We went to Keinemusik at Hi Ibiza (3am – 8.45am, Oct 13). Here are some moments from the experience. They’re my moments, written from my perspective, coming from a place of loving dance and looking to deepen my understanding of what makes a great dance experience.
The cost is too damned high
Ibiza’s been getting a lot of shit lately for being expensive, crassly commercial, and borderline unethical in its handling. RA.co’s Carlos Hawthorn wrote, “The White Isle’s world-famous nightlife is increasingly slipping into greed-fuelled stagnation.” For the record, here’s what I paid for two tickets to the closing party, picking my tickets up in a second-hand sale from Stubhub:
We danced from 1am to 8am, so including two bottles of water ($35 USD) and parking ($30), this event cost me about $150 per hour of dancing (~$1070 total). If I weren’t using the event as fodder for my writing about dance experiences, I’d have trouble justifying the cost and would feel pretty ripped off. But as a field research event, it was a steal, because I learned so much.
Commerce first, safety second at Hi Ibiza
A popular recent Ibiza subreddit post recently asked, “How long until someone dies at Hi Ibiza?” noting, “Seriously anyone thinking of going there, think twice about it. It’s the single worst club experience I’ve ever had an I’ve been all over the world clubbing.” I found many moments of joy through the night, but agree that the club oversold tickets, cramming people into the space at a density that resulted in lots of shoving, elbowing, and antagonistic behavior between the clubbers.
Put any pack of animals into a tight enclosure, turn up the heat, add alcohol and other substances to their water dishes, and subject them to flashing lights and sharp elbows, and there will be fights. Bouncers regularly removed combatants from the dance floor, and I participated in my share of petty squabbles over personal space. It wasn’t even a little bit comfortable.
Even in hell, nirvana can be found
One summer, living in NYC, I exited my air-conditioned subway car onto an underground platform rammed with people fighting to get somewhere. Some were pushing into the train I’d just left, not even waiting for everyone to disembark. Some people were scrambling for the exits, clawing their way through heat and humidity and putrescent garbage-ey smells, faces pinched from the effort to take in as little of the air as they could manage. Across the platform, an express train rocketed by in a metal-on-metal screech that sounded like a tortured whale dragging its barnacled belly across a chalkboard. I have been lucky not to experience war, but the smells, sounds, opressive heat, and psychological overload of this scene broke through my discomfort and inspired in me a sort of awe. “This is human life on planet Earth,” I remember thinking. It’s disgusting, dirty, impersonal, competitive, hot, crowded, smelly, decaying and being born at the same time. I got the goose bumps I get when listening to great music — it was a beautiful hell on earth, and I found myself proud to be a New Yorker at that moment.
There were several moments during Keinemusik at Hi Ibiza where this same feeling of overwhelming humanity became undeniable, and the only thing we could do was leave or dance.
We danced — staying in that mess of a room for seven hours, with just one break for restrooms and water.
Speaking of water, fuck Hi Ibiza and the Matutes it rode in on
I paid $35 for two plastic bottles of water. I’d have paid nothing, except the security at the entrance of the club forced me to toss my discreet, folding water pouch (pictured here) before they’d let me enter the club. My plan had been to fill this pouch up in the bathroom tap, a move I’ve used at many concerts, raves, festivals, and other events where extortionate water pricing is in effect.
There’s no safety reason why folks should need to toss an empty water bladder. Indeed, given the dehydrating effects of drugs, alcohol, heat, and dancing, forcing people to buy expensive water increased the risk of heat stroke or other emergency medical conditions.
But once again, the crassly commercial nature of Hi Ibiza ruled the night. Read the RA.co article linked above for more information on the assholes who own the club and designed these anti-safety policies.
The Elevator
Granted, door security did find the chocolate I carried into the club. The man took it out of my pocket and I shrugged and said, “it’s chocolate.” The security guy — the same one who had just made me throw away my water pouch, tucked it back into my pocket and patted it. “Enjoy your mushroom chocolate,” he said with a wink.
I did enjoy it. And, bless you, bouncerman, because your act of kindness made all the difference.
Let me tell you about the elevator.
The elevator is packed way beyond the fire marshall’s recommendation. It’s rated for 10 people, but somehow we’ve squeezed 20 people into this tiny box. We enter the elevator from the rear, and there’s three elevator operators up front pushing the buttons that will carry us to different floors. The operators are some of the best in the business — they really know how to take this elevator to all the floors — they way they push those buttons is virtuosic, which is why people are crammed into this elevator in the first place and when the doors open, very few people get out at each floor. Instead, more people cram into the elevator. By 2:00 AM, we’ve fit 30 people into the box. By 3:00 AM, somehow we’ve squeezed 40 people into this box made for 10 people.
