Energy Flash: on Rave and its Limits

V–A–C Sreda online magazine brings a new episode in the series of podcasts dedicated to games, produced in collaboration with the Tolk audio platform.

This time, we discuss the culture of electronic dance music and the rave movement. How have they changed over the last twenty years? Is rave now a thing of the past? Can genre definitions reflect all the versatility of the hardcore continuum?

This episode centres around a recording of a roundtable discussion to mark the occasion of V–A–C Press’s publishing of a translation of Simon Reynolds’ book, Energy Flash, in 2022. To understand the questions and controversies connected with electronic dance music, we invited culture researcher Artem Abramov, journalist and publisher Ilya Voronin, radio host and DJ Masha Sky, critic and translator Ilya Miller, and bass-music specialist Nikita Kuznetsov. Some thoughts on electronic music’s multiple crises, from a crisis of language to a crisis of identity, were also contributed by culture theorist and musician Evgeny Bylina.

The tracks featured in the podcast do not illustrate the genres spoken about, but serve rather as examples of the fluidity of genre labels.