Interlude. Who Owns the Dance Floor

At dawn a big psytrance festival looks the same in Portugal, Thailand and Mexico. The sun rises over the dance floor, the DJ plays a morning set, several thousand people dance with their eyes closed, and from the outside it seems that this whole construction of stages, sound, lights and tickets was built for the sake of music. For the people on the dance floor that is exactly how it is. The money that circulates around this night has a logic of its own, and in it music is far from first place.

In 1965 the writer Ken Kesey began holding “Acid Tests” in California, parties where the young Grateful Dead played and the audience was handed LSD, still legal at the time. The acid for these parties was cooked by Augustus Owsley Stanley, a self-taught chemist who between 1965 and 1967 made, by estimates, about five million doses of very pure LSD. The same Owsley, nicknamed Bear, worked as the Grateful Dead’s sound engineer, recorded their concerts and, together with a crew, built them the Wall of Sound in 1974, a system of more than six hundred speakers weighing seventy-five tons.