who has always advocated for the importance of sharing information through the internet, maybe it should come as no surprise that this is how Julian spent the 90s.
Back to the future
The rave culture that flourished in the 90s in Naarm was all about looking forward. Technology provided portals in which people could imagine a new future. It was a future with new types of music, new types of communication, new types of experiences.
More than three decades on from the rise of raving in Melbourne, the question remains – where do we go from here?
Raves ground themselves in evolution. They push culture further out of the mainstream and shape new sub-genres. As the current rave scene evolves, we might need to reimagine the future through the lens of the past. History repeats itself; looking back to the culture’s forbearers and the ideas they built it on reveals its lasting value.
As we navigate a digital world of endless possibilities, the rave’s essence – connection, creativity and escape – remains constant, shaping the scene today in ways both familiar and new.
Check out the best nightclubs in Melbourne here and the best bush doofs in Victoria here.