Around me are some big men who refuse to move or dance. They’re mostly filming on their phones, so it’s important for their keepsakes and social media clout that they remain stark still. That’s ok, I’m stubborn too, and I refuse to not dance when surrounded by a fairly glorious soundsystem — did I mention that the elevator has a glorious soundsystem?
So the big men become just another feature of the hardscape of the elevator. They’re much younger than me, much more solidly built, and very much like warm walls. I’m sweaty — absolutely dripping with it — but I don’t stop dancing.
Sometimes the big men dance. In these cases, it feels like the walls of the elevator are sliding and slipping. Thanks to my chocolate, I enjoy the feeling of the walls sliding around me. It’s disorienting and delicious.
Sometimes the big men dance offensively, elbowing me or stepping on my feet or jamming their squat-hardened asses into my ass. I enjoy this give and take but don’t I don’t move because I’ve got nowhere to go. No matter what direction I’m pushed, I’m pushed against another body, and that other body doesn’t like my sweat either. For a song, I’m ping-ponged between two large men, neither wanting me to touch them, but there are three of us in this corner and two of us are going to need to touch, that’s how packed it is. I allow them to ragdoll my sweaty body between them until one of them gives up and finds a new spot on the dance floor. Victory.
Hair tossers
Sometimes it’s not large men, but women who insist on space to dance where none is to be had. A common move these ladies employ is to swing their luscious manes of hair wildly around, wipping people in the face and eyes in an effort to create a zone of space. I don’t blame them — I wouldn’t want to be a woman on this or most any dance floor. As a relatively unattractive man, I’ve been (rarely) groped and kissed and grinded on without consent, but I don’t get triggered by these incidents as it’s usually someone just misinterpreting my dance style.
My girlfiend told me, at a club in San Francisco, “you dance with the energy of a gay man” and I cannot deny the truth of that. I take it as a compliment, but some take it as an invitation. I received several free shoulder massages that evening in San Francisco and my reaction was to let them continue for as long as the dude wanted to hold on to my sweat-soaked shirt. I enjoy free massage, even from strangers.
But I digress. Back to the hair-tossers. Several women jammed themselves into the elevator and proceeded to — Willow Smith style — whip their hair back and forth. They didn’t think it through. Every part of me was a sticky, sweaty flytrap for hair. The hair slapped my skin, stuck there, then typically didn’t realease its grip without a likely painful yank from the hair owner. These ladies moved on quite quickly.
The TSA Agent – Free Government Massage
During the many years I endured a completely sexless marriage, I took a bunch of flights. Because I resent the government’s intrusive security theater, particularly the scanners that peel our clothing away so that agents can better see if we’ve secreted weapons amongst our persons, I got the idea of “opting out.” Here’s how it works: when approaching the rapey-scan devices, you let the agent know you’d like to “opt out” and then the agent calls “MALE OPT OUT” and you wait a couple minutes and a guy comes and pulls you to the side and asks questions and gives a spiel.
“Would you like a private screening?”
“Any medical devices?”
“I’m going to use the back of my hands on your sensitive areas in the groin and buttocks.”
I’m a connoisseur of these pat downs, having endured at least 50 of them. Some agents are very thorough, some are lazy. But in all cases, I close my eyes and imagine I’m receiving a free, government-sponsored massage.
Because, like my favorite quote from Hamlet, I believe, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
I could experience this intrusive bit of security as a violation of my bodily autonomy. I could resent it. But I lean into the discomfort and find the joy there.
This perverse attitude of mine is, I believe, great armor for a packed and unpleasant dance floor. Every touch is human, and even the ones coming from a place of aggression typically have some pleasantness to them, so long as I’m not being outright punched. I’ve participated in rock concert mosh pits, and contact that would be a “10” on the scale of “mild” to “wild” for an EDM dance floor is a mere 2 within the context of a rock mosh pit. Tame and non-threatening, and generally pretty enjoyable, in the way that a TSA pat down can be enjoyable.
Have a drink, peasants!
I believe that the stories we tell ourselves about experiences largely determines whether the experiences are remembered as positive or negative.
A woman on the VIP balcony above us — part of a group that likely paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for the opportunity to dance outside the general-admittance area, had clearly been struggling to hold her minimum consumption of drinks, and sloppily clung to the railing with a fresh drink. She tipped part of it onto us, splashing about four of us peasants dancing below her.
It felt cool and refreshing. Then it smelled alcoholic. Then it felt sticky. I thought someone had thrown a drink in the air, so I looked around for the culprit to judge whether they thought they were being pro-social or anti-social, and spied the drunk above, blithely unaware that she was about to tip the rest of her glass onto us.
I reached up with my fan and gently tapped her hand. “Heyyo, you’re spilling your drink on us,” I yelled.
