Newsletter

"... not just desirable but urgently necessary."

A love letter to do-it-together gatherings, intimate scales and micro parties.

Nono

— 12 min read

Hi friends,

 

Happy new year or new years, depending on which calendars rule your clock. In fact, what is time – as we wondered last month – if not a succession of opportunities for hopeful beginnings? 

How are you? I love winter and I’ve enjoyed 2023 so far! A couple of weeks ago, I reconnected with Room 4 Resistance where I hadn't danced or played since pre-pandemic times. A blast it was!! The collective's renewed approach to organising parties feels refreshing. Hosted at Globus every two months on Sunday afternoons, the events are promoted, amongst other things, with a secret line-up. This allows a loosening of performance exclusivity, which is regularly discussed as an obstacle to sustainability. To me, secret line-ups are also synonymous with vibe and community and a great way to encourage a democratic approach to dancing. Finally, R4R offers the performers full transparency on remuneration, with fees being distributed in an equitable way. The line-up this time included Luz, Juba, Deena Abdelwahed, CCL b2b Objekt, and then me.

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If you're new here, my name is nono and I play music as gigsta. In this somewhat sporadic newsletter, I usually share recent thoughts, often related to music and/or climate justice. This month, I want to have a look at some parties that have inspired me in 2022 and why. It was another flight-free year for me. That I have been able to continue sharing my passion in different places is partly thanks to the support, courage and inventiveness of smaller cultural structures. 

Here is a list of gigs I played in 2023. Pic taken by Angus.

For the sake of brevity, I won't discuss all these experiences, though many of them were fun and/or inspiring. And I'll focus on only some aspects of the events featured below. If you’ve ever thrown a party, of whatever kind or size, I bow to you. It really is an art.

There’s a plethora of great crews in Berlin and I feel very at home at R4R and my own Fictions parties. In 2022, I met the Reverse Engineering collective, for whom I played twice. I still have anxieties related to my very sparse online presence and consequent lack of following on the usual platforms. If a party is empty, I feel guilty for not having posted about or promoted it. When they welcomed me the first time, Seb and Jojo mentioned that they actually respected my distant relationship with social media! Their crowd felt friendly, faithful, familiar even. The constellation around Reverse Engineering organizes not only dance parties but also hangs out in small venues (with cooking, tattooing and setting up games) and organises pub quizzes (where one can win a loaf of bread with the Aphex Twin logo). 

I recently bumped into a little Rough Trade publication entitled D.I.Y. as privilege: A Manifesto. In it, Richard Phoenix reflects on his experience of forming a band and adopting the D.I.Y. ethos, “that can be boiled down to the idea that you don’t need to wait for permission to do something creative, or share it with the world, you can just go and do it”. 

After years of this experience, he started working alongside people with learning disabilities, which made him realise that the opportunities he had had “as a musician weren’t available to everyone”. The drummer and singer goes on to propose a 13 point Manifesto for Musicians. The 7th entry states: “Don’t assume what’s accessible; ask and learn.” 

NVST on the decks and Jojo helping out. This is “La Ferme de Quincé”, a farm at the periphery of Rennes where I played in 2022 and 2021. The environment is fairly rural yet the place is reachable from the city center by bike and public transport. Open to the public over the summer, the collective grows veggies, cooks food and hosts music and cultural events. They have built sustainable infrastructure, including accessible dry toilets. 

There’s a lot to unpack in Richard Phoenix’s generous essay and I particularly connected with his humbling approach to collective work. The 4th point goes: “Do It Yourself can mean different things to different people and is a misleading term – it can mean you still work with people that record your music, people that make and sell your records, people that own the buildings you rehearse in, people that put on gigs, just as much as music facilitators, support workers or transport to and from a gig.” And I’m going to use this space to thank Eilidh, Kim and Josh for their help with some of these gigs.

Finally, the 12th entry of the D.I.Y as privilege manifesto suggests: “The more invisible you make yourself the more visible others will be.”    

Fuego at Frappant in Hamburg. The crew also seemed to have a crowd-first approach! The name of their party series stands not only for “fire” but also “fuck your ego”. The room was busy and vibey right from the start and I later crashed at the promoter’s place to save them hotel money. Maybe this isn’t always the best option, but in this case, it was comfortable and I wondered why we don’t do it more often? Hotels and Airbnbs are underwhelming anyway.

Considering the role and status of everything and everyone that is involved in organizing an event might have an inherent positive effect on sustainability: the two might encourage each other in a certain direction.

In the 2021 issue of the Ultrarave zine, DJ Volvox explored the “future of raving in post crisis times”. She imagined that: “Contrary to mainstream culture, we are likely to see profound changes in underground culture and especially queer clubbing. In particular, I imagine a greater emphasis placed on sustaining micro-economies led by local talent as opposed to an endless rotation of international bookings and adhering to the general pre-pandemic status quo.” 

