Present-day EDM scenes are not, at least occasionally, without a prominent sense of vapid commercialism; would you have guessed that a decade before Tiësto arrived on the scene and subsequently appeared on posters doubling as advertisements for GQ, clandestine event planners were literally getting beaten with baseball bats for infringing on the territory of other electronic shows, which were otherwise actively broken up in the absence of police “connects”?
New York DJ Frank Mitchell a.k.a. Frankie Bones can attest to all of this by virtue of his early-90s involvement and essential MCing of the city’s Storm Raves, which are generally considered, alongside comparable scenes in Detroit, the beginning of (and foundation for) American underground raves. Inspired by an absurdly well-attended show in England in 1989, and initially buoyed by the consumption of an unfamiliar pill, Bones conducted these raves for a year-and-a-half period until December 1992. Moby, Richie Hawtin, and Adam X (Adam Mitchell, Bones’s brother) were among those who contributed tunes to the secret warehouse furor during that time.
And now we’re dealing with a temporary revival! If shows taking place at marked locations are a turn-off for you, look forward to the first Storm Rave event in 22 years, set to take place May 16 at an as-yet unspecified warehouse in NYC. Adam X, Heather Heart, Lenny Dee, Rob Gee, and Frankie Bones himself are on the bill, and you can purchase your tickets here (even though it might seem antithetical to how things originally went).
“Psst, y’all got any more of dem techno shows?”
• Frankie Bones: https://www.facebook.com/DJFRANKIEBONES
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