FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor
In memory of Colin Hood
FreeNRG is a collection of frontline communiques on technotribes, contemporary musical practices and events transpiring on the fringes of Australian dance culture throughout the nineties. The anthology's 13 essays are written by specialists and affiliates of a spectrum of youth phenomena found at the edge of the dance floor.
Edited by Graham St John (Common Ground, Altona 2001), the anthology examines DiY culture, a networked youth movement committed to voluntarism, ecological sustainability, social justice and human rights. FreeNRG people subscribe to an economy of mutual-aid and co-operation, are committed to the non-commodification of art and embrace freedoms of experience and expression. Artists and activists, their cultural output is a product of novel mixtures of pleasure and politics. Technicians and esotericists, they pirate technologies in the pursuit of re-enchantment and liberated space.
Contents
Comments About FreeNRG
"Culture and critique, utopia and hedonism, secret history and public protest: all are dancing between--across--bursting out of!--the pages of FreeNRG." George McKay, Dept of Cultural Studies, University of Central Lancashire.
"Finally, the electronica underground is getting the attention it deserves as a genuine and articulate cultural movement. Extending from the dance floor and into politics, economics, environmentalism and spirituality, the rave movement deserves the multi-dimensional analysis only possible in an anthology like FreeNRG." Douglas Rushkoff, author of Ecstasy Club, Cyberia, Playing the Future, Bull.
"Dance cultures are a fundamentally important area for people working on popular culture from a range of disciplinary locations — cultural studies, media studies, sociology, and popular music studies. FreeNRG is the first local book to analyse and document these practices and their cultural politics.It is written by a group of exciting young writers, well-informed about their subject and in many cases, closely connected with the various industries which make it work. This will be an extremely valuable book, eagerly sought by students and academics working in these disciplinary areas and addressing a major gap in the Australian literature of popular and media cultures." Graeme Turner, Director, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland.
"FreeNRG is both a selfless and ... a self-indulgent counter culture, fusing social critique with abandonment and escape (to the dance beat, to pleasure). FreeNRG commentators are emergent public intellectuals, articulate technicians, producers of treatises and manifestos as well as CDs and other electronic paraphernalia. Their work and activity is a source of renewal and hope for a youth so often imagined as "without politics" ... This is a wonderful archive of counter cultural ideas and activities in Australia in recent times." From the Foreword by Ken Gelder, Head, English with Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne
FreeNRG is available from Common Ground
Ebook download from undergrowth.com
Email Graham St John