Amid our limitless online-ing, Aria Pedraza isn’t interested in “just something you can scroll past.”
This summer, the Chicagoan started the community-led Midwest Rave Culture Archive (MRCA). It catalogues the physical culture of electronic dance music (read: ticket stubs, wristbands, flyers, zines, recordings, notes scratched on papers found at a rave.) They’re all vestiges of a regional culture big in the ‘90s. And they’re not staying there.
“How can we put this into a database that makes sense to people that it needs to make sense to, so they can go and propagate stories and information and pieces and books and documentaries and whatever they need to do to show the significance of this movement that’s getting swept away?” Pedraza says.
The community archivist, along with a small team and big help from the rave community, is documenting ephemera and memories across Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan.
Continually catalogued on the free and accessible Internet Archive, Pedraza hopes it’ll remind people how significant rave DJs, technicians, poster designers, and partygoers were and are. What can these artifacts tell us about what happened between Saturday night and (often far into) the next morning? Where will they go, other than a box in the closet or on a personal hard drive?
“No one’s talking about this, so I wanted to know more, too, right? I mean, I really don’t know the full story. But people would tell me their experiences, and they’d say, like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got that flyer. It’s like in a shoebox somewhere,’” Pedraza says.
And it’s not only nostalgia; the culture shaped the lives of many Midwesterners. Raves have built an ecosystem of creative collaborators, from producers and promoters to DJs, engineers, and other artists.
Pedraza grew up around rave culture and credits her life to raves: Her parents met at one.
“It’s . . . a huge populace of people. Tons of people were coming out to rave,” she says, noting folks spanned socioeconomic status and race. “Everyone was coming together under music . . . It’s actually how some of this was possible, because this [integrated scene] was resource sharing and making it safe for other people to come out and experience something beyond a club or a festival.”
Midwest raves in particular, Pedraza theorizes, have that extra DIY-ness. House music enthusiasts gathered in fields or empty warehouses next to train tracks and highways, bringing their own sound systems and lasers.
“The farmland is really significant to what was possible. It’s like private land in the middle of nowhere,” she says. “The detachment from the city was very illustrious, and very exciting and possible for experimentation of massive sound and lights and lots of people coming together.”
Though the archive captures the yesteryear of it all, perhaps it’ll inspire a new generation of Midwesterners. Artists today can look back so they can look forward—to create, collaborate, and, yes, party.