Phantasmagoria of the Uncanny : Nomadism, Technique, and Aesthetics in the Psychedelic Rave - Leandros Kyriakopoulos

Phantasmagoria of the Uncanny

Nomadism, Technique, and Aesthetics in the Psychedelic Rave

By: Leandros Kyriakopoulos

Hardcover | 15 August 2024

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Phantasmagoria of the Uncanny: Nomadism, Technique and Aesthetics in the Psychedelic Rave examines the psychedelic rave music and culture with a focus on the multiday phantasmagoric events organized in mountains, deserts, beaches, and other exotic destinations. Using mobile and multi-sited ethnography, the author follows the routes of a diverse group of Greek EDM and party enthusiasts across the festival map of psychedelic-trance gatherings, including Hungary, Morocco, and Greece, with the aim of investigating the revelatory experience of the chemical psychedelic raving. By situating the rave experience within the phantasmagoria of the festival - a dreamworld par excellence of the alien and the uncanny - the work reformulates questions of 'liminality', 'spirituality', 'community' and 'identity' while initiating a discussion about the limits of cosmopolitanism and aesthetics as they are reorganized in the techno-political conditions of the 21st century. In an intense and at times demanding theoretical 'journey', the author reframes questions of taste, consumption, altered experience, and lifestyle through the lens of technology or technoaesthetics, speculating on an impending techno-social world of augmented senses and artificial impressions, thus posing questions to the reader about the mediation of social and public events, and the reification of 'utopian' paradises in the form of contemporary dreamworlds.

Industry Reviews

In gorgeous language, Leandros Kyriakopoulos lures his readers into the world of the niche experience of substance-induced and music-enhanced rave parties. With robust theoretical focus and deep ethnographic richness this book tells the story of the "rave party" as an anthropological site through its entanglements with ritual, the uncanny, and the spectrality of psytrance. From Goa to the Nestos River water, music, travel and the danger of a police raid set the latter-days psychedelia that this book transverses so fluidly. Such a joy to read!

--Neni Panourgia, Columbia University

With Phantasmagoria of the Uncanny: Nomadism, Technique, and Aesthetics in the Psychedelic Rave, Leandros Kyriakopoulos delivers an ethnography of the European festival rave scene that guides the reader along the unravelling edges of late modernity. Expertly parsing and elaborating the technics and aesthetics, places and nonplaces (utopias), and histories and imaginaries of "the psychedelic rave in its festival phantasmagoria," Kyriakopoulos shows how organizers, DJs and ravers collectively construct the uncanny vibes and adventures of the main stage dance floor. Yet, he does not avoid the ambivalence and aporias of this transnational "euphoric nomadism." Fueled by drugs and money and driven by electronic music and its dreamworlds, the rave festival is both nostalgic utopian reach and a "psytrance theater of hallucinations, misunderstandings, and transformations." As the staged performance of a post-counter-cultural enjoyment, the bodily and chemical communions of "psytrance apocalypticism" are more a symptom of late modernity's crises and cul-de-sacs than cause for moral panics. Phantasmagoria of the Uncanny memorably documents an episodic nomadism in search of an experiential exit.

--Gene Ray, Geneva University of Art and Design and author of After the Holocene: Planetary Politics for Commoners

In this fascinating ethnographic study, Kyriakopoulos explores the socio-cultural dimensions of rave and partying in Greece from the 1990's onwards. Drawing on a rich theoretical corpus from cultural studies and sociology, the author engages with issues of subculture, identity, and performance. Resistance, transcendence, as well as phantasmagoria and consumerism are dimensions embedded in rave partying rituals and practices. Rave emerges as a global, nomadic event, bringing together various groups and individuals seeking adventure, utopia, and escapist experiences.

--Yiannis Mylonas, HSE University

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