RA's twenty four/seven party at Video Club, Bogotá, 2018

Later that night, around 11 PM, I'm walking north on Caracas Avenue to the first of many nightclubs in my marathon weekend. Bogotanos takes Halloween very seriously, and I start to see signs of that as I get closer to the Zona Rosa, the city's gaudy shopping and nightlife neighborhood. I hear the din of engines behind me and turn to see a cloud of bikers thundering up the avenue, howling and honking at pedestrians. As the motorcade passes I see their faces are painted with black and white skulls, like you might see on Mexico's Day Of The Dead.People are spilling out of neon and LED-lit dives, wearing cheap, store-bought costumes. The soundclash effect of multiple mega-clubs intensifies, some playing reggaeton, others playing commercial EDM, a few playing guaracha (a Colombian style that, to oversimplify, sounds like a hybrid of both).I'm looking for Alejandro Arango, DJ and cofounder of Bulto, a new collective that puts on Berghain-style techno-sex parties at private locations. Before I left New York I was trying to find some kind of techno super-fan to show me around the Bogotá scene, and a friend in Medellín passed me Alejandro's number, saying he never misses a big night. I texted Alejandro the next day and he agreed to come with me to a new dance spot in the Zona Rosa called Tres Cero Tres ("Three Zero Three" in English—a reference to the Roland synthesizer).After a round of confused Whatsapp messages Alejandro finds me on a street corner between a guy passing out flyers and a guy selling cigarettes and gum. He says he usually avoids this neighborhood and makes a face like he wants to find shelter. There are no quiet bars within a mile of the Zona Rosa so we end up on a noisy patio with a front-row view of the madness. The occasional firecracker interrupts our conversation.Alejandro is a 27-year-old native of Pereira, the most populous city in Colombia's mountainous coffee-growing region, an hour west of Bogotá by plane. By day he works at an advertising firm, saves what money he can, and then spends it once a year on his big European techno trip. He's been to Sónar in Spain, Awakenings and Dekmantel in Holland, Forte in Portugal and Into The Valley in Sweden. After returning from a recent German pilgrimage, he went on Facebook and posted: "Who needs liposuction when you have Berlin? I just dropped six kilos and two pant sizes."Alejandro says something special is happening in Colombia. "Five years ago, Radikal Styles was the only electronic music festival in Bogotá," he says. "Now there are five: Baum Festival in May, Cosmos in August, Sónar in November and in October there's Tatacoa"—a two-day desert festival that's been referred to me as "the Burning Man of South America." That's not even counting Vagabond Festival, a 14-hour techno event in November, or Freedom, which brings thousands of partiers to Medellín's central plaza every year.Because of a few important promoters, he says, queer nightlife in Bogotá is starting to open up to electronic music—and vice versa. "One of the great things about Video Club is the drag component," he explains. "There's a group of drag queens that end up there later in the night to close out the club, and that's not something you usually see in this scene. I mean, at Baum I have never seen that."

