When we met, and merged, it was good. But I didn’t know if you would want to come dancing with me. You said you like dancing. A lot of people do. But do you need it? Wouldn’t work to have someone in the raving part of my life unless they need it too. We went to one of the smaller raves. It’s a curious kind of date. You came to my place. I made dinner. We got high, fucked, got to sleep early. Woke to the alarm at three-thirty to be at the rave by four. Dancing, not together, not as a couple, but close. Sensing these bodies, moving in sound, connected by sound. You’re into this. Lost in it. The default dance someone does at a rave, after a good hour or so, becomes so intimate. To rave one gives oneself over to this gestural body, arrayed among others, under the machine. How tender it makes me feel to be near you, lost too. Jasmine Infiniti is playing. She flips me into ravespace. Its all coming so easily. The flight into strange flesh, the strange flight out. Being here with you is helping me get out of myself. Dance until the flesh presses needs of its own. We take a break. Get water. These crip feet hurt, so rather than return to the dance, I take you by the hand to the back of the rave. Perched on a plywood ledge, leaning together. Heat and sweat. I can taste you on me, mixed with my own taste. Running a hand up your thigh. Into you. Feeling you flood over my fingers. Gasp. Enlustment. Feel like I’m offering to you, to the situation, all the states in which I’m free. Let our bodies be with each other when they’re free. We’re there ‘til the end. A little cluster of favorite ravers gather and chat before we all head home. Back out of the rave continuum, into the cursed sun. Back home to mine, and sleep. When we wake, around eleven, you say that it’s like we get an extra day into the weekend by getting up for a morning rave. It feels to me like you’ve found k-time. Ketamine time, the sideways time a good rave makes. A pocket in time where there’s more time. You’re a raver now. Or always were. Next, we go to the big Halloween rave. Office building in Manhattan. With light and fog, an empty glass-walled office spaces become something else. A playground for non-labor. It’s a fetish-wear party. You bought a black vinyl dress for it. Hot. I’m in some black mesh thing, suspenders, stockings and boots. We’re stage left. Empty aluminum cans dancing on the bass bin right in front of me. They bounce to different heights, depending on how much liquid is left in them. What I take to be three gay men in puppy masks gambol right next to us. Delightful. Less so the man in basic jeans and tee with his dick out, half hard. He strokes it in a desultory way. Rubs it against another body. Looks consensual, sort-of. Hard to tell. I’m not paying much attention. What fills the senses is meat and heat—and strangeness. A whim is emerging. Sixteen beats pass. Then its decided: clambering on top of the bass bin. Facing the whole room, taking in the swaying and bobbing bodies. It’s a little hard to dance up there as the top of the bin is narrow and its vibrating like mad. I wonder for a moment if anyone recognizes me. Or if I’m making a fool of myself. Probably. And what’s wrong with that? Lost to the xeno-euphoria of this othered body, bursting free of itself as itself. Come back to check vitals. Thirst. You help me climb down. It’d be embarrassing to break a hip. And so, morning raving became a particular ritual of ongoingness. Our favorite big party got pandemic relief money and went legit. Tickets for sale not just on discreet lists but to just anyone on Resident Advisor. WE came anyway. It would have been a good morning except for some annoying cishet men who can’t dance, and the heavy police presence. There to remind us that our space becomes their space whenever they want and short of a riot there is nothing that we can do about it. That had always a strictly no-photo party. Only this time someone made a TikTok on the dance floor. Last I looked it had 300,000 views. I wonder about how not to say too much about these situations some of us really need. Three-thirty in the morning. Wake with you wrapped around me. Untangle an arm, turn off the alarm. By a bit after four we’re at the club, banging on a steel door. No answer. Bang on the door again. The bouncer opens it, not for us, but to throw some guy out for having his camera out on the dance floor. “Doors closed at four,” the bouncer declares. I’m smiling and holding out my vax pass and ID. He shrugs, checks our passes, and lets us in. The opening DJ got Covid, so Juliana Huxtable has been playing for six hours already with more to go. She’s throwing down a slew of her signature sounds. Jazz musicians improvise by pulling notes or chords out of a space of possibility into horizontal time. She pulls tracks out of a space of possibility in parallel vertical times. A kind of meta-jazz. She flicks in some eighties post-punk tracks. I’m not loving these, being old enough to recall them. They’re freighted with memory for me and maybe me alone in this younger crowd. Still, I can ease back on the moves and admire how Juliana threads and layers those into others, jailbreaking eighties sounds from the tyranny of taste, shattering residual structures of feeling. Then