3am in the morning at a rave pumping out smoke, strobe and blistering hardcore is about as close as I have ever come to feeling completely liberated. This experience transformed me forever into a dance fanatic. It has led me on a crazy journey of large sound systems, mad cap parties and wicked people.
This culture of beats, bass and badness has always captured my ideals of being edgy underground and living half a step into the future. It satisfies my craving for action and reaction. It gives me tools for expression.
Deep in the music, events and people living left of field, obscured in late nights, flashing lights and this nagging tinnitus. Like travelling in an alternate dimensions, or a lucid dream from another life. It always feels like busting it out to thumping bass in some crazed location with a couple of hundred people should be your best kept secret.
Yet this life has become real around me. It expands. The music and culture evolves and grows. It collides and collaborates with other kinds of reality. Marketing hype, popularity fights and new kinds of spin.
But while everything else changes the dance remains the same. The sense of liberation, the sense of freedom, the moment when life seems better. It's still all there at 3am, dancing!
