Dancecult: Electronic Dance Music Culture Research Network
With its doors having opened in April 2005, Dancecult is an electronic forum and journal for the electronic dance music culture (EDMC) research network.
With over 200 members, Dancecult-l is an interdisciplinary mailing list for scholars, graduate students, and other parties interested in the study and documentation of EDMCs from proto-disco through post-rave formations. Dancecult incorporates a bibliography, links to other relevant web-based resources and events, a list of scholars researching EDMC, and other mysterious developments. Thanks to the design skills of Eliot Bates, the website enables visitors to make additions and updates.
As a critical information exchange hub, Dancecult enables resource sharing and collaboration between international researchers of club cultures, raves, techno, electronica, doof, digital arts and other manifestations of EDMC. Members come from various different disciplines, operating in many different global locations, employing diverse methodologies.
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Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture
Dancecult emerged as an extension of the Dancecult network at www.dancecult.net. It uses the Open Journal Systems software developed by the Public Knowledge Project, and has an advisory board of international experts:
Dancecult is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture (EDMC). A platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of EDMCs worldwide, the journal houses research exploring the sites, technologies, sounds and cultures of electronic music in historical and contemporary perspectives. Playing host to studies of emergent forms of electronic music production, performance, distribution, and reception, as a portal for cutting-edge research on the relation between bodies, technologies, and cyberspace, as a medium through which the cultural politics of dance is critically investigated, and as a venue for innovative multimedia projects, Dancecult is the forum for research on EDMCs.
From dancehall to raving, club cultures to sound systems, disco to techno, breakbeat to psytrance, hip hop to dub-step, IDM to noisecore, nortec to bloghouse, global EDMCs are a shifting spectrum of scenes, genres, and aesthetics. What is the role of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion and spirituality in these formations? How have technologies, mind alterants, and popular culture conditioned this proliferation, and how has electronic music filtered into cinema, literature and everyday life? How does existing critical theory enable understanding of EDMCs, and how might the latter challenge the assumptions of our inherited heuristics? What is the role of the DJ in diverse genres, scenes, subcultures, and/or neotribes? As the journal of the international EDMC research network, Dancecult welcomes submissions from scholars addressing these and related inquiries across all disciplines.
Submissions: The journal features a fully electronic submission and reviewing procedure. Once you have logged in and registered as an author you are able to submit content to the journal by clicking on “Author” in your “User Home” column. Once submitted, you are able to track the status of your submission.
Journal Sections:
Besides editorials, featured articles (5000-8000 words), and book/ film / conference and symposium reviews (1500 words), Dancecult publishes “From the Floor” articles. These are shorter peer-reviewed pieces, including field reports, mini-ethnographies and interviews. Pieces for this section should be from 1500-3000 words in length. Rather than written in the style of an article with formal analysis and many citations, FF pieces are more conversational and creative, and may include substantive multimedia components. The emphasis is on ethnography, style and creativity.
Solicited by the editors, Dancecult also features Conversations designed to provoke dialogue concerning contemporary issues in the field.
Dancecult is published biannually.
Submissions
Dancecult features a fully electronic submission and reviewing procedure. Once you have logged in and registered as an author you will be able to submit content to the journal by clicking on “Author” in your “User Home” column. Once submitted, you are able to track the status of your submission.
Executive Editor - Graham St John
Managing Editor - Eliot Bates
Reviews Editor - Karenza Moore
Editor's Introduction - Graham St John
Featured Articles
IDM as a "Minor" Literature: The Treatment of Cultural and Musical Norms by "Intelligent Dance Music" - Ramzy Alwakeel
Decline of the Rave Inspired Clubculture in China: State Suppression, Clubber Adaptations, and Socio-cultural Transformations - Matthew M Chew
Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival - Graham St John
Too Young to Drink, Too Old to Dance: The Influences of Age and Gender on (Non) Rave Participation - Julie Gregory
DJ Culture in the Commercial Sydney Dance Music Scene - Ed Montano
From the Floor
Convergence and Soniculture: 10 Years of MUTEK - tobias c. van Veen
The Hardcore Continuum? - Jeremy Gilbert
The Abstract Reality of the "Hardcore Continuum" - Mark Fisher
12 Noon, Black Rock City - Graham St John
The Inverted Sublimity of the Dark Psytrance Dance Floor - Botond Vitos
Reviews
We Call It Techno! A Documentary About Germany’s Early Techno Scene (Sextro and Wick) - Hillegonda C Rietveld
Lost and Sound: Berlin, Techno, und der Easyjetset (Rapp) - Sean Nye
Chromatic Variation in Ethnographic Research: A Review of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (Saldanha) - Anthony D'Andrea
Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa (D'Andrea) - Charles de Ledesma
Breakcore: Identity and Interaction on Peer-to-Peer (Whelan) - Emily Ferrigno
The High Life: Club Kids, Harm and Drug Policy (Perrone) - Lucy Gibson
Dancecult wishes to thank:
Eliot Bates for the logo design, pdf layout, and fearless wrangling with the OJS installation.
Todd Thille for web design and banner.
Tobias van Veen and Cato Pulleyblank for helpful advice and suggestions on web layout.
Alex Canazei for first edition images.