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 of guest experiences and safety. In a feature-length article, RA.co’s Carlos Hawthorn wrote, “The White Isle’s world-famous nightlife is increasingly slipping into greed-fuelled stagnation.” I can’t argue with that — because here’s what I paid for two GA 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 might feel ripped off. But as a field research event, it was a steal, because I learned so much about the good, bad, and ugly of Ibiza’s infamous party scene. 

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 managed to find many moments of joy through the night, but agree that the club’s management 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 for the vast majority of attendees. Part of the reason clubs do this is to inspire the purchase of VIP tables at $10,000 to $20,000 (or more) per table. By making the GA experience miserable, the value of a VIP table experience increases.

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 — each of them in a hurry to get somewhere. I stood on the platform and waited for my connecting train and watched as people pushed into the train I’d just left, not even waiting for everyone to disembark. Some people scrambled for the exits, clawing their way through heat and humidity and putrescent smells, faces pinched in an effort to avoid breathing deeply of the fetid air. 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, oppressive heat, and psychological overload of this scene broke through my discomfort and inspired in me a sort of awe. I found, despite my discomfort, my skin prickling with goose bumps of pleasure, the same reaction I get when listening to really great music. This underground cavern was a hell on earth, but it was also overwhelmingly human and beautiful, and I found myself proud to be a New Yorker. “This is human life on planet Earth,” I thought. “It’s disgusting, dirty, impersonal, competitive, hot, crowded, smelly, dying and being born at the same time.”

There were several moments during Keinemusik at Hi Ibiza where the smells, heat, and general feeling of too many bodies pressed into competition against each other became undeniable, and the only choice we could make was to leave or dance. My girlfriend and I chose to stay and dance in that hell for seven hours (from 1am to 8am), 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 250ML plastic bottles of water. I’d have paid nothing, except the security at the entrance of the club had earlier forced me to toss my discreet, folding water pouch (pictured below) before they’d let me enter the club. My plan had been to fill this water bladder 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 increases the risk of heat stroke or other emergency medical conditions. It’s anti-safety extortion to force people to buy water at $70 per liter, and yet that’s what Hi Ibiza does.

Once again, the crassly commercial nature of Hi Ibiza made itself clear. Read the RA.co article linked above for more information on the assholes who own the club and design these anti-safety policies. This anti-safety behavior is all the more reprehensible because, for several years running, DJ Mag has declared Hi Ibiza “the number one club in the world,” an honor that the club captures through savvy use of Instagram bots that steer the club’s 818K followers to vote for the club via web polls conducted by DJ Mag and other entities in which Hi Ibiza advertises.

The Elevator 

It’s only fair for me to note that the club’s security team wasn’t all bad. The security guy who patted me down did find the tiny chocolate bar I attempted to carry into the club. He 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, security guy, because I don’t think I could have made it through that hellscape sober.

Let me tell you about an epiphany I had under the influence of the chocolate: the Hi Ibiza experience can be thought of as a really packed elevator. Though the main floor of the club on which we stood was perhaps 20,000 square feet, all that mattered to our experience had been compressed into a much smaller space of perhaps five feet by five feet. We had a wall of people surrounding us in every direction, and we had no ability to move to a less crowded part of the floor — so we were, in essence, stuck in a box jam-packed with people all there to get elevated.

This metaphorical elevator was packed way beyond the fire marshal’s safety recommendation (I’m making the assumption here that Ibiza actually has a fire marshal that isn’t simply bribed to look the other direction). Our little section of floor might have comfortable fit 10 dancers, but somehow we’ve squeezed 20 people into this tiny area. We enter the elevator from the rear, and there are three elevator operators up front pushing the buttons that will carry us to different floors (if you’re following, the elevator operators in this extended metaphor are the DJs). The operators are some of the best in the business — they really know how to take everyone higher. The skill with which they push those buttons is virtuosic, which is why people are crammed into this elevator in the first place.

When the elevator doors open, there’s a change of bodies. 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 a box that — again — might have comfortably fit only 10 people.

Around me are some very big men who refuse to move or dance. They’re mostly filming on their phones. It’s important for their keepsakes and social media clout that they remain stark still while taking their videos. 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 or sway a little. 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 dizzying.

Sometimes the big men take notice of me in their space and they 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 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 touching my sweaty body either. For a song, I’m ping-ponged between two large men, neither wanting me to touch them, but there are three of us large men in this little area and two of us are going to be touching at any given moment, because that’s how packed it is. For the hell of it, and because I’m feeling completely mellow, I allow them to ragdoll my sweaty body between them until one of them gets fed up with being touched by my sweat 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, whipping 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. This is a form of male privilege that I consciously enjoy: I’ve been (rarely) groped and kissed and grinded against without my consent, but I don’t get triggered by these incidents as it’s usually someone just misinterpreting my dance style. I never feel unsafe because I’m confident I can put a stop to things (or de-escalate) if someone gets too handsy with me.

