A free party is a party "free" from the restrictions of the legal club scene, similar to the free festival movement. It typically involves a sound system playing electronic dance music from late at night until the time when the organisers decide to go home. A free party can be composed of just one system or of many and if the party becomes a festival, it becomes a teknival. The word free in this context is used both to describe the entry fee and the lack of restrictions and law enforcement.
Motivations for organisers range from political protest to simply wanting to have fun. An example of free parties as political protest was their prominence during the M11 link road protest. At most parties no money is asked for entrance since the aim is not to make profit. However, at some (most often indoor) events it is requested at the door to make a donation to cover costs. Typically organisers make little profit or make a loss setting them up. The term free party is used more widely in Europe than in the US. In Canada and some parts of Europe they are also referred to as Freetekno parties. A free party might have once been described as a rave, and the origins of the two are similar. Since the birth of nightclubs in town centres in Europe the use of the word rave had largely fallen out of fashion; however, in recent times it is increasingly being used again.
The term squat party defines the free parties with secret indoor locations. The address is obtained on the day of the event personally from organizers as the buildings are squatted. The parties often last over 24 hours.
May 2005, UK Tek a large outdoor free party in Wales
After the emergence of the Acid House parties in the late 1980s up to 4,000[2] people were known to attend a rave. These events happened almost every weekend. The noise and disturbance of thousands of people appearing at parties in rural locations, such as Genesis '88, caused outrage in the national media. The British government made the fine for holding an illegal party £20,000 and six months in prison.[2]
Police crackdowns on these often-illegal parties drove the scene into the countryside. These weekend parties occurred at various locations outside the M25 Orbital motorway and attracted up to 25 000.[2] Sound systems from this time include Spiral Tribe and DiY.[citation needed]
The flyer advertising the Total Recall free party on Pepperbox Hill, 25 August 1990. Original artwork by David Stooke.
In August and September 1990 a series of unlicensed free parties took place on Pepperbox Hill, just outside Salisbury, in South Wiltshire. The parties were organised by a loose collective of new age travellers, squatters and anarchists based in the Salisbury area. They used different pseudonyms, including Inner Temple, The Fools On The Hill and The Leyline Lunatics, but ultimately became known as the People From Pepperbox or PFP. Initially small scale affairs, the parties grew in size during August as word spread to clubbers in Bournemouth and Southampton. By the end of August, people were attending from across the UK. The final party on Pepperbox Hill was held on 1 September 1990.[3][4] with Wiltshire Constabulary closing the site off from public access the following weekend. The People From Pepperbox then went on to organise three subsequent events in 1990, at Barton Stacey airfield in Hampshire, a disused RAF airbase at Sopley in Dorset, and at a squatted former pub in Salisbury, deploying guerilla tactics to stay ahead of the police and ensure the parties remained undetected until they were too large to be stopped by the authorities. On 13 April 1991 one further PFP party was held at a new age travellers' site at Pitton, near Salisbury. The party ended in violence, and led to parliamentary debate discussing new age traveller sites. The Pepperbox free parties are regarded as being the first of their kind, as they represented the first time that the concepts of raves and free festivals combined to create a new cultural entity: the free party.[5]DJs at these pioneering events included Pepperbox organisers DJ Oli and DJ ETC, Bournemouth DJs Justin Harris and Nigel Casey (known as North and South), and latterly, Simon DK and DJ Jack from Nottingham's DiY soundsystem.
In the 1990s legal raves began to expand into a global phenomenon. Around 1989-1992[2] people who had travelled to attend the first raves began setting up promotion companies in each region to organize their own parties. This happened on a grassroots basis.[citation needed] By the mid-1990s, major corporations were sponsoring events and adopting the scene's music and fashion for their advertising.[citation needed]
After sensational coverage in the tabloids, culminating in a particularly large rave (near Castlemorton) in May 1992, the government acted on what was depicted as a growing menace. In 1994, the United Kingdom's Criminal Justice Bill passed as the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 which contained several sections designed to suppress the growing free party and anti-road protest movements (sometimes embodied by ravers and travellers). This led to the expansion of the movement mainly due to the collective named Spiral Tribe, who fled the UK after the Castlemorton rave. Fleeing the numerous fines they were facing from the English government, they went to France, where they organized the first major festival outside the United Kingdom: Frenchtek, which is still held illegally every year.
