I’ve spent a lot of this month in Texas—stuffing my face with steak, rubbing shoulders with Big Oil executives, and comparing Oura Ring scores with ex-governor Rick Perry while reporting on conservative psychedelia. I’m excited to share these surreal scenes with you soon.

A big driver behind Republicans’ recent embrace of psychedelic medicines is the ravages wrecked by the US opioid crisis, which at this point is inescapable regardless of race and class backgrounds, or where you stand on the drug spectrum. As Bryan Hubbard, one of the main figures of the movement put it to me on a phone call last week, “We’re talking about the constellation of people who experience all of the damage that comes from [opioid addiction]. It is a generationally compounded dynamic of disfigurement, [and] a social expression of post-apocalypse.”

Writing about this side of drug culture always conjures the spirits of dead homies who I’ve lost to the streets or to overdoses. Their faces flicker by as I get up from my desk to pour a coffee or use the bathroom: friends like Gian, the iconoclastic New York publisher and editor who was a sort of based guru figure to me and so many young writers in New York. (A posthumous collection of his searing, hilarious essays for VICE was just published, you can check it out here.)

I’m also thinking about Michael Alig, the notorious club kid king of 90s New York nightlife, who spent 17 years in prison for killing his drug dealer, and whose story was captured in the film Party Monster. After he got out of jail, I tracked him down and spent almost a year reporting on this profile for THUMP, the electronic website under VICE that I was working for at the time. Back then, I was at the height of my own hardcore partygirl era, and would sometimes come home at 9am from these marathon raves, still high, to work on the draft for this story. I was interested in how far the limits of this lifestyle could go—was Alig an exceptionally narcissistic sociopath, as many people claimed, or was this more of a cautionary tale of what could happen when you fall too deep down the hole?

Even out of prison, when Michael was a washed-up 50-year-old felon trying desperately to regain his club kid clout, I found him brilliantly funny and creative—still oozing the charisma that got him to the top of New York’s greatest nightlife era (they just don’t make em like that anymore). But addiction is a sad, complicated thing, and I never knew if I could trust him. After publishing the piece, I invited him to my birthday party rave in a Bushwick fried chicken shop. He showed up and demanded that I escort him around the party like a VIP; later, I found out that he’d gone around the room begging people for cocaine, even though he’d promised me he was sober. When I confronted him, he said something like, “oh darling, I used to shoot meth and heroin! A bump of cocaine is sober, relatively speaking.”

Here is the feature story for your weekend reading.

The Comeback Kid: Michael Alig’s Return to New York Nightlife

(Originally published in THUMP/VICE on January 7, 2016)

Sex and the City. CBGB. Andy Warhol. Rent. Everyone who dreams of moving to New York City has that one rose-tinted fantasy of what they hope to find here. I had Michael Alig, the most infamous party boy in the world.

Well, not exactly. I had Macaulay Culkin in face paint, prancing below disco balls in Party Monster. The cult movie immortalized Alig’s rise from suburban outcast to the city’s most powerful party promoter—and his inevitable fall in 1996, after Alig and his roommate, Robert “Freez” Riggs, killed their friend and drug dealer, 25-year-old Andre “Angel” Melendez, while high on a cocktail of ketamine, heroin, Rohypnol, and crystal meth.

I discovered Party Monster as a lonely teenager halfway across the world, in Tokyo, around the time that I’d begun sneaking into local clubs. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for in those seedy spaces, but watching Alig and his friends dancing in a van steered by a drag queen on acid, I knew that they had found it. “It doesn’t matter what you look like!” declares Alig’s friend James St. James in the 2003 film’s most famous quote. “If you have a hunchback, just throw a little glitter on it, honey, and go dancing!” Party Monster showed me how clubs could be radical spaces where freaks become glow-in-the-dark superstars. On solo bus rides to swim practice, I sunk into the movie’s soundtrack, an anachronistic collection of electroclash tracks from the likes of Vitalic, Miss Kitten, and Ladytron. I started to understand how dance music sounded like freedom.

By the time I made it to New York in 2007, Alig had already been in prison for a decade, riding out a 10 to 20-year sentence for manslaughter. New Yorkers’ opinions on his legacy seemed divided, with younger and older generations equally distributed on both sides. To some, his over-the-top parties represented the pinnacle of New York club culture. To others, the druggie excess and grisly murder symbolized the dying gasp of an era—the moment when things went too far, and the city started cracking down on clubs. I found that what people thought of Alig often revealed more about their own relationship to nightlife—he’d become a mirror for our own fantasies and fears.

Wandering from one dark club to another, I sometimes felt as if I was on the brink of touching his ghost, like I’d entered a room and the air was still chilly. When I went to the Limelight—a club in a deconsecrated church where Alig was a director and threw his legendary Wednesday night party Disco 2000—I came face to face with a nightmarish vision of gentrifying New York. The club was bloated with tourists and bad electro, and had even rebranded under a cheesy new name, Avalon.

Twice—in November 2006 and July 2008—Alig became eligible for parole, and returned to the media spotlight. Both times, he was denied after testing dirty for drugs. When Alig was finally released on parole in May 2014, I joined the scrum of journalists chasing after that coveted post-prison interview. I wanted to know what everyone else did. What happens when you put a wild club kid in an iron cage for nearly two decades? Now that he was out, would Alig attempt a grand re-entry into New York society, or remove himself from public life—like Riggs had, when he was released in 2010? And if he decided to go back into the nightlife business, would my generation of club kids, who now rule the scene, be willing to give him a second chance?

At the heart of these questions was a core dilemma: was Alig a dangerous sociopath—or just a troubled, attention-obsessed former junkie who had a very bad night?

The New York Times snagged the first interview, meeting him outside the prison gates on the day of his release, where a 15-person van piled with his friends—including, per the reporter, “three guys with dyed and spiky hair who had been sipping Red Bull and vodka all morning”—was awaiting his arrival. Also in the van: former Jane magazine deputy editor Esther Haynes, who is Alig’s editor for his in-progress memoir, Aligula, and two separate video crews—one shooting footage for Party Monster 2, and the other a documentary on his life called Glory Daze.

On the ride back to the city, using a Twitter account his publicist helped him run while he was locked up, Alig blasted a beaming photo of himself in a blue button-down shirt and glasses, licking a Starbucks cup with a twinkle in his eye. He could’ve easily passed for a soccer dad, if it weren’t for the tweet: “Who needs coke when u can get a caffeine jolt from a Starbucks double espresso? #drugfree.”

Almost every major media outlet covered Alig’s release. I even interviewed his mom, Elke Blair. “I’ll tell him to call you back,” she said in a heavy German accent. But he never did.

Then in May 2015—almost exactly a year after he got out—a video of Alig popped up on my Facebook feed. Apparently, Alig’s newest project was a homemade YouTube series called The Pee-Ew Show (now called Peeew!), which he’d started in September 2014 with Ernie Garcia, an ex-club kid friend who also goes by Ernie Glam. Described as “a stinky, sit-down comedy talk show satire” on the YouTube profile page, the daily broadcast involved the duo commenting on a grab-bag of trending topics—from new Hot Chip music to Russian prank masturbation videos—with their own party stories sprinkled in. Friends from their old nightlife circles, like James St James and DJ Keoki, would sometimes pop in as special guests.

In this particular episode, the pair joked about how Glam had scooped a red drug baggie off the ground at a Red Bull Music Academy event called Storm Rave, only to realize it was a gag invitation to an upcoming boat party hosted by Rinsed. Alig ribbed Glam for falling for the trick. “This is the club land version of the hundred dollar bill with the string that they drop on the sidewalk to see who’ll pick it up,” smirked Alig, sassy as ever. I realized with a thrilling shiver that Alig’s world was closing in on mine. I had been at the same Red Bull event. The Rinsed crew were my friends. In fact, at that moment, the same red baggie was resting in my pocket.

Two weeks later, our worlds finally collided when an email from Glam landed in my inbox. He’d found me through a story I’d written about club kid collecting cards from the 90s were fetching up to $112 on eBay. Turns out Glam had been one of the sellers.

Glam was writing to ask if he could send me a review copy of his new book called The Darkest Tunnel, which was a tale of murder, drugs, and prostitution set in the gritty belly of New York nightlife. (Yes, it was supposed to be fiction.) I seized the opportunity to inquire if I could watch them film the next episode of Peeew!, which happened to be marking its 200th episode that weekend. And just like that, I landed an invitation to Glam’s apartment in the Bronx, where I would finally meet Alig in the flesh. To quell the nervous excitement strobing through me, I reminded myself that celebrities are almost never as cool as they appear from afar. I also knew that Alig was a masterful manipulator of the media. Even former Village Voice writer Michael Musto, who has reported on Alig since the 90s, noted that Alig loved to “[make] himself the victim” when talking to the press.

On a bright hot Saturday on June 13, I showed up at Glam’s apartment—a modest, whistle-clean three-bedroom awash with sun and colorful pop art. Alig bounded into the living room beaming, wearing a white T-shirt, loosely fit jeans, and bright red sneakers. Although his frame was stockier and his cheeks fleshier than I’d seen in pictures from the 90s, his face bore traces of the beautiful boy he’d once been—blue eyes like deep wells, pillowy lips, almost wrinkle-less skin. It was crazy to think that he was 49 years old.

Alig had been living in Glam’s spare room since getting out about a year ago. In addition to Peeew!, he’d been using the time to work on AligMart, an online store that sells Alig-branded merchandise and prints of his paintings—a hobby he picked up in prison.

“I knew he’d have a hard time getting his own place without a job,” Glam told me as the three of us circled the kitchen table. “It was a rocky start, because [my husband] craves order while Michael represents disorder,” Glam said. But Glam, a Sacramento native, is a loyal friend of Alig’s. When Alig was starting out as a promoter, he scouted Glam in the bathroom of a club called Copacabana in 1988; before long, Glam was helping Alig throw parties and getting paid $100 to go-go dance at Limelight. From 1990 to 1993, they even shared an apartment in Chelsea. “It is exactly how it was back then, except without all the drugs,” Glam laughed, referring to their new life as roommates.

Peeew! sprung out of the time Alig and Glam spent shooting the shit at home. Though they’d been apart since 2009—the last time Glam visited Alig in prison—they still loved swanning around like retired drag queens, spitting crass jokes and barbed jabs at each other. “We would have these crazy conversations over breakfast and tears would be rolling down our faces because everything was so funny,” Glam said. “So we decided to make a show out of it, at least to entertain each other.”

The duo had been filming scenes for the show all afternoon. After our interview, they ushered me into Glam’s bedroom for the next scene, a spoof of the week’s biggest news: the escape of convicted murderers David Sweat and Richard Matt from Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. Pretending to be Sweat and Matt by putting on hoodies and bad Italian accents, Alig and Glam discussed—what else?—seeing their pictures on TV.

But this bizarre scene was nothing compared to what happened later that day, when Alig was interviewed by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. Apparently, Alig’s three-year stint at Clinton Correctional Facility—and his long history in the public eye—qualified him as a “celebrity expert” on inmate culture. He’d also appeared on CNN earlier that week, dressed in a bright red shirt emblazoned with the words “Call My Agent,” to discuss the same topic. With each remark, Alig unfailingly drew attention to his own background as a party promoter. When Kelly asked how the convicts were able to hide the sounds of their escape, Alig pointed out that music was often blaring in the prison until 6AM. “It’s louder than a nightclub!” he exclaimed.

Before he became a Fox News pundit and former king of New York’s demi-monde, Alig was a misfit kid from South Bend, Indiana. His mother, Elke Blair, was a German immigrant who moved to the United States after marrying his father John, a computer programmer she met when he was serving in the military during World War II. When Alig was four, his parents divorced, and he stayed with his mother. In a 1997 interview with the New York Daily News, she described her son as a “sensitive, a straight-A student who didn’t like sports,” and preferred TV shows like I Love Lucy. As a teenager, she said, Alig worked at a men’s clothing store after school, and was often the first to pick up on the latest trends, like wearing leather ties or listening to Devo.

But being on the cultural cutting-edge set Alig apart from the rest of the kids at the public Penn High School—as did his homosexuality. “Quite a few times Michael came home with a black eye, bloody nose, torn shirt,” Blair told the Daily News. “‘I got into a little scuffle,’ he’d say. I know now he was ashamed.”

In 1984, Alig graduated in the top 3% of his class, and got a scholarship to Fordham University in New York. He struggled to fit into the conservative Jesuit college, which was hardly the escape he’d hoped for. Like many other small-town boys trying to make it in the big city, he quickly found himself in over his head. Within the first semester, after a breakup with a boyfriend, Alig tried to kill himself by overdosing on antidepressants prescribed by his doctor back in Indiana. He survived—and came out to his mother over the phone when he woke up a few days later.

But his miserable stint at Fordham also paved Alig’s road to nightlife. One night, a fellow student who was dating the artist Keith Haring brought Alig to one of Haring’s parties at Area—a short-lived, mythical nightclub with immersive installations that would change every six weeks, including a pool designed to look like a bowl of alphabet soup (for the “Food” theme) and a ramp whizzing with skaters on the dancefloor (for “Gnarly”).

“I’d just come from Indiana, and it was like this magical world; the air just felt electric,” Alig told the Huffington Post about this pivotal first night at Area. “I could just feel that everything in the world really was coming out of this place. And I had to be a part of it.”

Alig decided to devote himself to breaking into this glamorous new world, and started working as a busboy at Danceteria, a three-floor club that was the era’s most vibrant creative incubator—at various points, Madonna worked there as a waitress, Sade was a bartender, and LL Cool J an elevator attendant. In 1985, Alig transferred from Fordham to the Fashion Institute of Technology, but dropped out after a year. Meanwhile, he continued working his way up the nightlife social hierarchy, persuading Danceteria’s owner Rudolf Piper to let him throw his own parties at the club.

Andy Warhol, then the reigning king of New York’s glitterati, was everything Alig and his friends aspired to be. “We were all going to become Warhol Superstars and move into The Factory,” Alig told Interview in 2010. “The funny thing was that everybody had the same idea: not to dress up but to make fun of people who dressed up. We changed our names like they did, and we dressed up in outrageously crazy outfits in order to be a satire of them—only we ended up becoming what we were satirizing.”

Warhol’s death in 1987 opened up the playing field for a new generation of nightlife stars, and Alig’s parties spread from Danceteria, Limelight, Area, and The Palladium to Red Zone, The Palace, and World. To draw crowds into these venues, he would throw guerilla-style “outlaw parties,” where Alig’s costumed friends would hijack quotidian locations like Burger King, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s, ATM vestibules, and subway platforms, blasting music from a boombox and dancing until the cops showed up. Conveniently, Alig always made sure a club was nearby to continue the revelry, complete with another of his marketing tactics—an open bar. By March 1988, Alig was on the cover of New York Magazine, with writer Amy Virshup dubbing him and his gang the “Club Kids,” a name she’d picked up from Piper.

But there was a darker side to Alig’s entrepreneurial flair. Disco 2000, Alig’s iconic party at the Limelight from 1990 to 1996, was known for subversive, extreme performances—like a woman who once had sex with a dancing amputee’s stump, and a man who’d drink glasses of his own pee. “There was always this anarchic edge to Michael’s plans that made them so tempting,” wrote former club kid Fenton Bailey on the blog for his production companyWorld of Wonder, which was behind Party Monster and RuPaul’s Drag Race. “Michael himself got into the habit of peeing into bottles of beer and handing them out as free drinks, and peeing off the balcony of Disco 2000 onto the people below.”

As Alig’s parties got more and more extreme, so did his drug use. In the beginning, Alig was “actually almost drug free,” Limelight, Tunnel, and Palladium owner Peter Gatien told celebrity news site uInterview. By 1992—five years after his New York cover—Alig told me he was binging for days on a cocktail of heroin, Special K, Rohypnol, and cocaine. “The kid who had always laughed at junkies had become one,” wrote Bailey in the same blog post. “The life of the party who threw himself down stairs just to stir up more drama was now so fucked up that falling down stairs was all he could do.”

Alig told Interview he started relying on drugs to keep up with the empire he’d built. “The pressure had become intense, and we needed to be on something because you’re up all the time.” He also justified the binges as part of his performative critique of celebrity culture. “Strangely enough, I really saw it as taking this art project to its extreme. I was the kind of person who says, ‘Let’s see how far we can take this. Let’s see what happens.’”

But Alig was trying to push the boundaries of New York nightlife just as the authorities were waging war on it. In October 1995, after an eight-week undercover investigation, Limelight became the first club to get shut down by court order, with city lawyers asserting that drugs were “rampant” and sold in an “open and notorious manner.” (It was allowed to reopen a few weeks later.)

Mayor Giuliani’s anti-nightlife campaign wasn’t just a legal issue—it was cultural one, too. When Peter Gatien was arrested in 1996 for allegedly supervising a narcotics ring at his clubs Limelight and the Tunnel—which the US Attorney called “virtual Ecstasy supermarkets”—the New York Daily News noted that “the busts were aimed at bringing the Ecstasy-fueled Generation X dance parties called raves to a halt.”

