As Night Turns to Mourning: YouTube’s Ahistoric Rave Archive

Abstract

Often with little visual content aside from a static information sticker from the centre of a 12” vinyl record, electronic dance music releases from the late 1980s onwards are now widely available as YouTube uploads. Subsequently allowing for their embedding on other platforms/sites–including extensive crowdsourced music database Discogs–they go from literal records to digital approximations of the tracks that permeated UK nightlife since the emergence of acid house in the mid to late-1980s. Focusing on a sequence found within these recordings identified by Reynolds as “the Hardcore Continuum”, this paper examines how the documenting of rave culture on online platforms is feeding nostalgia. This can be expressed through user comments that centre on themes of loss. However, it is argued that this practice runs in parallel with a later generation of UK-based musicians who continue to draw influence from these earlier recordings. Three contemporary examples are considered in detail: Overmono (a production duo made up of brothers Ed and Tom Russell), Joy Orbison (real name Peter O’Grady) and Burial (the recording guise of William Bevan). Noting an influence of YouTube on some of their output, it also asks if this retrospectively informed approach is a direct response to our digitally connected present. While YouTube supposedly facilitates a portal to this pre-internet past, the chapter considers the platform as a space for reframing recordings as nostalgic yet ahistoric. It particularly looks to this practice of memorialisation in conjunction with its displacement of time.