She looked embarrassed, and pulled her drink away from the railing and turned her back on us. Cold.
A minute later, she got my attention, having recovered from her embarrassment. “Sorry,” she said. “Thank you for letting me know.” I gave her a thumbs up.
Cool lady. But I’ll choose to remember this one as a rich old guy’s plaything icily dumping her premium cocktail on the heads of the hoi polloi dancing below her and cackling, “THIS DRINK’S ON ME, PEASANTS! AND NOW IT’S ON YOU! MUAH HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA!”
The scarves, and the hats
Keinemusik’s &Me (pic below) wears a headscarf (Hermes?) to his shows, perhaps to keep his luscious fro in check, perhaps just because he thinks it looks cool. This has inspired many in Keinemusik’s fandom to come to their events in cosplay. Perhaps 10 to 20 percent of attendees at Hi Ibiza sported scarves wrapped around their heads.
Imagine wearing such a getup to a hot and sweaty club, then imagine trying to dance for hours in it. No wonder, then, that most scarf-wearing Keinemusik fans don’t actually dance. The scarf wearers are more likely to stand still and film, in part because they’re young and they haven’t learned how to dance, and in part because dancing in such a getup would put them at greater risk of extreme physical discomfort.
It’s kind of weird, and in the words of one Redditor, “LA show was FULL of guys wearing the head scarf and it is honestly cringe to go to a show dressed like the artist you are going to watch.”
At the Hi Ibiza gig, &Me wore a winter knit cap. I’m sure the scarf wearers that showed up in solidarity with him are going to be shopping before their next outing, and we’ll see them bundled up in an even-warmer woolen knit cap.
I’m thinking at this point that &Me is trolling his fans, and that he’ll start showing up in a down parka with fur-lined hood, just to see how far his followers are willing to go in the name of mimicry.
Shoutout to my man, Ali, though. He’s a six-foot-seven mountain of a Pakistani ibanker that showed up with a scarf, but eventually shed it so that he could dance. I whipped out my hand fan and gave him lots of air — he deserved it for coming to his senses and getting his groove on. Earlier in the night, he’d been standing still and filming, and thanks to his height, getting some decent shots of the action. The images and videos here are all from Ali’s instagram.
Plucked from childhood in Pakistan — a Hindi banger
Speaking of Ali from Pakistan, at one point a song in Hindi played, and he went wild. It was a song he’d grown up hearing as a kid, plucked from that culture and given a ridiculously wonderful beat and remix treatment by Keinemusik. I loved the song, but Ali fucking loved the song because it reminded him of his childhood. “These guys are geniuses,” he said.
Keinemusik, despite their flaws, make some very dancable tunes, plucking vocals from Africa, India, and South America and seamlessly mixing them for hours. In terms of energy levels, their set ranged from five to ten, and they do a better job than many DJs at creating something of a journey with their longer sets. If the floor weren’t packed like the last elevator out of hell, if the club weren’t greedy, if the air weren’t lousy with phones held aloft, this would have been an amazing event.
Fuck your phone
So that brings us to the heart of it. The image above shows a bunch of phones held in the air filming. It was so much worse than this image indicates. Maybe 30% of the club at any given moment held their phones aloft, and at some moments it felt like 75% of the club were serving as social media interns for Keinemusik.
Keinemusik, as artists, have the option of telling the club “we want no phones at this show.” Other artists have performed at this same club and have held no-phones residencies. The result of no-phones policies is that people stop standing still, stop capturing for later consumption and social media clout, and they dance. They also stop shoving forward for a better vantage point from which to film. Keinemusik’s show would have been a smash success if they’d insisted on no phones.
But Keinemusik have created a bit of a monster for themselves. Their fandom are notorious for being on their phones for almost the entire show. Here’s a video demonstrating the situation at Hi Ibiza last night, again courtesy of Ali.
It wasn’t just Hi Ibiza. This is a common thing at Keinemusik EDM concerts. Here are some images from their appearance at the Pyramids of Giza earlier this year:
Speaking as a marketer (my day job) the social media exposure from these thousands of phones capturing images then posting images to Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and the like is worth millions or dollars in brand equity because it results in word of mouth, awareness, impressions, and the sort of buzz that you can’t achieve through paid marketing. Nothing’s more persuasive than a friend posting a clip from a concert they went to and saying they had a good time there. All of their followers feel fomo, and develop the desire to do the same (see Mimetic Desire), and so the types of people who show up to Keinemusik concerts are those who were brought there by friends who enticed them with videos of the event. Naturally, they’ll be nabbing their own videos as well.
It’s a self-perpetuating social media hype cycle, and acts who ignore it are forgoing invaluable exposure for their brands, which means fewer bookings, lower pay, and a weaker brand.