By the early 2000s, the term "rave" had fallen out of favour among some people in the electronic dance music community, particularly in Europe. Although the terme "rave" is still used quite a bit in North America to describe EDM events. The Freetekno movement is not nearly as present in North America, except some parts of Quebec. [citation needed] Many Europeans identify themselves as "clubbers" rather than ravers. The term 'free party' has been used for sometime and can be seen on the Spiral Tribe video 'Forward the Revolution' in 1992. It tried to disconnect raves from big commercial events of the early nineties to a more anarchist version of a party.
Some communities preferred the term "festival", while others simply referred to "parties". With less constrictive laws allowing raves to continue long after the United Kingdom tried to ban them, more anarchic raves continue to occur in Central Europe and France, where the law says there can be only 4 teknivals per year (2 in the south, 2 in the north). In France the larger teknivals can attract up to 30 000[6] people in a three-day period. The terms free party and squat party have become the predominant terms used to describe an illegal party.[citation needed]
Free parties tend to be on the boundaries of law and are discouraged by government authorities, occasionally using aggressive police tactics.[7]
Free parties are much like other rave parties, their main distinction being that people are free to express themselves and for events without restrictions, some times they are free of charge. These events are often held in isolated outdoor venues or abandoned buildings. Away from authorities attention and also to avoid public disturbance.
Often free parties and squat parties involve a lot of (mostly illegal) dance drug use. The music played at free parties is very bass heavy. It is for this reason that they are usually held in isolated venues or places where police interference is unlikely, such as protected squatting residences (particularly in the UK, where police used not to be able to enter a squat easily).[9]
The types of music played are usually various forms of dance music with fast repetitive beats. Each sound system has its own music policy, following and entourage. The breakcore, gabba, psy-trance, freetekno, Acid Tekno, Hard Trance and Electro House/Techno, Drum & Bass/Jungle, Hardtek, Tribe, Tribecore, Tekstep genres are all played. It is important to differentiate the techno played in clubs and that is nowadays mainstream, from the tekno with a ´´K´´played in freeparties. Some parties in England, but also across Europe such as in the Netherlands, now incorporate elements of performance art ("synthetic circus") as well as electronic dance music.[citation needed]
Due to the lack of licensing restrictions, these parties often start after midnight and continue through the night until morning, often longer. Parties lasting several days are not uncommon; some large teknivals can go on for a week.[citation needed]
Squat parties have an overt or implied radical left-wing stance.[citation needed] The squat party community embraces autonomous, anarchistic principles by refusing to recognize the right of any third-party authority to decide when and how people should congregate. Squat party organizers also eschew capitalistic values by putting on parties which benefit the community and its artists instead of to turn a profit.[citation needed]
Occasionally, squat parties act as ad-hoc information points where political pamphlets are distributed or petitions signed in order to raise awareness about a variety of causes, usually of a left-wing nature. London's Reclaim the Streets movement, which brought traffic and commerce to a standstill once a year in an attempt to draw public attention to inner city problems, was itself a highly visible and politicized affiliate of the U.K. squat party scene.[citation needed]
Squat parties are events held in squatted venues/occupied properties usually without restrictions allowing people to express themselves freely, just like a free party with the difference that a squat parties are held in unused/abandoned buildings mostly happening in the winter and autumn, when its mostly cold to hold parties outdoors.[citation needed]
"music" includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.
—Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994
Sections 63, 64 & 65 of the Act targeted electronic dance music played at raves. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act empowered police to stop a rave in the open air during any period of time, day or night when a hundred or more people are attending, or where two or more are making preparations for a rave. Section 65 allows any uniformed constable who believes a person is on their way to a rave within a five-mile radius to stop them and direct them away from the area; non-compliant citizens may be subject to a maximum fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale (£1000). The Act was ostensibly introduced because of the noise and disruption caused by all night parties to nearby residents, and to protect the countryside. It has also been claimed[2] that it was introduced to kill a popular youth movement that was taking many drinkers out of town centres drinking taxable alcohol and into fields to take untaxed drugs.
The number of people attending and organising such an event for it to be deemed illegal were altered in the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003[9] section 58 to cover indoor parties and outdoor parties of more than 20 people. It is also a crime if, within 24 hours of being told by a police officer to leave a rave, a person makes preparations to attend a rave.
