TAA very much

Gosh it’s 2017 already, big up the people doing the TAA this year! 

As my contribution I thought I’d make a zine about me and TAA...

EDIT well now it's 2021 and TAA is 20 years old woop wopp I tried to make this into a zine and failed

EDIT 2025 what have I been doing with my LIFE, the people need this online right now

TAA VERY MUCH

I first got involved with Temporary Autonomous Art in 2001 when I turned up at the old Smithfields club in East London (a long-term empty building I'd always wanted to squat) and saw a strange assortment of beautiful people making weird art … some were my friends hehehe. A had drilled lots of circular holes in a bar table. I remember looking at that and thinking errrr...For his graduation show he made a room you couldn't enter!

TAA LONDON

Overall, I thought the whole thing was great and really enjoyed the way creativity was being unleashed from the free party scene (ie the squatters doing massive tekno parties every Saturday night all over London taking time out to do a free cultural event). Sure, I loved the parties and found them really inspiring pockets of freedom, but yes I could also agree they were quite nihilistic and I did sometimes wonder what all these interesting people were doing wrecking their heads every weekend (and also why I needed to do that too). So it was cool to see an open access art event with minimal curation, where everyone could put up stuff and also anyone could stumble in of the street if they dared and have a look around. 

The www.randomartists.org website has lots of good stuff on it and an archive with photos of all the events up to 2007 at least. Random Artists was originally a useful anonymous multi-use moniker for people who were associated with Headfuk, Hekate and Pitchless sound systems. It has since become a sprawling empire of underground talent!

Back in 2001, the next month the Liquid Spiral Collective did a party/exhibition in south London and invited us along. Suddenly, we were recognized artists! D drew all over a wall and fell asleep on K, the pen still in his hand as he slumped to the ground. We really meant it! Actually all I can really recall of this event is that it was supposed to be alcohol free, which made for quite a good atmosphere apart from the occasional radge person moaning about their human rights being restricted after walking round the whole building twice looking for a bar. In 2021 this sort of dickhead would have totally been moaning about masks and freedom. 

An unstoppable art juggernaut was now in motion. TAA 2 had to happen. Somehow our squat ended up being the venue locators. We were living in Clapton at that time and Hackney was our whole world, so we didn't look around that far. Me and V found a building set back from the main road near the cemetery in Stoke Newington, which was empty on the first floor with a car mechanics underneath. Crash bang one night and we fell through the door into an empty artist atelier. Perfect! Things came together really well, we went down to New Covent Garden market and skipped a shitload of veggies for food, then people turned up and put up their art. There was sculpture, photographs, painting, a really good mix.

We experienced a bit of the tension inherent in putting on an event which wasn't a party when we kicked people out at midnight but it was really important for TAA not to be a party, to be something else since we could go to a wicked party every weekend, so that wasn't a problem or a need to be fulfilled. One drunk guy got really aggro and was chucked out, but came back the next time in a suit and a mask, this was accepted as fair play and he was let back in. The three days of the exhibition flew by, then we tatted down and all went out to a festival in the park. When I came back, my key didn't work in the door any more and it really was all over. Right then a guy turned up saying “Is this where the art event is happening? Am I too late?”

Then came TAA 3, in Clapton Square, in dilapidated Council buildings I'd wanted to squat for a while, since I used to cycle past them twice a day. We'd planned it from the nursery in Leyton where some of Headfuk were living, but as the time to crack got closer I got itchy feet, so I bought a truck and moved to Europe. Thus I missed the next few TAAs, first back at Smithfields again (and you know last time I went past in 2012 the building was STILL fucking empty), then Commercial Street, Flowers East and Hampstead.

Next, in summer 2003, some Random Artists made it out to Czech Republic where I was then living. It was mainly people from Hekate and Headfuk, combining art exhibitions in CZ and Poland with doing teknivals. We put on a wicked art event at squat Milada in Prague (now sadly evicted) with a night of electronic music. The electricity came from a streetlight so the music only came on when it got dark. There was also an excellent short film night. E made some intricate stuff out of the crap in Milada's garden and as an intense art action I managed to drop this really heavy bit of scrapmetal which he'd put on a pedestal directly onto my foot.

I thought I'd visit the next TAA back in London, which ended up taking place in October 2003. I turned up at the venue in Goswell Road, Farringdon, to find everyone really stressed since the original venue in Aldgate had been evicted literally just as people started putting stuff up on the walls! Despite teething problems like having no leccy or water in the new place, everything got sorted out superfast and I think in many ways it was the ideal TAA building - central so people could stumble across it, an office block which meant lots of rooms for installations etc, lots of floors (maybe eight?) so the art could expand ever upwards and outwards rhizomatically, a big basement for a party (although i think we didn't party it since we had grief from snooty neighbours - they called noise abatement at midnight not because we were making noise but because we wouldn't let them in since we had just closed the building, the bastards!).

Again I can't really remember that much apart from Czech friends being there and J's band playing. M had kittens, that must have been really stressful moving around twice in one week. I put my A0 photocopied BW sheets of kunst in a toilets which flooded so I don't think anyone saw them. Oh yeah and there was a bit of kinetic sculpture which featured ping pong balls being popped out of a wooden vagina.

Then the virus started spreading in even more directions. Bristol did a TAA, so did Manchester. Later on so did Sheffield and Edinburgh, as did Brighton, which I'll get onto below. I was still living in Europe so I missed these. I didn't go to the next London one near Old Street (2007) which ended being a weird lockdown situation for a few days with security posted on the street trying to stop people getting in.

Some Random Artists went back to CZ in 2007 but I didn't end up joining them because I was living in the Netherlands by then. I do remember there was at some stage a full-on handbags fight about whether the walls should be painted white or not. For me it was always more about making art to fit the environment, plus a dirty warehouse is way more interesting than a white cube. But yeah if you came from a fine art background it must I guess be really liberating to make your own gallery space. Anyhoo I just enjoyed putting up my photographs exactly where I felt like putting them, whether that was on the stairs or outside the building.