The struggle between these opposing forces came to a head on March 17, 1996, when a club kid named Angel Melendez showed up at Alig’s apartment on West 43rd Street, where he would sometimes crash over the weekends with Alig and his roommate, Robert “Freez” Riggs. Melendez was paid $200 a night to work at Alig’s parties as a host, and sold drugs on the side. What happened next was a “silly, pushy catfight” over money Melendez was owed, as Alig recently put it to the New York Post.

Alig told me that he and Riggs were high on a combination of ketamine, heroin, Rohypnol, ketamine, and crystal meth when Melendez started biting him. Freez then hit Melendez with the handle of a hammer, and Alig wrapped a sweatshirt around his hand and smashed it into Melendez’s face. “Maybe it was the combination of me doing it for too long or having more strength than I realized, but Angel stopped writhing,” Alig explained to the Post. “We laid him on the couch, thinking he was unconscious. It wasn’t until a few hours later that we realized he was dead.”

Leaving Melendez’s body in the apartment, Alig and Riggs fled without reporting the death. Instead, they continued partying; later, in September of 1997, Riggs would tell police that they returned to the apartment five to seven days later to “do something about this terrible mess.” The corpse was starting to decompose, so Freez left the apartment to pick up a box, sharp knives—and heroin. Alig did ten bags and chopped up Melendez’s body in the bathtub. Then, reported the Times, the two put the remains in a box, took a cab to the West Side Highway, and tossed them into the Hudson River.

After the crime, Alig continued to throw parties while casually telling his friends that he and Freeze had killed Melendez. According to the Guardian, he even showed up at the Limelight with the word “Guilty” written on his face. Many people assumed he was joking, or trying to pull off another attention-getting stunt. But Alig claimed that Gatien freaked out when he told him what happened several weeks after the murder, responding, “You’ve just jeopardized a thousand people’s jobs. The clubs will be closed down.” In April, Gatien’s wife handed Alig a severance paycheck. “They thought I was involved in this crime and didn’t want to be associated with me,” Alig said.

When Michael Musto wrote about Alig and Gatien’s falling out in his column for the Village Voice, he alluded to the fact that Melendez’s disappearance was beginning to turn heads in the nightlife community. Melendez’s brother Johnny had been desperately searching for him in clubs all over the city, offering a reward for any tips. In June, the mystery reached the cover of the Voice under the headline “A Murder in Club Land?“

Neither the public nor Alig knew it yet, but Melendez’s torso had actually washed up in the waters off Staten Island in April. It was only identified by the coroner in November. Alig told me he was arrested on December 4, 1996 in a motel in New Jersey, where he would frequently spend the weekends with his heroin-dealer boyfriend, getting high and watching America’s Funniest Home Videos. He and Riggs pled guilty to manslaughter in October 1997, with Alig serving 17 years. Riggs was released four years earlier in 2010 for good behavior.

The next time I saw Alig was on a sticky late-summer evening in August. In the two months we’d been apart, a new documentary by director Ramon Fernandez called Glory Daze: the Life and Times of Michael Alig had come out. On June 25th, Alig also had two solo art shows open, at Lower East Side galleries Castle Fitzjohns and LESpace. Both exhibitions displayed paintings he’d made in prison, with a portion of the proceeds from the LESpace show going to non-profit charity ATOC, which provides art therapy to victims of trauma.

Walking into a bar in Williamsburg, I found Alig scarfing down nachos and a soda next to a beefy, clean-cut friend. “This is Patrick,” Alig said with a wink. “He doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s my boyfriend.”

“I don’t go that way,” Patrick quickly clarified, smiling through a mock sigh.

At Alig’s feet lay a messy pile of rolled-up paintings, a laptop, and other knick-knacks. When I asked what they were for, he dropped the news: he was moving into Patrick’s spacious, beachside condo by Coney Island. Also leaving Glam’s place was Peeew!, which Glam and Alig were going to start filming in front of a live audience on August 22 at Lovegun, a gay club in Williamsburg. With all of these developments, it seemed like Alig’s life was getting better and better.

After the meeting, Patrick went home, and Alig and I took a stroll down Bedford Avenue, searching for some ice cream in lieu of dinner. Shortly after 9PM, he realized with a start that he was late for his nightly check-in with his parole officer—but he decided to delay the call.

After eating our ice cream, we parted ways. Leaning against the subway gates as strangers swarmed around us, I asked if he’d encountered any backlash for his plans to re-enter the nightlife game, or if he would reconsider that decision if he knew it would upset Melendez’s family. Alig said he hadn’t spoken to Melendez’s relatives because of the plea deal, but if he knew they were upset by the fact that he was doing events, “it would impact my decisions.”

Still, he wasn’t sure what else he should be doing with his life. “I can’t stop making art or thinking of these crazy projects,” he explained.

“Everybody in this country can do whatever they want to do,” Alig said with a determined jut of his chin. “I found this out because I had to, moving to New York and not knowing anyone—I had to make things work. It’s the same for this show. I have this tenacious part of me that keeps doing it until it clicks.” He gave me a raw look stripped of all flamboyant posturing, then disappeared into the subway. It was nearly midnight, and I realized he still hadn’t called his parole officer.

A few days later, the backlash finally exploded, and it wasn’t pretty. The rumblings began with a Facebook post written by a 26-year-old promoter and journalist named Dream (formerly known as Mark Dommu). Dream threw a monthly party called Boop! at Lovegun with a fellow promoter named Paul Leopold, under the name The Culture Whore. When they found out that live tapings of Peeew! would fall on Saturdays, the same night as Boop!, they decided to move their event away from the club.

In her post from August 14, Dream explained her reasoning: “Michael Alig straight up MURDERED someone, and we should not be supporting him, especially in a nightlife/entertainment context.” She continued: “If you want to build some kind of community space, don’t let murderous clowns on parole use your bar.” The comments on Dream’s post were divided, with some arguing that Alig had paid his legal debt to society and should be allowed to move forward. But one of Alig’s most vocal opponents was Charlene, a 26-year-old transgender drag performer who is a member of the queer collective House of Bushwig. Over email, she reiterated Dream’s sentiments on Alig. “I speak for the overwhelming majority when I say that Michael Alig is not welcome in queer Brooklyn nightlife under any circumstances. Whatever Michael Alig did for nightlife died with the man he murdered.”

That weekend, Lovegun’s manager Pez Epstein sent Alig a text saying the club’s owners had decided to cancel the event. Alig emailed Page Six reporter Richard Johnson with the news, and on August 17, Johnson turned the brewing scandal into the talk of the nightlife community with a flashy headline: “Club Kid Killer’s latest project is being boycotted.“

Dream felt like Page Six had gotten things wrong. “The whole story has been twisted,” she said on the phone, referring to Johnson’s decision to introduce her primarily as Next magazine’s nightlife editor. “They make it sound like I used my position at Next to get them to cancel the party.” Dream said Alig had emailed her boss at Next accusing her of journalistic misconduct, but “this was a business, artistic, and moral decision that had nothing to do with my work. We felt strongly that we couldn’t be doing an event in the same space as a murderer.” She added that she never called for a boycott, and accused Alig of “always trying to create this narrative that he’s the victim.” “It’s really delusional,” she added.

Despite Alig’s assertions that he’s a changed man, New York nightlife might not be willing to accept him back into the fold. The posterity of their community, said Dream, is ultimately what’s at stake for today’s generation of club kids—many of whom ascribe to queer ideals of community building and self-empowerment over debauchery and cynicism.

“Alig paved the way for what’s happening today, but I also think we’re set back by it,” Dream said. “Nightlife took a long time to recover from what he did to it. When I hear that word ‘club kid’ I kind of cringe, because it seems like it’s all about excess with no substance. That energy coming back into nightlife scares me.”

Calling me from a ferry to gay stronghold Fire Island, Dream’s partner Leopold questioned Alig’s motives. “If he really wanted to make a difference, why not work with people who are struggling from substance abuse? It doesn’t seem like he’s moving on at all—it seems like he’s trying to capitalize on the fame he garnered through murdering someone.”

Lovegun manager Epstein, on the other hand, said that Dream was overreacting. “Everyone deserves second chance,” Epstein said. “Besides,” he said, “Lovegun is a bar—not a church.” Alig, for his part, seemed unfazed by the backlash and determined to make sure the show went on. “Failure is not an option,” he told me with conviction. “After all of this, we really have to get it done right.”

On August 28th, I received a text from Alig asking if I’d seen the new flyer for Boop!, which had moved to a bar near my apartment. I said I’d noticed that it had Party Monster star MaCaulay Culkin’s face on it. “It’s weird, right?” Alig said gleefully, referring to Dream. “It’s like [s]he’s obsessed or something!”

A few weeks later, Lovegun reversed its decision and reinstated the party. Shortly after sunset on October 10, I went to the Williamsburg club for the second edition of Peeew!‘s live taping. Two towering drag queens struck my name off the list. Inside, it was a distinctly more grown-up scene than Alig’s glory days at the Limelight, but was still probably the wildest thing happening in the neighborhood before dinnertime. There couldn’t have been more than a few dozen people circling the bar, mostly groups of 30-something gay men in dark winter coats, with splashes of more colorful characters in the crowd—possibly hired by Alig himself. At one point, a svelte dancer stripped off his leather thong and thrusted his hips to Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction” while erecting a crucifix against his groin, his dick perfectly tucked between his legs.

Alig and Glam were seated on a small stage surrounded by cameras, dressed in sharp blazers and commanding the room’s attention with a bawdy spin-off of “pin the tail on the donkey,” calling on audience members to “pin Justin Bieber’s dick on RuPaul’s body.”

At the bar, I met a conservatively dressed couple in their 40s named Nick and Marisa, who used to go to Alig’s parties and now live with their kid in Westchester. They’d found out about tonight’s event through Alig’s DJ’s Instagram. When I asked them how they felt about Alig’s past, Nick glanced at his wife and replied, “A lot of us did fucked up things as kids. Should you still be punished for that?” Similarly, when I asked the hulking blonde MC of the evening why she wanted to work with Alig, she tossed her hair saying, “I’m not a judgemental person. And I love people who turn their lives into a work of art.”

Alig was enjoying the attention, sure, but I suspected there was another reason why he was pouring so much effort into his parties and painting—because he believed art could be the ticket to his redemption. Watching him flit between his admirers, his face brightening whenever a friend or fan screamed his name— Michael! Michael! Let’s take a picture!—I was reminded of an Alig quote I’d read in an article that one of his prison friends had written about him for Deadspin.

“Art redeems morality, does it not?” Alig told his friend in the piece. “Our culture forgives Woody Allen and Roman Polanski for the accusations against them. Ezra Pound was basically forgiven treason for his brilliant poetry. You say you managed to get over what happened between us because you found me talented. I hope the world can do the same.”

On a Friday afternoon in November, I rode the F train to the last stop, Coney Island, and walked to a gated residential neighborhood where Alig had been living with Patrick since August. The posh-looking apartment I’d seen in pictures turned out to be a two-floor duplex, parked so close to the beach that you could hear the roar of the ocean from the doorstep.

Alig opened the door mid-call, talking on speakerphone with an unidentified male friend about who should be on the guestlist and which promoters to work with for that weekend’s Peeew! event—” He doesn’t bring anyone in! He hasn’t done anything for my website!” Even after asking if I wanted some lemonade and returning from the kitchen with a glass, he continued walking around the house speaking loudly on the phone. I took the chance to survey the living room, which looked out towards an umbrella-lined patio with a grill, and beyond that, the glistening waters into which Melendez’s body had once disappeared.

When Alig finally hung up, he took a seat at the kitchen table across from me and explained that he’d convinced Patrick to let him stay there for free, in addition to investing in his upcoming clothing line. “I’ve found people to take care of me since I moved to New York, and it’s got to be a father figure thing—Rudolf [Piper, owner of Danceteria] was the first one, then Frank Roccio at the World, then Maurice Brahms at Red Zone and the [Ice] Palace, then Peter Gatien, and now Patrick.” His voice dropped to a whisper as he admitted to a Freudian slip: “I call Patrick ‘Peter’ sometimes.”

As if anticipating my puzzlement over what Patrick was getting out of this, Alig continued, “It isn’t a manipulative relationship. He likes to live vicariously through me, and I keep this house very clean—I’m on my knees cleaning this floor every single morning.” He paused and added a little spin: “It doesn’t cost him anything for me to live here. He’s getting a clothing line for [feeding me] food, basically. That’s a good deal!”

Our conversation turned to nightlife, as it usually did. Three days earlier, the 17th edition of a gay nightlife tradition called the Glammy Awards had taken place, and I asked Alig if he’d heard about it. The second the words came out of my mouth, he shot me a withering look, exploded off his chair, and trundled up the stairs to the second floor. Through the ceiling, I could hear him throwing things around and hissing to himself: She asks me if I’ve heard of the Glammys? Unbelievable!

For a few minutes, sitting in lengthening shadows as orange sun set below the Verrazano bridge, I suddenly became aware of how alone we were. A silent fear shot through my spine. Up to this point, I’d brushed aside warnings to be careful about my safety around Alig, trusting a gut instinct that he was no longer dangerous—at least, not in a violent way. What if I’d misjudged?

When Alig returned with a scowl on his face, he haughtily thrust a folded piece of paper towards me. “I started the Glammies,” Alig sniffed, and I realized that I was holding the program for an awards ceremony held at the Limelight on September 2, 1992. In gold cursive script, it read: “Michael Alig & Kelly Cole present—The Glammies—The Club Academy Awards.”

Opening the page, I scanned the list of categories—”Best Party,” “Best DJ,” “Platinum Ho Award (Biggest Slut)”—recognizing nominees who’d later become nightlife elite, like DJ Junior Vasquez, scene queen Susanne Bartsch, and photographer Patrick McMullan. Later, when researching the Glammys, I found multiple articles crediting the newer version to founder Cherry Jubilee, and neither her interview answers nor the Glammys website mention Alig’s version. Perhaps in the worst slight of all, they hadn’t even invited him this year.

On a level, Alig’s frustration is justified. This erasure of his legacy—intentional or not—seemed to speak to the fickle nature of the nightlife industry, where old concepts are often recycled, making it difficult to distinguish between appropriation, homage, and sheer coincidence.

Alig himself wasn’t immune to borrowing ideas from previous generations; for one Disco 2000 party, he sent invitations on pieces of paper contained in vials of pee-colored liquid, a gimmick that recalls the invitations for Area’s opening party: slips of paper buried in pills you had to dissolve in water. In turn, many of today’s best parties echo Alig’s famous stunts. When fashion designer Telfar threw his NYFW afterparty at a White Castle back in September, or the NYC music label UNO took over a fried chicken deli for their holiday celebrations, it was impossible not to think of club kids dancing in a Times Square McDonalds at one of Alig’s outlaw parties.

My time with Alig was running out, so I suggested we walk by the water, hoping a change in scenery might make it easier to do what I knew I had to next: break the friendly camaraderie we’d been building over the past seven months, and start asking uncomfortable questions about the murder and his time in jail. We put on our jackets and stepped into the sand, the salty ocean air whipping against our bowed heads. But my interrogation plans were dashed when Alig whipped out his phone and started broadcasting through Periscope, keeping the camera trained on his face as he told his viewers that he was taking a stroll on the beach with a VICE journalist. After a few minutes, he stopped the stream, looking crestfallen. “Look, the retention rate is bad.” He flashed his phone at me. “That means people stopped paying attention.”

Back at Patrick’s house, Alig took me to his room, which I discovered was a small attic you had to climb a ladder to get up to, overlooking the living room without the privacy of a dividing wall. One side of the room had been turned into a tiny studio, with his pop-art paintings stacked against the wall. On the other, a black couch served as his makeshift bed. We sat down, and knowing that it was time for our talk, Alig stretched some blankets over us, pulling a teddy bear out from behind a pillow. He reached into a plastic bag bulging with boxes of Cry Baby Tears and tore one open. Popping the sweets into his mouth with the bear cradled sweetly in his arms, Alig looked like he was 5 years old—instead of nearly 50.

“I want to ask you about the murder,” I said slowly. He barely flinched, looking at me without even blinking. “It bothers me when people call it murder because it wasn’t—it was manslaughter,” he insisted. “It was not premeditated. We didn’t wake up and say, ‘Let’s kill Angel tonight.’ To me, there’s a huge difference.”

“What’s that?”

“The difference is between something that could be forgivable, and something that isn’t.” We were silent, and the sounds of Patrick watching TV in the living room drifted upstairs.

“You don’t want people to think that you’re a bad person,” I said.

“I’m not, Michelle, I’m really not,” he said, his voice rising into a plea. I was surprised to see tears pooling in the corners of his eyes. The club kid’s ultimate mission, he reminded me, was to help outcasts blossom into who they really are. “That’s what I like to do,” he said. “A bad person doesn’t like to do that.”