More recently in the United Kingdom, anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) have been used against unlicensed rave organisers if the police receive repeated complaints about noise and littering from locals.
Despite these laws, free parties continue to exist. They do so in a number of ways. They can be small (with fewer than 100 people) and remote so that they are unlikely to cause distress to the local residents. If the police find out about the party and turn up, it is rarely worth the use of resources to attempt to arrest people and seize equipment. The people at the rave would then have to leave without having time to tidy up and potentially still incapable of driving safely. The other way free parties continue is to be large enough to make breaking them up difficult. When there are more than 500 or so people then there is a potential for a riot.[11] A typical police response to why a rave was not stopped is: "officers had decided not to stop the rave because they had only received one complaint about noise and the amount of resources needed to stop it would not be justified."[12]
In August 2006, an unlicensed party organised by united sounds – Aztek, LowKey, One Love, Mission, Illicit, Monolith & Brains-Kan Sound Systems in Essex, England was broken up after 24 hours resulting in approx 60 injuries from both sides and over 50 arrests. This was one of the largest confrontations between police and ravers that had occurred at an unlicensed event for many years. The Chief Superintendent in charge of the police operation said "These sorts of raves are quite unheard of in this county - I have not seen this sort of violence since the old days of acid house."[13]
Squat party
A squat party is a party that takes place either in a disused building (broken into and secured for the party) or in an already existing squat/occupied building.
Squat parties are usually advertised either by word of mouth, postings on internet bulletin boards, whatsapp, telegram, flyers handed out at other similar events and through phone lines set up by organizers or the sound system(s) planning the event. This is for security reasons, since the organizers do not want the authorities finding out about them and trying to stop them. Other events might be much smaller acoustic nights run more like a cafe. Squatted buildings are often used as social centres and creative spaces for people to use.
Most squat parties usually run for 12 to 24 hours, finishing when the organizers have had enough or if they are shut down by police. Most large cities in the UK have a squat party scene with London considered the most active location in the country. The majority of London squat parties occur in mainly industrial states in disused warehouses which make ideal venues and a smaller chance of residential noise complaints. The London squat party scene of recent years has seen an influx of foreigners and usually becoming events with attendees from all around the planet. Its a very unique experience that you don't find in licensed venues, but as they are secret events, then it can be tricky to find them out. Usually regular attendees bring news attendees, and the word spread out.
Squat parties has grown in recent decades after London night clubs start closing down in a fast rate. Since 2007, new laws and restrictions imposed by the council and government has created a crisis in London night life forcing many club closing its doors. which has increased interest by people on squat party scene which allows them to party and express themselves freely and dance for longer hours without hassle or securities watching over your shoulders.
These events has often police presence, usually they come around to check on event and people's safety. Despite most of free parties are unlicensed, often they are allowed to go on the basis that people are safe because closing down illegal events can cause great chaos, putting people in danger, drunk party goers and general public, but they will usually close the event if they understand that people are in danger.
Squat 'eviction' parties occur when the squatters residing in a building have been given a final date for their eviction, and as a final act of resistance organize a large scale party and protest in order to try to withstand the police or bailiffs.
In early years MDMA was the most common drug taken at parties; however, over the last ten years there has been a steady increase in the popularity of ketamine in Europe, most noticeably in the London scene, where ketamine has a massive presence.
In many free-parties, the organisers will have some sort of risk-reduction in place. Often offering earplugs, nose and eye drops, condoms and paper straws for sniffing. They will do this knowing that people will consume drugs anyways, so they decide to prevent issues like Hepatitis or deafness. In some cases they will also have a tent to tend to people in need, who have either consumed too many drugs or are tired from dancing for extended periods of time.[14] Since 2000 ketamine has crossed over from being almost entirely a drug found in the free party scene to one commonly found in mainstream clubs as well.[15]
Security
Due to the drug culture and unregulated environment, security has become a problem for many party organisers. Some free party sound systems hire private security at events to keep the crowd safe, but they are not always present.[2]
Parties become autonomous zones, with self-policing and control being established by all attendance. If people make trouble calling the police is not an option so sometimes the music is stopped and the trouble makers are simply told by all the party goers to leave.[16]
Locations
Typical parties in the London scene range from small parties with a couple of hundred people up to huge multi-riggers involving a thousand or more people. The number of sound systems involved also varies – small parties may have just one or two sound systems, larger parties may have anything up to 20 or more, including several "link-ups" where two or more sound systems will combine their rigs into a single large system.