Laganja Estranja performing at Oh My Drag

Alejandro Arango

BAUM

Something similar is happening in cities all around the world, where rave culture is often misconstrued as a straight pastime despite its historic ties to queer party scenes. "People think that going to a gay party means listening to Britney or Madonna," he says. "Or they think it's circuit music, the kind you hear at big gay clubs." Beyond just throwing kinky queer parties with good techno, his Bulto collective wants to use their media platform to inform people about the music's historic and political context. Without that, he says, it will never achieve its potential as a social movement built on a dream of collective uplift.Since Iván Duque was elected president last year, Colombia's government has taken a hard right turn. "They want to end gay marriage," he explains, "and they're coming for women's rights too." In September Duque rolled back the "minimum dose" law, which allowed people to possess a small-enough quantity of drugs for consumption, but not enough for sale. He sees this shift as an opportunity for the scene to become something more than just a recreational pastime."We're at a moment," he says, "where if the scene doesn't get political, if it doesn't find a cause, if it doesn't stand up to our ultra-right wing government, it's never going to be more than just a bunch of parties." Many of his friends felt galvanized by the mass social movement that formed when Bassiani, a techno club in Tbilisi, was raided last year . "When they had that huge party in front of the parliament building ," he says, "all of my Facebook contacts shared those videos. Why can't we have a demonstration like that, with electronic music, to protest the minimum dose law?"To find some middle ground between hedonism and a sense of purpose, club culture in Colombia will have to distance itself from its somewhat sordid past. "When rave culture began in Colombia, it was all tied up with narco-trafficking," he says. "Why? Because it's a great way to launder money. So they would bring Carl Cox down to play, pay him this extraordinary fee and there you go. I was too young to see all of this firsthand, but from what people tell me those parties were mostly full of gangsters and prostitutes.""That was the birth of this scene," he continues, "and I think that's why we've been delayed in finding the more political side that we need."We pay the bill and head back out in search of Tres Cero Tres. Standing where my phone says the club is, I see tattoo shops, a karaoke bar and a couple of velvet-rope VIP spots with giant bouncers. The online listing that piqued my interest had a moody greyscale image with Gothic lettering and a medieval illustration of a skeleton blowing a ram's horn, which does not fit the strip-mall aesthetic of what I'm seeing in front of me. Then we see the unmarked door, and up a narrow set of stairs there is indeed a scrappy techno club.The vibe is like you're in somebody's house. A French DJ named Laura BCR is mixing zip-zap electro with richly textured techno. Instead of facing the center of the room, they've got her and the speakers oriented out towards a small terrace where twenty-somethings in leather and denim jackets are dancing and smoking. There's another dance floor on the roof, and the reggaeton beat is quietly thumping from upstairs.I meet one of the club's owners, a techno punk named Franco whose tastes tend toward the really gritty stuff. Since Tres Cero Tres opened last year he's booked acts like Schwefelgelb, Ron Morelli and François X, whose sounds tends to brush up against EBM and industrial. (One promoter told me that Bogotá is, more than anything, a heavy metal city, which accounts for its predisposition towards high-intensity sounds.)Then all of the sudden it's 3:30 AM and Alejandro says he's hitting the eject button, which means my next mission is a solo one. I hail a cab and tell him to take me to the big daddy of Bogotá nightclubs: BAUM. The 900-capacity club, which opened in 2013, is the ballast that stabilizes the city's dance music scene. With a budget that's big enough for top-tier international DJs and a guaranteed crowd, they've built a solid economic and cultural base that's allowed other, more boutique-y clubs to flourish. They run multiple festivals throughout the year, including their flagship event in May, headlined by Jeff Mills and The Black Madonna.BAUM, along with Billares Londres ("London Billiards," which shut down after its terrace collapsed during a party in 2015), catalyzed Bogotá's current electronic music boom. But there have been clubs playing house and techno here since the early '90s, starting with Cinema and Gótica, which paved the way for clubs like Cha-Cha as well as a busy network of illegal raves. So you wouldn't say it's an emerging scene so much as one that's found the confidence that comes with maturity.When I arrive, the Danish DJ superstar Kölsch is playing melodramatic tech house to a room full of frothed-up kids hanging on his every kick drum. I pay New York prices for a beer at the bar and squeeze my way through the main room, to the second, smaller dance floor in the back, where two DJs I don't recognize are playing piano-heavy vocal anthems. When BAUM first opened, this was a patio for open-air dancing, with a two-story-tall tree as the centerpiece ("baum" is German for "tree"). They've since had to put a roof on it, but they left a hole so it can poke through the ceiling. I dance under the tree for a while and then clock out around 5 AM, while the club is still filling up.I land in Medellín, Colombia's second city, at night. It's an hour-long taxi ride into the city, and you can feel the air pressure shift during the gradual descent. City lights emerge, bit by bit, as we circle the lip of the Aburrá Valley bowl. The next morning I text José Luis Posada, one of Colombia's top techno promoters, from a balcony while gazing up at the mountains. He asks me what I think of Medellín and I tell him it's beautiful."So you're enjoying paradise physically, huh?" He writes back. Then a pause between messages. "Let's see what is hiding behind it."We meet the next day in front of the Hotel Nutibara, an icon of early modernism in the city center, now in a state of mild dilapidation. He parks his moped and leads me across the Plaza Botero, past the Palace of Culture, a Gothic cathedral-like building, and we sit down at a cafe overlooking the square.José Luis talks fast, with conviction, like he's rushing through one sentence so he doesn't forget the next. "I had my dreams," he says, when I ask about the first edition of Freedom, the techno festival he founded just over a decade ago. "I wanted it to be like DEMF: free, and all about the music. The money didn't matter." He'd built an online empire with his website MedellínStyle, a blog and message board through which many of the country's house and techno DJs first met. He'd also organized club nights here and there, but in 2008 he leveled up, bringing the Detroit heroes Stacey Pullen and Kenny Larkin to headline a 14-hour festival in the city's main plaza."The cash I had was from my savings account," he says, "and in the end we had 4,000 people through the door. I lost €1,500, which isn't even a loss, really. It was a fucking investment. A publicity campaign."He brought his mother and father on to help run production of the event. They still manage Freedom together 11 years later, and you can spot them moving around the crowd with headsets making sure that logistics are running smoothly."The second year I found this airplane hangar out at the domestic airport," he tells me. "You have no idea, the best venue in history, and I did it for free—again."But it was a victim of its own success. "At 6 PM there were 3,000 people in there," he says, "and another 2,000 outside trying to get in. Total collapse. The riot police showed up. Terrifying. They wouldn't let any more people in and then they shut us down at 1 AM. You can imagine how sad I was. It was my dream, and it all just vanished."