Alig seemed determined to convince me that he was an ethical person. “I cared about the people who worked for me,” he said. “If a club didn’t pay somebody, I paid them myself.” He continued: “It’s funny, because that’s what spurred the argument. Angel came to get his money. He had accumulated something like $1200 or something,” he said, referring to the wages Melendez was owed for being a host at Alig’s parties.

According to Alig, around the time of Melendez’s murder, Limelight’s management received a tip from an insider that agents were planning to raid the club and arrest a list of people they believed sold drugs there, in order to shake out information about owner Peter Gatien, who they were investigating for tax evasion (Gatien was convicted in 1999 and deported to his native Canada, where he lives today with his family.)

Alig said that list included Melendez, who first showed up to the club at 2AM demanding his wages. The bouncers turned him away on Alig’s instructions—but Melendez showed up at Alig’s apartment anyway, around six hours later. “He felt slighted and wanted us to go out of our way to feel fabulous again,” Alig posited.

Then, Alig turned to me conspiratorially and asked, “Have you done ketamine?” I told him I had. “Thank god, because it’s so hard to explain what it’s like to other interviewers who haven’t,” he said. All the ketamine he’d done—combined with the other drugs—made him feel like he was living inside the movie he was watching at the time: Fassbinder’s 1972 film about a tortured romance, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Describing the incident using the language of a dream, Alig recalled, “I just remember this massive blob, all of us crashing into glass with blood spilling everywhere—that was how I imagined it. Freeze hit him when the handle of the hammer, but he didn’t hit him hard enough to break the skin.”

Alig said they left Melendez on the couch thinking he’d wake up. In the morning, they realized he wasn’t breathing. “From that moment on, it felt like we were in a movie,” he said, repeating the same metaphor as before. “It just felt so unreal.”

“Maybe the murder was an accident,” I said, referring to his suggestion that the whole thing had happened in a drug-fueled blur. “I think what repulses so many people is what you did afterwards—leaving Melendez to rot in your apartment while you partied for a week, returning to get high and chop his body up, and bragging about it to your friends.”

“In some versions of the story I’ve read online,” I added, “you even injected Drano into Melendez’s veins. Stuff like that makes you seem like a monster.”

“We didn’t inject Drano!” Alig protested. “We put ice, Drano, baking soda, and probably other things on the body. We thought it would mask the smell. We didn’t know what to do—we were thinking two minutes ahead.” Then, Alig told me, he and Riggs stole the drugs Melendez had in his backpack, and a rarely-mentioned fourth person who was present at the scene of the crime, Daniel Auster—son of famed novelist Paul Auster—stole his money, $3000 in total. (On January 21, 1998, Auster pled guilty to possession of stolen property in exchange for five years probation.)

Going through withdrawals in solitary was crazy. It was the first time in my life that I experienced pure hopelessness—and it gave me more reason to use drugs.

Running away from the apartment to keep doing drugs was classic junkie behavior, Alig explained: they just wanted to keep getting high and not face reality. And telling his friends about the murder wasn’t bragging. “It was unloading,” he said. “Everyone I told became part of the conspiracy, so that took some of the guilt away.”

In what seemed yet another attempt to provide an ethical justification for his behavior, Alig said that he and Riggs finally decided to get rid of the body not just to save their own skins, but to preserve the jobs of everyone working for the Club Kid empire.

“Peter [Gatien] said when I moved in, ‘No drug dealers, no suicides and no overdoses.’ He said that if any problems [happened], 800 to 1000 people would be out of work. Now I’d just destroyed a family’s life, and I was going to destroy 800 more. My thought was, ‘Let’s stop this. Let’s not make it any worse.’”

“I wanted to die that night,” Alig continued, talking about the night he chopped up the body. “We just did bag after bag after bag [of heroin] until we got to a point where we just didn’t care. And I just said, ‘Either one of us is going to die, or we’re going to do this.’”

“I can’t imagine being high enough to chop off a body,” I said.

“If you had interviewed me the day before that happened, I would have said the same thing,” he replied. “When you’re in that situation and so much is riding on this, it’s really like being on the third floor of a burning house—do you jump or not? You have to or you’ll die. It was about the survival of myself and the people in the club.”

“I wasn’t the first promoter to be found with a dead body in my apartment,” he continued. “It was only a big deal when it happened to me because I was the director of a club, and the DEA was investigating us. It was impossible for it not to be a huge story.”

The problem, Alig said, is that people couldn’t distinguish between him and the satirical character he’d created: “When you combine that persona with the crime, it’s an ugly-as-fuck combination.” His drug addiction, he posited, compounded this image problem even further. “I had all the symptoms of a sociopath, but the symptoms associated with a sociopath are almost identical to those of a drug addict,” Alig said, matter-of-factly.

Why should anyone believe that drugs were to blame, I asked, and not a convenient excuse? “I hate using drugs as an excuse,” he replied, even though that’s exactly what he seemed to be doing. “But there’s no way around it—I took drugs to not feel. I was craving love. Heroin replaced it.”

When he landed in jail, Alig said he kept himself numb by continued doing drugs like heroin and Percocet, procured from inmates in the Bloods gang—which he claimed hooked him up because they ran ecstasy to the clubs he threw parties in.

“I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror, and I wasn’t shaving,” Alig said, his gaze drifting out the window towards the black sky. “I knew what I really needed was to experience the pain of what I’d done so I could pay for it in a way—even though nothing I could do could pay for it. You can’t apologize for something like this. It would almost sound like an insult. It’s not something I could say in words.”

Alig wound up spending extended stretches in solitary confinement because he kept failing his drug tests. “Going through withdrawals in solitary was crazy,” he said. “It broke me a couple of times.” To try and get out, he’d hurt himself in front of the officers: “My arms were all cut up,” he recalled. “I swallowed toilet cleaner, I banged my head against the wall, I swallowed a battery, and took 120 tablets of Tylenol. It was the first time in my life that I experienced pure hopelessness—and it gave me more reason to use drugs.”

Today, he said he’s a staunch believer that the punishment should be abolished for non-violent inmates. In fact, he told me that two weeks before, he’d gone to the Department of Corrections to give a speech on the subject, and received a standing ovation.

In 2009, at 43 years old, Alig had a mid-life crisis. “I thought I would never get a boyfriend or a job [when I got out],” he said. “I was afraid of all these young, creative people that I can’t compete with. I thought my life was over, basically.” His therapist told him he had to get sober, and Alig basically decided to try it as a dare, not believing that anything would change. “When I stopped using drugs, I realized that I was delusional,” he said. Alig turned to art, which gave him hope again. “I put paintings on my cell wall, and everybody would stop by my cell and look at the colors, and it was the first thing I delved into that excited me other than drugs.”

A year out of jail, Alig seemed to think of himself as an inspirational figure. “I get emails and letters from people who were on the verge of suicide,” he said. “They felt that they could make it because I did.” Helping others, he explained, is why he decided to stay in the public eye. “The first day I came home, I had an existential moment,” he said. “Part of me wanted to hide in a cabin; the other part was telling me to do what I’ve always wanted to do.”

“I won’t lie and say I don’t like attention,” he admitted. “I’m not going to apologize for that. But I found a powerful message. People who are sitting in their 40s or 50s thinking, ‘Why bother?’ Bother because it’s worth it.”

Even though he ended our conversation on a high note, I spent the subway ride home in a gloomy daze, lost in a fog of ambiguity. I thought the tough questions I’d saved for last would help straighten things out, but instead, my thoughts criss-crossed and doubled back like an unsolvable maze.

I weighed everything Alig told me against everything I’ve figured out on my own. Yes, I believe wholeheartedly that what he wants most is to be loved. Although he kept his composure while talking about the horrors he endured in solitary, he came close to tears—twice—when I suggested that people thought he was a bad person. Even while I was inching towards the door, all he wanted to do is show me the cute guys he was talking to on dating apps. I also believe that his drug addiction contributed to both to the end of Melendez’s life and the destruction of his own.

But the inspirational message he hawks also feels more self-promotional than altruistic, coated with the grease of a used car dealership. I find it difficult to buy that Alig’s goal for throwing parties is to be a good role model, just like I find his claim that he chopped up Melendez’s body for the sake of saving his employees’ jobs pretty ludicrous. I also saw how Alig turned into a bully when threatened by Dream, accusing her of blackmail and journalistic malpractice instead of trying to understand why some people might not want him around.

From what I’ve seen, everything Alig does, from his interview with Megyn Kelly to his relationship with Patrick, always circles back to himself. Even if he does help others, Alig’s biggest drive always seems to be his own self interest. And while I don’t think this makes him a dangerous sociopath, I do think it qualifies him as a shrewd opportunist for whom power can be a dangerous weapon.

This solipsism perhaps explains Alig’s tendency to exaggerate the truth to the point of lies. He told me that his therapist in prison diagnosed him with histrionic personality disorder, which is characterized by the American Psychiatric Association as “a pattern of excessive attention-seeking emotions, including inappropriately seductive behavior and an excessive need for approval.” “My therapist said I was the most extreme case he’d ever seen,” he said, which almost seems like a set-up for a joke—because, well, of course someone with a histrionic personality disorder would claim to be the most extreme case.

If Alig really wants to redeem himself in the eyes of his detractors, and pay the moral debt that some people feel he still owes to society, doing charity or activist work seems like the obvious route. Yet aside from giving the speech on solitary confinement, or donating some of the proceeds from his art show, Alig was unable to provide examples of work he is doing to further the anti-drug redemption narrative that he is selling.

More than a reformed drug addict, motivational hero, or any of the other new personas that he’s created for himself, Alig strikes me as a bonafide hustler—someone who moved to New York from a backwards town in Indiana and become the king of nightlife in the time it would’ve taken him to graduate from college. Similarly, he left prison with a felony on his record and no money or job prospects; a year and a half later, he has launched a YouTube show, a Brooklyn party series, a merchandise line, and a fledgling painting career—all while developing a dedicated online fan base and living rent-free.

When I first started spending time with Alig, the backlash against his parties captivated me because it brought up complex questions about crime and punishment, and how the nightlife community polices itself. But the more I dug into his psyche, the more I realized that the deepest dilemma at the heart of his tale is also my own.

Everyone who regularly sacrifices sleep to the rave gods understands that there’s a darker side to all the endless fun. Nightlife attracts people who like extremes, and hedonism can erupt into moments of transcendence just as easily as it can spiral into drug abuse, mental illness, and physical harm. I know this darkness exists because I’ve touched it, in cramped bathrooms at grimy afterparties where bumps are offered from wandering hands. So, more than anything, I pursued this story to know if what happened to Alig could also happen to me. Maybe this is the source of his enduring grip over our collective imagination—maybe everyone is fascinated with the danger of going too far, of crossing beyond the point of no return. But the particular sadness of Michael Alig—what some would say is his real punishment—is that only he knows what it feels like on the other side, alone, wrestling with the question of what comes next.

Michael Alig died of a heroin overdose alone in his Manhattan home on Christmas Eve, 2020, shortly before midnight.

I don’t remember how I first came across DoubleBlind magazine, but when I did, it felt like a revelation. In today’s media landscape, there is nothing quite like it: wild tales from the esoteric fringes next to portraits of wisened indigenous elders, musings from mystics and poets, and deep investigative reporting on drug culture’s shape-shifting faces—all accompanied by lush photography that could have been plucked from the pages of National Geographic… if the art editors were on mescaline. It was nothing short of a full-spectrum exploration of contemporary psychedelic consciousness, each issue like a feast of the subcultural stew that it emerged from.

Eventually I started writing for the magazine and its newsletter, and even served a stint as a contributing editor. DoubleBlind co-founder Shelby Hartman became a good friend, and we’d spend afternoons co-working at her Victorian cottage, taking breaks to do yoga under a lemon tree, or sample some of the many psychoactive products that were constantly showing up on her front porch. While I always admired Shelby’s sharp editorial eye and grueling work ethic—traits made it possible to publish a magazine amidst a dying industry—I also began to see her as something deeper: a psychedelic lore keeper, and a critical node in the mycelial network behind today’s psychedelic renaissance.

This spring, Shelby and her DoubleBlind co-founder Madison Margolin (also a notable psychedelic journalist!) published The DoubleBlind Guide to Psychedelics: A Road Map to Tripping, Microdosing, and Beyond. Ostensibly, it’s a Psychedelics 101-style primer that covers the basics of substances like mushrooms, LSD, DMT, and MDMA, including how to prepare for and integrate the trip, proper dosages, and harm reduction tips. But what makes this book go far beyond a basic guide is their inclusion of indigenous issues, drug policy, psychedelic elders, and headier cultural practices—with their writing on these topics deeply informed by seven years of reporting in the magazine. It’s as if Shelby and Madison wanted to say: if you’re going to do psychedelics in 2026, it’s not enough to know how to microdose a mushroom. You should also know how to be a psychedelic person.

On a recent evening, DoubleBlind hosted a book launch party in the hilly canyon of Topanga in Los Angeles, where a small group of friends and fans sat on cushions in a living room to listen to live sitar and Indian classical music. A few hours before the event, Shelby called me to ask if I’d host a Q&A with her about the new book. “Michelle, I know this is last minute, but I feel like we could do this conversation high, while sliding off our chairs!” Below is an edited version of our rather spontaneous chat—the book is also out now, cop it via Hachette.

Read more

Sup fam!

It has come to my attention that many of you are interested in (or at least munching whimsically at the idea of) starting your own Substack and would like some advice. When I launched Rave New World in 2019, all I knew is that trad media was dying and I needed a new platform to write about raving and drugs—in my own crazy gonzo style. Over the years, it’s become a lifeline, opening up horizons that I couldn’t even imagine—and at the same time, presenting all kinds of challenges and annoying shit I’ve had to work around.

So many writers (and non-journalists) are now flocking to Substack, which has moved from the periphery to the center of the media ecosystem; as the space gets more saturated, I think it’s important to consider whether this is really right for you.

While this newsletter is such a powerful tool for reporting on subcultural subjects, I think starting your own platform is a big shift that requires new ways of thinking about engagement and the dissemination of (sub)cultural information—especially if you’re interested in writing about the underground. This Friday, I’ll be hosting our next virtual hang for subscribers, where I’ll do a brief presentation on my journey as a Substacker writing about “alt” subjects, and then take any of your questions.

The meeting will last about an hour, and is open to all paid subscribers. Everyone is welcome, even if you’re just curious or bored and want to gab. The video link is after the paywall—hope to see you at the hang!

Subscribe now

Read more

Subscribe now

The high holidays of Bicycle Day and 4/20 are usually a time for getting so high your brains bleed out your eyes, but this year, the news felt more disorienting than the drugs themselves. On April 18, Trump signed an executive order that lifted federal roadblocks to psychedelic research—the most monumental leap in drug policy reform since the Nixon era. The executive order, which also directly funds $50 million towards research into an obscure psychedelic called ibogaine, officially launched us out of the DARE chapter and into a new era of conservative psychedelia. No longer associated with the wacky conspirituality of the Q-Anon shaman, the right-wing psychedelic movement is now characterized by a sense of moral justness and bleeding-heart patriotism that recodes these substances as Godly and righteous.

It is mind-boggling that the cosmic Right ultimately cinched the political victory that liberal-leaning activists have spent decades fighting for. Yet, in retrospect, this was probably the only way to make psychedelic legalization a truly bipartisan issue, and get conservative Christian legislators on board the proverbial magic bus. So where does this leave the hippies, heretics, and hedonists—in other words, the rest of us?

At this point you’ve probably watched snippets of the Oval Office scene, or caught some of the countless memes. If not, it’s worth going over some of the surreal highlights. First, Joe Rogan, who helped broker the deal, stood right behind the President and opened with a speech about how the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 was actually a government attack on the Civil Rights movement—not about the dangers of the drugs themselves. This was remarkable, because it shows how the racist roots of the War on Drugs has become an accepted truth, even on the tough-on-crime Right. Another stunning admission from Rogan is that it only took a couple texts about ibogaine’s effectiveness on opioid addiction to prompt Trump’s move. While pharma companies like Lykos and Compass have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get these drugs rescheduled through the clinical-trials-to-FDA pipeline, Rogan’s influencer clout turned out to be a direct line into the President’s approval. “[Trump’s] text came back: ‘Sounds great. Do you want FDA approval? Let’s do it,’” Rogan said. “It was literally that quick.”

Notably, ibogaine was the only psychedelic compound specifically mentioned in the executive order, which also directed $50 million towards accelerating research into the drug. Much of this will flow into Texas, which has already committed $50 million of taxpayer dollars into its own ibogaine clinical trials. Seemingly overnight, a drug that the average person has never even heard of before this week has become the dark horse frontrunner of the psychedelic movement. “Can I have some, please?” Trump joked as he struggled to pronounce the word “ibogaine.” “I’ll take whatever it takes. I don’t have time to be depressed.” Then he put his pen to paper, and boasted that this was getting done under his administration—not Biden’s.