BRIGHTON INTERLUDE

The first Brighton TAA was 2008, Subterranean Art in a squatted warehouse in Portslade. There's a good little short film on youtube showing the construction of it. I liked the urban minigolf. There was a good mix of stuff, graffiti, workshops, cabaret, kids stuff, films and also snow in April on my last day there.

The second Brighton TAA in 2009 was a long time in the planning and ended up being in Moulsecoomb, which personally I thought was a shame since we had floated the idea of clashing with the Brighton Festival Fringe and one of the things I find amazing about TAA is the way new people can just wander in and get involved, but being up a hill in Moulsecoomb (in the the burbs) meant that we were mainly catering to our friends and family. No bad thing in itself, but it also felt a bit cliquey (and druggy) and it became apparent to me at least that requirements such as having a place for people to park their vehicles was becoming more of a priority than finding a fat central venue for an exhibition. We could've squatted the old post office on Ship Street but for some reason everyone ought it was too ontop, it was then squatted and lasted over a year, which is insane in Brighton squat terms. It's now (2021) a poncey restaurant. The TAA went off ok although we did have a full-on riot with the local kids.

The third Brighton one in 2010 was in Shoreham and got illegally evicted on the Thursday before it was supposed to begin, which was unintentionally hilarious and showed the low capacity of the crew. TAA by this point was inevitably being tugged in different directions. Some people went down more of a fine art route doing exhibitions under other names on the back of TAA, others dumped whole cans of paint down stairwells (which you could say is even finer art). Some people took the experimental music nights onto another level, other people hung out by their vehicles all weekend.

CHIN STROKING

There was an idea at some stage to do a TAA festival which encountered quite a lot of debate since some people felt the ethos of TAA could not be shoehorned into the requirements of a commercial festival. In the end, the sheer logistics of putting on a festival meant that the idea went on the backburner and then later fed into other projects instead.

Personally I’m much happier with the TAA brand staying associated with squatted events, since so much of the meaning of it is tied up with shortterm transformation of space. Maybe now that is changing for the people still organising it because it is so much harder to squat in England. That’s a shame but good that stuff still happens. Actually I feel bad I never organised an event in the Netherlands, that would have been awesome, although now it’s the same problem, it would be hard to squat a big building for an art event where I am (in 2017).

BACK TO LONDON TAAs

Anyway, to get back to the London chronology after quite a long break (3 years maybe) we did another TAA in London in 2009 (? I think). At meetings beforehand I was pushing again for less partying and more info, soooooo (be careful what you wish for) I ended up in a little sideroom doing an infoshop (on holiday from my normal infoshop activities). It actually went really well: I had some great conversations and shifted most of the stock on donation.

The building was in Hackney Wick, which personally I thought was quite far out of town although to be fair the Wick (which used to be rave central and now is post-Olympic) was at that point in time a place where lots of young arty types were living in warehouse conversion type things, so maybe it was a good place for it. Anyhoo, it was a large warehouse (exprinters) with office space and a yard, and we crammed in lots of art, including P's head outside. There were various workshops (such as blacksmithing, self-defence and drawing). Pitchless did a cool sound installation. There was a pirate paddling pool, where you could drift over to the computer and illegally copy music! I sat in it for a good half hour happily chatting away and soaking my feet before realising my camera was in a sidepocket and underwater. After a good dry-out, it took bleached out photos for a while but it survived somehow!! I then showed some of the weird fotos at a later TAA :)

At the end, just when I was pushing a shopping trolley full up of the remaining infoshop stuff plus stacks of tatted papers left over from when the place was a printers towards my car, I got a call from my dad saying my grandad had died. We were pretty close and I still remember the sudden switch from post TAA euphoria to private grief. And then I was driving home for the funeral instead of going home.

Grief works in weird ways and I think this was one factor amongst others stopping me going to the TAA the next year in Tottenham. But then I was back doing info again with W the next year for the one off Hackney Road in 2011. This was really great, although it was fucking cold in the warehouse (which by the way in an upcoming area of London had been empty for year and still had a DJ setlist on the wall from when it was squatpartied several years before!?). Loads of people came down and I found it really sociable.

I did a presentation of my academic work feeding back how mainstream media discourses were being used to criminalise squatting. It looked like no-one was coming until the sofas and chairs filled up at the last minute. I was a bit nervous to do this in case people thought it was meaningless or stupid, but actually people totally got it and made superinteresting comments. I started working academically to try to work out why squatting was being criminalised and how to stop it, for me it’s really important then to get the research back out of the academic sphere and discuss it with fellow squatters, who of course have a pretty shrewd idea of what is going on since they are the beautiful people in this stupid fucking society based on greed and property. We discussed mainstream media reports on squatting and how they stereotype squatters as the dangerous, criminal, foreign other which must be repressed. I had some slides and showed an unexpected renaissance foto of the Scumtek party which ended up in a riot.

HOME

Everyone was getting no younger and there was talk of this 2011 being the last TAA, but here we are in 2017 and TAA is still happening, that’s fucking amazing! EDIT 2021 lol scream if you wanna go faster EDIT 2025 make it stop 

And since the theme of this particular exhibition is the concept of HOME let me say that TAA has been a real inspiration for me, a place, an idea, a freespace which has really affected who I am and how I see the world. It’s really amazing that a bunch of people can come together and in a short time period invade a building, fix the toilets and leccy, promote the event, fill it with crazy good art and hold it down for week, then clear up and go home. This sort of self-organised DiY stuff gives me so much energy, when everything else is so crap and normal and expensive. Just like squatting a house, just like putting on a squat rave, I am in a space where I can breathe and feel free.

Imagine not having the opportunity to do that.