this body is moving again. Back in k-time. I’m locked into some mid-range series of sounds, fading me in and out with it. Dissociating out of historical time. Only something in it sparks a different kind of memory. It’s kin to a refrain from a familiar track, and for once I can place it. Almost. It’s either ‘Nannytown’ or ‘Maroon’ from the Interstellar Fugitives album, by Underground Resistance. Nanny Town was a maroon village in Jamaica, home of a resistance led by an Ashanti woman from what is now Ghana, known as Queen Nanny. That track has a vocal, a stark male-sounding voice, but one beyond any singular being. Over the thud of a three-note bassline, they address the listener—me—in the second person. This is a voice from the past, they say. Standing in the future. Forever to haunt—me. I should never have done this to them. Because now they can never rest. They are: Black, electric. Strong electric. That’s the negative, unvoiced noise of techno. The blackness of techno itself. It is not that the future haunts the past; it is that this past haunts the future, unburied, restless, electric. My white ass is haunted by that voice, from that track. Surrounded by a past that is not a lost future but a past that prevents there ever being one. That clutches at our fleeting moments of ongoingness with a cold hand. That past in which the slave was a thing, a machine. That past in which the slave as a machine was the prototype of the machine as slave. I think of those cishet men who don’t want to be sonically fucked by techno. I think of it as the straight cis man’s horror of being penetrable, of being fuckable. A state he associates with powerlessness. That which is technical can only be that which he masters. Techno, not as genre but as technique, lets digital machines speak. Not unlike the way jazz lets analog instruments speak. Sounds at the limit of what the machine can do to get free. Blackness in sound as the technique of making the thing free to sound off as itself and to take the human with it, into movement, into feeling, into sensation. Feels like that’s what we’re all doing here, while Julianna plays, when I dance, when you and I dance. We try to play along, inside the machine, with no fantasy that we could ever dominate it. Try instead to make at least a part of it that a part of the human can live with. Is that a black need? I don’t know. Is that a trans need? I feel that. To turn some small part of a technics made against us or without us to our wants. We take a break from dancing to get water. I ask you how you’re feeling about tonight. “Apocalypse Prom vibes,” you say, and I laugh.

When we met, and merged, it was good. But I didn’t know if you would want to come dancing with me. You said you like dancing. A lot of people do. But do you need it? Wouldn’t work to have someone in the raving part of my life unless they need it too. We went to one of the smaller raves. It’s a curious kind of date. You came to my place. I made dinner. We got high, fucked, got to sleep early. Woke to the alarm at three-thirty to be at the rave by four. Dancing, not together, not as a couple, but close. Sensing these bodies, moving in sound, connected by sound. You’re into this. Lost in it. The default dance someone does at a rave, after a good hour or so, becomes so intimate. To rave one gives oneself over to this gestural body, arrayed among others, under the machine. How tender it makes me feel to be near you, lost too. Jasmine Infiniti is playing. She flips me into ravespace. Its all coming so easily. The flight into strange flesh, the strange flight out. Being here with you is helping me get out of myself. Dance until the flesh presses needs of its own. We take a break. Get water. These crip feet hurt, so rather than return to the dance, I take you by the hand to the back of the rave. Perched on a plywood ledge, leaning together. Heat and sweat. I can taste you on me, mixed with my own taste. Running a hand up your thigh. Into you. Feeling you flood over my fingers. Gasp. Enlustment. Feel like I’m offering to you, to the situation, all the states in which I’m free. Let our bodies be with each other when they’re free. We’re there ‘til the end. A little cluster of favorite ravers gather and chat before we all head home. Back out of the rave continuum, into the cursed sun. Back home to mine, and sleep. When we wake, around eleven, you say that it’s like we get an extra day into the weekend by getting up for a morning rave. It feels to me like you’ve found k-time. Ketamine time, the sideways time a good rave makes. A pocket in time where there’s more time. You’re a raver now. Or always were. Next, we go to the big Halloween rave. Office building in Manhattan. With light and fog, an empty glass-walled office spaces become something else. A playground for non-labor. It’s a fetish-wear party. You bought a black vinyl dress for it. Hot. I’m in some black mesh thing, suspenders, stockings and boots. We’re stage left. Empty aluminum cans dancing on the bass bin right in front of me. They bounce to different heights, depending on how much liquid is left in them. What I take to be three gay men in puppy masks gambol right next to us. Delightful. Less so the man in basic jeans and tee with his dick