And yet it totally fucks the dance floor — turning an entire generation away from co-creation of the dance floor WITH the DJs to audience spectators that never knew what it was like to dance with each other, to feel communion with the artist and with the music and with all of the other humans on the floor.
My own attempt to make things right is that I keep my fan arm in the air, weilding my Big Despacio Fan with all the strength and stamina of an arm trained by nearly a decade of involuntary marital celibacy. I can fan for hours, and the folks around me tend to appreciate the breeze. Especially the folks on ecstasy. Said one of these folks last night to me, “it feels like a dream, thank you.”
I make friends with the fan, though for the first time ever at Keinemusik last night, one lad asked me to put the fan down so that he could better film. I said, “fuck your phone, just dance” in the nicest possible way, and he put his phone down. In the floor behind me, people did not film because my fan was so frequently aloft — and our part of the floor, where we established a tribe of dancers, was jumping more than almost any other part of the floor.
If you want to make your part of the elevator cooler and more tolerable for those around you, bring a fan. As an added benefit, fans have phone antibodies.
Gqom
Again, another word for the wonderful music of Keinemusik. I’m not entirely certain that history will be kind to them — some of what they do feels like cultural appropriation, but the music is irresistably dancy afro house music that borrows from cultures outside of the collective’s German roots. A telltale sound of afro house and amapiano is the hollow-sounding “gqom” sound.
Wiki explains, “The word gqom derives from an onomatopoeic combination of click consonants in the Zulu language (isiZulu) which could be interpreted as a “hitting drum”, “ricochet” or “bang”. Gqom’s isiZulu pronunciation is pronounced with an alveolar click followed by a guttural “om”. The word itself in a literal sense resembles the sound produced by a kick drum.”
This sound is gutteral and primal, and brings afro house music a tone that’s as distinctive as the Roland TR-808, TR-909 and Linn LM-1 drum machines that defined the 1990s era of house music.
It’s an emotional sound that hits especially well when a megawatt and megadollar club soundsystem is driving the lowest frequencies into one’s bones and belly. Dancing for seven hours to it in a crowded elevator was a treat and a privilege.
Red pill the dance floor
Of all the drugs that I saw people taking (thank you for the offers of coke, mdma, pot, beer, and shrooms, you kind fellow dancers), the one I wish they’d take is the red pill wherein they learn the following unsettling truth: dance music is for dancing. Holding your phone aloft turns you into an unpaid social media intern for the act, and makes you part of the machine.
If you want to support your favorite artists, buy their vinyl releases, attend their events, tell your friends about them, but there’s no act of worship more affirming than actually dancing to the tunes that they lay down. DJs like to be paid, but the best DJs are motivated to share music that moves people emotionally and physically. Show that you really love the music by moving that body.
YOU SHALL NOT PASS
One of the least pleasant dynamics that happened once every minute or two at Keinemusik was (typically) scarf-wearing fans who insisted on entering the packed elevator and driving themselves to the front so that they could be in better video and selfie range. Group after group — couples, trios, and more — drove themselves relentlessly forward into the packed room, shouldering and shoving and sliding past dancers so that they could get to the “front.”
We see some of this behavior at Coachella, especially on weekend 1, when simpering social media clout-chasers are more prevalent. But Keinemusik shows take this to the next level.
All groups driving to the front typically do so in a line. The person at the front is the tip of the spear. A popular method is to put the group’s women at the front, because they’re typically less threatening and more likely to be given roomn to slither through the crowd. The group’s men follow in the gap created by their women, a creative way of using the “soft power” of women’s disadvantage in size and strength to advantage. Other groups put their strongest guy at the front, thinking that his power and size will allow them to barge past bodies that the women can’t.
In all cases, the tribe of people that assembled on my part of the dance floor — a bunch of blissed-out ecstasy and hallucinogenic dancers, made a pact. We foiled spear-thrust after spear thrust. The women-led spears were easy to deter — as soon as they touched my sweat-soaked shirt they noped out and went to look for another route. The men were more problematic, but our group had a few giants in it and we barred passage of these groups as well. Some of them tried to fight over it, but we were friendly and gentle but firm, and in doing that we assembled around us, in our packed elevator, a sense of safety and camaraderie.
Bottom line on Keinemusik at Hi Ibiza
Great music. One of the least dancey fandoms in the entirety of dance music — Keinemusik fans take videos more than they dance. Terrible venue (fuck Hi Ibiza). But also, Keinemusik themselves are to blame for the lack of solid dancefloor vibes — they could have requested no phones, and didn’t.
I’m at 4,000 words and need to wrap this up, but I probably have another 4,000 in me on this event. So much happened in my little elevator and I will remember this night fondly, the same way I remember the hell of the stinking bowels of the NYC subway system in the summer. What a fantastic night. What a terrible night. But mostly fantastic.