FreeNRG: Notes from the Edge of the Dance Floor

by Graham St John (Editor)

FreeNRG is a collection of frontline communiques on technotribes, contemporary musical practises and events transpiring on the fringes of Australian dance culture throughout the nineties. The anthology's 13 essays are written by specialists and affiliates of a spectrum of youth phenomena found at the edge of the dance floor.

FreeNRG people subscribe to an economy of mutual-aid and co-operation, are committed to the non-commodification of art and embrace freedoms of experience and expression. Artists and activists, their cultural output is a product of novel mixtures of pleasure and politics. Technicians and esotericists, they pirate technologies in the pursuit of re-enchantment and liberated space.

The book is unique in its coverage of issues (drugs, activism, party as protest) it's thorough assessment of the diversity of music/dance events, and the profiling of significant musical and visual artists such as LabRats, Ohms not Bombs, Ray Castle and Robin Cooke ~ just to name a few.

The anthology examines DiY or "Free NRG" culture, a networked youth movement committed to voluntarism, ecological sustainability, social justice and human rights.

An impressive array of contributors (artists, activists, academics and music makers) document the history of DiY culture, doofs and technotribe activism in Australia analysing and free-wheeling around specific technotribes, locales, events, technics and musics.

Fre-ebook download: https://www.academia.edu/2064821/Free...

274 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 2001

About the author

Graham St John, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist and historian with a research interest in transformational events, movements and figures. Among his books are Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press 2025), Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT (North Atlantic Books 2015), Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance (Equinox 2012), Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures (Equinox 2009), and the edited collections Weekend Societies: Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures (Bloomsbury 2017), The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance (Routledge 2010), Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance (Berghahn 2008), Rave Culture and Religion (Routledge 2004) and FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor (Commonground 2001). He was recently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellow in the Dept of Arts, Humanities and Media at the University of Huddersfield and is currently Senior Research Fellow in the department. He is Executive Editor of Dancecult journal.

Reviews

[OSKR]

Awesome, and great attitude.

I read this many years ago, it's a collection of short articles on the subject of dance music and activism in Australia.

I came back to it recently when talking to a friend about the Do It Ourselves Culture documentary. You can see most of the documentary online I believe on youtube here, the content is related and overlapping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ6Mj...