PARTY-POLITICS

• Every party is political.
There needn’t be a banner hanging with a political demand anywhere.
And it's not only about the lyrics of a track.

• Political is how people interact with each other at a party.
Is it collaborative or based on Ego-trips?

• For example it is also political if all reverentially look up
to the DJ and acclaim whatever he may do.

• The question of who makes money out of a party is political, too.
Is it a single person that thrives on inflated admission charges?
Or is it a group of people that are mainly concerned with a good party?
Or is it a free party?

• Political is also the handling of nature at an Open-Air event.
Does one strive to use the place sensibly
or are there piles of rubbish left behind?

• Certainly it's political if people dance for real change
in the streets, and for example in schools,
in supermarkets or in the headquarters of multinational companies.

• And of course specially a consciously organized party that defies
the guidelines of commerce, consumption and control is also political.
A party that becomes a free space.

Wolfgang Sterneck
www.sterneck.net
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MUSIC, MIND AND POLITICS :
CONNECTA & CROSSING BRIDGES

Usually you don’t dance right after some speeches were held, and it doesn’t seem likely to catch lots of attention at a party with political issues ... But you can connect these two worlds! As seen recently at two events in two weeks in Frankfurt / Main. Political movies about underground activism were shown while psychedelic, techhouse or experimental music played at the dance floors. There was a happening in the middle of the night at the chill telling how to compose music from the structures of certain molecules, combined with ambient sound created in this way. You could see people strolling through an exhibition of art installations that critize consumism, or checking info and book stalls. At the playground, where lots of pois and sticks and other toys were provided, jugglers and drummers got into a flow with the downbeat DJ’s in the room.

To connect music, mind and politics - and people - was the most important about Connecta (ten year anniversary of Alice Drug & Culture Project) and the Playground Crossing Bridges festival. Crossing Bridges stands for using music to overcome frontiers that still seperate the regions of former Yugoslawia. Dancing together you can understand that these so-called ethnic barriers between human beings are artifical ones, that help to keep up an arrangement of who has the power and who hasn’t. But there are networks beneath those or economic interests like in this project. Conni Maly aka Lava303, one of the initiators, was host for underground groups from Belgrade and Prishtina such as Queer Beograd, Stani Pani Kolektiv und Urban FM.

Both events were showing once more, how much potential underground partys carry, when you work a little against pure hedonism to acvtivate it. Much too often it’s all about DJ names and getting wasted. So when you try a different way of shaping a party not everything will work as you wanted it. Maybe one of the orators has to face some wrecked shouts: »We want paaady!« Maybe next morning some playground toy is missing and you end up thinking about how to secure that stuff better next time, which is actually nothing you want to do. One shouldn’t expect too much from the guests, their concern, willingness or ability to absorb all info offered. Lots of things travel subliminal, and so one thing will reach them for sure: there can be a lot more about parties than making money.

(2005)

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www.sterneck.net