---
title: "CDCY On the Quarantine"
abstract: "Part 2 of our exploring of the impact of Quarantine"
authors: ["nikomas.md"]

---

Part 2 

First and foremost, it must be remembered that, in terms of subcultural value, Sunwaves is more than a rave. It is a kind of annual rominimal summit, where the cult leaders present their vision of the next phase or years of the rominimal movement. The idea is, that rominimal music as a movement is not just about the aesthetic of the music. Rather, what rominimalism is, is a specific trip, a specific feeling, a specific state of mind that is achieved through engagement with rominimalist ritualism. Certain combinations of drugs, matched to certain kinds of music, played in a certain kind of way; if these aspects are combined as they are by rominimal artists, there is a very unique experience to be had. It is cult-like in that the whole movement revolves around a closeness to this perspective and experience, or a closeness to this festival and it’s organisers. Year by year, those who are involved in the production side of rominimal, further develop this unique feeling or trip, and each year they produce new music and new sounds based on their understanding of how this trip works. Sunwaves takes on a kind of communion style presentation, embracing a format that can seem like a sermon.

The concept of purposeness becomes important here, as the stream of Sunwaves was not just an ad hoc entertainment piece, but rather it had to take on the role of presenting the year’s sermon. Given that most of the music is unreleased, there was a consistent sense of excitement about what would be played next. The audience of sunwaves know what is going on, and they know that the music is always cutting edge, there were more reasons to tune in. It was broadcast on Youtube, with no comments or chat on the main screen. The fact that it was international not local, also discouraged any sense of needing to interact with the format in any way - put the stream on the TV, sit on the sofa and watch the presentation.

The second important thing overall, was the way they made the screen part of the performance. They removed any boxing or framing on screen, and the angle of the video helped to hide any reminders that it was a computer stream. With no frame or box, the frame became the screen of your computer itself, as if the stream stepped one step closer to the viewer. Certain kinds of drugs like ketamine become highly influential here, as the lack of visual reminders on screen meant that the whole concept of place within the stream was distorted. This specific experience was reinforced by a truly inspired visual dimension: the animators had highlighted just the DJ and the CDJs, and isolated them, which meant that the background could be deleted, leaving just a perfectly cut out silhouette of the DJ and the decks. This silhouette was then overlaid with dynamic animations which metalized and reified the DJ and decks into one mechanical entity that appeared to drift around the screen.

As the music ramped up in energy, and as the artists started to deliberately pull at the strings of the trip, visual distortions began pulling anything around the computer screen into union with the screen itself. If you placed two plants either side of the screen, the whole framing of the stream would start to suggest that those two plants were the booth, and the hologram FX thrown over the DJ created a profound illusion of a 3D hologram detached from the screen. At a time, it could feel like there was a 3ft tall holographic Mihigh in the room, summoning extremely bizarre, otherworldly sounds from seemingly everywhere at once (see: non-diegetic sound).

It was as if this stream of sunwaves Sunwaves was intended as a Ph.D thesis in some underground university, and the sophistication that has gone into the engineering of the whole Sunwaves trip culture, pushes them to the foreground of rave culture in terms of redefining the future of electronic music and rave. And redefine the future they did.

When Cap’s closing set drew to an end, the artist’s name was dropped off the screen, and Cap was replaced by a black silhouette of an unknown, unplanned DJ. It was clear, who the DJ was didn’t matter, they were obscured and anonymous, and they were entirely unscheduled. For everyone watching at that moment, the anonymous DJ and the rominimal cult actually achieved the goal of standing one step further ahead than everyone. At that moment they were in the future already, because not a single person watching had any idea how this was about to go down. At that moment, it seemed equally likely that the set would end suddenly, or that the festival was about to go on for another 5 days (or forever). This experience was of the same monumentality as the first kraftwerk concerts, where everyone in the audience was unified by a collective awe-inspiring stare as these aliens from the future showed to them the future of music. Even the most rational music critics enjoy this idea that Kraftwerk had a vision of the future and their art was an attempt to show the audience this future through a kind of interpretive symbolism spelled out through performative sound and visuals. At times, at the peak of the trip, with the most fucked up visuals, Mihigh was not playing music as we know it. Those sounds isolated don’t seem very musical, but if you remember the analogy of someone “producing upside down”, these bizarre non-musical sounds have not been composed with intention of being heard as music from that angle, observing these visuals and these sounds without being high, or without having a huge understanding of the cultural context of it all, is like looking at a stage from behind it, and not from the angle that was intended. Of course the stage doesn’t seem quite right, you’re standing on the wrong side of it, you can’t see the crowd or the performers, it can’t make any sense.

At the moment in which the rominimal cult stepped out of the present and into the future, the point was made. It didn’t matter, after all, how long this encore/after party would go on for, they had already proven to the audience that they were worth paying attention to: “we were the future, we are the future again, and we remain in the future”. It could seem insignificant now, but if the next Woodstock is virtual, it would be rooted in the cybernetic innovations of rominimalism and Sunwaves’ engineers and designers. When the stream suddenly cut 2 hours into the anonymous closing (who was Arapu in the end),  it was like a mic-drop. After presenting that, no one can complain about the finish, it was everything and more, and they could kill it however they wanted.

It redefined the future because it reminded the audience that there is a future at all. In a world where the future is cancelled (see: Mark Fisher), just reminding the audience that things will change, and things can move forward is unstatably important. They successfully pulled off a non-localised rave, where the audience was able to break through into what you might call the rave state, without the need for immediate proximity. The sheer unexpected quality of the sunwaves stream made them seem like future pioneers in the same way pirate radio stations were in the 1970s. With enough Wi-Fi and wisdom, rave culture could sustain even in nuclear bunkers; everyone buried underground receiving a mysterious alien broadcast, interacting with holograms. If rave can always remind us that the future can be brighter than we imagine, then it is a seriously important revolutionary tool, and one that must survive all changes of format and all modes of organising society.