out, half hard. He strokes it in a desultory way. Rubs it against another body. Looks consensual, sort-of. Hard to tell. I’m not paying much attention. What fills the senses is meat and heat—and strangeness. A whim is emerging. Sixteen beats pass. Then its decided: clambering on top of the bass bin. Facing the whole room, taking in the swaying and bobbing bodies. It’s a little hard to dance up there as the top of the bin is narrow and its vibrating like mad. I wonder for a moment if anyone recognizes me. Or if I’m making a fool of myself. Probably. And what’s wrong with that? Lost to the xeno-euphoria of this othered body, bursting free of itself as itself. Come back to check vitals. Thirst. You help me climb down. It’d be embarrassing to break a hip. And so, morning raving became a particular ritual of ongoingness. Our favorite big party got pandemic relief money and went legit. Tickets for sale not just on discreet lists but to just anyone on Resident Advisor. WE came anyway. It would have been a good morning except for some annoying cishet men who can’t dance, and the heavy police presence. There to remind us that our space becomes their space whenever they want and short of a riot there is nothing that we can do about it. That had always a strictly no-photo party. Only this time someone made a TikTok on the dance floor. Last I looked it had 300,000 views. I wonder about how not to say too much about these situations some of us really need. Three-thirty in the morning. Wake with you wrapped around me. Untangle an arm, turn off the alarm. By a bit after four we’re at the club, banging on a steel door. No answer. Bang on the door again. The bouncer opens it, not for us, but to throw some guy out for having his camera out on the dance floor. “Doors closed at four,” the bouncer declares. I’m smiling and holding out my vax pass and ID. He shrugs, checks our passes, and lets us in. The opening DJ got Covid, so Juliana Huxtable has been playing for six hours already with more to go. She’s throwing down a slew of her signature sounds. Jazz musicians improvise by pulling notes or chords out of a space of possibility into horizontal time. She pulls tracks out of a space of possibility in parallel vertical times. A kind of meta-jazz. She flicks in some eighties post-punk tracks. I’m not loving these, being old enough to recall them. They’re freighted with memory for me and maybe me alone in this younger crowd. Still, I can ease back on the moves and admire how Juliana threads and layers those into others, jailbreaking eighties sounds from the tyranny of taste, shattering residual structures of feeling. Then this body is moving again. Back in k-time. I’m locked into some mid-range series of sounds, fading me in and out with it. Dissociating out of historical time. Only something in it sparks a different kind of memory. It’s kin to a refrain from a familiar track, and for once I can place it. Almost. It’s either ‘Nannytown’ or ‘Maroon’ from the Interstellar Fugitives album, by Underground Resistance. Nanny Town was a maroon village in Jamaica, home of a resistance led by an Ashanti woman from what is now Ghana, known as Queen Nanny. That track has a vocal, a stark male-sounding voice, but one beyond any singular being. Over the thud of a three-note bassline, they address the listener—me—in the second person. This is a voice from the past, they say. Standing in the future. Forever to haunt—me. I should never have done this to them. Because now they can never rest. They are: Black, electric. Strong electric. That’s the negative, unvoiced noise of techno. The blackness of techno itself. It is not that the future haunts the past; it is that this past haunts the future, unburied, restless, electric. My white ass is haunted by that voice, from that track. Surrounded by a past that is not a lost future but a past that prevents there ever being one. That clutches at our fleeting moments of ongoingness with a cold hand. That past in which the slave was a thing, a machine. That past in which the slave as a machine was the prototype of the machine as slave. I think of those cishet men who don’t want to be sonically fucked by techno. I think of it as the straight cis man’s horror of being penetrable, of being fuckable. A state he associates with powerlessness. That which is technical can only be that which he masters. Techno, not as genre but as technique, lets digital machines speak. Not unlike the way jazz lets analog instruments speak. Sounds at the limit of what the machine can do to get free. Blackness in sound as the technique of making the thing free to sound off as itself and to take the human with it, into movement, into feeling, into sensation. Feels like that’s what we’re all doing here, while Julianna plays, when I dance, when you and I dance. We try to play along, inside the machine, with no fantasy that we could ever dominate it. Try instead to make at least a part of it that a part of the human can live with. Is that a black need? I don’t know. Is that a trans need? I feel that. To turn some small part of a technics made against us or without us to our wants. We take a break from dancing to get water. I ask you how you’re feeling about tonight. “Apocalypse Prom vibes,” you say, and I laugh.