DWELLER

DWELLING IN REMEMORY

Another Star

It seems to me that most of what we’re doing when we wake up from a disco nap, style a fab outfit, link with the girls, storm the club, and carry is searching for rememory; recollecting, recalling, and recreating memories based on things we have seen and things we have yet to see, stories our mothers told us, a music video we used to love, that one perfect night from a few years back that we can’t stop dreaming about. That is what a particular moment from this year’s Dweller 5 felt like for me. Theo Parrish was DJing at ________ and I had to be there. The last time I saw Theo Parrish play, my tears, my sweat, and my body deliquesced into an iridescent puddle on the dance floor. Like every set I have seen him play, it was an example of evocative mastery and spiritual grooves. By this point, I had been dancing for hours and hours and hours, leaving very little left to expend physically. But my body was no longer the driving force. There was a susurrating buzz that energized the space and those within it, and for this particular occasion, most of those being energized were Black. 

Beginning in NYC in 2019, Dweller is an electronic music festival platforming Black electronic artists in response to its co-optation through white ethnocentrism. This same co-optation provides the grounds for pleasant surprise when attending a Dweller event and seeing almost no white people, and the lack of white people in this particular space added to the cohesive buzz that charged the spirits of those dancing. Among the dancers is beloved Black trans activist and organizer Qween Jean, who, wearing a red keffiyeh, instinctually began to clap in perfect syncopation to the music; and in between each set of claps she chanted, “FREE, FREE! FREE PALESTINE!” In a room full of Black people, it felt like a spell. We all followed her lead, clapping as she clapped, incanting for a free Palestine; and Theo Parrish followed us, lowering the volume to fall just under the new song we created. A call-and-response. We grow louder and louder and louder until, blasting at full volume, “For you, there may be a brighter star…” pumps through the speakers, and we resound in praise.

“The Light of You is All I See”

Particles of feeling. A timeline, distorted. Ambient atmospheres. Foggy mirrors. A calling back. This rememory blazes with scintillating clarity:

This house is mostly empty. Empty of people and empty of furniture. Footsteps reverberate and a smoke detector echoes. A soft, young child, almost a boy, starved of stimulus and affection, opens a boundless door to a glacial linoleum floor. The etching between the tiles is dotted with black sugar ants, marching across the austere hallway and along the wainscoting. Each ant follows the ant in front of it, and so on and on and on, choreographed by alchemical pheromones, the ultimate collaborators. I, the soft, almost-boy, watch the performance, my eyes following the dotted black line to its assumed end, wrapping out of sight into the furthest room at the end of the hall. I never go into that room.

I have always imagined myself in the future, and in my imagined future, I am not alone. No. No, I am surrounded by and enmeshed with people who organize their daily lives upon their most emancipating dreams. Utopia is not an option, nor a desire, but perhaps something even more fructiferous can be found through the collective power of imagining and dreaming, calling back, remembering. A power so Black, it’s beyond. It severs all conceptualized concepts of freedom and weaves a new imaginary. Remembering what we know and what we do not. If freedom is a place, then I imagine that place must house Black electronic rememory, the communal memories of Black musical, technologic innovations, a singular camouflage “under the provocative intensity of a scream,” a digital queering. House, dub, techno, electro, bass, jungle, a constant flux, both/and, neither/nor, formed from formlessness, an extreme noise:

That room is where my father Dwells. He maroons himself there for hours at a time, becoming even more unreachable than usual. But in this room, the unreachability is not emotional, but rather dialectical. When he is in the room at the end of the hallway, the world becomes not. It is only him and vinyl, scratches and samples, funk and jack. A euphonic genealogy. I glissade along the ground, gelid and grating, gratuitous and green, led by the gyrating ants, the ants lead by pheromones, and the pheromones trigger-released by a nasty-ass Chicago House beat that seems to emanate from the fingertips of my father, with a vocal on top, which I recognize as Stevie Wonder. “The Light of You is all I see…”

In the United States and Europe, there seems to be a concerted effort to detach Black people from our own spiritual, political, cultural, and technological histories. Berlin is upheld as some sort of techno paragon, a paradise of electronic escapism, a fortress for the disaffected, the detached, and the soulless. It’s just about the music in Berlin. And neo-fascist, highly militaristic, state-sanctioned violence enacted in the name of Zionism, of course. And the exact same can be said about New York City, where a near-unanimously despised cop-mayor, Eric Adams, sasses his way into galas and radio shows and throwaway Iftar dinners while sending his military pigs to beat, harass, and jail protestors: Black, Brown, Arab, student, professor, worker, Native, and houseless alike. Clubs in NYC are mostly politically bereft, and as capitalists who enjoy making money off of people dancing, the owners are only interested in programming that will maintain their brand of lukewarm liberalism and line their pockets. 