I’d been hearing hints that this moment was coming from sources in Texas, where I spent a lot of last month reporting on conservative psychedelia and ibogaine. Austin, in particular, is becoming America’s next psychedelic frontier—a place where a fierce commitment to libertarianism and independent thinking has incubated a new wave of culture operating outside of traditional party lines. While chasing the story at SXSW (and swiping all the cringey free shit I could find), one afternoon I followed a group of policemen into a hotel where ex-Texas governor Rick Perry was moderating a panel on the wonders of ibogaine. As we rode up the hotel escalator together, I realized the cops were looking for the same talk, and expressed my surprise that they were psychedelic enthusiasts. “I’m looking for samples!” one of them laughed. Another cop told me that actually, a lot of police and first-responders have tuned into psychedelics ever since the movement shifted its focus towards PTSD and veterans; he also recommended that I check out In Waves and War, a Netflix documentary about former Navy SEALs going to Mexico to take 5-MeO-DMT and ibogaine.

Inside the darkened ballroom, Perry, who has fashioned himself into the folksy elder statesman of right-wing psychedelia in his late-stage career, discussed how Texas was able to pass a bill through its extremely conservative government. “We focus on the veterans, because the veterans population is a very sellable population to go to the legislature with,” Perry said. To his left, Americans for Ibogaine founder Bryan Hubbard embodied the soul of the movement, speaking with the fiery poetry of an evangelical preacher about how ibogaine is the antidote to this country’s spiritual famine—a way to save everyone who is “lethally estranged from their soul.” Hubbard, who cut his teeth as a lawyer in Kentucky in charge of the state’s opioid abatement program, railed against the broken healthcare system as “fictitious legal realities designed to do violence to legitimate reality” by “monetizing sustained human misery.” Delivering his elegant diatribes in a strong Appalachian twang, Hubbard sounded like the Terence McKenna of this generation.

Then Perry disclosed that he had been an “anonymous 73-year-old” who’d participated in a Stanford study on ibogaine, and afterwards, the neurosurgeon looking over his scans was shocked that the atrophy in Perry’s brain was “completely gone”—a miracle! Leaning into a sense of pathos, Perry said that even though his political consultant had warned him not to throw away his reputation on “hippie shit,” the lives of veterans, these young men and women who have served our nation, were more important than his name. “I’ve become completely convinced of the efficacy of this medicine,” Perry said slowly, drawing out each word in an East Texan drawl. “What we are on the verge of can literally change the trajectory of the world we live in. I believe that with all my heart.”

Ibogaine’s sudden star turn is a fascinating plot twist because it allowed the conservative coalition to sidestep psychedelics’ countercultural baggage. The drug is derived from a West African shrub called iboga, and has little recreational use outside of psychedelic retreats, scientific studies, and indigenous practices; unlike MDMA or mushrooms, “no one’s ever going to hear about an ibogaine rave,” as Hubbard likes to say. Hubbard also often recounts how his experience on the drug was brutal and not something he’s eager to do again. This is because an ibogaine trip is extremely, and sometimes excruciatingly, long—with an intense visionary peak within 8 to 12 hours, and lingering side effects including nausea and a sense of stimmy up-ness for up to 72 hours. Ibogaine also has a significant risk of cardiac events, including fatal arrhythmias, that has resulted in 38 documented deaths since 1990—it’s therefore physically much edgier than the classic psychedelics, making ketamine’s effects on blood pressure look like child’s play. For this reason, careful medical supervision is required, and some patients spend the entire trip in a hospital bed.

That said, I know at least one psychonaut who is into microdosing iboga root bark powder to combat addictive impulses, so “recreational” use does happen, but right now, only amongst the very deep heads. That psychonaut told me that he buys the powder on the clear web, and the drug “meets the moment as far as people’s frustrations with the compulsive energy that’s around.”

You could argue that ibogaine’s anti-recreational traits fit into the Christian model of suffering and penance for sins—this idea that one has to undergo a transformative ordeal in order to gain salvation. The pleasure of tripping balls is never mentioned by Hubbard, who in his cowboy boots and blue jeans, is about as far as you can get from the Day-Glo Pranksters guzzling acid orange juice while trying to dose the world. When Hubbard takes the pulpit, he speaks of ibogaine instead in reverent tones, positioning it as a God-given molecule that’s the antidote to the spiritual famine fueling America’s opioid crisis—an impoverished void he experienced first-hand in Kentucky. This framing, along with the grassroots veteran movement that has coalesced around it, has been key to advancing ibogaine. “Democrats early on were like, yes, we support this, but we’re not going to get tagged as the druggies,” explained Logan Davidson, Policy Director of Texans for Greater Mental Health and a key lobbyist behind Texas’ ibogaine bill. “That’s where the conservative influence provides cover. Each side gets permission from the other side to do this.”

While this week’s news was a monumental step forward for the entire psychedelic movement, there is no doubt that the conservative coalition is building on decades of cultural normalization and policy victories built by liberal activists—such as those who successfully fought for decriminalization in Oregon and Colorado, How to Change Your Mind titan Michael Pollan, and Rick Doblin the founder of MAPS, whose advocacy around MDMA trailblazed the path for what’s happening today. Yet, none of those people were in the room when Trump signed the order. Psychedelia’s swing from the vehemently anti-war era of the 60s to its contemporary framing as a patriotic duty to veterans—at a time when the United States is engaged in multiple high-stakes global conflicts—is particularly complex. Trump himself pivoted to Iran in the middle of signing the order, mentioning that roadside bombs that maimed many American veterans were supplied by the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a 2020 drone strike he’d ordered—“that was Iran that did that,” he said, before going back to the issue at hand. While none of the leftists I’ve spoken to over the last few months have advocated for denying veterans psychedelic care (in fact, many are actively involved in veterans groups), the increasing militarization of psychedelics is an issue that few seem to have a coherent stance on. Most are choosing to have a “wait and see” approach around what comes next.

On the same weekend that Trump’s executive order was issued, many members of the psychedelic left gathered at Psychedelic Culture, a conference in San Francisco organized by the Chacruna Institute, a non-profit that describes its mission as “[advancing] psychedelic justice through… uplifting the voices of women, queer people, Indigenous peoples, people of color, and the Global South.” On the last day of the conference, at a closing panel that featured MAPS leadership Rick Doblin, Ismael Ali, and Betty Aldworth, a small group of protestors disrupted the conversation to question MAPS’ ongoing work in Israel, where researchers have been conducting group MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for survivors of the Hamas attacks as well as IDF veterans with PTSD. I was not at the conference, but I’ve watched a video clip of the incident, and news of the disruption trickled its way to me via friends who were present—the TLDR, they said, was that the protestors were trying to get Doblin to denounce what’s happening in Gaza as a genocide. Doblin refused to use the “g” word, but Ali, a Muslim-American who took over as co-Executive Director of MAPS last year, stepped forward and did use the term while the audience erupted in applause.

Of course, this incident didn’t capture the full breadth of the discourse at the Chacruna conference, and protestors holding leaders’ feet to the fire is generally a good thing. But the contrast between typical leftist infighting—over the use of a word—while the Right stood in the White House scoring a historic win was too-perfect of a snapshot of the moment. The next day, I called Ali to discuss the disruption, and he told me he’d had an extended conversation with the protestors about MAPS’ work in both Israel and the West Bank. Then Ali cited Doblin’s remark in 2023, after MAPS’ own conference was disrupted by protestors around indigenous issues. “[Rick] was like, it’s a good sign that protests are happening, because it shows there’s still a revolutionary spirit in the movement.”

Our conversation then turned to the executive order. Ali noted that some people at the conference were upset that MAPS’ pioneering work is being sidelined; neither Doblin nor Ali were included in the White House’s official press release which featured statements from many industry and government leaders applauding the move. “We didn’t have to be in the room to have set the groundwork to make that possible,”Ali said. “This was a threshold moment in the field. Trump, in a backhanded sort of way, interrupted the partisan cycle around drug policy.”

Yet, even though MAPS released its own statement applauding the federal action, Ali’s comments at the Chacruna conference were more candid. Responding to the protestors, he said that he and Doblin have spent years debating with each other about what happens when psychedelic therapists work with active duty soldiers—are they just making it ok for them to go back to war? One of the insights from their studies, he noted, is that many veterans who go through psychedelic healing realize they were going to war on behalf of a system that never really cared about them. “That doesn’t mean they all become peaceniks,” he said, “But a lot of them do.”

Ali then spoke to the predicament that he and the leftist movement’s leadership are facing. “When you’re trying to appeal to the worst people in the world, it’s really important that you don’t tell them that people who commit violence regret it after taking psychedelics,” he said. “If we’re really trying to change culture with psychedelic science, it’s really giving master’s tools, master’s house.”

However, when I pressed him further on where these recent developments leave the psychedelic left, Ali deferred—he’d had a long day full of interviews, and admittedly, my brain was starting to hurt too. Instead, he left me with an open-ended question: “We’ve appealed to the worst people in the world,” he said. “Congratulations, we’ve succeeded. Is that really what success is?

SXSW might be the best festival ever for scoring random free shit—and I’m saying this as a professional swag bag schemer. The music, film and tech gathering has been gradually cannibalized by corporate interests since it began in 1987, going from a scrappy showcase of Austin’s music scene to a networking bonanza for tech founders and angel investors raising millions on LinkedIn.

Sure, there’s still some cool music sprinkled into the mix—shoutout to Diles Que No Me Maten, a psychedelic post-rock band from Mexico City whose freewheeling excursions into saxophone-tinged free jazz and spoken word carried the punky zing of their home city. But such discoveries feel like sideshows, and for the most part, SXSW’s subject position resides squarely within the machine.

This was my first time at SXSW, and I scrolled through hundreds of panels, networking sessions, pitch competitions, and sponsored lounges on the conference’s app, desperately trying to find programming that didn’t feel like it was trying to sell me something. Quickly, I realized that SXSW is the eyeroll-free safe space where marketing gurus learn about the “four types of attention” they must master for effective campaigns; tech bros pick up “skills to succeed in an AI-powered world;” and Spotify’s new CEO plugs the company’s mission of “delivering creativity to the world.”

The irony of company representatives embracing the ethos of Big Tech and Big Pharma while simultaneously claiming to be “changing the game” was so soul-deadening that I had no choice but to surrender to the base, craven part of my soul that delights in collecting junk food, plastic tchotchkes, and reusable tote bags bequeathed by random acts of corporate largesse. SXSW is known for attracting big brands competing to outdo each other with their glossiest approximations of culture, and while marketing budgets were supposedly smaller this year, the decentralized format of the conference, which took place in dozens of event venues and hotels all over downtown Austin, created even more opportunities for sponsored activations and “immersive experiences.”

“What kinds of free shit will I fill my tote bag with today?” I asked myself every morning, as I joined the slipstream of tech bros and music executives flowing down Congress Ave. Redistributing the wealth of foam plushies and free barbecue sponsored by some pharmaceutical company to my friends who couldn’t afford $1995 festival passes thus became more than a little game to keep myself sane—it was praxis. While most of the freebies will probably end up as landfill, a couple items were admittedly pretty cool.

Here is all the free shit I scored at SXSW, ranked from least to most cursed:

MDMA SUPPLEMENTS 😈

Biohacking bros have an extreme nerdiness around neurochemistry that comes in handy for recreational drug users interested in frying their brains responsibly. Third Wave podcaster Paul Austin introduced me to Vessel, a company selling supplement stacks to counteract MDMA’s neurotoxic effects. The elaborate protocol, which is so over-the-top it borders on absurd, costs $100 for two trips’ worth of supplements, and is split into six batches that must be taken one hour before ingesting MDMA, then 12, 24, 36, 48, and 60-hours after. (The MDMA itself is not included.) Ingredients include some usual suspects (magnesium, Lion’s Mane, L-theanine, ashwaganda), but also lots of deeper cuts that I’ve never heard of and are probably a bitch to source yourself. NGL, I kinda love this.

PROTEST FLYER 😈😈

On the first morning of SXSW, I came across five people standing outside the JW Marriott, holding up signs and waving a Palestinian flag. Most passers-by were ignoring them, and when I grabbed one of their fliers, a protestor turned to me with surprise and shouted “THANK YOU,” his eyes hungrily locking into mine.

Turns out the demonstrators were with the advocacy group United Musicians and Allied Workers, and were trying to draw attention to SXSW's continued ties to the military industrial complex. The backstory: in 2024, over 80 artists dropped out of SXSW to protest sponsorship from the literal US Army; in response to the backlash, the festival announced it would cut ties with defense contractors going forward. This year, that promise was quietly removed from its website, and SXSW partnered with a local startup incubator whose clients include defense contractors Palantir and BAE Systems.

This protest flier is slightly cursed because it points to an interesting complexity, especially in this era of escalating global warfare: as Texas Monthly pointed out, “the part of tech that actually is booming—military innovation—is exactly the part SXSW badge holders seem least comfortable embracing.”

QUESTIONABLY LEGAL WEED DRINKS FROM OUT OF OFFICE / TENUR 😈😈😈

Something weird and kind of lit is happening in Texas right now with weed. Even though cannabis is still illegal in the state, super cute dispensaries and smoke lounges are popping up all over Austin, selling hemp-derived edibles, vapes, and buds through a legal loophole in the 2018 Farm Bill. That loophole is closing as regulators actively crack down on these products, but during SXSW, it was still giving grey-market golden era.

One afternoon, I pulled up to a house party hosted by Tenur, an AI-powered social networking app for “the ones who know their network is their greatest asset.” The crowd was mostly 40-somethings with snatched surgeries and sunburnt tans frolicking in a pool; I hid under an umbrella and dissociated while sipping this sparkling THC drink from a brand called Out of Office. The high is always kind of mid with these alt-cannabinoids, which make you feel kind of blunted without the radiant full-spectrum stoned experience—but the taste was surprisingly refreshing.

GARNIER’S MAKEUP REMOVER AND BOOTLEG SMOOTHIES 😈😈😈😈

Rolling Stone’s Future of Music showcase was purportedly the place to check out rising talents, so on the night that Lola Young was playing, I got in line at The Moody Theater behind a bunch of burly German music executives wearing white button-downs. In the lobby, a brand rep was giving out bottles of Garnier’s micellar makeup remover—a product you might recognize from the discount bin at CVS—which was inexplicably paired with a smoothie in a strange shade of off-white, the cheap plastic bottle emblazoned with a sad little sticker in the shape of Garnier’s logo. Not sure what the ROI was for a multi-billion dollar beauty company giving people bootleg smoothies to drink while watching a band, but there’s definitely a spreadsheet out there justifying this confusingly cursed pairing.

PROTEIN PASTA, FANCY CHIPS, AND A GOLF POLO SHIRT FROM ULTRANATIVE x ARENA HALL 😈😈😈😈😈

Ultranative is an Austin-based private equity firm that invests in psychedelic startups and alternative health companies. A while ago, I wrote about their attempt to create a plant-based MDMA pipeline for DoubleBlind’s (paywalled) newsletter last year, so when a calendar invitation popped up on my phone, reminding me that their SXSW day party was ending in 15 minutes, I jumped on a scooter and raced over to Arena Hall—a new members club for “influential builders and thought leaders”—to see what’s up with them.

The venue was teeming with young professionals who looked like they had invested wisely in diversified portfolios. (Overheard: “I had a meeting with Spotify’s CEO this morning…. they can’t afford me.”) The healthy slop bowls were overflowing, and a table was stacked with giveaways of polo shirts for golfers. In the outdoor patio, someone sitting on a panel conversation on the science of sugar was wearing a MAHA hat, and when an audience member chimed in, he referenced something that had the approval of “Bobby”… yes, that would be RFK Jr.

When I peeked into the swag bag, I noticed it contained a bunch of food you might find in the aisles of an Erewhon— a box of protein pasta, a giant bag of gourmet chips, an almond flour cookie, a nut butter brownie. That’s when I realized I’d made it to the tip of the political horseshoe, where California’s wellness influencers meet Austin’s MAHA-adjacent techies.

GODREJ AER’S DISGUSTING AIR FRESHENER

“This will change your life, sis,” a smiling woman said, reaching into a cooler and handing me two plastic packets as I walked through the streets. If I looked closer, I might have seen her fangs. Instead I received the gifts with gratitude, thinking they were innocent little face wipes to combat the 90-degree heat. Alas, I had accidentally welcomed into my sphere one of the most cursed items of the week—air fresheners whose sickening scent would haunt my every waking move, sticking to my skin like some abominable demon. I placed this product in my friend’s bathroom, and as soon as I opened the plastic, a nauseating, stomach-curdling stench flooded the entire house, as if someone had used toxic-grade cleaning products to mask the smell of a rotting corpse. When I threw it into the trash minutes later, the nightmare didn’t end, instead continuing to seep out of the trash can for days. Even the cat yowled and hissed, as if she knew that something unholy had been unleashed.

