The weekend before the Netherlands entered into what the government called “intelligent lockdown” in March 2020, I was at my favourite – licensed – warehouse party in Amsterdam, witnessing the natural convergence of two music tribes that until this moment had been kept separate. At Unpolished, held in one of the original 1990s Dutch gabber crucibles, techno DJs were playing heartfelt gabber sets, and gabber DJs were dipping their USBs into techno. It was loud and confrontational, the most hard-lined techno concept in Holland; it was hardcore. But then this community that had been organically growing out of the techno scene was forced into survival online, and a movement that had previously shunned social media was made to depend upon it. DJ streaming and fan-led popularity became the norm.

The techno, rave and club cultures that have since erupted out of lockdown are not the same. Even at their most niche, authentic and underground, the pandemic fundamentally changed how we socialise – and dance – together, while the music industry has remodeled itself upon this new digital world order: Instagram has replaced journalism and dancefloors have adopted the ‘Boiler Room set-up’ with ravers wrapped around the DJ booth – as much on a pedestal now as the artists themselves.

But for those willing to journey beyond the algorithms, there are welcome exceptions. In a former coal station turned cultural centre in the outer ring of Paris, sitting crosslegged on a dancefloor, a collection of curious ravers gather to hear why hard music will always be the soundtrack for resilience and survival.

Paris has been a stronghold for hardcore rave culture since the early 1990s, with late trans trailblazer Liza ’N’ Eliaz and queer icon Laurent Hô (who performs heady nosebleed techno in heels and fishnets) holding court over the city’s once thriving – unlicensed – warehouse scene. Tonight Liza’s widow, the 81 year old visual artist Yvette Néliaz, best known in the elder counterculture as Dame Pipi, is in conversation with Sentimental Rave, a third generation hardcore artist to break through during the 2017 global revival, the year originators like Frankfurt’s Marc Acardipane and Dutch megarave Thunderdome returned from exile, and outsiders like Parisian party troupe Casual Gabberz rose to the fore.

This is the third edition of French FLINTA label’s Explity Music’s Endless Hardcore Summer event, and the soundtrack is a balance of 90s nostalgia and neo-gabber futurism, blasted from a hackle-raising sound system that penetrates to the core. 200 bpm kicks spliced with emotionally raw breakdowns and a genuinely techno-informed style of ‘hard techno’ permeates the venue. Kilbourne and Neurokill are the international headliners, two trans artists and club promoters re-queering their respective scenes in Brooklyn and Mexico City, with DJs from the Explity Music collective opening and closing. The dancefloor is casually packed until 6am.

Rotterdam raised Parisians peacocking in Aussies (the definitive gabber uniform of colourful Australian-brand tracksuits) are flicking their Nike-shod heels in the wild folkish gestures of the hakken dance next to a PVC masked raver in BDSM gear. Everyone is dancing tolerantly and uninhibited in their spaces, and there’s an authentic community vibe throughout. Neon pink-vested SAFER TEAM personnel carefully monitor proceedings, while getting stuck into the rave themselves. It’s fun, it’s radical, it’s considered, and it’s femme! It’s the blinking strobelight of hope for our pandemic-crippled scene.

The weekend before Paris I was in Berlin, revisiting the towering techno cathedral where I became a diehard raver. In 2011 I permanently left the UK to pursue a life in and writing about dance music, producing copy for techno labels and working the kasse (checkout) at nightclubs in between magazine commissions – covering as much hard, dark, weird music as I could get away with.

Over four years I was caught up in the sleepless Berliner shuffle towards oblivion, spending endless weekends with my adopted nighttime family migrating between repurposed reinforced concrete wombs beneath the streets of Köpenicker Strasse in Kreuzberg and old swimming pool boiler rooms in Wedding, and marinating most Sundays in the bowels of a power plant where today’s trendy sex-positive techno culture was first cultivated, clandestinely, by word of mouth. Within these great clubbing institutions I learned about tolerance and respect, patience and rejection; how to treat others, and be treated, in extreme environments and conditions. Before my techno-flash in Berlin I was a cultural outsider, an alien, shy and awkward moving through society. But here, in the blinding glare and smoke-induced disorientation, surrounded by strangers fully immersed in the music, I was liberated from all anxieties in the crush of bodies synced up to sound.

But on returning to these former safe spaces during these socially polarised and politically excoriated times, I’ve struggled to feel fully comfortable or free in the dance. It could be my age, but I fear the issue is more nuanced and pervasive than that. We are not locked down any longer, and yet many of us still feel locked out of this culture that previously defined us, excluded from the regular clubbing rituals that once helped us get through the week. For us hardcore ravers, club culture is not just a lifestyle but a life. We are watching this precious multigenerational movement become irreversibly atomised, increasingly appropriated by brands, exploited by the industry, and reinterpreted beyond recognition. Many of us have stopped raving all together, and not because we want to.

As the chiming of venue closures around the world turns into a din, and rave culture gets contorted into bizarre white cube simulations and literal virtual reality ‘experiences’, I reflect back on my own hardcore journey, paved from too many parties to mention across half a lifetime of raving. From my first drum ’n’ bass free parties as a student in Manchester in the mid-2000s, chasing rave hotlines through the countryside, and facing down the police as a rebellious youth movement too powerful to ignore, to drowning in a sea of iPhones in a Dutch football stadium, gawping at the spectacle that raving has become, I am reminded that whenever we come together to bask in repetitive or broken beats – in whatever space we feel most comfortable and safe – we find respite and release, in sound and in each other.

Without bodies on the dancefloor, there will be no more dancefloors. So let us dance dance dance, or die! 

Holly Dicker’s Dance Or Die: A History Of Hardcore is published by Velocity Press. This essay appears in The Wire 502. Wire subscribers can also read it in our online magazine library.