What's left of this past projection of the present though? Chal Ravens insists that “the idea of an energetic and self-sustaining local scene becomes not just desirable but urgently necessary”. In her brilliant piece “Hyperlocal. Smaller-scale scenes and sustainable dance music culture”, the British journalist admits that "shifting focus to the local level can be extremely difficult. Mass media is global, the internet is ubiquitous, and we’re always caught up in world events beyond our own postcodes. But in a future fated to be marked by the chaotic wrecking of existing systems, we might as well think big about the tools we have to hand."

I played at beloved club De Pip (The Hague) for the first time in September. I was one of the only artists on the line-up who wasn’t based in the Netherlands. Several rooms, all busy and buzzing, and Mairo Nawaz (who was on after me) played one of the best sets I heard that year.

With cutting down on emissions being a growing concern, “local” and “community” are sometimes presented as keys to the solution. I have a complicated relationship with both, but for slightly different reasons.

In its “Future Vision”, DJs For Climate Action suggested that musicians should "fly only when sustainable alternatives are unavailable". The report quotes Kenyan musician Jinku: “The best way to empower and make change is to create communities.” 

The thing with the concept of “community” is that it is increasingly used for advertising or marketing purposes, much in the same way as “sustainability” is used for greenwashing. In some cases, community is a cover for unpaid labor from which capital is generated and, for example, sold to brands. But obviously, fostering community is a beautiful and difficult and very much-needed task! And some do get it right.

I played in Aarhus twice over the last 18 months, both times with Perko. The parties were hosted by two different crews who are supportive of each other: they compare calendars prior to confirming events in order to avoid promoting on the same date, and lend each other material. Humble, ambitious and skeptical of any centralisation of power, the Super crew is constantly exploring new formats and asking questions. The club’s website: “How do you actually structure a flat organisation with equal opportunity for the involved and stay open to ideas and people from outside the circle? How do we participate in stopping the reproduction of unhealthy ideals and discourses of success within arts, culture and music?” The place is warm and welcoming and their crowd was incredibly dedicated. Cherished memories of creative moves!! 

Since I mentioned greenwashing, this might be a good time to quote Eilidh McLaughlin, who told the New York Times that “any effort to advance sustainability is essentially greenwashing unless you are working to actively break the cycle and reduce your carbon footprint by touring more sustainably”. The article asked “Can Flashy Music Festivals Go Green?” featuring, among others, American event Deep Tropics. 

Marylou on the decks. Held in France in September, Sarcus put together a flight-free line-up for their 2022 edition, with DJs traveling from all over Europe. The festival also included a digital detox, with phones locked away when arriving on site. The site itself was stupendous, with plenty to look at and listen to all weekend.

Exclusivity clauses, remuneration, social organization within events, hyper-locality, community and transport may often be discussed in relation to sustainability. I hear less often about “size” and “scale”. Intersecting with many other factors, scale seems to be crucial to an event’s ability to be regenerative. 

In an article dedicated to micro-festivals, Pablo Belime wrote that “(...) studies have shown for more than ten years that the ecological impact of festivals is intrinsically linked to the increase in size, a structural phenomenon that makes the objectives of carbon neutrality by 2050 unattainable. In this race for size, the international dimension of the event plays a major role, since air travel can produce up to 53% of CO2 emissions. This is why the Shift Project's recent report recommended the organization of ten events of 28,000 people each, allowing emissions to be divided by 30, rather than a single large gathering of 280,000 participants.” 

According to this report, here is the impact of a 4-days big festival situated in the periphery of a city without decarbonisation measures . Side note: the impact of 3% of the audience flying to the event is bigger (60,6% of teq CO2) than 50% travelling by car (27,6% of teq CO2).

What's big though? 

Tomorrowland: 600,000 tickets sold in 2022  

Sonar: 122,000 visitors in 2022

We Love Green : 40,000 capacity in 2023

Dekmantel Amsterdam: 25,000 fans expected in 2023

Deep Tropics: 5,000 capacity

Dekmantel Selectors: 2,500 tickets for 2023

Sarcus: 2,800 planned in 2022

Atom: 650 people in 2018

Chantelouve: 200 people in 2022 

Numbers are approximate but sources are linked. Please reply if you think something should be modified :)

Chantelouve rapidly sold out its tickets in 2022: 200 capacity including artists and volunteers and organizers (many people were all of the above). I was picked up at the train station in Grenoble by someone who also played and cooked and helped and drove me to the gorgeous site high up in the mountains. THE MOUNTAINS!! Drink tokens were made of small pieces of branches but one could also just drink straight from a natural water source that sprung up near the dancefloor. There, people danced and dogs slept. “Artists” were all paid the same fee. An ephemeral radio was set up which discussed local birdsong and featured an impressive collection of lefty zines … I don’t know? What more do we want? It *was* paradise. 

