“I want to tell you a little story about house,” goes the opening line; we’re listening to Todd Terry’s 1991 single “Jump Up In the Air.” “House? What house?” somebody else asks. “House music!” the speaker replies, as if it were a question about the shape of the sun.
Prose is not clubbing’s first language. Lips become hard to read inside the lurid murk of the rave; chemical scents flood other senses. Between midnight and dawn, those uncounted hours, duration slips loose from narrative. Most books about dance music take a historical or sociological perspective, with the genre conventions that implies. In her recent book Raving, McKenzie Wark writes about dancing as a practice instead, an aesthetic, given form by bursts of noise. Club literature, let’s call it, which tries with words to contain what overwhelms the body. Maybe those efforts will always be doomed. How do you document an event that forbids notes or cameras? How can you describe unutterable sensations? The attempts continue anyway, each author compelled to preserve a sliver of some dissolving whole. As sand vanishes from the hourglass, we pocket a few grains, and wonder in daylight which moments they belonged to.
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