I’m also really looking forward to TAA2047 (edit 2057) which will be all of us sneaking into a nice warm building in the ruins of London and sitting around knitting and gossiping about the good old days.

It’s gonna be awesome, I can’t wait!

EDIT 2021 my views on squatting have not changed much, I still think it's as important as ever to occupy and resist. I need to feel free and when we did a squatted homeless shelter in Brighton in early 2020 I felt alive again for the first time in a while. I'm lucky to be housed nowadays but my heart is still in squats, it's when I feel alive and free. Props to groups likes ASS, Bike Wars, NLSN and Pokora for keeping the dream alive, it's hard nowadays.

As for TAA? Well it just keeps on going...

EDIT 2025 ... i am now old and reduced to writing long tracts on the internet that no-one reads haha oh but we used to have fun..

Floating in Space - Squat parties 2025 edit

This is an ongoing draft, first started here, about squat parties in London. Memories are hazy, but it's important to shape the future by recalling the past. These squat parties had an immense impact on me and how I see the world. I hope everyone gets to experience that sort of freedom in their lives at least at one point. Yes drugs were involved, but the locations, the music, the camaraderie were also important. Plus it's good to dance. Nowadays (2025) that's mostly in my kitchen.

[Music to listen along with - Lochi - Serious Tangent - Smitten1 - working 2025]

I first started going to London squat parties when I moved there in 1995 to study at UCL, having just turned 18. I must have already had a vague yearning towards alternative culture since I knew about cooltan and wanted to visit, but then it was evicted. It's always easy to think there was a golden age that happened just before and I'm not really complaining because squat parties were incredible from 1996 to 2000, but it does feel a bit like in terms of squatted social centres and underground festivals at least, 1995 marked a downturn - impact of the CJA perhaps.

I was already into underground music and had been to some Exodus raves in Luton plus a few free festivals in London. There was the final Deptford Urban Free Festival, where I heard Zebedee DJing for the first time on a rig called Avinit Army, plus one on Clapham Common where the Revolutionary Dub Warriors played. And there was the last Hackney Homeless in Clissold Park, which ended up in a riot - all I really remember of that was being literally shoved out of the park by the Met and trying to stop them beating up a wheelchair user.

                                            [Hackney Homeless festival 1994 - link working 2025]

The above image is the NME report thanks to historyismadeatnight, which also links to a film about the fest.

[Advance Party flyer - working 2025]

I picked up some Advance Party flyers at the festies, one pictured above. They were a group fighting back against the CJA. Once I was actually living in London I had a looot of places to explore, as well as going to the occasional lecture. I was going to clubs like Club UK, Shtonka and Eurobeat 2000, in fact I do recall getting the United Systems number (0181 9597525) in a chillout. Buying records at Ambient Soho meant meeting people who worked there like Chantal (Mira Calix, RiP) who took a shine to my friend Andy (and who wouldn't), Miss Pink, Aaron Liberator and Simon Freeform.

Back in those days I thought nothing of clubbing Thursday through Sunday (without drugs even! the very thought, I'm exhausted all the time nowadays, I guess I used up my energy back then). This was all before the internets and mobile phones of course, so people used to stand in the rain and flyer the clubbers leaving other parties. I remember getting flyers at the end of Megatripolis at Heaven for two different parties, one was Vox Populi  [I didn't go and then they headed off to Europe] and the other one was Immersion. I really wanted to go to a Spiral Tribe party, but they had already left. I nervously called the infoline for Immersion and found myself at a squatted cinema in Turnpike Lane, where they were doing the classic nonsense of selling straws at the entry to get round licensing. I was on my own and I had never seen anything like it. I didn't know what to expect, but the quadrophonic sound was great and Gizelle played the classic Tesox track 'Go Ahead London', such a great bubbling acid line and of course a forerunner of the acid techno scene that was just about to explode.

                                                [Tesox - 'Go Ahead London' - working 2025]

Another early rave was the 1995/1996 NYE bash on the corner of Well Street and Mare Street in  Hackney in an old cinema which later became an Iceland supermarket and presumably now got gentrified into a fucking yuppy tower. I went with a buddy from school [who moved to Edinburgh and got spiralized by Sativae] - we walked there from Highbury and Islington tube, which shows that despite living in London for a few months, I did not yet know my way around London very well at all!!

Another early rave which I persuaded people I was living with to go to was in Farringdon, near Mount Pleasant....

[Flyer for LSD / Jiba party - working 2025]

The Farringdon party (flyer above) was great, the guy on the door with a pierced lip said he thought Spiral Tribe were in Germany but he wasn't sure; I went to the loos and was terrified by a toilet full of turds. Our little hippy group sat in a corner as all these crusties (which in 6 months' time would be us) just kind of stood around and chatted, whilst an absolute racket played. I don't remember anyone dancing and I just couldn't process the music at all, it was a wall of noise. There's an excellent quote 
from Simon Reynolds, I think it must be in his 1999 book 'Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture' where he says "one Spiral-affiliated outfit plays a set of undanceably fast, stiffly regimented, metallic beats that sounds like ball bearings rattling around in a concrete pipe". Sounds about right!

It was a scary scene, I suppose in the same way every scene is when you are outside of it. And of course there was a whole heap of drugs going on, but at the same time most people were alright and nobody died [with a couple of exceptions - an old tramp once and then the guy who jumped off the hexagon building thinking he could fly]. Systems around at that time were Mainline, Virus, Oops, Insanity, Jiba, Mayhem. They were all playing seriously good underground tekno, a language I started to understand. On rigs like Immersion and also at parties like Club Alien and Kinky Techno (a semi-legal Immersion venture under KingsX station in what had been the Serious Road Trip building) acid trance was just getting going and that was great for a while before it stagnated. 