BOTTLE OF WATER FROM TESLA’S ROBOT

One afternoon, after watching a panel where Serena Williams touted her investments into woman and minority-run health companies, I wandered into a parking lot where a huge crowd was gathered around a Tesla cybertruck. At first, I assumed some lame celebrity was making an appearance, then realized this audience was gathered to witness something far weirder: a live demo of Optimus, the company’s humanoid robot, which is still in beta testing and slated for slated for sale in 2027. Smug-looking Tesla employees ushered dozens of humans willing to wait in a long line to interact with a robot stationed behind a bar. After handing over a bottle of water, the robot flexed its creepily dexterous hands into a peace sign, as if anticipating the barrage of excited photos and selfies.

It was unclear if this robot was being controlled remotely by AI or some underpaid operator in a third-world country—a similar demo in Miami sparked an online debate after a robot fell backwards, and made a motion as if removing a VR headset. All I know is that I’m tired of billionaire man-children bringing to life their sci-fi fantasies. This corny Daft Punk-looking ass is the future of robotics? It even had the nerve to ask for tips.

Jeff Mills is playing in San Francisco this weekend, at a very special double-header where he will celebrate the 30th anniversary of his iconic Liquid Room, Tokyo mix at 1015 Folsom, and perform his 2023 live score of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on March 7 at Palace of Fine Arts. The shows are part of a yearlong series of events celebrating Detroit’s originators presented by local promoter As You Like It. Tickets and info here. LA heads can also catch him playing with Developer on Sunday at Work.

Techno Wizard Jeff Mills beamed into the simulation known as “Earth” on a laser, piercing through the clouds through a hole in the sky and taking in the possible utopia surrounding him with unblinking, amphibious eyelids. Perhaps the DMT entities who watch over this god-forsaken realm sensed that the earthlings needed something different amid the dust of collapse. So they gave us techno, an immaculate technology manufactured at the nexus of the ancient-future, and appointed The Wizard as one of its storied keepers. At least I think that’s how the mythos goes.

Even as he coasted through 80s Detroit on a skateboard, raising his fist with Underground Resistance, and absorbing the synth disco, cosmic funk, and proto-electro on The Electrifying Mojo’s airwaves, The Wizard hovered in a threshold outside of time. While peers looked to submerged civilizations and cybernetics for inspiration, The Wizard spoke to the stars, his antennae permanently tuned towards the frequencies of the future, his mind spinning through the rings of Saturn. Here was a man with an extraordinary talent: the ability to jump between timelines and intercept otherworldly transmissions.

Listen to Live at the Liquid Room, Tokyo, enshrined as the greatest DJ mix of all time. In that seventh-floor club under the seedy neon of Shinjuku, The Wizard flexed with a raw manic energy so pure that he had the crowd on their knees as records flew to the floor, scratching and twisting and teetering on the verge of collapse as he tore open wormholes in search of communion with the machines. As the needle slid across the surfaces of the discs, motorik rhythms driving against whiplash backspins, propelling forward before bringing it all back, the precarity of it all became a metaphor for the frailty of information transmission—and the insistence that we persevere when it all goes wrong. The Wizard’s undying desire to go beyond merges sci-fi and fantasy to conjure sounds we’ve yet to feel—if you wanted to believe in something, why not believe in this.

But even as he probed the impossible, the Wizard gazed into the dark halls where he presided night after night, and saw inside the dancing bodies a decay caused by wanton hedonism without direction—a rigidity of the mind that needed to be further coaxed open, towards the limitless possibilities beyond the decadence of the dancefloor. The membrane between this world and the next was thin, but few dared to walk in. Instead they shuddered at the thought of it, closed their eyes, or held up their phone screens. Still, the Wizard refused to retreat into the gilded memory palace of nostalgia, or the bloated inertia of success, ascending into his role as an elder statesman without ever losing his cool. He stretched the elastic skin of techno over new forms—orchestras, spiritual jazz, psychedelic scores to silent films—and never stopped preaching his prayer of techno-optimism.

But as Big Tech’s oligarchs tightened their grips of enslavement by algorithm, some wondered if The Wizard had become an avatar for a future forestalled. Can the speculative Afrofuturism of the techno elders still be a counterweight to the grim reality of digital feudalism? How quickly have the instruments of our promised liberation turned into the tools of our surveillance. Even the machines know we are lost. As I wandered through the mist wondering how to download the reality upgrade, a disembodied voice suddenly emerged from a black screen. From behind the veil The Wizard granted me a few moments to hack his mind, and learn how he’s thinking about some of the most pressing questions of our time.

Jeff Mills is playing in San Francisco this weekend, at a very special double-header where he will celebrate the 30th anniversary of his iconic Liquid Room, Tokyo mix at 1015 Folsom, and perform his 2023 live score of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on March 7 at Palace of Fine Arts. The shows are part of a yearlong series of events celebrating Detroit’s originators presented by local promoter As You Like It. Tickets and info here. LA heads can also catch him playing with Developer on Sunday at Work.

Subscribe now

🎙️ As a bonus for paid subscribers, the audio version of this interview is available at the bottom of this post! Also a reminder that our first subscriber hang is today at 4:20pm PST, details here.

Michelle Lhooq: Hi Jeff, I wanted to start with kind of a fun question. Whether it’s through dreams or mind-expanding psychoactives or spirituality or even direct experience, I was wondering if you’ve ever had a compelling alien encounter?

Jeff Mills: [laughs] No, no… I’ve never had a compelling encounter.

Not even in the subconscious mind?

Well, in my youth, a few strange things happened. But… I think that those were more dreams than anything else.

[laughs] I believe in dream visitations.

Well, actually, a few years ago, I’ve seen something quite interesting on a flight. You know, looking out the window, something clearly was at an angle going up into the atmosphere, not that far from our plane, that was a brownish, grayish color. And it was at an angle that was definitely not an airplane. But I think that’s kind of common now, right? I think that many people are seeing things like this, even more so now.

Well in the age of SpaceX, I think it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish.

I mean, if you run the numbers and you do the calculations, chances are great that we’re not alone. That’s for sure.

So I was watching Metropolis the other night and it struck me that the speculative vision of the future that the film presents has in many ways already arrived. I’m curious, as so many advances that once seemed like science fiction become real, how has your vision of the future shifted from back when you were thinking about this in the 80s and 90s?

I’m getting more and more excited, actually, as time moves on. I like to look back to compare say, 100 years ago, 1926 to 2026, looking at similarities between what was happening then and what’s happening now, in order to be able to have some type of idea of what may be happening in 100 years from now, and how we’ll get there. And it’s kind of interesting to look at the signs, you know, the signals and the signs.

The signs of what?

Well, 100 years ago, we were in the Industrial Age—that ended around 1950 after the war and the Computer Age started. It’s looking very likely that the same thing is going to happen. The Computer Age is going to end around mid-century and we’ll move on to the next boom. And I think that might have something to do with telepathy. I think that either our senses will be enhanced, or we will gain more [senses]. Or technology will allow us to be able to do things in those types of directions, with that type of skill. So reading someone’s thoughts and reading someone’s mind and feeling and sensing and understanding things non-verbally and things like that, I think might have something to do with the latter part of this century.

“The Computer Age is going to end around mid-century and we’ll move on to the next boom. And I think that might have something to do with telepathy.”

That’s fascinating. So you think we’re going into a post-verbal paradigm.

I see the signs of it now, with AI and what we may need advanced technology for. So, protecting ourselves from nature, and making ourselves live longer, and be more healthy, and learning more, and experiencing things that we physically would not normally be able to experience.

Right now, if you want to go to Chile or Italy, you have to get on a plane to do that, and you have to experience it [by] walking around. But I think that by [the latter half of the century], the simulation of it will be so advanced that basically you’ll be able to experience and feel everything that you would normally feel if you were physically there.

That shift that you’re talking about is one that’s based from language to feeling, right? Telepathy implies some kind of intuitive sense, rather than direct communication. It’s the realm of psychic connection and feeling.

I think that either by consequence or by choice, we will have to change as well. My sense is what’s coming is going to require us to change the way that we think about certain things, in order to be able to go a bit beyond history, and go a bit beyond mathematics, and go a bit beyond science, into things that we probably never thought that we would be thinking or exploring. But I see the signs of that now, actually.

I wanted to talk to you a little bit about AI. It’s obviously been such a mind-bending shift for all of us in this era, and it’s making a lot of people think about things like the consciousness of machines, the ethics of machine-human relationships, and things like that. I’m curious how this AI era has altered your thinking on our relationships to synthetic consciousness, or synthetic agents?

The creation of AI isn’t something that just popped up. We have been thinking towards this type of existence for quite a long time. In this film Metropolis, the character creates the robot, and the robot transforms into an unrecognizable form, and people are fooled by this robot. I think that we’ve been wishing to have this for a very long time. So I think that AI is something that we’ve all worked towards: technology to the point that it becomes our best friend and our helper and our assistant. It can solve problems that we can’t solve, and can see things that we can’t see. I’m actually quite optimistic about it. The discussions around AI remind me of the discussions leading up to the change of the century, Y2K, when people were panicking about all the computers crashing. Because no one figured out how to make the dates change or something like that. So this panic is valid, but I think that the benefits and the rewards of how it’s going to help us outweigh and overshadow the fears that we have now, right?

“The discussions around AI remind me of the discussions leading up to the change of the century, Y2K, when people were panicking about all the computers crashing.”

I guess the big difference though is that when the Y2k thing happened, everyone could see that it was much ado about nothing, whereas we’re already seeing examples of real world harms that are being caused by AI. But I’m curious—

—I just have to add, it’s not like we did not have opportunities and chances to create safeguards so that people can save their jobs, right? And still, for some reason, we’re letting it evolve in this direction where people are going to be allowed to fire massive numbers of workers, and the society—we are letting this happen. So like I said, we have been working towards this for quite a long time, and there are things that we can do: we can really press our politicians and our government to actually do something about it. But I don’t know. In my opinion, we’re a bit too passive about it. So I just have to assume that we’re on some course [that] everybody is wishing to have.

There’s a big debate right now within the music world, too, about working with AI. Obviously Bandcamp caused a lot of drama by banning music that uses AI. Have you experimented with using AI and producing music? Or are you interested in doing that?

No, I haven’t. I haven’t made an effort to, really. The way I produce music is still very… it’s the old way. It’s connecting one machine to the next machine. There’s no computer in my studio. It’s very old fashioned, and it’s very hands on. But I’m waiting for the moment where, even in my small little studio, I can have this assistant that can do things for me and work on things while I’m working on other things, and and someone that I can speak to and throw ideas at, and those ideas could be kicked around. I look forward to situations like that. But yeah, I like options when I’m in the studio. I don’t record music really in one particular way. So for very complex things, for instance, if I’m working on a conceptual album and it’s on the subject of something that is just a bit beyond my knowledge, or just beyond understanding it, AI might be able to rationalize certain things to make sense [of it]. I might be able to sit down and compose music, for instance, [about] traveling through a black hole, and what that could feel like physically—if that were possible. You know, thinking about things like that. So I can see myself using [AI] at some point.

I love your optimism around all of this, but sometimes I find it a little bit hard to connect with, because I think that as people living in this technocratic hellscape that seems to be the present, there’s this feeling that the system is really closing in, and that the scale of technological greatness that’s so magnificent to behold is also being gate kept by the elites. Even the counterculture of raving and these tools of our liberation, like psychedelic drugs, they’re all being co-opted and commercialized and used against us.

You know, I hear you. But I just understand that the people have the power. The power is with the people. It’s not what politicians or…

It’s all so lethargic, and it feels like what you said before: there’s barely any pushback. How do we reclaim some of this agency?

I don’t know. But we have the power, we can change things when we want, and I think that the world is the way it is, because we allow things to happen. When we don’t want things to happen, we change them. I think people are thinking maybe more about the consequences of what it may take to be able to change things, and put things in the right direction. Maybe that is creating the reluctance to get out into the street and shut the country down and shut it down, right? We have what we have, because this is what we’re allowing ourselves to deal with. But I never forget this point: the power is always with the people. It’s always been that way, no matter what it looks like, or what it seems like—trillionaires and billionaires controlling everything. But they can’t do anything without people, right? That’s just how I feel, and I don’t know why we don’t shut it down. At times I think we should, I think it’s necessary, but I don’t know why.

“I never forget this point: the power is always with the people. It’s always been that way, no matter what it looks like, or what it seems like.”

Well, I think partly it’s a crisis of imagination. And you’ve spoken about this a lot: about how the techno scene suffers from this lack of imagination, to come up with a vision of a future that isn’t based in hedonism and nostalgia and escapism. Do you feel like the rave can come up with the new vision of the future that fits the needs of today?

Sure, sure. I think so, and I think that there are enough people thinking in that direction to make it happen. But will they do it? Will they say, OK, enough is enough. We want something that we can really be proud of, and we can hand down to generations, and they can practice this art form and and be able to live a normal life, and send their kids to college. I mean, we can do that. It’s always been this possibility to have discussions about certain things that we could be doing to make things better for us in the music industry. But people would prefer to go to Ibiza instead, and just party and not think about things like that. So I hear what you’re saying, but in the back of my head, no one’s controlling what I do with music. I have an incredible amount of freedom of what I can do in my own studio. I just need electricity and a little bit of time and ideas and dreams, and that’s all, really, that I need. Everyone that produces music in this industry has the same situation.

So it raises the question, why don’t we have a large variety of different types of ideas, and reasons why we were making this music is? It’s by choice. People are choosing to not do certain things, not use music for certain reasons, by choice. We’ve been working for this world that we’re living in right now for quite a while. And many of us, like myself, are shocked to see the way that it is, and how people are getting away with doing all these crazy things. But we definitely have the override switch. The people have that. I don’t know why we don’t use it. It’s a mystery.

Thank you for the reminder that we have this override switch and it’s time for us to push the button. All right. Thanks so much, Jeff. I’ll talk to you later.

Thanks, Michelle

🎙️ Wanna listen to the silky smooth baritone of The Wizard as he fields Michelle’s questions? Subscribe to Rave New World!

Read more

Hey everyone <3

It’s been six (!) years since I started Rave New World, and the community meetups for this newsletter’s readership have taken many forms: mushroom parties, early morning ambient performances in the park, weed raves on Zoom, group microdosing journeys… it’s been an amazing ride.

Moving ahead into 2026, I’m excited to engage with the suppo…

Read more

In June 2023, I attended Psychedelic Science, the largest psychedelic conference in the world. The five-day event took place in a sprawling convention center in downtown Denver, attracting 12,000 attendees from 52 countries, including not just the biggest scientific experts, but also random celebrities, politicians, and billionaires who’d decided to attach their brands to tripping.

On the main stage, nepo baby Jaden Smith, NFL player Aaron Rodgers, and Boomer rockstar Melissa Etheridge yapped about how much ayahuasca had changed their lives, while in the side rooms, wiley entrepreneurs hustled to raise Series A funding while the money spigot from deep-pocketed investors like soap mogul Dr Bronner and tech bro Christian Angermayer was still flowing. In the fluorescent-lit, carpeted halls, briefcase-toting Pharma investors sipped kava mocktails next to rat-tailed hippies, while buttoned-up therapists snapped selfies with feathered shamans, and DMT-vaping psychonauts swapped esoteric trip reports with galaxy brain researchers. Even though direct sales of psychedelics was still illegal in Colorado, vendors in the exhibition hall still hawked pounds of shrooms wrapped in giant plastic bags, while offering samples of LSD microdoses to passersby.

It was a surreal scene that spoke to the power of MAPS—the influential psychedelic advocacy organization behind the conference—as well as its charismatic, 69-year-old founder Rick Doblin, who I would often spot heading out to the Burner-inflected afterparties as I returned to the hotel at 2am, joint dangling from his lips. The psychedelic industry had hit a high point in the hype cycle, buoyed by early clinical trial results in the 2010s that demonstrated how psychedelics are effective for mental health disorders such as depression and PTSD. Emerging from the shadows of prohibition, these substances were quickly shedding their reputations for decadence and delinquency—instead being cast as a paradigm shift in mental health care. Everyone expected that Lykos, the for-profit Pharma arm of MAPS, would fulfill its promise to get FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy within the next year or two. In this window of time, it was like the industry was holding its breath, and everything felt possible—as long as you believed.

In the summer of 2025, I returned to Denver for the next edition of Psychedelic Science. Only 8,000 people were in attendance this time, and the previous edition’s atmosphere of frenzied excitement had dissipated from the building. In the two long years, since the last conference, the dream of psychedelic legalization had been dashed after the FDA rejected Lykos’ application for MDMA-assisted therapy, citing insufficient data, issues with clinical trial design, and a host of other concerns—including whether the drug’s euphoric effects could lead to addiction. Sexual misconduct by a pair of therapists who participated in the trial also led to intense public scrutiny on the ethics of psychedelic therapy, and Psymposia, the leftist watchdog group that aggressively amplified these concerns, was blamed for torpedoing MAPS/Lykos’ efforts and sowing division.