José Luis Posada

Freedom Festival

The incident left a mark on his reputation, and almost nobody showed up when he did it the next year. He also chalks it up to an unlikely competitor: reggaeton, which hit Medellín hard around that time and, José Luis says, stole would-be fans away from the techno scene. He goes as far as to say that the fiasco in 2008 dramatically altered the city's entire cultural timeline. "If everyone had gotten in without any trouble that year," he says, "I don't think reggaeton would have become as popular as it did."In many cities the idea that techno and reggaeton could steal fans from each other is inconceivable. They're generally seen as warring subcultures with entirely opposed values, dress codes, dance moves and class connotations. This is something that distinguishes the Medellín scene, and Freedom Festival in particular, from other world-class techno cities. Here, techno is the great equalizer—it unites ravers who wouldn't otherwise end up in one room together, from Bogotá's elite club kids to the working-class locals they disparagingly call "neas." It transcends the category of subculture to become something like the force of a generation.After taking a few years off to re-evaluate, the festival came roaring back in 2013. At first it was a mix of big-room techno and tech house DJs like Matthew Dear, Martin Buttrich, Alan Fitzpatrick, tINI and Stacey Pullen. The formula worked, and attendances started to tick upwards again, but instead of piling on more recognizable names, José Luis went the opposite direction. He did away with the tech house bookings in favor of intense, purist techno, with big-ticket DJs like Joseph Capriati on one end and cultish figures like Oscar Mulero or Shifted on the other. It wasn't just because of his personal preferences, but because other festivals started cropping up that could pay the increasing fees for commercial acts."I had been doing Freedom for seven or eight iterations," he tells me. "Then all of a sudden they tell me they're gonna do The Social Festival on the same day. They have 364 days of the year but they're gonna do The Social on the same day as Freedom? That's evil shit."The Social Festival, which began in England in 2014, is a large-scale house and techno event. They have budget to hire the who's-who of high-paid Ibiza superstars. Instead of trying to compete, Jose Luis booked his riskiest lineup ever, which is when Freedom Festival's identity really clicked into place."Everyone said, 'You need more mainstream acts,'" he says. "They told me: 'Nobody's gonna go to this. Look at the lineup, it's too weird! I don't even know who these people are.' And I'm thinking, son of a bitch what am I gonna do? There was no other way. The only path for me was to go more underground, more underground, more underground."At this point," he jokes, "I feel like the public doesn't even recognize half of the lineup!"Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Freedom had its best year yet when it came around in February of this year. The rave reviews rolled in from visiting DJs, who wrote gushing social media posts about how Medellín crowds are the best in the world."People talk about Berlin as an epicenter of techno," wrote Ambivalent, "but every artist who has been to Medellín knows it's a city with a deeply passionate audience that rivals anywhere else.""Go to Freedom Festival," posted Antenes, from the Bunker crew in New York. "If you heard the scene there is amazing it's true. Dedicated and enthusiastic, warm and engaging—they research artists so well before seeing them, [that's] so clear in conversations I had." Watch the re-cap videos from any of the last few years and you can almost smell the frenzied enthusiasm. The artists' inboxes are flooded with effusive messages from fans in the days and weeks after the festival. Even mid-tier DJs will tell you how the Colombian ravers treat them like rock stars, recognizing them in the crowd and asking for photos."I've been lucky enough to go on tour with some of my friends," José Luis tells me, "so I've gotten to know the European scene a bit. And what I realized is that Colombia is one of the few countries where there's still soul in the scene. Berlin? Berlin is great. I love the way everything orbits around techno, the way the vampires sleep during the day and come out at night. But there's no soul. There's no heart."