Rebekah Farrugia, "Detroit Ecstasy: Ruminations on Raving, Movement, and Place" This paper draws on both the personal experience of becoming a raver in the nineties as well as the history and music scholarship that tracks and conceptualizes electronic dance music’s development. Detroit figures prominently in both of these dimensions. The reciprocal relationship between sites from Europe and Detroit are discussed and intricately latticed to the personal experience of being there and being baptized into a new cultural formation. In sites of both pleasure and the struggle for legitimacy, movement, sound, and unruly spaces invite experimentation, engagement, and a place where one could simply disappear in the crowd. A first person account of the party space serves as an entry point into a discussion of the inaugural Detroit Electronic Music Festival [DEMF] in 2000. The paper reflects on its discursive framing and its function as a civic space it in its early years when it was a free event. From here, the essay invokes research on the culture of production to consider the changes that it has undergone since Paxahau took over its production and renamed it Movement in 2006. In the 2010s, the field of large scale music festivals experienced unprecedented growth. To the end, this essay examines where and how Movement and electronic dance music fit in with the increasing corporatization of music festivals—what Fabian Holt notes has been their adaptation to mass culture tastes. The symbiotic relationships between Detroit, Techno and their often overlooked “humanness” are the threads that bind the aforementioned thoughts.