I had been listening to pirate radio, that was of course another way to find out what was happening in an era before the internet and mobile phones. Zone FM played sick DnB (DJ Freebase!) and on Energy FM Marie Chantal and Callie were playing mad acid hardcore before the genres splintered into gabba, speedcore, happy hardcore and breakcore. It's funny to remember a time when playing drum n bass was controversial, like there being mutterings about dnb in the second room at Hellraiser lol. Luckily for a time there was all sorts at parties.

The Hackney Wick mashups in what were then old Victorian warehouses before they were demolished for the Olympics in 2012 - Dace Road, Carpenters Road, Waterden Road. At a benefit for Curley's family, I remember turning up late on acid, then taking K and forgetting I was on acid and getting eviscerated by Spiral Tribe's 'Going all the way'.

                                             [Spiral Tribe - Going All the Way - working 2025]

The (Unsound-run) cinema in Wood Green was pretty awesome for a few weeks - one time we turned up fucked after Pride on Clapham Common (free in those days!) with these little flashing wands (it doesn't get much better than seeing the Pet Shop Boys do 'Go West' as thousands sing along and the sky explodes with fireworks). 

The bullring at Waterloo was pretty funny - outside, in the place where the IMAX stands now, as a benefit for the homeless people who were being evicted. My fave memory of that party is a DJ whose name I almost remember playing this wicked Anticore track below - Demoiselle Douce Innocence– Moonbreaker. It samples Moonraker and the vibes were just right. We'd met Fred and the Toulouse hardcore crew at Czechtek, and he'd given me the record :) But I just looked up on discogs who made this track and it's Jörg Buchholz, which doesn't sound very French!

                        [Demoiselle Douce Innocence– Moonbreaker =Anticore 3 - working 2025]

Overall, so many good memories. Some of the flyers are here. Molly's book 'Out of Order' documents a lot of the places, even if I remember them slightly differently, since there was also joy as well as macho posturing. Maybe that's because we were friends but hung out with different systems. I started DJing on Headfuk and Panik sometimes, although I honestly cannot remember that much about it :) Two weeks in a row we got noise abatement orders when I was playing in the morning, so I must have been an unlucky charm. I would be playing spiral tekno back then, which seemed to divide the crowds between those who hated it and just wanted more acid techno,and those who loved it. This pushed my sets further and further into the morning...

And of course we were travelling out to Europe for teknivals when we could - for a few summers that was what summer meant. systems like metek, dstorm, lego, furious, foxtanz, heretik, total resistance, sound conspiracy, samovar, damage control all twatting out amazing music through electrical storms.  Czechtek was always great - cheap booze and amazing weather; Dutchtek tended to feature loads of gabba and speedcore; Paristek 2000 was where I made a lot of good friends before my travels had even started in earnest. A previous French one I hadn't gone because I was finishing my course, but a carload went over with my then girlfriend and she came back completely traumatised :( something about being on acid and taking a leak then the strobe putting her pissing shadow all over a mountain.

                                                [Tolworth Teknival - 2000 - working 2025]

We started a system called Xombie and did a night at the Dungeons then most people got absorbed into Headfuk. And suddenly things got fun in the UK again with festies like Tolworth (Indymedia report) and the travellers field at glastonbury (RiP) and great quarry raves in Wales and up on the Ridgeway. And we started Temporary Autonomous Art! That's a whole other caboodle to write about.

                                             [Gak Foxtanz - Super Keuf - FXZ2 - working 2025]

Then it was time to travel. The truck was ready to roll and we went off, with the free diesel a bonus thanks to a French rascal. There was Slovtek, Poltek, picking up hitchhikers heading back to Berlin after the Genoa protests who took us to their wagenplatz at Kopi, a FrenchTek which I finally got to on the Monday heeh... The list goes on.. 

Whilst I was living in Europe I carried on raving, going to parties in and around Prague from rigs like Cirkus Alien, Komatsu, NSK and Vosa, but of course it's not quite the same when you are a visitor to a scene. By the time I ended up in NL, I preferred hibernation. There was still the desire to get out and party for NYE, and there was one good one at Villa Friekens, another time DJing VSnares in the morning in the killout at a ZMK rave in Enschede (?). But after a while even TDK and ZMK went quite silent, only surfacing every so often.

Back in the UK in 2013, it was hard to find a good party, although of course they still existed. People have met up under the stars to dance for many thousands of years - it's not a new phenomenon of course. It's what I like to think happened at stone circles. The new generation were no doubt doing it in their own way by that point now; the only London rigs I would bother with were IRD, NFA and Pokora. 

Around that time there was an excellent NYE party in London - I was living in Brighton so drove up to somewhere below Brixton, got my bike out of the car and went to the prison solidarity demo at midnight which went off well since it was the first one for a while, then cycled into London for the party. I hadn't stopped to think whilst making this genious plan that central London would have just had a massive street party at midnight, and I had to carry my bike over whichever bridge I crossed to avoid all the broken glass. I eventually made it to the party which was an excellent Pokora party in a tiny former porn cinema in deepest Soho - the crew were delighting in turning away all the straight ppl at the door despite however much money they offered.

When in Brighton, I'd missed the boat for parties at Black Rock. There were still raves being organised but the infos came out after midnight and by 2am they had been busted, which seems amateur but the cops were getting better at shutting them down all the time.

                                                [Black Rock rave 2009 - working 2025]

In 2015 (ie ten years ago in 2025!?) I wrote an update which stayed a draft, so I'll add it here...

Since a while now I'm living in the Netherlands again and it's interesting how there aren't really so many squat parties anymore. I guess more than anything that is connected to the criminalisation of squatting, although also parties feel a bit tired, there's a lot of the same old tekno getting played over and over again, so maybe people can't be bothered to go out any more and  the innovation is elsewhere. Older systems are still doing parties but there are also a fair amount of legal parties, also I suppose fashion changes, but I do hope the youth are experiencing freedom in other ways.

The only really good free party style stuff I've been to lately has been in Belgium, things are happening a bit more there. We went to Antwerp to see Killabomb play a massive hall, that was fun. As club nights go, PRSPCT in Rotterdam is still pretty rocking. With residents like Thrasher and DJ Hidden, it pioneered that distinctive snare heavy drum n bass style like 10 years ago (skullstep) and they are still rocking. Indeed, you can hear much harder sounds there than at a squat party which I find weird and acts like Limewax are actually innovating and are interesting to listen to, rather than a DJ banging out free party classics. I mean, if you like Crystal Distortion records great, so do I, but why not get him to play live instead? When I did make it to a squat party here in NL, Nimatek/#23/Oerocircus/Baeng, I heard the same Crystal Distortion three different rigs. They all had DJs just phoning it in, putting on one track after another with no emotion or plan to build the evening. Perhaps it was a missed opportunity in that Jigsore were on the lineup as well but didn't make it. Then again, the last squat party I went to in London (NFA, IRD, an acid techno rig) was also pretty rubbish. When the best music is someone playing a Venetian Snares tribute mix, by it's probably better to get on the bike and go home.

My last party was.... maybe the TAA building near Old Street. That was years ago. Did enjoy dancing on the street at Brussels Pride last year. And now for an update in 2025? When I'm living in Scotland? Well I shit you not, I have reconnected with old friends from travelling times who are doing a rave soon. The only thing I'd heard before up here  was a midge death Scottek off Loch Ness two years ago.

The story continues....

Thanks for the comments on the previous draft, I always enjoy anonymity but I realise I prob would have heard more stories if I'd made myself more accessible. Feel free to leave a comment or hit me up on discogs - pijnappel.

RiP Eun

 

RiP Eun, he of Black Mass Plastics and many other names. Hemel Hempstead's finest. We got to know each other at squat parties I guess. He popped up all over. 

TAA - Arty Party Refugee Fundraiser Saturday 7 September 2024

 

TAA 2023

 

Jamie Lidell - Freely Freekin (MSQ08)

 

TAA 2057

 Taken from Rupture 2018 - https://rupturezine.org/

TAA 2057

Parking my mobility helicopter on the highrise rooftop and boosting with my jetpack down to the cultural resistance centre on level 23, I realise I haven’t been in these parts since I got the fuck out of London during the 2020 meltdown. Earlier, as I flew down the highway to the periphery at Colchester, it had been tough to see the still smoking ruins of East London for the first time.

This is the first Random Artists meetup for 38 years. Of course, when martial law came in and the hunger wars started, everything took a back seat to survival; woman cannot live on Instagram alone. I’m happy that a lot of people I knew survived the riots. We were already nomadic and pretty well prepared for complete societal breakdown. I moved up north with the hoverbarge and never really came back.

At the door for TAA it’s funny to see the usual reprobates hanging out; grey-haired, several decades older but still recognisable. The beer cans of old are now opioid-based concoctions and noone smokes tabak anymore. Still we can all stand around and talk bollox for hours – at least that hasn’t changed. Some of the Hekate crew are here showing off their new bionic limbs; very nice. The Ship of Theseus paradox has reformulated with a vengeance – if you are continually replacing broken limbs with metal parts, when do you stop being you and start to become a robot? Or at what point does the robot become you?

The exhibition is broken into several immersive VR spaces; where you can wander in and out, interacting for several days if you want. The politician shoot-em-up is super popular and glitching a bit, so I take the party option. I spend several pleasant hours reliving the Curley memorial party in Hackney Wick back in the late 1990s. As the stream enters my visual cortex I feedback data from my own frazzled birthday memories, blending them into the broader knowledge base and creating a wider playing field for other visitors. Where no memories exist, I hit a grey wall; then if I turn round I’m back on the dancefloor again.

I do miss the first squatted TAAs of the early 2000s, since one of the best things about those exhibitions was that they were centrally located and people could be enticed in off the street to see what was going on; back when walking was still a thing. Occasionally, visitors had never stepped foot in a squat before, so it made everything a lot more exciting - just like your first rave. The unrestricted transformation of space, the unbridled enthusiasm of smashing a wall to make a door or pouring paint down the stairs; I still miss those things and I never saw them in a legal gallery setting.

It’s funny what a boom and bust society we have lived through in almost hundred years, now it’s post-WWIII situation where there is no rule and most buildings are severely damaged. In the cycles of urban growth and decay, the Wessex region is a shadow of its former self; whilst the Manchesti/pool/port conglomeration is gathering the new generation of freeloaders. Take this venue – the centre is a huge space spanning a few floors of an abandoned yuppy tower that would have cost millions to buy before the crash. Now the ruins are freely available to anyone sufficiently brave to risk living in them. There’s free electricity, since the building is covered in adaptive solar panels and most of the technology on view will have been cannibalised from the other abandoned flats.

Up north this would have already been put to use by a pirate crew, down here it’s just another derelict block. I'll definitely take what I carry with me when I leave. This squatter attitude of reusing and recycling, of doing stuff for free wherever possible – of hanging onto things when any sane person would throw them away – has done us proud. Here we are, in the wreckage of the ex-capital city, still creating social spaces to interact with each other face-to-face; when many people are still hiding out in bunkers in the interior, waiting for the green-light to emerge. The all-clear will never come; the government prefers everyone to live in fear. They say that you can’t breathe the air outside, but it’s ok. In any case, I’m half bionic by now.

