Review of our second rave, "Dose",
or how to throw a really good
party for about $500.
by Anonymous
This article is brought to you courtesy of Hyperreal.com
After being turned down at about 20 other locations, I read an article about a
local gallery buying a small (1300 sq ft) warehouse for artist use. I
approached the owner, and to my surprise, she was very enthusiastic about what
I wanted to do. So I scheduled the place for the first weekend after school
got out, June 13th.
I made and distributed about 2000 flyers. Unlike the first rave we threw,
where we had about three days to advertise, this time we had two weeks, so we
blew it out as hard as we could. Flyers in every club, every night, plus
plastering them all over the university.
The week before, I used my work's slide printer to make 180 slides of fractals
and computer graphics from the net. Who said effects had to be expensive?
Approximate cost for film and developing was $80.
The night before the rave, I was up to 2:00AM trying to get my laser setup to
work. I'd purchased a mirror kit that was supposed to do wacky spirograph
patterns. It wasn't functioning very well. At 2:00, I discovered that I had
two wires reversed. My apartment was then bathed in a red glow as I sat and
played with the thing for an additional hour before collapsing in bed. I'd
managed to piece together a decent laser show for $150.
What a completely screwed up day. The first even to happen was a car accident
that took place while we were waiting in an intersection. One of the cars
involved did a couple of fast 360's a foot in front of my truck. This was
before we had picked up our sound and lights. If we had been hit, the whole
event would have been screwed. Luck shined on us.
After picking up the sound, then nearly losing one of the speakers over the
side of the truck, we setup the scaffolding that would be the center structure
in the warehouse. I'd received it for free, and once it was up, it looked
rather cool. Two sections in the center of the room, with one section for the
DJ booth. Then I spent a good two hours with the video guy trying to get the
composite output from my Amiga with Mindlight to work with his equipment. We
finally threw our hands up in the air and bagged the video. He left and I
went and picked up the lights.
Being the complete sound idiot that I am, I couldn't get the top range
speakers to function. I called the sound shop and they gave me a few tips,
but nothing really helpful. I was packing everything up to take it back to
exchange, when I decided to try again. Ahh! It helps if you have the top
range amplifier actually PLUGGED IN. Things were starting to come together.
We had the laser and the fog machine on top of the scaffolding. Two
projectors on the next level, two strobes on the lowest level, about the
height of your head. Then a derby-star hanging from the warehouse's I-beam,
and a flowerscan off the side of the scaffolding. When everything was
running, it looked incredible.
Then the breaker went off. After investigating the electrical system, we
discovered another circuit ON THE CEILING. So we strung an extension cord up
a wall and tied it to the socket, then ran all the sound into that circuit.
The lights alone threw the breaker again later that night, but nobody noticed
on the floor. They just thought it was another effect.
When we finally opened, I discovered that one of my mixing channels wasn't
working. After a bit of swearing and shaking, I moved my two disc players to
channels 3&4.
The initial 9:00 attendance were all under 21. They looked rather dazed and
confused at the whole situation. They would dance for one track, go outside,
then dance again. I was wondering if this was the way it was going to be all
night. It wasn't. The older crowd started to flow in. Incredible as it was,
it seemed like a completely different set of people from the first rave we
threw. I don't know if this was a good or a bad sign, but people who didn't
come told us it was because it wasn't 21 and over.
Things were going good until I discovered the second CD player was skipping on
selected discs. It was really a toss-up on whether it would do it or not, so
I had to have the other player ready to go immediately after the second one
started. What pissed me off was the seamless beat matching I was doing all
night to the second player, then it would start skipping and people would look
at me like I was a complete buffoon. Oh well, live and learn.
Then there was the constant request for "hardcore". It seemed that if I
started to play anything remotely housey or ambient, someone would drift over
and ask when I was going to play something fast. The worst comment all night
came while I was playing "Digeridoo". This clown walks over and asks, "When
are you going to play some techno/rave?" I asked him what the hell he thought
I was playing. The answer came back, "This is industrial." So I asked him
what group he thought I should play. Funny enough, but he couldn't name any.
Instead he just asked me if I had certain compilations. There were bozos like
this all night. "I'm from LA, and I wish you'd play some hardcore."
"Hardcore is what they're playing at raves in California." People who acted
like they had been transplanted for the night, but who probably hadn't been
there in the past year. As usual, the cool people made up for it. Someone
quietly approaching the booth and asking for Moby, a girl asking me to play
that "Injected With Poison song" again after I had played it ten minutes
earlier, and this completely hot female asking me to play "Rough Sex" (grin).
However, I felt it was my worst night of DJing ever. People danced, but
combined with the skipping CD player and the constant requests for "hardcore",
I would have given the old thumbs down if I had been on the floor.
We could only rent the space until 2:00. Even though cops had driven by, they
didn't give us any problems all night. I thought that people would give us
problems about stopping at 2:00, but around that time there were only about 20
people left on the floor. I desperately want to do a 12 hour rave, but will
this town catch on? Maybe with a chill room and a smart-bar things will be
extendable, but right now, Salt Lake seems to be having a hard time with the
rave concept. At 2:30, everyone had left quietly.
There's still a lot of momentum to ride from this. My partner John said that
he got nothing but good comments all night long. The biggest problem with the
first rave we threw is that we weren't able to ride the momentum at all. With
it being summer, we're going to do the next one out in the desert, for free.
There's this huge ridiculous piece of art, known as the "Tree of Utah" that is
a large cement cartoon-like tree out on the salt flats. We're just going to
rent the sound and use the projectors and lasers for the rest. The only
question now is, will people drive 50 miles to get there?
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art, altered states of consciousness, and experimental ways of expressing those memes over the wires. Information like this
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