As legalization stalled, funding dried up and stocks collapsed, leading to several high-profile psychedelic startups like Field Trip Health and Silo Wellness to shut down and file for bankruptcy. Industry-wide turbulence seemed to suggest cracks in the dominant systems that were struggling to integrate these powerful tools. Was it even possible for clinical trials to measure the totality of the psychedelic experience? As companies tried to turn these slippery substances into ordinary medicines backed by insurance and co-pays, it seemed like they were also revealing the contradictions in capitalism, as well as cultural fears around pleasure and dependency.

At the conference, founders of psychedelic companies spoke candidly on panels about their failures, including how they had overestimated the public’s desire for expensive psychedelic treatments—leading to the closure of luxury ketamine clinics once hyped as the future of medicine. Some of these CEOs also admitted that investing in social reciprocity programs with indigenous communities were “distractions”—mistakes that detracted from their profit-seeking goals. Many conversations, both on and off stage, revolved around the dark side of ketamine, with the lack of proper regulatory oversight and potential for addiction leading many to wonder if ketamine clinics were a preview of what could go wrong if other psychedelics are commercialized too quickly.

Even the exhibition hall that previously felt like an open-air drug market had been cleaned up, with vendors no longer openly selling psychedelics; indigenous shamans offering sniffs of hapé (sacred tobacco snuff) even got in trouble with security. While the adrenaline rush of unadulterated hope had been neutered by the collective comedown, in many ways, the atmosphere also felt more grounded and connected to reality.. There was no longer a sense that anyone could start a psychedelic company with a pitch deck and a dream.

Now that MDMA was no longer the frontrunner for FDA approval, the industry’s attention shifted towards ibogaine, a South African shrub known to be particularly effective as a treatment for addiction. Just a few days before the conference, Texas Governor Greg Abbott had signed Senate Bill 2308, allocating $50 million in public funding to study ibogaine as a treatment for opioid use disorder and other mental health conditions. Seemingly overnight, Texas became the biggest government funder for psychedelic research, with conservative politicians like ex-governor Rick Perry now these drugs’ biggest proponents. War veterans, who suffer from suicide and addiction at outsized rates, were now the moral center of the psychedelic movement’s more militarized and MAHA direction—strategically highlighted in fundraising, lobbying, and PR efforts because of their bipartisan appeal. Who could be so heartless as to deny life-saving care to vets?

I wandered around the conference in a miasma of increasing confusion and dread. Psychedelics have historical ties to the hippies, draft dodgers, and anti-war movement, but in this befuddling new era, they were being championed by Navy SEALS, Republican legislators, and military vets who spoke about healing the trauma of warfare as a patriotic duty. Meanwhile, MAPS’ attempt to legalize MDMA-assisted psychotherapy had seemingly failed in part because they failed a leftist group’s purity test, but the companies poised to become the new front-runners, Compass and AtaiBeckley, are venture-backed biotech companies with ruthlessly commercial and IP-driven strategies that leave little regard for public benefit. Psychedelic legalization seemed closer than ever to gaining bipartisan, institutional support—but at what cost?

Read more

The Rave Discourse™ is always shifting as it percolates through the after-dark antechambers and digital echo chambers where the raveheads gather to gab. Over the past few years, it feels like the collective consensus has been complexifying, as the conversation turns from celebrating rave culture’s radical potential, to mulling over the limits of raving as a political force—a shift that mirrors the culture’s increasing co-optation and commercialization in the age of Burning Man hegemony and Instagram DJs.

Most of my pontifications on The Sorry State of the Dancefloor happens on this very platform (shoutout to the subs!), but I was recently invited to speak in an ongoing conversation series between psychedelic writers and artists, co-curated by Stephanie Young and Ramsey McGlazer, titled Poetics and Plant Medicine. Held in the cozy confines of Bathers Library—a super cute members-only library in downtown Oakland—the inaugural event that I participated in was called “States of Euphoria,” and centered on rave culture. As Young wrote in the event description:

“The liberatory promises of the rave sit uneasily alongside its entanglements with capitalism, colonialism, and state violence. The party has always been part of the world it seeks to escape. What forms of political desire emerge, or falter, when the rave confronts the conditions it inhabits?”

My fellow panelists were Hannah Baer—a writer, psychoanalyst and meme lord whose barbed insights on raving and revolution are sharpened from sweaty experience as a New York nightlife party girl; as well as Arun Saldanha, an academic whose canonical book Psychedelic White examined the Goa trance scene through a critical race theory lens (the book was also an invaluable source for my essay, “A Post-Colonial History of Psychedelic Trance.”)

Our conversation with each other, and later with the audience, ended up circling many of the most pressing questions and concerns facing rave culture and psychedelics today—it was like a hive mind took over, and everyone was relieved to have the chance to work some shit out, together. I’m excited to share it with you guys below.

(Bay Area folks, don’t miss the rest of the series, which includes upcoming conversations and reading groups on psychedelic tourism, time travel, and Black/indigenous healing practices. More info here!)

Hannah Baer: I was curious how both of you hold this complexity around parties as liberatory experiences, in contrast with more difficult, objectionable, or hegemonic parts of these spaces.

Michelle Lhooq: People look towards raving for the same reason they look towards religion: we’re all looking for some kind of compass. Raving is a way to imagine a more utopian way of being. But I feel the same way about rave culture as I do about psychedelics, where I’m having a personal reckoning over the realization that they are not inherently liberatory. I drank the Kool Aid for a really long time about both, so the trough of disillusionment has been quite intense, and even more so by what we’re seeing today with the militarization of both psychedelics and raving, which complicates a lot of the epistemics that allowed me to go full force into these subcultures.

Arun Saldanha: Maybe this is a cop-out because it’s a little too neat, but I follow Alain Badiou, a Marxist philosopher, and he has these four true procedures. There’s art, politics, science, and love, and all four of them are equally important for human beings to experience. But you can’t expect one to be substituted for another. So in that way, the rave is extremely important as an enlarging of the sensorium. But whether it allows for people to prefigure something like communism is a political question. It would be great if everyone going to rave becomes a communist, but it’s definitely not stamped with the experience.

“The rave is extremely important as an enlarging of the sensorium.”

ML: Arun, you said something earlier, referencing Guattari’s concept of microfascism1, about how the “againstness” of counterculture, and the intensity of it, can be co-opted to make the culture more saleable. That reminded me of how the right wing is now the counterculture, and they’re using psychedelics to engineer some kind of self-healing. These politics confuse me, because the conservatives are also interested in environmentalism and psychedelic therapy… and yet! Their values seem so reactionary.

AS: There’s a very masculinist, eugenic way of thinking about the enhanced body—kind of like Robocop—where drugs have become like a technology to expand, on a superhero level, the capacity to control and to also have self-control. That goes together with this whole reinvention of stoicism. Of course, stoicism doesn’t sit well together with hedonism, but it all becomes this macho post-human mishmash.

HB: Raving, or ketamine therapy, is like a technology that can be used, but doesn’t have an intrinsically political quality to it. Having been in a political moment where it was sort of countercultural is actually a bit arbitrary. I’m attached to an idea that there could be an intrinsically radical social form, and then I’m like, oh, but the Nazis loved nudity. You can always find a right wing person who has a whacked out left wing-coded thing that they love. Maybe it’s actually that the aesthetics are always arbitrary. And actually the Badiou distinction is, the clarity of it is also quite true. But it’s sad for me to be like post-modernism is right and all of your aesthetics are kind of arbitrary.

“Having been in a political moment where raving was sort of countercultural is actually a bit arbitrary.”

ML: There’s an interesting relation between stoicism and raving. Both raving and psychedelics engender this sense of estrangement, and I feel like having this possibility of escape, of otherness, also allows you to kind of hold yourself in a non-reactive state to the world, in a time where we’re being asked constantly to escalate and react to endless meme-driven warfare. There’s something to being cool and unflappable as a stance that raving engenders.

AS: Gilles Deleuze has a line that he picked from Henry Miller, where he says that he loves to get drunk on water. There’s a radicalization of the whole Timothy Leary thing of set and setting, where you agree that an altered state is beneficial to enlarging your subjectivity, and perhaps, forcing a hinge point in your life, but it’s not necessarily through the drug itself. You don’t have to actually ingest something to feel the changing power. LSD really changed visual culture and music, and not everyone was doing LSD to feel that creative pulse.

HB: You said something, Arun, about euphoria itself being a state with borders that could be policed with an in-crowd or an out-crowd. It made me wonder whether the ideal liberatory space would be a space where there was no power differential or authority.

AS: This goes to the old question of anarchism versus communism. Capitalism is a global system, so it is possible to create what Hakim Bey famously called Temporary Autonomous Zones. But capital is intrinsically globalizing, and the power of money is such that it can just be scooped up again for further commercialization. It sounds super pessimistic, and I have a lot of respect for the anarchist tradition, but I don’t think a space without hierarchy is possible. It’s very clear that there’s always going to be incipient state formations in any kind of social situation. So any countercultural or spiritual movement will have something like a desire for a state coming up. That’s just part of how human culture works. But that shouldn’t stop people from trying, I guess!

ML: During the pandemic, I actually went to a lot of autonomous zones that were springing up in places like Minneapolis and Seattle, and I was attracted to them because people kept telling me that they felt like music festivals. I noticed over and over that the euphoria that people were having in these spaces—the fact that people were drinking and doing drugs—was constantly used to belittle them, and to reduce their political seriousness [in the media]. It reminds me of how recreational psychedelic use is also really frowned upon in the psychedelic industry, and it’s this hypocritical double standard. It’s like, “euphoria for me, but not for thee.”

Dig into Rave New World’s past reporting on temporary autonomous zones in Minneapolis, LA, Seattle, Philadelphia, and more:

After the paywall: Hannah, Arun and I chew into some meaty questions from the audience about where the next wave of psychedelic culture is going, the function of narcotic states in today’s attention economy, and how to expand counterculture into new modes of subversion…

Read more

All photos by Peter Tomka / via New Theater Hollywood

On a rainy Sunday in January, anti-ICE activists with walkie-talkies and megaphones slung from their hips patrolled the sidewalk outside New Theater Hollywood, squinting into the mist. The 49-seat black box theater usually stages experimental and one-off shows; its founders Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff previously ran a divey watering hole in Berlin called TV Bar, and have similarly turned New Theater into a critical convergence point where the audience is always a scene. Previous productions have starred queer filmmaker Leilah Weinraub, virtuosic vocalist Colin Self, and nepo baby Kaia Gerber, with casts of it girls and artists performing mostly for their friends.

“The boundaries between truth and fiction are slimmer in a small theater,” said Henkel. She and Pitegoff practically live at the venue, and that afternoon, they were up in the rafters, adjusting a projector light that displayed subtitles for the upcoming show. “The actors are often people you know or care about, and there is a built-in empathy to who is in front of you,” Henkel continued. “You are forced to listen. To be present together. It is very close to love.”

That weekend’s play, titled “La Madre Patria,” (or “Motherland”) centered on themes of motherhood, ancestry, and resilience. It featured a cast of ten Mexican and Indigenous women, many of whom spend their days cleaning houses and working on farms in Sonoma County, a fertile region in Northern California equally known for its vineyards and history of labor organizing. The women are part of a theater collective called Teatro Almas Libres that tells immigrant stories from their own perspectives; plays are often rehearsed in public parks, office spaces, or friends’ garages, and created collaboratively with Jackie Katz, a drama teacher who has been directing their works since 2022.

“ICE arrested and detailed someone a block away from here yesterday,” said Katz, explaining why volunteers were stationed outside the theater. Katz noted that some of the theater collective’s members are undocumented workers, and staging this play in LA, a “hot” city where ICE has had a heavy presence for the last eight months, was no small task. “We didn’t even want to advertise this play on social media too much,” she said. “These women are taking on a lot of risk to be here.”

Katz led me backstage where the women were getting ready, clutching worn copies of scripts while muttering lines to themselves. Their young daughters, who had come with them to participate in the play, swished around in wide ruffled dresses while weaving ribbons into their hair. Socorro Draz, a member of the collective, told me that many women have not seen their mothers in over two decades—ever since they chose to walk over the border. Enacting parts of their lives on stage, she explained, constituted a “healing process” that allowed them to express feelings long buried by the immigrant experience.

Subscribe now

While the anti-immigrant crackdown in the US continues to escalate following the killing of Renee Good, inside the theater’s walls, the atmosphere felt warm and almost sacred. Flowers and medicinal plants like sage and rosemary lined the room, while giant portraits of the women’s mothers hung on the walls like altars. Backstage, the women stood in a circle as Katz led a prayer, chanting “Sí, se puede!”—a common rallying cry for labor unions and civil rights organizations that means “Yes, you can!”—as the lights dimmed.

The play began with the children performing traditional folkoric dances, ruffled skirts flashing in blurs of turquoise and red. Then the women took turns dedicating emotional homages to their mothers, some breaking down in tears of gratitude and longing. In one climatic scene, a cast member draped herself in the bulleted vest of Adela Velarde Pérez, a famous soldadera who fought and supported troops in the Mexican Revolution, while saluting her as a symbol of female strength. Then the women brought out a giant puppet used in Oaxaca and Michoacan folk traditions to bring happiness in times of darkness, gleefully waving its hands with wooden stilts.

In the audience, many people sang along to familiar songs in Spanish, while hooting and cheering for the women at every opportunity. Activist Jesse Sanes from the LA Tenants Union told me that at the previous day’s show, some members of the crowd included Mexican laborers from a nearby Home Depot, who’d heard about the play and been given free tickets. Sanders said that “La Madre Patria” reminded him of similar grassroots efforts, such as film workshops and communal lunches, that have sprung up at Home Depot parking lots and other frontlines of LA’s ICE raids. “These are ways for workers at the front lines to claim and assert power over their territories,” he said. “A lot of self-reflection happens here.”

Katz situated the group’s work within the longer tradition of theater as a tool for raising political consciousness, drawing parallels to Soviet communist agitprop and Italian street theatre in the 1600s, and framing “La Madre Patria” as a contemporary response to Trump’s immigration crackdowns. Constructing a scene, she said, requires examining how to quickly communicate and convince the audience of a message—and get people to truly listen. Quoting Augosto Boal, the Brazilian pioneer of political theater, she said, “Theater is not the revolution. It is a rehearsal for the revolution.”

POETICS AND PLANT MEDICINE: STATES OF EUPHORIA

I am in the Bay Area this week to speak at the inaugural edition of Poetics and Plant Medicine, a series of conversations between writers, scholars, journalists, and artists that interrogates the psychedelic experience beyond familiar narratives and pure advocacy. Co-curated by Stephanie Young and Ramsey McGlazer, and supported by the University of Berkeley, part one is titled “States of Euphoria,” and will take place at 7pm on Thursday, Jan 15 at Bathers Library in Oakland. I am joined by my sis hannah baer—a meme lord who is one of my favorite queer rave writers—as well as scholar Arun Saldhana, whose canonical book Psychedelic White unpicked the racist undercurrents behind the Goa trance scene, and was a foundational text behind my essay “A Post-Colonial History of Psychedelic Trance.”

Here’s the organizers’ description of the event:

“Long imagined as a site of utopian possibility, the dance floor offers a fleeting glimpse of freedom and psychedelic transcendence—if only for the night. As these three writers show, the liberatory promises of the rave sit uneasily alongside its entanglements with capitalism, colonialism, and state violence. The party has always been part of the world it seeks to escape. What forms of political desire emerge, or falter, when the rave confronts the conditions it inhabits? As baer writes: “If we agree that we do not like the way things are, we must ask over and over again, are we subverting them?”

If you’re in the Bay Area, come through! The event is free, and you don’t need to RSVP—just make sure to come early, as space is limited.

The freaks in Singapore are lying low, explained a friend, smoking a cigarette outside an Italian deli fronting for a champagne bar speakeasy in Chinatown. It was my last night in town, and he’d met me in a suit from his corporate job—a grind that allowed him to throw parties that were like gifts to the scene. While we stood in an alleyway, under a horizon of twinkling skyscrapers, he gestured to the shophouses around us, which stood silently in the shadows with their hatches batten down. “A few years ago, right after the pandemic, man—these streets were full of club kids going from one party to the next!” he said, listing the short list of venues that make up Singapore’s underground nightlife circuit. He took another glum drag and continued. “People just aren’t going out like that anymore. The financial anxiety you guys have been feeling in the States, it’s just starting to hit us here now. And if people like me are starting to give up, man… I just don’t know.”