My girlfriend told me, at a club in San Francisco, “you dance with the energy of a gay man.” It’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said about my dancing — I take it as a compliment. But some take it as an invitation. I received several free shoulder massages in that club in San Francisco and my reaction was to let them continue for as long as the dude wanted to rub my shoulders through my sweat-soaked shirt. I enjoy free massage, even from strangers.

But I digress. I was describing the hair-tossing ladies. Several women jammed themselves into our section of the elevator and proceeded to — Willow Smith style — whip their hair back and forth. It’s a move that typically works for them, but they hadn’t anticipated the very sweaty man (me) nearby. Every part of me was a sticky, sweaty flytrap for hair. Their hair slapped my skin, stuck there, then typically didn’t release its grip without a likely painful yank from the hair owner. These ladies moved on quite quickly to a section of the floor where their tactic could be more effective.

The TSA Agent – Free Government Massage

During the many years I endured a completely sexless marriage, I traveled frequently for work. Because I resent the government’s intrusive security theater at airports, particularly the scanners that peel our clothing away so that agents can better see if we’ve taped box cutters or other weapons under our nuts, I got the idea of “opting out.” Here’s how it works: when approaching the rapey-scan devices (no joke a leading manufacturer of these devices is named Rapiscan), you let the TSA agent know you’d like to “opt out” and then the agent hollers “MALE OPT OUT” and you wait a couple minutes for a guy pull you to the side, ask questions, and pat you down.

“Would you like a private screening?” he’s required to ask.
“Any medical devices?” he continues.
And then, “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, and some are lazy. But in all cases, I stand with my arms outstretched, legs spread shoulder width apart, close my eyes and imagine I’m receiving a free, government-sponsored massage. “My tax dollars are paying for this massage,” I remind myself.

My favorite quote from Hamlet applies to this situation: “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. I could recoil from the touch. But if I’m going to fly, I’m going to have to find a way to endure it. So I learned to 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. Dance floor bumping is 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 packed GA floor 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 the peasants dancing below her.

The ice cold drink was a shock at first. But it also felt cool and refreshing. Then came the smell of alcohol. Then it felt sticky. I thought at first that someone had thrown a drink into 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.

A minute later, she got my attention, having recovered from her embarrassment. “Sorry,” she said. “Thanks for telling me.” I gave her a thumbs up and a “it’s all good” smile.

Cool lady. Ultimately harmless, but just for fun I want to remember this incident 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 HAHAHAHAHAHA!” 

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 in imitation of &Me.

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 — like at all. The scarf wearers are far 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 with a scarf on would feel really hot.

It’s kind of a weird getup for a dance floor. 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 had swapped out his traditional headscarf for a red winter knit cap — like a Santa Claus hat without the white fringe or pompom. I found myself wondering if the &Me imitators are going to be shopping before their next Keinemusik concert and whether some sizable portion of their fandom will be wearing red Santa hats to the next gig.

I’m also thinking at this point that &Me is trolling his fans. Perhaps when they start showing up in Santa hats, he’ll start showing up in a down parka with fur-lined hood, just to see how much unbearable heat his fans are willing to endure 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 head 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 almost 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 (“Choli Ke Peeche” — specific version unknown), and Ali 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 only as much as a person who’s never heard a song can love it, 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 danceable tunes, plucking (appropriating?) 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, and if people actually danced at a Keinemusik event, this would have been a pretty great experience.

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.

After I posted this review, the video below circulated on Twitter, generating a firestorm of criticism aimed at Keinemusik because the video shows, accurately, how many phone zombies packed the floor around the DJ booth, phones aloft, barely moving. Ironically, the song is their biggest hit, and it’s titled even more ironically, “Move”:

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 video 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 had 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 videos to Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, and the like is worth millions 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. These clips engender a feeling of FOMO, and inspire the people who see the videos to buy tickets so that they too can stand for hours filming and not dancing (see Mimetic Desire). It’s now become a vicious circle — 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, harshing the buzz on the dance floor and driving away people who, crazily enough, actually want to dance to dance music. 

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, wielding my Big Despacio Fan with all the considerable 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 micro-tribe of dancers, was jumping more than almost any other part of the floor. People who wanted to film moved elsewhere.

PSA: If you want to make your part of the dancefloor 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 irresistibly dancey 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 guttural 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 internally motivated to share music that moves people emotionally and physically. Show that you really love the music by moving your body to it.

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 better film the elevator operators pushing the buttons and take selfies with them. 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 at this Keinemusik show, this antisocial behavior was taken to the next level.

All groups driving to the front typically did 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 room 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.

By the end of the night, many of us in our little tribe had exchanged contact info and felt real kinship with each other. We’d been forged by the fires of combat into a sort of team, and it was sad saying goodbye to these folks.

Bottom line on Keinemusik at Hi Ibiza

Great music, but 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. They could have ducked the music and got on the mic and said, “how about y’all put the phones away for a bit and just dance?”

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 packed 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.

By Discoho

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