I bring none of this up to suggest that clubbing is resistance, that DJs are revolutionaries, or that techno in and of itself is radical. However techno, or Black electronic rememory, arose in response to race and class warfare, in conversation with decades of Black diasporic musical forms — an attempt to resist, an act of rebirth, the turntables as industrial weaponry, a way to recontextualize social death and infrastructural decay. So, do we expect undying support, collaboration, or loyalty from racist, white, liberal institutions that refuse to publicly support Palestine and denounce Zionism; that abuse their Black and Brown workers, particularly femmes; and that ban outspoken Black trans women from DJing at their venues? For me, this is where the symbol of Dweller Forever comes in: a recognition of rememory and the people organizing themselves, and those they find recognition with, around it:

I never understood my father. We never recognized each other and that misrecognition brewed into a quiet disdain. He saw me for what I was, an almost-boy, dangly, self-soothing, and femme. I remember always wondering what my mother ever saw in him. Perhaps she enjoyed the twinkle in his eye when he heard a hard four on the floor or the way he squinted his eyes and pursed his lips at the details of a snare or a siren or a heavy bassline. The only memories of my father that I recall in a haze of warmth are the ones where I am in the car, windows down, the air exhaling around our grins of contentment as A Tribe Called Quest or Inner City blares from the speakers. He would play a song and then I. Our Father / Almost-Son B2B.

The power of Dweller lies in its potentiality for futurity. We must develop a language and a practice for our futures. It is inevitable. We (Black people) will be in the future. We are in the future. But if freedom is a place where our futures lie, then there must be a path cleared towards it. Weeds must be cut. Pavement laid. Bridges built. Seas parted. Dweller calls upon us to “be vigilant towards persisting as to not just speak for ourselves but redistribute resource, equity, and justice in a space that has long made its worth on the backs of the silenced.” The pinnacle of Dweller’s power is its potential for future making and future placing:

I enter the room at the end of the hallway and a place is made. The first time I ever heard House music, it was played by my father. Armand Van Helden. Crystal Waters. I entered the room at the end of the hallway and was invited into his past, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, DJing at kickbacks and block parties, spinning vinyls he traded with friends, at breakdance competitions, a b-boy in Kangol. Could it be providence to think that despite the vast continents of distance between my father and myself, his past has conjoined with my present? His daughter, almost not a woman, trading Bandcamp links and track ids with my friends, DJ bootcamps and impromptu B2Bs, or a weekend carry after a week of wage laboring. We calmly navigate violent waters, in search of our “Black lighthouse,” listening for the welcoming song of a beautiful, Black siren — the one from our rememory — through the treacherous, white storm.

This potentiality can only be fully realized when we use Dweller as a precedent for future making and power building. Everyone complains about how many white people come to Dweller events hosted in white spaces. Our justification: “white people buy the tickets” or “white people have the money.” But that feels like the wrong conclusion to the wrong question. Why are there so many white spaces? How have the most popular venues all come to be owned by white people? Why are the raves with the best infrastructure, lineups, and operations most often exclusively white-run, where the only Black people you see are the ones working door and maybe the ones DJing? The intentional withholding of information, resources, and opportunity. Organized abandonment. 

"The dance floor is a spiritual space that has allowed us to remember and preserve our roots - to move with our ancestors and the ancestors of others. Like an altar, the bass, the sound, and the foundation of the dance floor present us with questions: It asks us who we want to be. What does it mean to be free (in the moment)? And what does it mean to feel and BE the spirit, the reflection, an answer? It's beautiful when you aren't familiar with people: you dance with them for five hours and take care of each other, and that moment holds a memory between you and those you won't ever forget. Dweller reminds me of the history of care methods created by Black people, especially Black women, trans, non-binary, and gender-expansive folks, and the importance of continuing this consideration. The sound welcomes my body to heal and exercise what it means to confront myself as the world around us continues to create violent laws prohibiting us from being who we are: sacred gifts."

-Texas Isaiah

So why do I insist upon placemaking within anti-place structures? Why do I insist upon future making in an anti-future timespace? I am lost within these structures, but I am not trapped. I am lost in hopes of finding something worthwhile, something mystical, something malleable, resisting ossification. I will not harden into accepting myths of scarcity, to the point of accepting the co-optation of Black dance music, Black technologics, or Black rage. My hope is we leave these spaces to collapse in on themselves, revive Black punk DIY infrastructures with fervor, and build our own Houses to collectively Dwell within:

Dweller 2024. Dubstep night at _________. I pull up with Xya, my main bass diva. We were seeking a laid-back vibe with some Black people (hopefully) and, of course, Livwutang. We get in free because I’m Black and trans, Xya is Black and on the friends and family list, and we know mostly everyone who works door. And as we should, because we are definitely one of 12 Black people in the entire venue. We’re on edge, of course, but not unfamiliar with this feeling, foreignness, dislocation, unresolvement. We are not unfamiliar with this sight, out of body; the dancing dead, white people standing in hoards, feet glued in one direction, calculating the beat matches in their head. I begin to dissociate, as I often do when I am depressed and dysphoric and in public. (I should’ve known. I am always sad during Black History Month. I wonder if they did that on purpose? Giving us the saddest month.) I am a new dubstep fan, so I watch the bass diva I came with, my bestfriend, gradually ease into the offbeats, creeping back into the earth as the bass ascends from it. I’m learning and begin to ease myself into the off-kilter, unexpected syncopations. Something about this bassline feels like it belongs in the air, around my head, and so I raise my arms and sway a bit, closing my eyes and remembering… Dancing with Ley and Aerinn at Sustain, twerking on top of moss-painted logs, molly plus sleep deprivation increasing my neuroplasticity. My father, recounting his own carry in ‘85, when he saw Frankie Knuckles play at the Powerplant in Chicago. Back at Dweller, familiar syncopations. Xya is looking at me, bright and alive. He loves one of the songs Livwutang is blending in; he knows it well.

Yes, we know this place. And there will be even better places and better times to know. As the knob of the filter is turned from low to high, the rememory widens and softens, and then comes pummeling back into focus.