At these parting words, I felt a profound hopelessness. Stories like this are too familiar, and I was unable to envision a way for the Singapore scene to prevail against the forces mounting against it: the real estate squeeze, closures of spaces that once felt like home, lack of late-night public infrastructure, the soaring costs of everything, police crackdowns, increased surveillance, and a general anhedonia borne from the anxieties mentioned above. Even though I know that nightlife ebbs and flows in cycles, it was as if the way forward was narrowing into a dead end. I had an overwhelming sense that the dominant system of capital and order was once again tightening its grip.

Electronic music has always looked at a world in flames, and in the burning horizon seen the inevitability of radical change. When I first started chronicling this subculture in the Obama years, a new wave of techno-feminism and post-Black Lives Matter political consciousness infused dancefloors with an exhilarating sense that collective liberation was just around the corner. This was music “that brings the hardest hit of futurity, the most jolting break with tradition,” as critic Simon Reynolds put it in Futuromania. But these days, a real rave revolution has begun to seem to me like a lie—or more like a vision that shines brilliantly for a brief burst, before it collapses under the weight of its dreams.

Just two years ago, I had been enraptured in the Singapore underground’s dream of blasphemy, as I witnessed—and then chronicled in a short documentary—a new wave of queer parties popping up in abandoned tunnels, movie theaters, and bank buildings across the island, fusing noisy, technofuturistic sounds with Southeast Asian folklore and spiritual traditions. A yearning for a tropical rave tradition connected to the soil of my ancestors had been answered by an incoming generation bold enough to build altars in the blind spots of global capital, and the satisfaction I felt moving next to bodies that looked like kin was distinct. I wished the story didn’t always go like this: a revelatory moment that turns out to be a flash already fading; maybe I would have danced harder if I’d known.

Earlier in the trip, I’d stopped by a cute bar frequented by artists and musicians. The rave circuit had been quiet during this trip, and I was hoping to run into some friends. The bar sometimes hosted DJ nights and was a good place to pick up local gossip; about a year ago, while chatting with a local chef in the smoking zone, I’d first heard about blackmarket drug vapes called “kpods” that were being sold on Telegram. “You never really know what’s in them because it’s usually a mix of stuff, including ketamine,” he said, explaining why they were called kpods. “What does it actually feel like?” I asked. But he’d never tried it, and neither had anyone else I spoke to in the electronic music scene.

I learned that k-pod’s typical consumers were not from the underground club world; rather, they tended to be teenage students who got into vaping from candy-flavored nicotine, as well as hardcore drug users who might also be into meth or heroin. Sprinkled into this spectrum were adult professionals with stressful jobs, “uncles” who typically crush beers at karaoke bars, and other random normies. It was shocking to discover that such a wide swath of Singapore’s population was flouting the country’s strict drug laws—the relative accessibility of vaping, and the veneer of safety around this mode of drug consumption, had created a rift in the sober social order through which they had fallen in.

When I walked into the bar this time, the CDJs in the DJ booth were missing. The speakers were pushed against the wall, like silent witnesses of better days that lingered in the imprints of the plush velvet sofas. A handful of people sipped beers on the patio, but I recognized no one except for a DJ-friend in his 30s who sometimes worked there. We sat down at a table, and he proceeded to tell me about the bar’s recent misfortune: police officers had recently raided the place in search of people smoking vapes—the latest crackdown in an all-out War on Vaping that the government had launched earlier this year.

The kpod loophole in the country’s zero-tolerance drug prohibition had been discovered, and etomidate, the main psychoactive substance in kpods, was reclassified as an illegal drug, meaning that dealers were now jailed and caned. Nicotine vapes have actually been illegal in Singapore since 2018, but in the past, the police tended to look the other way. These days, owning any type of vape resulted in steep fines, and possibly getting shipped away to a mandatory “rehab” program in jail-like conditions. Vaping, in effect, was now criminalized as a drug offense.

I asked my DJ-friend if people were smoking kpods at the bar, and he shook his head. “Nobody lah! But people were stuffing their vapes down their bras and underwear, trying to hide them,” he said. “A few unlucky ones got caught, and they kena $700 fines.” The War on Vaping also led to the bar catching some stray fire: when the cops saw the DJ booth, they warned that spinning records was considered “live music,” which required a permit. Other venues in the circuit had been given the same warning, resulting in a general hushing of the electronic music scene, which had already been under strain. In a way, the crackdown was working. “No one is vaping anymore,” my friend said, taking a drag of his cig. “We’ve all gone back to analogs.”

There were more signs that Singapore’s anti-drug efforts are intensifying. A public hotline has been set up, with citizens encouraged to record videos of people vaping in public and report them to the police—even if they are underage teens. Throughout my trip, I’d also noticed the posters blanketing MRT stations, bus stops, park billboards, and other public spaces that warned about the dangers of vape addiction. In addition to advisories about the higher penalties, the campaign questioned if vapes are really a safer alternative to cigarettes, arguing that many users get addicted to both.

I went home from the bar and started reading everything I could find about etomidate, the main synthetic chemical compound in kpods. The popularity of etomidate vapes, I learned, was not limited to Singapore—the internet was full of concerned media reports from across Asia, where the drug has been given various street names like “space oil” in Hong Kong, and “zombie cigarettes” in Japan. Much of the online reporting highlighted how the legal grey area that etomidate has so far existed in has accelerated its spread as authorities scramble to catch up. The reports also frequently mentioned a particularly disturbing side effect of the drug: erratic physical behavior that one woman in Okinawa compared to “an insect writhing after being sprayed with insecticide.”

This explained the videos I found on TikTok of people purportedly fucked up on etomidate: a teenager falling sideways to a train station floor like a felled tree; two men staggering across a plaza, limbs swinging at sharp angles, heads collapsing toward their knees. Shot from a distance by strangers who’d seized on their bizarre behavior, these clips were often folded into news segments warning of the drug’s dangers. There was something lurid about this “gotcha” footage that filled me with voyeuristic fascination and second-hand shame as I consumed the familiar spectacle of public debasement, reframed through the increasingly normalized practice of citizen surveillance. Even as I resisted the media’s scaremongering, it was hard not to feel like the drug’s effects had crossed into something supernatural and truly zombie-like.

The stuttering, mechanical motions also reminded me of the “tranq walk” associated with xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer saturating the United States opioid supply. The resemblance suggested that these were not typical recreational drugs, but poisons of last resort. In these videos, users seemed to stumble past the threshold of weird-but-harmless intoxication into some disturbing hinterland—an unholy place of oblivion the body visibly resists. What, exactly, was going on with this new drug of the moment? And if the side effects were this brutal, what was drawing so many people into its grip? The further I went down this dark rabbit hole, the more I realized that zombie vapes aren’t just a weird trend. They represent a broader shift in drug culture—a shift that’s already been happening for decades, and whose deadening effects are really starting to hit.

Read more

Consider the wook: a much-reviled dance music archetype that first emerged, in a snarl of matted dreadlocks, in the parking lots of Grateful Dead shows. Dressed in drop-cotch harem pants, wire-wrapped crystal necklaces, and hooded hemp ponchos, wooks wander barefoot, trying to trade shroom chocolates for free concert tickets. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, many wooks migrated to the dubstep scene, replacing their devotion to jangly guitars with a love for the wub. Festivals like Lightning in a Bottle, Desert Hearts, and Shambalah are now festering grounds for the contemporary wookie, and where you’re most likely to catch them six tabs deep, spinning poi to “sacred bass.”

In the 2000s, wook culture became the hairy butts of endless memes in the dance music scene. Our distaste for their feral, drug-addled lifestyles might stem from a deeper wound: wooks force us to confront the long shadow of psychedelia—its anti-capitalist spirit boiled down to opportunistic mooching, psychonaut experimentalism devolved into brain-fried stupidity, countercultural resistance cross-faded into pseudo-spirituality. These grimy drug goblins particularly plague festivals on the North American West Coast, where the underground often cannot escape the twin blades of New Age cheese and Burning Man cringe.

I was skeptical when I first heard whispers in the rave network that something interesting was happening in Oregon. The granola-ass state is the perfect petri dish for wooks to self-replicate, and has a hard time shaking off its reputation for whitewashed woo-woo. Then friends told me about Osmosis, a psychedelic music festival connected to Portland’s electronic music scene. I was curious about the West Coast network that Osmosis is both drawing from and actively building; many of their DJs come from Vancouver, Portland, Seattle, and the Bay Area—cities with vibrant but chronically under-documented rave undergrounds.

It was at Osmosis, surrounded by horses and pot farms as cybernetic basslines shook the pines, where I first heard the term: neo-wook. The phrase was circulating around the festival like an inside joke, because it so perfectly captured the subcultural flavors converging there into something familiar, yet new. “Neo-wook” forced me to contemplate questions that had never before crossed my narrow, wook-hating mind: What if the wook psyche holds a secret to resisting the logic of late-capitalism? Can wooks mutate from goofy caricature to an updated psychedelic archetype that fits this era of global club culture, post-ironic memes, and cybersigil spiritualism? Wait—am I a neo-wook too?

Osmosis happens deep in Oregon’s weed country, in an artist colony called Takilma nestled on the edge of the Sisiyou Mountains. Locals consider this region the northern tip of the Emerald Triangle, where the nation’s best cannabis has been cultivated for generations. Takilma’s original pot farmers are earthy, back-to-the-landers who fled cities like San Francisco in the 60s and 70s, in search of an Eden far from the surveillance state. These hippies were the spiritual predecessors of the wooks—staunchly anti-authoritarian, and a little rough around the edges—and the bassbin ravers of Osmosis are the latest pilgrims seeking escape from technofeudal hell.

Read more

Today’s hot tips include: new wave weed drinks, soft clubbing at LA’s ambient tea parties, the rebranding of ketamine as a lifestyle cheat code, and decoding the psychedelic guru Terence McKenna.

Read more

Everyone in LA is gabbing about a polarizing new theater performance called The Cortege. Ads for the show created by artist Jeff Hull and his team of collaborators are blanketing our feeds, promising a “festival funeral” that weaves together folklore, pageantry, and ritual in service of communal grief. On the surface, it looks sick. The soundtrack features titans like Jean-Michel Jarre, Air, and Andrew Bird, and trailers reveal snippets of mysterious characters in billowing beige robes, towering monsters that resemble giant mops, and a swarm of drones twinkling against the night sky.

Unfortunately, after watching the show last weekend, I regret to inform you that The Cortege fails to live up to the sum of its intriguing parts, serving up instead an empty spectacle thread together by an almost comically confusing storyline.

The constellation of concepts and artists The Cortege reaches for are part of an emerging zeitgeist in today’s darkening world. In the early 90s, rave culture’s favorite psychedelic sage Terence McKenna famously prophesied the “archaic revival”—a return to ancient knowledge systems to address the contemporary existential crisis. As it becomes increasingly evident that we are living in the worst possible version of the reality simulation, the mainstreaming of psychedelics, ritual practices, and other ancient knowledge systems are evidence of humanity’s last-ditch attempt at self-healing. The Cortege is drumming up excitement partly because it responds to the palpable urgency for communal experiences that process our deteriorating conditions. I especially resonated with its tagline, which positioned public grief as a form of renewal. It read: “Before we are able to welcome a new era, we must mourn the loss of the world we knew.”

So how did this show, with its grand ambitions and bonkers production budget, ultimately fall flat? A lot of ya’ll have been asking for the tea, so let’s get into what fucked—and what flopped.

Read more

Thank you to everyone who responded to our first reader survey! You guys are funny and smart :) Building out Rave New World outside of social media has become even more critical in light of the events below. Please take a moment to fill out the survey if you haven’t already! Then come with me as I descend into into the liminal space of Instagram and Facebook suspensions, where we will encounter digital ghosts, a therapist specializing in online grief, and thousands of desperate people whose accounts have been chopped by the bots.

TELL ME WHATS GOOD

Something strange happened to me recently when I woke up and popped open my Instagram —a hard-to-break habit as reflexive as yawning. Instead of the usual bubbles of messages that reassure me that I am indeed a desired person, my eyes, still soft from sleep, slowly settled on a white screen. “We suspended your account,” read the voice of the Meta God. “You have 180 days to disagree or we’ll permanently disable your account.”

The room around me disappeared as my physical senses withdrew into the data vacuum where my digital avatar once lived. I read and re-read the stern pronouncement, whose cruelty was sharpened by the scarcity of information about why, exactly, I had been banned. The peepholes into my friends’ lives had snapped closed, and out of fondness and weakness, I desperately wanted to cling to the content I had been cut off from. All those messages, memes, posts, and photos that had constituted my online life—poof! Gone in an instant, banished to the invisible realm of the unarchived self.

Worse of all, there was no way to tell everyone that I had departed from our shared space in a premature demise akin to cyber necrosis. Suspended in the bardo between digital death and rebirth, I felt like a powerless and pissed-off ghost, shocked at how much of my life I had given up to the whims of these motherfuckers.

Read more

Just a quick note to let ya’ll know that I am going to be in Berkeley on Wednesday, August 6 to speak at a livestreamed psychedelic salon hosted at the Berkeley Alembic—a new center for consciousness culture founded by writer Erik Davis, meditation guru Michael Taft, and neuroscientist Kathryn Devaney that’s definitely worth checking out.

Many of you know Erik as one of the foremost scholars of the weird. His books Techgnosis and High Weirdness are canonical reading for anyone interested in esoterica, cyber/counter-culture, and psychedelics, and I’ve long admired his ability to carve out a career more rooted in underground community than the mainstream media establishment. When I found out that he’d created a physical space—a zen zone where dharma talks live alongside mystical Sufi dervish dancing classes, a class on “feeding your demons,” and drone concerts—it made a lot of sense. I was also stoked to find out that tickets to this event (and many others) are donation-based / no one turned away for lack of funds, since psychedelic education is increasingly gatekept (I mean, have you seen how much it costs to sleep in a bunk bed at Esalen?!)

The event is part of the Chalice, a monthly series on psychedelic culture that skips the usual (boring) discussions of clinical trials and legal frameworks, and instead focuses on what it means to be “psychedelic people” — spanning poetry, spirituality, mystery, and high weirdness. Instead of a straight-ahead lecture, the event was described to me as a “jam sesh,” which means that I’ll be chopping it up with Erik, fellow counterculture scholar Christian Greer, and psychedelic researcher/midwife Maria Mangini—whose takes will no doubt be both fun and edifying.

I will be sharing insights from all my latest reporting in the worlds of drugs and raving, including: the sorry/scary state of the psychedelic movement, the nightlife vibe drought, the ancient goddesses of cannabis culture, and the weirder sides of tripping out, including my current obsession: entity possessions during ayahuasca trips. That portal may also lead us into the worlds of spiritual channeling on TikTok, Indonesian ritual trance states, and what the hell “light language” even is… let’s find out!

🎟️ Tickets are here, which also includes access to the livestream. Please support them if you can.

OUR FIRST READER SURVEY!!!

Speaking of ~community~ I’ve been thinking a lot about how many cool, thoughtful people subscribe to Rave New World, many of whom I’ve met on dancefloors around the world. Now that we’ve hit 15k subscribers (!) I’d like to engage more directly with you all, and create opportunities for ya’ll to connect with each other as well. I have a lot of ideas—ranging from IRL meetups, collective microdosing journeys, to a group Signal chat—and would love your input on what you’d like best.

To that end, please take this quick reader survey (I promise it’s fun) to tell me more about you, what kinds of stories you like, and what kinds of hangouts we should plan. Thanks!

Take me to the survey

I’m doing yoga on a sun-kissed Monday morning in Los Angeles when the radio blares that another ICE raid is going down. The target of this latest political theater is MacArthur Park—a 145-year-old public park in Westlake, a neighborhood home to a large Central American community that’s a stone’s throw from downtown. Abandoning my pigeon pose and hopping on X, I scroll through videos of federal officers charging through the park on horseback like unhinged calvary, flanked by gun-toting armed troops and military humvees—an increasingly familiar sight in a city besieged by Trump’s goons.

I start texting friends who live near the park, asking for eyewitness reports. “Choppers still hovering… It sounds like war from here,” reports a friend who runs an art gallery a few blocks from the park. Another homie texts: “A few min ago I saw a lady who looked Central American with her young daughter sprinting.” “Ooh sis, I’d be v careful,” warns a friend who has been organizing against ICE raids in his neighborhood. He tells me that ICE has been targeting Asians, and the local news confirms that even legal Asian immigrants are staying home. For a few minutes, I deliberate if it’s safe for me to venture outside—I am neither a US citizen or green card holder, and am working in this country on the Melania visa. It might sound insane to get deported for covering a protest on Substack, this has literally happened to foreign reporters unluckier than me.