TAA 2018

 

Rave - a 12 minute docu

 https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-rave-1997-online

TAA 2017

 

Reclaim the Beach

2025 - fixed the image size woohoo

squat parties (work in progress)

i first started going to squat parties when i moved to london to study. i guess i already had a vague yearning towards alternative culture since i knew about cooltan, which unfortunately got evicted just before i got there in september 1995.

i was already into underground music and had been to some exodus raves in luton plus a few free festivals in london. there was the deptford urban free festival, where i heard zebedee DJing for the first time on a rig called something like avinit army, plus one on clapham common where the revolutionary dub warriors played. then there was hackney homeless in clissold park, whre i took mushrooms for the first time. it ended up in a riot... aaand that was the excuse for that not to happen again

above is the nme report thanks to historyismadeatnight, which also links to a film about the fest



i picked up some advance party flyers at the festies and of course once actually living in london had a lot of places to explore. back in those days i thought nothing of clubbing thursday through sunday (without drugs even!) and i remember being given a vox populi flyer at the end of megatripolis. i didn't go and then they headed off to europe. spiral tribe were already gone. but not to worry, i found the infoline for an immersion party in manor house or somewhere in north london and headed up to a bingo hall and a party which blew my head off.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaa-Vj85Pdo

another early rave was a NYE bash on the corner of well street / mare street in an old cinema which is later became an iceland supermarket. we walked there from highbury and islington tube, not knowing london very well!  i think my first rave was in farringdon, or maybe that was later than the NYE party...

the farringdon party (above) was great, the guy on the door with a pierced lip said he thought spiral tribe were in germany but he wasn't sure and we sat in a corner as all these crusties (which in 6 months would be us) just kind of stood around and chatted. i don't remember anyone dancing and i couldn't process the music, it was just a wall of noise.

systems around at that time were mainline, virus, oops, insanity, jiba. all playing seriously good underground tekno, a language i started to understand. on rigs like immersion and also at parties like club alien and kinky techno (a semilegal immersion venture under kingsX station) acid trance was just getting going and that was great for a while before it stagnated. i remember when drum n bass was controversial (like there being a dnb room at hellraiser WTF!?!) but that soon started to feature. parties that stand out for me were: the hackney wick mashups - dace road, carpenters road ... one was a benefit for curley's family, since he had just died. i remember turning up late on acid, then taking K and forgetting i was on acid and spiral tribe's 'goign all the way' eviscerating my body.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1zCVvxChFs

the (unsound)cinema in wood green was pretty awesome for a few weeks - we turned up fucked after pride with little flashing wands (acid again - it doesn't get much better than seeing the pet shop boys sing go west as thousands sing along and the sky explodes with fireworks). the bullring at waterloo was pretty funny - outside, in the place where the IMAX stands now, as a benefit for the homeless who were being evicted. dan hekate talks about it in this resonance radio show:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvLLtMOLY8I

 my fave memory is someone playing this wicked anticore track:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wai_ZEcUay4

 come to think of it there were K-related religious experiences galore at that time. molly's book documents a lot of the places, even if i remember them slightly differently. and of course we were travelling out to europe for teknival - for a few summers that was what summer meant. systems like metek, dstorm, lego, furious, foxtanz, total resistance, sound conspiracy, samovar, damage control all twatting out amazing music through electrical storms. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuxDiYqGqLs

 czechtek was always great - cheap booze and amazing weather; dutchtek tended to feature loads of gabba and speedcore; paristek 2000 was where i made a lot of good friends before my travels had even started in earnest; slovtek; poltek; the list goes on.. and there were english festies like tolworth and the travellers field at glastonbury (RiP) and some great quarry raves in wales. by this time, there were newer systems like headfuk and hekate. and panik. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RDm65exZ6s

whilst i was living i europe i carried on raving, going to parties in and around prague from people like cirkus alien and vosa, but of course it's not the same without your drug buddies and a scene which you are part of. by the time i ended up in NL i preferred hibernation. nowadays its hard to find a good party, they still exist of course. the kids are no doubt doing it different now but i still (2013) try to make NFA and pokora parties.

Doppelgangers

from an old link zine:

doppelgangers 

when i was a kid i was really struck by this newspaper story about a guy who was found drowned in a quarry lake somewhere in south wales. he was positively identified by his family and about to be buried when 'he' turned up again, alive and well and wondering what the fuss was about. 'his' family must have been overjoyed to find out 'he' had simply gone off travelling for a while to sort out his head.

meanwhile the police must have been a bit frustrated to have to reopen a case they thought they had closed. apparently this man and the dead man bore a stunning resemblance, even down to a shared birthmark on their respective legs. obviously it's quite rare that we hear about such blatant cases of mistaken identity, but what if they don't happen so often not because people don't look the same but more because there are rules governing whereabouts the doppelgangers can go and most of the time they prevent them meeting up? it's possible but then of course you start to wonder who makes the rules. and does he/she have a doppelganger too?

definitely i see types of similarity - for instance a girl in a record shop with the same length hair, the same glasses and the same backwards tilt to the head which she adopts when looking at something as an irish girl i met in another country. are people really so different? are we really unique? or are we just a bundle of behaviour patterns grabbed from the collective unconscious and as with language we can unconsciously turn on or off various factors. with so many parameters to choose from that most of the time waht results is a real unique individual?

certainly the patterns can be traced. certainly fashion and society shape the way we look, whether we allow it consciously or not. well, my childish mind decided that everyone has a doppelganger living somewhere on the other side of the globe. although you must bear in mind that around this time, i was also trying to pull fully grown oak trees down with my plastic tractor, still it's a theory which cannot be denied. the sticking point was skin colour actually, i just couldn't decide whether doppelgangers were racially the same, they do have to be really, since for example one racial division is body build and i never resolved that one satisfactorily. and also another problem comes back to me now, namely whether the two doppelgangers would be born and maybe even die at the same time or not. the welsh quarry man could be a counterexample or the exception which proves the rule. i dunno.

anyway, this squat party in eindhoven i went to recently also got me thinking about this topic in a different way, for it is weird to see how things such as dress sense and face composition move in circles. i see this a bit having been to lots of tekno parties in the netherlands, the czech republic and england. if you look at the people it's strange to see how across arbitrary boundaries like nationality and location, things such as a look or a posture can be the same.

