"There's a good reason why all clubs take place in the dark,
why many warehouse raves are almost pitch black. It's the same reason you turn
the lights low when listening to your favorite album, or wear headphones and shut
your eyelids. Diminishing or canceling one sense makes the others more vivid.
Dance culture takes this simple fact and uses it to overturn the hierarchical
ranking of the senses that places sight at the summit. Visual perception is
eclipsed by the audio-tactile, a vibrational continuum in which sound is so
massively amplified it's visceral, at once an assault and a caress. The body
becomes an ear.
"Although many people on the dancefloor close their eyes to
watch their own music-catalyzed and often drug-enhanced "eyelid
movies," and most clubs have some kind of visual element (fluorescent
backdrops, lasers scything through clouds of dry ice, use of strobes or
"black light"/UV, back projected videos, etc), Sykes's comment does
crystallize techno culture's relative indifference to the visual and its re-privileging
of the ear's primacy.There's a kind of sliding-scale ratio between the visual
and the sonic: the more underground the club or party, the less there will be in
terms of visual divertissement; the more hardcore the scene, the less there is
to be seen. Of course, financial factors go some way to accounting for this;
promoters of underground, small-scale parties have less money to spend on visual
spectacle than the mini-corporations that run "superclubs" or organize
huge commercial raves. But the fact that they choose to skimp on visuals and
decor in order to have enough funds for a powerful sound system again reinforces
the priorisation of the aural in techno culture. Essentially, the purer and
truer to techno's "spirit" a club or scene is, the more it is "dead"
to vision.