Although London is the central location for squat parties[citation needed], they exist outside the capital and places such as Three Counties Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire & Cambridgeshire also Buckinghamshire have popular scenes dating pre 1995.[citation needed] Modern parties are usually hosted in Bedford, Norfolk, or London; but Cambridgeshire, Northampton and Suffolk still have a contemporary underground scene, along with Derbyshire, South Yorkshire and South Wales.[citation needed] Outdoor parties are popular all over Wales and the South West and can attract up to a thousand people.[citation needed] Outdoor parties are organised so that noise pollution is not a factor. If the local residents complain then the party is much more at risk of being stopped. In most big cities there is an underground counterculture centred around free parties which are predominantly outdoor parties in the summer and squat parties when it is too cold. Most organisers will try to secure a warehouse, if not they will look for a wooded area to hide themselves and try and soften the music and enjoy the outdoor environment also to avoid being discovered by the authorities.[citation needed]
The Love Parade was an electronic dance music festival and technoparade that originated in 1989 in West Berlin, Germany. It was held annually in Berlin from 1989 to 2003 and in 2006, then from 2007 to 2010 in the Ruhr region. Events scheduled for 2004 and 2005 in Berlin and for 2009 in Bochum were canceled.
A rave is a dance party at a warehouse, club, or other public or private venue, typically featuring performances by DJs playing electronic dance music. The style is most associated with the early 1990s dance music scene when DJs played at illegal events in musical styles dominated by electronic dance music from a wide range of sub-genres, including drum and bass, dubstep, trap, break, happy hardcore, trance, techno, hardcore, house, and alternative dance. Occasionally live musicians have been known to perform at raves, in addition to other types of performance artists such as go-go dancers and fire dancers. The music is amplified with a large, powerful sound reinforcement system, typically with large subwoofers to produce a deep bass sound. The music is often accompanied by laser light shows, projected coloured images, visual effects and fog machines.
Freetekno is a cultural movement that is present in Europe, Australia and North America. Freetekno sound systems or tribes form in loose collectives, frequently with anarchist philosophies. These sound systems join to hold parties wherever a viable space can be found – typical locations include warehouses, fields, abandoned buildings or forests. Because freetekno parties are usually held illegally this sometimes leads to clashes with the police, as was the case at both the 2004 and 2005 Czechtek festivals and many other, smaller parties around the world at different times.
Club drugs, also called rave drugs or party drugs, are a loosely defined category of recreational drugs which are associated with discothèques in the 1970s and nightclubs, dance clubs, electronic dance music (EDM) parties, and raves in the 1980s to today. Unlike many other categories, such as opiates and benzodiazepines, which are established according to pharmaceutical or chemical properties, club drugs are a "category of convenience", in which drugs are included due to the locations they are consumed and/or where the user goes while under the influence of the drugs. Club drugs are generally used by adolescents and young adults.
An acid house party was a type of illegal party typically staged in abandoned warehouses between 1987 and 1989. Parties played acid house and acid techno music, electronic music genres with a distinct sound from the use of the Roland TB-303 synthesizer. The origin of the term acid house party is disputed coming either from the 1987 song "Acid Tracks" by Phuture, or the consumption of MDMA and LSD that were common at the parties.
Genesis'88 was a party promotion crew who threw some of the first acid house parties also known as raves in the United Kingdom from 1988 to 1992.
A technoparade is a parade of vehicles equipped with strong loudspeakers and amplifiers playing electronic dance music. It resembles a carnival parade in some respects, but the vehicles are usually less elaborately decorated. Unlike some carnival parades, a technoparade does not share the tradition of bombarding the spectators with sweets. However, the revellers do occasionally throw confetti and spray foam from the vehicles onto the crowd.
Teknivals are large free parties which take place for several days. They take place most often in Europe and are often illegal under various national or regional laws. They vary in size from dozens to thousands of people, depending on factors such as accessibility, reputation, weather, and law enforcement. The parties often take place in venues far away from residential areas such as squatted warehouses, empty military bases, beaches, forests or fields. The teknival phenomenon is a grassroots movement which has grown out of the rave, punk, reggae sound system and UK traveller scenes and spawned an entire subculture. Summer is the usual season for teknivals.