i guess you will only understand what i am droning on about if i give some examples. actually to start with the very building gave me deja vu, since it was a massive distribution centre, the type where one side of the building has loading bays which trucks back up to and inside there were huge empty rooms and tiny prefab office spaces, just like a distribution centre where i went to a few parties in london (tottenham hale). then the people reminded me of other people in various ways. in attitude, in action, in look, in gesture. maybe the drugs help, the same chemicals twisting faces in the same way over europe and driving evolution in new interesting ways.

base users do certainly develop this weird sort of reptilian tan. we can say for sure some sort of europe wide tekno fashion underclass is developing, i guess as tribes do. tekno sits in a grand line of cultual movements. the kids are always revolting. since the hippies anyway. so are we talking about some form of universal tekno resistance? in a sense yes, this is a brotherhood of sorts which can be nice to be a part of (things like meeting a french truck in eastern europe and bonding instantly because we are listening to the same mixtape) but then from another point of view tribalism is fake, it's a lowest common denominator movement, where people are afraid to be different and celebrate diversity. i guess that's the negative side of of all tribes. there is a uniform, there are facial piercings, bomber jackets, combat pants, mighty hooded tops, dark clothes and caps at jaunty angles which become more and more ridiculous as the night wears on.

but it does go deeper than that too. how come the gurl who looks like a drugged up czech punk i know, in the sense of having the same weird dreads, long grey german army jacket and big boots, also acts like her, drifting around the dance floor mashed up and encouraging men to molest her by bumping into them with the same far-away look in her eyes? isn't that a bit too weird? why do those speaker freakers hanging out by the stacks just like their tribal brothers in the czech republic manage to have high cheekbones and haircuts which actually make them look czech? yes, part of this is me bending my head on drugs and seeing links where the links exist because humans do resemble each other but i expect there is a bit more going on here. i'm thinking in terms of memes and affects: this notion current in the theory of ideas that ideas are virus-like; thoughtpatterns exist as electro-magnetic radiation; the brain is a transmitter and the signals it produces can be picked up by other receivers; and taking drugs probably helps this process either by making us more sensitive or anaesthetising us to it.

hooray for tekno parties, they're fun to go to and give you weird thoughts. and i don't have very much more to say than that.

except that we started off discussing doppelgangers and next time you are at a tekno party you should keep an eye out for your's.

121 / speedcore / Dead by Dawn

I was there! Occasionally.

Dead by Dawn gets mentioned in a long crimethinc piece on squatting in the UK...

By the late 1990s, the 121 centre was running out of steam as Brixton began to gentrify around it—or so it seemed to us when we visited for meetings, although it did host the first Queeruption in 1998, and the monthly Dead by Dawn speedcore parties were great. In the 1980s, it had been extremely active as a café, bookshop, library, venue, and rehearsal space. It was used as a base by groups such as Brixton Squatters Aid, Brixton Hunt Saboteurs, Food not Bombs, Community Resistance Against the Poll Tax, Anarchist Black Cross, the Direct Action Movement, London Socialist Film Co-op, the Kate Sharpley Library, and the Troops Out Movement. There was a printing press in the basement which produced the feminist magazine Bad Attitude, the anarchist magazine Black Flag, and the squatters’ newspaper Crowbar, among other publications.

Andy gets interviewed!

Spannered

This is a (hilariously late review of a) book about free tekno parties in the 1990s by Bert Random. It is set over the course of one night at a fictional Bristol party, which serves as a metonym for the free party scene as a whole.

Whilst I liked the book and thought it was fairly good at expressing the inexpressible pleasures of being on drugs at a rave, I also found it slightly embarrassing. These personal insights which you have on drugs mean a lot to the person concerned but otherwise tend to sound a bit facile. And the groups of mates with funny sounding names, whilst perfectly appropriate, also seems a bit of a cliche.

The illustrations interspersed throughout the text by five different artists (with pretty different styles) were .. ok.

Whilst Hunter S. Thompson is name-checked, this book isn't quite in that class. It's a good read, but Random doesn't pull a whole lot of meaning out of all the drugs experiences. And maybe that's because there isn't much to be found. Thompson got high in Vegas and wrote about the American psyche. Random took drugs in Bristol and wrote about feeling fucked. And more could be said, since the act of people partying on industrial estates in derelict warehouses to drill-hard music is a statement on the way society is going, but we will have to wait for another book to talk about that.

There's an interview with the author here which is more interesting..

Reclaim the Beach - central London

Party NL

UKTEKLOL

In 2025, all the clips seem to be gone - it was a cyclist normie with a go pro unexpectedly hitting a party on the Downs near Brighton in the morning :)

310514

Guardian - Illegal raves: social media messages bring in a new generation of partygoers

Fairly shit Guardian article:

It's after midnight in a repossessed college building in east London. Hundreds of ravers in their early 20s shuffle in front of a wall of speakers, cutting shapes to heavy drum 'n' bass as an MC raps. Upstairs, a queue snakes away from a small table, where a man is selling balloons for a pound. A girl buys one and bounces back to the dancefloor, sucking on its nitrous oxide – laughing gas – before passing it to her friend. For the next 36 hours, the narrow road outside is clogged with vans, cars and taxis arriving and departing. About 1,000-1,500 people come and go until a pipe is broken, the floor floods, and the Valentine's Squatters Fancy-Dress Ball comes to an abrupt end.

Yes, illegal raves – those secret warehouse parties so synonymous with baggy jeans and luminous whistles – are back.

Oscar, 35, runs a cleaning company. Nick, 24, works as a marketing consultant in the defence industry, having recently left a multinational investment bank. Both are part of a new school of rave promoters who use Facebook rather than flyers to organise their free parties. Crews are popping up all over the country. Some of those Oscar works with, he tells me, learned the trade from their parents, first-wave rave promoters.