Even if I did stay home, it’s impossible to avoid the emotional toll that compounding crises—first the fires, now ICE—are having on LA. For the last few weeks, the streets and public plazas have been ghostly quiet, all kinds of immigrant people taking cover from the masked men snatching up bodies in broad daylight. There’s a real boogeyman quality to these attacks; my reporter friend tells me horror tales of taco trucks getting raided, meat still sizzling on the grill but no one left to flip it. Over the weekend, at a rave called “Fuck the Fourth,” everyone knew that America was cancelled, and barely anyone was dancing. “I’ve been stuck in a psychic swamp,” said a friend who didn’t make it out. Even the smoky haze that drifted over the city from the fireworks felt lethargic.

Read more

This month I’m bringing you a series of stories from the psychedelic frontier, as the industry barrels into what you could call the “Elon era” of right-wing psychedelia. Much of this reporting will be from Psychedelic Science, a massive conference that takes place every two years in Denver. Since pretty much everyone who’s anyone in psychedelics comes to this conference, there was no better place to get a sense of the trends and conversations driving the industry. These posts are for paid subscribers—THANK YOU for making this reporting possible!

The sun was setting behind the Rocky Mountains when I touched down at Denver International Airport, orange beams breaking through the clouds to cast a faint rainbow over the parking lot. The distant, rippling silhouettes of the mountains hugging the deep, bright sky gives Colorado a touch of majesty; it’s a place where you can feel the land’s dignity just by gazing out of a Lyft window. No wonder this is one of the first states in America where mushroom therapy is legal. In November 2022, a bill called Prop 122 decriminalized all plant medicines for personal use, while allowing adults to take shrooms at licensed healing centers. Technically, the retail sale of psychedelics is still illegal, but that hasn’t stopped a greymarket from thriving.

Walking to my hotel, I pass a sign for a vape shop openly advertising shroom chocolates right next to the conference convention center. While shops like these are popping up across America, the impunity with which they operate from the law is what stands out in Denver.

Conferences are invariably stuffy, soulless occasions, with long days spent in air-conditioned quarters listening to self-important figureheads drone on about their work. I’d rather be in the mountains, holding court with the bison and pine trees, but there I was, trekking across downtown Denver while on a mission: to take the temperature of a movement that seems to be losing its way. With the FDA’s recent rejection of MDMA therapy, Elon’s ketamine addiction driving his catfight with Trump, and RFK Jr. pushing for psychedelic legalization, it is getting pretty spooky out here in the psychedelic space—so what’s the tea?

Read more

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with my friend and fellow rave-cellectual Emily Witt to present our thoughts on the nightlife discourse at Demo Fest—the New Museum/New Inc’s annual festival on art and technology in New York City. Our jump-off point was my recent essay on the nightlife Vibe Drought—a concept that I was tickled to hear has already permeated New York’s hyper-networked party circles and become the term du jour.

But one of the things about a good collaboration is the way ideas can reflect and refract off each other. Mind-melding with Emily—one of the greatest cultural critics of our generation (follwq her coverage on the ground in Los Angeles of the ICE protests rn)—stretched my critique of nightlife into new directions, while circling back to the central question: why bother? In other words, if a lot of things suck right now (but a couple things don’t), why bother trying to maintain an underground?

What we believe is that the rave, at its best, counters the reigning logic of the world we live in—a logic that is materialistic, self-promotional, advertorial, motivated by profit rather than sustenance, and equates style with status. We need places that challenge that logic a little bit, or we will lose our minds.

In order to not fall in the “whining elder complaining about how things used to be so much better” trope, Emily and I also identified five elements of what makes a good party—the secret sauce, so to speak. You can watch our presentation (which begins around 2:14:19) below:

Next week, I will be attending the world’s largest psychedelic conference, MAPS’ Psychedelic Science in Denver. For those of you who will also be there, I’m speaking/moderating a couple panels that will go deep into the challenges facing the worlds of psychedelic raving and the media respectively:

• Thu Jun 19 at 11:40 AM: Rave as Ritual, Festival as Ceremony: Ecstatic Frequencies of Dance, Music & Community — joined by a group of academics, healers, and party organizers, this panel will focus on a pretty controversial topic: the blurred line between recreational and therapeutic psychedelic use

• Friday Jun at 12:15 PM: The Dark Side of Psychedelics: The Media's Role in Confronting Shadows — three other investigative journalists (Rachel Nuwer, Mattha Busby, John Semly) and I will be discussing the media’s role in the psychedelics hype vs backlash cycle that’s currently playing out, as well as bad shamans, abusive leaders, and unhinged watchdog groups… it will get spicy!

Beyond these two panels, I am looking forward to taking the temperature of the psychedelic industry at large. It’s a strange time for the scene: a decades-long movement to legalize psychedelics took a huge blow recently when the FDA decided to reject therapeutic MDMA, and many are wondering what comes next, and whether new strategies are needed.

Right-wing politicians and business leaders are also becoming increasingly dominant in the psychedelic space—many believe that legalization will happen under RFK. Will these political forces have more visibility at the conference too?

I’m also dying to know what people are thinking and feeling about the Elon Musk drug addiction bombshell story—which has definitely been a PR disaster for ketamine. Is this an instance of public drug shaming, or a valuable chance to educate the wider public on the dangers of ketamine?

I’m sure everyone is going to be talking about all of the above—and more—and I’m going to do my best to bring you the news scoops and juicy goss from on-the-ground. My dispatches from the conference and its surrounding afterparties will be for paid subscribers only, so please smash the sub button if you want to be in the loop!

Subscribe now

The streets in LA are buzzing about Another Castle’s Cuntillion this weekend—a decadent ball running from midnight to noon (!), and featuring a dazzling lineup of techno and ambient music all-stars. It’s going to be major, and if you’re in town, I highly recommended snagging a discounted ticket before the prices go up again!

I’ve been put in charge of the chill-out room—a task that has tickled my growing interest in curating spaces designed for softness, introspection, and psychedelic journeying… you could call it “soft clubbing.” As such, I’ve invited a cast of colorful characters plucked from the forests and dark warehouses of Los Angeles and Berlin, where they have been playing soul-stirring music made with everything from field recordings of raindrops to classical Turkish lutes. The conversations I had with them are like road maps to some of the most amazing ambient-adjacent music and happenings around right now… Dive into it below.

ELIJAH BADUA — SC / Spotify / IG

Track that reminds you of your earliest rave days:

It’s hard to even remember who was playing my earliest rave days. I was literally a rave baby, the first warehouse I lived in was in Oakland when I was six years old, with my mother who was a touring musician and artist and her friends. There was a wall dividing my bedroom and where they’d play everything from psytrance to happy hardcore til there was one guy left dancing his ass off in the morning.

I grew up going to shows and festivals with her while she toured, and was exposed to a lot of music. I honestly didn’t start paying attention to techno or artists in the rave scene though until I went to Europe, in particular one cold Berlin evening where I encountered DJ Stingray, and by effect Drexciya for the first time. I think hearing it there really put the music into context for me. It felt like a visceral response to the harsh realities of war and trying to cope with the mind boggling pace of post war technological and social change.

Best album/mix to play for a friend who wants to go deep and introspective on a psychedelic trip:

Most unlikely inspiration source recently:

Just, the ground. Sometimes I look at the ground, kind of space out on the cracks in cement or different particles of sand where I find my thoughts. Pattern recognition is a kind of game I play that conjures ideas running parallel with each other, some of them musical.

You just got back from an Asia tour. What excites you about the underground scenes you experienced there?

China is a trip, I’ve experienced probably the most contrast between futuristic and ancient here then any single place I could say I’ve been. Chengdu took us in like it was home, it just happened. It’s like the precious cradle of creativity, you could be in a rave 30 floors high one night and the next in a cave near the Tibetan plateau. It’s a true melting pot for the world, no wonder they eat so much hot pot.

Tell us about the tanbur, the instrument that you are playing during your set at Cuntillion

Yaylı tanbur is the recently invented (hundred or so years) bowed variant of the mizraplı (plucked) tanbur from ottoman times in Turkey, a classical instrument played in the courts of sultans, as well as dergah’s which are the tombs of passed Sufi saints and ceremonial meeting places for those that pay respects to them.

Saddest sound you’ve ever heard:

My ravanhattha teacher, Ramlal Bhopa’s fiddle playing. He was a Romani from Rajasthan, India, the last of a generation of oral storytelling priest musicians from a 2000 year old clan called Bhopa with no place in today’s society after the partition of India in 1947. He was illiterate but knew days worth of songs and would teach them to me crying because he knew there’s some that would die with him. I could not keep my tears back. He died from throat cancer smoking beedis since he was two years old.

A musician that has deeply influenced your work:

My dear friend Yaarrohs, who just recently passed away. She helped me find my voice, my musical identity, and is one of my biggest inspirations as an artist. She was so gifted, like magically. I really cherish the time we spent together, her insights were some of the most meaningful anyone’s ever imparted, not just to me.

Fantasy chill-out room of your dreams:

Hot sexy penguin pile.

Recent photo from your camera roll:

011668 - website / IG / BC

What inspired you to start the Church of Toyota?

My family, starting with my grandmother, was part of a church called Seicho No Ie, a non-denominational church that was influenced by a mixture of christian, buddhist, and shinto elements. The church says that all religions emanate from one universal source, and each religion differs because of cultural, historical, and environmental influences.

My grandmother also passed down a Toyota vehicle to me. I thought that the Toyota logo evoked the feeling of a venn diagram, or the overlapping beliefs between multiple religions. It reminded me of all the religions that currently coexist in the USA. All of these religions are also in conversation with Christianity, since America was "founded"/settled upon Christian ideals. Every household has its own unique blend of spiritual beliefs.

With all of these things in mind, I decided to use the Toyota logo as a placeholder for my personal religious experience, one that is definitely influenced by industry, capitalism, and car culture.

Most sacred site in LA:

The LA River - Arroyo Seco Confluence is my favorite place in LA. This area has been officially designated as the First Temple of Toyota in Los Angeles. I enjoy coming here to watch birds, listen to the train pass, and think about the passage of time. According to New Toyota Theory, the LA River will break apart in the year 2378 and I believe that the next God will rise from beneath it. According to the book of Exodus, God occasionally lives on Earth within a tabernacle for 440 years at a time. The LA River was paved in a tabernacl shape (inverted trapezoid) in 1938.

Ideal DJ mix/album to trip to:

Malibu - One Life, Bon Iver - Bon Iver, Ariana Grande - Eternal Sunshine

Most unlikely recent inspiration source:

Food, specifically soup broths, have been my most recent fascination. They remind me of the formation of the Earth, and ancestral memories.

Craziest/spookiest/coolest place you’ve thrown a rave:

Dockweiler Beach.

Song playing as you die and are reincarnated into the next life:

Three performance artists that have had a deep influence on your work:

1. My grandmother loved Cirque du Soleil. I loved the acrobat/juggler Viktor Kee in Dralion.

2. The first Butoh dancer I saw was called Yokko. I saw her perform in Hollywood sometime in 2018-19ish. I had already been touching on butoh elements but this was my first introduction to butoh as a style. From there I started to research more.

3. Lunice.

Fantasy chill-out room of your dreams:

Cement floor, empty room with a tatami mat, pond or lazy river, speakers, skylight, cool temperature lights

Recent photo from your camera roll:

DJ TY — IG / SC / radio show

Song that reminds you of your childhood:

It's a cheese track, sure, but my earliest memories at Hollywood YMCA's daycare are full of excitement for when this song would play on the little boombox they had in there.

Best album to play while tripping on mescaline in the desert:

Most unlikely inspiration source recently:

This was a bedroom production by two high school kids in the 80s. It has seen vast recycling into the purgatorial zones of corporate hold music. It also happens to be a downtempo banger.

What excites you about the underground in LA? What do you want to see more of?

LA is actually a raw and chaotic city, and that rawness is nowhere more honestly distilled than into the venues we use. Our warehouses are our imploding temples. I would love to see more unexpected collaborations between crews that promote very different types of music. I am easily bored by pretentiously singular lineups and moods.

California DJs or rave collectives that have inspired your sound:

Bay Area's Wicked is a point of origin for me. Also Kandel's Exist Dance era. Inner Sunset Recordings. Modularz.

It's 6am on a beach in Croatia, the sunlight is breaking through the clouds as you emerge from the ocean after dancing all night at a beach rave. What do you want to hear?

Pretty much any Pete Namlook and Mixmaster Morris collab.

A DJ who has deeply influenced your style:

DJ Marcelle. Her mixes are creative in the strictest sense, abstractly fusing disparate elements into a new rhythmic unity.

Fantasy chill-out room of your dreams:

It would probably have a wide spectrum cushioned floors/pillows - but there would also be a lot of scrap metal at perhaps dangerous orthogonality from the floor. Also a sandbox on one side of the room and some sort of silent stretching session. Perfect speaker coverage and tuning. Minimally visible DJ.

Recent photo from your camera roll:

JAKE MUIR - website / BC / SC / IG

Fave secret nature spot in LA:

For a long time I would regularly hike the eastern section of Temescal canyon. The trail started up some steps behind the community center building at the parking lot. I'm not sure if any of it is left from the fires... I should go check it out. It was less maintained than the main trail on the left side of the park and barely had any traffic. It also had some very lush sections and these narrow ridge parts that would plant you in the middle of this canyon. All of that made you feel pretty removed from the city.

Describe an ideal DJ mix:

One of my favorites is this heater from Keith Fullerton Whitman:

Not a "Greatest Hit" per se, but easily my favorite (early) Mac song, edited across multiple versions & fidelities to play somewhat seamlessly for over 2 hours, with the mix slowly being eroded by a cavernous echo that is being gated by the dynamics of the dry signal.

Most unlikely inspiration source recently:

I never thought I’d end up in Berlin making an album about church bell ringing, but here we are!

What excites you about Berlin’s experimental music scene right now?

Unlike most cities, Berlin is lucky to have multiple spaces that host nights on this axis, on a regular basis; KM28, Silent Green, Morphine Raum, 90mil, Arkaoda, Bar Neun, plus others like Panke here and there. I've seen some great performances at these places. When it comes to ambient music specifically though, I find that whether it's Berlin or somewhere else, not many risks are being taken.

Gayest sound you’ve ever heard?

*Censored*

Artist or field recordist that has deeply influenced your work:

The Voigt brothers [Wolfgang & Reinhard], Marina Rosenfeld, DJ Olive, DJ Spooky, Philip Jeck and Janek Schaefer’s collective efforts in abstract sampling and turntablism have had the biggest impact on my work. I was drawn to their productions over others as I found them to be more conventionally psychedelic sounding; I've never really enjoyed the noisier and highly cut up end of turntablism/sampling music.

Hearing how they processed and collaged together existing music really unlocked something in my brain. I guess it showed me there was a way to structurally make the music that I like the most, using the kinds of materials that hip hop was made with. I also came across their music before I stumbled upon musique concrète composers like Michel Redolfi, whose work has been an influence in recent times. I started messing around with samples and field recordings in May of 2013 and I've never looked back.

Fantasy chill-out room of your dreams:

I think my ideal chill out room would be a combination of: the layout of Light & Sound Design (LSD) in NYC, the environment of the Absurd Lustre events at Arkaoda in Berlin, and the visual work by the Groupwork crew in Buffalo; shout out Frankie. LSD has a Moroccan lounge aesthetic that I like w/ the rugs and different kinds of seating, Absurd Lustre had loads of plants which felt inviting, and the light work from the Groupwork show I played last summer was very tasteful and trippy; Draped cloth hanging from the ceiling with visuals projected onto it. All of that mixing together would be a big vibe.

Recent photo from your camera roll:

NINA KEITH - BC / IG / Spotify

What have you been working on lately?

I built this sound sculpture recently called Periphone that was displayed on the roof of the Printed Matter Art Book Fair. It involved rain water, an Ableton-rigged system, and metallaphone bars. One day I’d like to build a version that’s 12 feet tall, with a bunk bed that’s the size of my body next to it. I would be lying on this structure eight feet in the air, with a bunch of EKGs hooked up to my head, which goes to the computer, which dictates what the water is doing.

I like the idea of being able to control it posthumously, like a haunted water avatar that I can step into. I’m just trying to figure out the right way to present it, so that it’s like a shitty gay miracle.

Give me a shitty gay miracle in the form of a song:

I was obsessed with this song for years now, specifically this unreleased YouTube version. She has this insane quote where she's like, I wrote this song about being a trans woman.

We're doing this interview while walking by LA River at sunset. What’s a song that conjures the vibe of this place?

You co-run the outdoor ambient music series Living Earth. What’s the coolest / craziest / spookiest place that you guys have done a concert?

A graffiti-adorned water tower in Malibu Creek State Park.

A song of yours with a hidden field recording:

In the very first second of it starting, you can, hear a child screaming 300 feet away. I am obsessed spaces in general, and the way field recordings do something different to the way you remember stuff. I feel like music that contains more of the energy of a physical space gets stored in your brain in a much different way than like electronic music recorded in a studio or something. Walking around with a field recorder, I create this romantic way of living with this musical practice where I can reference magical pieces of time.

Song playing in the background as you do a rain dance:

Recent photo from your camera roll: