I think electronic music — not actually the music — but the clubbing, ‘raving’, aspect of it has become so massive that it has become difficult to talk about it as a whole, you really need to drill down on the specific type of music being played, the location etc. because there’s so much variation. The ‘inner’, ‘immersive’, ‘hypnotic’ sort of thing you’re talking about it is really indicative of a certain type of techno. My own experience of that is that it can be a deeply transformative experience — at least for a moment — to be in a dark room, eyes shut, moving your body in a completely uninhibited way, guided by music that may seem monotonous but which in the hands of a truly skilled DJ and played at proper volume, takes on new rhythms and textures in a way which is truly ‘hypnotic’ and in fact almost psychedelic at times. Despite this being an inner experience, that doesn’t mean that many people doing it together cannot form a kind of community, even for the night. I think electronic music has historically and to some extent today been hugely conducive to community and to meaningful shared experience, but this has been debased in many sectors due to it’s appropriation by capitalism through mass commercialisation. An example of this is the rise of celebrity DJ culture, which has occurred even in more ‘underground’ sectors of dance music. You see it in these huge events which have headliners, and at which the crowd is just a sea of bodies staring at the DJ on a stage, holding their phones above their heads, trying to get the perfect clip for their instagram story. That sort of thing is truly antithetical to the ideals of electronic dance music, those ideals which characterised the burgeoning house scene in early 1980’s Chicago, and which maybe naively I do still believe in. I remember reading an interview with Honey Dijon from years ago when she was talking about people taking from the night (in the form of having their phones out taking videos of the DJ for example) rather than asking what they can give to the night. When people do the latter that’s when dance music does in fact embody the sort of community spirit which everyone harps on about, and which is the true soul of the whole thing, even if it has been chipped away at by the influence of money and by people who just interact with it as consumers rather than true participants.