Facebook pages used by Nick and Oscar's crew have about 10,000 users. Nick handles the lineups – assessing Soundcloud samples sent in by those wanting to play the parties – and writes the online promotional text. Facebook replies are a reliable gauge for how many beers or balloons of nitrous oxide they need to buy to sell to the punters. "Are we over 2,000 [RSVPs] yet?" he asks Oscar as they plan another Project X free party. "I invited 300 more earlier today."

Scores of other crews operate in the city, with the new rave economy built on failed mortgages. Parties often take place in properties on which the banks have foreclosed, and that lie derelict. Perfect homes in which to set up quickly, party, and leave. "Everyone wants to get in on the rave scene lately," agrees Oscar. "Looking at how relaxed the police are about it, I sense there's something coming round. Another law banning squatting, maybe."


 Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris for The Guardian. Frantzesco Kangaris for The Guardian
Just as before, an air of moral threat hangs over the rave scene. In December, a teenager was stabbed and a police officer injured at Oscar's Santa Stomp party in Wapping, with local politicians calling for the party sites to be secured against "troublemakers". Even then, social media played its part. "[The teenager] recovered well and we caught the little bastard who did it, but it cast a black cloud over our parties," says Oscar. How was the culprit caught? "I had 2,500 people here, so we got on the net and we found a picture of him. We took it to the hospital and the kid recognised him, so the cops took it over from there."

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I first talk to Oscar and Nick while they're in the process of stepping up their business by investing in their own soundsystem. We drive to a garage in Croydon packed with another crew's gear, where the pair shop around for two new "scoops" (speakers) and an amp. "We're a network – we know each other all over the country. In a couple of weeks we've got someone down from Nottingham playing our party," Oscar says. It's international, too. "We're doing France in March."

No one's in this to get rich. "I've put more money in than I got out," Oscar says. It cost him about £7,000 to put together a new rig – 8,000-watt speakers, Technics turntables, CDJ consoles, mixers, lasers and lights and a rack of festival-grade amps – and that's before you start adding up the runaround money he needs for fuel, maintenance and to pay squatters for location tips. He keeps in touch with groups of drifters who scout London for suitable buildings (known as "goers"). They get in as homeless residents, inform the police of their new abode, and Oscar starts planning a party in the building that is notionally their home. Once the rigs are in place, a voicemail is recorded on a phone number revealing the location. The phone number is listed on their Facebook pages. Then the doors open. By the time the case against the original squatters comes to court and bailiffs are appointed to evict, it can be weeks since the building served its purpose as a party venue.

Like Oscar and Nick, most promoters have day jobs and are in the scene because they're ravers. Their only reliable source of income from parties is from door fees and selling balloons of nitrous oxide. Given that popular DJs need to be paid at least a token sum and that security companies charge £10 an hour for every bouncer, there's little profit to be made.

The raves are called "free parties" not because they don't charge for tickets, but because they're free from restrictions. Nobody worries about smoking or taking drugs. "We let you do whatever you want," says Nick. "Security only throws out those who act aggressively. You'll get checked for glass and weapons. Otherwise, you're totally free."

Any dealing is usually done by small-fry freelancers who generally pay their way in with some of their goods. More serious drug pushers tend not to be involved – the millions of pounds generated by dealing at the 90s raves ended up attracting the attention of the police, and in turn killed the scene. The idea, says Oscar, is that "some people need to let their hair down properly. Down here we live first by the laws of the land and then by the government – there's a difference." The police seem to be fully aware of this ethos and relatively comfortable with it: at one party I go to, in Beckton, east London, police arrive only to leave after handing out flyers about the dangers of drugs.

At the first party I go to, in a warehouse in Silvertown there's no headline DJ – he's been poached by a rival outfit – and Oscar demonstrates his own unique way of dealing with fire alarms. "It's crying of thirst," he says, taking the screeching object into the bathroom to run it under a tap. The screeching stops. "There you go. A little common sense never goes amiss."

At 10, before the event has begun, there's a cry of "Old Bill!" and two plainclothes officers come in. Oscar makes an announcement: "Ladies and gentlemen, the police are here to have a look. Please stay calm." They leave after five minutes, seemingly content, and sound-testing resumes. At 11, there's a power failure and both rigs go down. An engineer in wellies scrambles between the two systems and the main electric panel, finally getting it up and running until the party powers down around 7am.

"See what a little Facebook post does," Oscar says the next week, at the end of another party, handing me a beer in the back of his van. About 150 people had turned up to a food-processing plant in Stratford, on just six hours' notice, the lights silhouetting the dancers against stainless steel walls: moving shadows in purple and green. The event had a charitable cause: door fees (£5) were donated to a family who had recently suffered a death. "We need to clean up the brand a little," Oscar remarked.

Although illegal raves have been an incubator for the electronic music and dance scenes – Wiley and the Roll Deep crew reportedly debuted their acts at raves – you won't hear many artists who've made the crossover to the mainstream talking about it. Media coverage of the scene has been so toxic for so long that few will admit to a connection (even though some name artists do still appear for free at squat parties). Some overground outfits openly support the movement, among them the award-winning radio stations Freek FM (which plays house and garage) and Kool London (drum'n'bass). Tune into Freek and you can hear DJ Madness calling out the party lines for the next squat bash. But that's pretty much where it stops.

So what keeps those on the scene involved, weekend after weekend, hauling tons of equipment though warehouses, factories and institutional buildings? "It's not about the drugs or the money now," Nick says. Instead, it seems to be the excitement of being part of Britain's cultural underground. "Rigs on standby! Call the usual lines after 9pm for location. See you by the stacks," reads a note saved on his phone, ready to be broadcast every weekend.

Names have been changed at the request of the participants