Spiral Tribe is an arts collective and free party sound system formed in 1990. It organised free parties, festivals and raves in the UK and later Europe in the 1990s. Spiral Tribe was involved in the Castlemorton Common Festival, and members have released music on labels such as Network 23 and Big Life Records. The sound system combined pagan beliefs with New Age traveller culture and rave to form teknivals. After a hiatus, the collective reformed as SP23 in 2011 and continues to organise events.
A sound system is a group of DJs and audio engineers contributing and working together as one, playing and producing music over a large PA system or sound reinforcement system, typically for a dance event or party.
The Second Summer of Love was a late-1980s social phenomenon in the United Kingdom which saw the rise of acid house music and unlicensed rave parties. Although primarily referring to the summer of 1988, it lasted into the summer of 1989, when electronic dance music and the prevalence of the drug MDMA fuelled an explosion in youth culture culminating in mass free parties and the era of the rave. The music of this era fused dance beats with a psychedelic, 1960s flavour, and the dance culture drew parallels with the hedonism and freedom of the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco. The smiley logo is synonymous with this period in the UK.
Free tekno, also known as tekno, freetekno and hardtek, is the music predominantly played at free parties in Europe. The spelling tekno is deliberately used to differentiate the musical style from techno. The music is fast and it can vary between 150 and 185 bpm and is characterised by a pounding repetitive kick drum. Nevertheless, bass drum distortion by clipping is used less often as in the related genre of mainstyle hardcore. Nowadays, some tekno producers also use drum sets that rather sound trancey, since many members of the tekno subculture as well as the psytrance subculture frequently attend the same raves and the two scenes are closely connected.
The Castlemorton Common Festival was a week-long free festival and rave held in the Malvern Hills near Malvern, Worcestershire, England, between 22 and 29 May 1992. The media interest and controversy surrounding the festival, and concerns as to the way it was policed, inspired the legislation that would eventually become the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.
CzechTek was an annual teknival normally held on the weekend at the end of July in the Czech Republic. It attracted thousands of free tekno dancers from several European countries. Open invitations were usually made to all sound systems, performers and all people with positive thinking.
Electronic dance music (EDM), also referred to as dance music or club music, is a broad range of percussive electronic music genres originally made for nightclubs, raves, and festivals. It is generally produced for playback by DJs who create seamless selections of tracks, called a DJ mix, by segueing from one recording to another. EDM producers also perform their music live in a concert or festival setting in what is sometimes called a live PA. Since its inception EDM has expanded to include a wide range of subgenres.
Exodus Collective was a community collective and sound system formed in 1992, in the Marsh Farm area of Luton, England. It organised free parties and became involved in housing, social exclusion, and community projects, founded upon the principle of DIY culture. The group squatted buildings and repeatedly came into conflict with Bedfordshire Police, which by 1995 had resulted in Bedfordshire County Council voting for a public inquiry into alleged police harassment. The licence of a pub owned by the mother of people in the collective was revoked, a decision which was later overturned by a judicial review.
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It introduced a number of changes to the law, most notably in the restriction and reduction of existing rights, clamping down on unlicensed rave parties, and greater penalties for certain "anti-social" behaviours. The Bill was introduced by Michael Howard, Home Secretary of Prime Minister John Major's Conservative government, and attracted widespread opposition.
A nightclub is a club that is open at night, usually for drinking, dancing and other entertainment. Nightclubs often have a bar and discothèque with a dance floor, laser lighting displays, and a stage for live music or a disc jockey (DJ) who mixes recorded music. Nightclubs tend to be smaller than live music venues like theatres and stadiums, with few or no seats for customers.
Acid house is a subgenre of house music developed around the mid-1980s by DJs from Chicago. The style is defined primarily by the squelching sounds and basslines of the Roland TB-303 electronic bass synthesizer-sequencer, an innovation attributed to Chicago artists Phuture and Sleezy D circa 1986.
Clubbing is the activity of visiting and gathering socially at nightclubs and festivals. That includes socializing, listening to music, dancing, drinking alcohol and using other recreational drugs. It is often done to hear new music on larger, high-end audio systems than one would usually have in one's home, or for socializing and meeting new people. Clubbing and raves have historically referred to grass-roots organized, anti-establishment and unlicensed all night dance parties, typically featuring electronically produced dance music, such as techno, house, trance and drum and bass.
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