 

As you can guess, size is not the only parameter to consider in terms of sustainability but one which is, I feel, sometimes overlooked in the conversation. A co-organiser of the French festival ATOM, which welcomes fewer than a 1000 attendees, Belime continues: “(…) micro-festivals, by their reduction in scale, make it possible to imagine and implement new solutions for pooling tours and territorialising audiences in order to adopt more sober and viable modes of distribution.” 

Ultimately, the issues aren't merely ethical and economic but also aesthetic. Pablo Belime writes: “If we agree to develop a new form of convivial festival that generates aesthetic experiences that does not degrade either individuals or the world, what insights can micro-festivals bring? Would they be the witnesses of a threshold beyond which a depreciation of the experience takes place? When we question the festival-goers, some mention a limit of 10,000 participants, while others do not hesitate to go down to 1,000, or even sometimes a few hundred people. However, everyone agrees on the notion of “human size”.”

Since the year started, my partner and I have been discussing plans to attend a festival as dancers this year. He’s resolutely committed to Bang Face, whilst I am forever faithful to Freerotation. The latter isn’t happening this year (and re-thinking event frequency may also be a strong sustainability move). Ultimately, we agreed that our finances are not looking good enough just now to plan anything. I’m sure we’re not the only ones in this situation and I wonder how this will impact the dance music landscape? Quite frankly, even if I had the money, I’m not sure I would pass it on to any of the “10 best festivals” promoted by a hegemonic ticketing platform.  

We ended 2022 in Amsterdam with some friends, who adapted an artists’ studio for a 100-people party (Nèna b2b Dj Corridor on the pic). It was an open bar situation with microwaved pizzas available all through the night, reminding us how some exchanges in more institutionalized places are often purely transactional. I entered 2023 with the vivid image of one of my friends who, after no sleep for 36h or so, put her hand in the rented urinal - which had filled up to the brim over the course of the night - in order to clean it. This is how far some of us go to throw parties on our own terms!!

If you’d like to go further with these topics:

  • International platform One Resilient Earth is hosting a festival sustainability lab: “a deep-dive into climate resilience through regeneration and transformation” which you can apply for until the end of January. https://oneresilientearth.org/festival-sustain-ability-lab/ 
  • The French collective Le collectif des festivals is rewarding festivals in the West of France for sustainable initiatives. Deadline, March 3rd: https://lesbravos.org
  • The French network Arviva recently shared their tool “Seeds” to measure the environmental impact of an event: https://seeds.arviva.org 

If you know more relevant resources, please reply to this email and I’ll add them on the substack post.

//

Some updates from me :)

Music:

  1. Bakläxa joined me for a 3 hour show on Fictions playing all things foody!! Long overdue and tasty all the way through.
  1. Ophélie and I played b2b on their fantastic Therapy Dog show on Refuge.
  1. Le Motel invited me to play with Lee Gamble at C12 in Brussels and we had fun warming things up on Kiosk a few hours before!

Travels:

  1. 11.02: I’m headed to France in February where I’ll be talking on a panel in Brest on Thursday 9th, defending my PhD in Rennes on Friday 10th, finally hosting some DJ workshops and playing at Astropolis on Saturday 11th.
  2. 14.02: I’ll be in Brussels for a Keychange panel on Tuesday 14th.
  3. 18.03: I’ll play in Köln in March (and I have something on hold in Hannover that month too).

Further hopes for 2023:

  1. Resolution: I’m trying to avoid working after dinner during the week, especially since I usually start my days very early and want to spend more pleasure time with books. I’m not doing great at this so far, which I guess is why people don’t make resolutions? 
  2. Fiction: No surprise here, I love fiction, especially novels. However, I always end up consuming more theory than stories. Please send fiction recommendations to soften my soul. I'm up for absolutely anything but would especially appreciate more solar punk experiments in imagining a grounded future. 
  3. Pledge: I’m attempting another flight-free year! Flight Free UK does inspiring work and this year they’re offering the option to sign up for more flexible pledges. Sunita’s story really stayed with me. In 2021, she wrote that she hadn’t visited her family in Mauritius for seven years: “what keeps me from feeling saddened by this is the knowledge that I am doing everything I can to keep Mauritius alive for present and future generations.”

As a dear friend of mine said on Jan 1st: “Looking forward to disrupting the fuck out of shit with you this year!”

Xx

nono 

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October 2022: “ … an absolutely intuitive critique of the hyper-capitalistic nature of …” On busy basements, empty floors and seeding communities

September 2022: “… at the core of an imperial mode of living.” Libertarian logics, “existing in harmony” and two years of the newsletter.

May 2022: “… not only demanding social justice, but also aesthetic justice …” On air pollution, James Hillman and BIG BOLD L E T T E R S

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