The Sweetness of Coming Undone: Rough Experience and Electronic Music Cultures

Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta

00:00

Free entry

Morphine Raum has a capacity of 50 people, first-come-first-served.

In his new book, Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor, Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta examines how people find ways to get along and share a dancefloor, a vibe, and a sound. Drawing on time spent in the minimal techno and house music subscenes in Chicago, Paris, and Berlin as the first decade of the new millennium came to a close, Garcia-Mispireta rethinks intimacy and belonging through dancing crowds and the utopian vision of throbbing dancefloors.

Diving more specifically into the chapter on »The Sweetness of Coming Undone« for this talk, Garcia-Mispireta reflects that when partygoers narrate, plan, imagine, and nostalgically remember a night out partying, they often express a desire for »something« to happen, a yearning for moments of intensity and rupture that make a night out feel special. In this presentation, he will investigate how »rough« experience forms part of nightlife cultures, as well as how partygoers manage its pains and pleasures. A dualism emerges between smooth flow and rough thrills, one that can be found not only in interviews with partygoers but also in music reviews, recordings, and popular discourse around electronic music. In contrast to psychoanalytic accounts of ecstatic self-shattering and radical transformation (such as jouissance and limit-experience), partygoers seeking rough experiences strive for the more modest pleasures of »coming undone«: stretching, unspooling, and snapping back together again.

More information on Together, Somehow: Music, Affect, and Intimacy on the Dancefloor, is available via Duke University Press.