Why I Rave

**Crankdat & Ace Aura @ Royale (2/24/23)**

It’s 10pm on a Friday night. The sun has disappeared over the edge of the skyline, and the streets of Boston are bustling with people. You’ve just spent your last paycheck on tickets to see a headlining DJ at one of the most popular nightclubs in the entire city, completely unaware of the expenses you may make on drinks and the drunk Uber ride home at 2 am. After walking through security and showing your ticket, the muffled bass of the opening DJ’s set begins to shake the building. You walk into the main room and immediately excitement fills your spirit as the music booms through your body and the lights flash in a crazy yet synchronous frenzy. After a couple hours, the lights dim and the crowd cheers as the DJ you paid to see finally comes onto the stage.

**Breathe Carolina & KHANI @ Royale (7/21/23)**

But this atmosphere may not be for everyone. The large number of people in one room, epilepsy-inducing lights and lasers, music loud enough to blow your eardrums out, overpriced tickets and drinks, or even the 4-hour timeframe from 10pm-2am may be too much for one person to experience in one night. Maybe there is an aspect of clubbing that is inherently bad for your health, such as hearing loss and epilepsy. So why is it that billions of people are coming out to a small room and listening to super loud music for 4 hours straight?

**Dabin, Apashe, & Grabbitz @ Roadrunner (3/10/23)**

Perhaps it’s best to start from the beginning. I started listening to electronic music when I was about 12 years old. I overheard my friends talking about an artist named Skrillex, who produced an impact-heavy genre called Dubstep. Now at the time, my music discography consisted of listening to Gangnam Style several hours a day along with the casual pop song that was popular at the time. I had a brief understanding of electronic music when my father would play David Guetta’s Nothing but the Beat album in the kitchen while cooking, but to me it resembled more pop that strictly electronic. So, I decided to look into this Skrillex guy and get an idea of what electronic music really sounded like. It was love at first listen. The sounds of the synthesizers, the heavy bass, the impact of the drums, and the euphoric vocals all rushing through my head gave me a new sense of what music could sound like. I immediately became hooked.

That timeframe was coincidentally close to when I started producing my own music. Nothing fancy, though. I was literally just a kid with an old Macbook Pro, messing around with loops on Garageband. When electronic music made its way into my playlists, I started producing it. At first, I wasn’t very good at it. Every song I made sounded like my microwave was dying from putting plastic plates inside it and dropping it down a spiral staircase. Eventually I started looking into YouTube tutorials and practicing music theory, which ended up making my songs more “listenable”. After two years of this production frenzy, I had 3 EP’s and developed the artist tag Sonic X, listened to a wider spectrum of electronic music, and was watching YouTube videos of DJ’s performing songs live. Skrillex’s 2015 Ultra Music Festival set in Miami is what got me into DJ’ing. For the next 9 years, I juggled producing and DJ’ing simultaneously to refine the sound I had created when I was 12 into something more contemporary and modern.

My first clubbing experience was in early May last year. I had purchased tickets to go see NGHTMRE at the Royale Nightclub in Boston. I had no insight as to what to expect, and I was going to the show alone. The only sign of reassurance I had was the people I would meet at the venue. Boston has a group of local ravers and EDM heads that share a discord server together, which I had joined the year before the show. Seeing as some of the people in that server were going to NGHTMRE, I used that as my only background going into this nightclub. When I entered the venue, my ears immediately recoiled at the volume the music was played at. My only live show experience before this nightclub consisted of Illenium’s Ascend Tour at Umass Lowell in 2019 and various local band shows throughout high school. I was a lost dog for a solid 30 minutes, like a father looking for her daughter at a Taylor Swift concert. Eventually I found myself at the bar and ordered a couple drinks to get a buzz going, completely oblivious to the fact I spent $24 on 2 Stella Artois. The bartender could tell that it was my first time at a nightclub by the look on my face that clearly read “I have no idea what I’m doing here”. A couple guys from the discord server recognized my face after I got drinks and brought me over to their little group by the side of the room. Now not completely alone and around people who shared the same infectious EDM addiction I had, I started to ease into the night more. At 12:30am, everyone started crowding towards the stage, which was my signal to take out my phone and start recording NGHTMRE’s intro sequence. I never thought I’d see the day someone mixed together Michael Bublé and Karate Killer by Bandlez, and the crowd loved it. Time must’ve flown by at an exponential rate during that set, because the night was over before I even had a chance to fully break down the technicality of NGHTMRE’s set. Instead, I was now walking home across Boston at 2 am, completely in awe of what I had just experienced. The only thought that surged through my head that night was that I absolutely had to go back. 2 weeks later, I had gone to the club 4 times and convinced my friends to come along for the ride. I was starting to understand and weave into the raving/clubbing culture those discord guys kept raving about (pun intended).

There’s a strong culture behind EDM. This was something I learned as soon as I started DJ’ing and producing my own music. Electronic Dance Music. Billions of people around the world still look for that modern groove that gets everyone out of their seats and fills the room with energy. EDM still has that effect on me, whether I’m listening to the slow and chill beat of a downtempo song or breaking my neck headbanging to dubstep. The spectrum of EDM is so wide, and seeing how influential each genre is to its listeners is what builds the community. Similar to the belief that eating food with others makes the food taste better, listening to music with others heavily elevates the experience, and raving/clubbing definitely achieves that. As I’m writing this, I have currently attended over 21 different shows at 4-5 different clubs all over Boston in the past year and a half. I don’t plan to stop, either. My love for raving only continues to grow the more I experience the flashing lights, the loud music, the hundreds of people coming out to vibe and have a good time, and the dopamine-inducing feeling of being a part of a strong and thriving community.

Sonic Adventure’s: Connective Gameplay and Narrative