The dance floor has suffered heavily under the auteur’s gaze. From eye-roll-inducing scenes in Hollywood blockbusters to cringing portrayals in avant-garde independent films, there’s always something lacking in the movie industry’s presentation of a club, rave, or dance floor.
Even when they do get it close, movies like Human Traffic, Party Monster, and It’s All Gone Pete Tong still resort to some creative license that pushes the scene between the hills of the uncanny valley, never quite suspending belief. There’s usually something about the music, a piece of dialogue that sits above the sound levels, or an actor in a fedora that suggests the director has never actually been in a club. For anybody that has ever been in a club, attended a rave, or even just enjoys electronic club music, realistic portrayals of club or rave scenes have been rare, if non-existent, in the past.
What so many movies get wrong, however, SIRÂT gets right – even the actor in the fedora looks appropriate. The Oliver Laxe film currently playing in cinemas has been an underground sensation, winning accolades and notoriety for its excellent and unusual story, but what sets it apart in this context is the accurate depiction of a rave.
The film is set in Morocco, taking place in some dystopian alternative reality with a traveler culture in the foreground, but it’s the first 17 minutes that contain one of the most realistic depictions of a rave event ever caught on feature film. There’s something instantly familiar, a vision you might encounter in the Norwegian woods in summer. From the location to the costumes, it all unfolds in what many have labelled a documentary of a rave.
It was “a proper rave,” according to the film composer Kangding Ray (David Letellier in Filmmaker). Recorded over three days during an orchestrated rave, it lent an authenticity to the whole scene that just couldn’t be faked. Similarly to the legends of Human Traffic encouraging its leading lights to take ecstasy, Laxe seems to have been eager to lend that same sense of realism by hosting an actual event, with Kangding Ray even playing a set.
By the time the extended scene comes to its resolution and the music dissolves, it’s as if you’ve been part of it, like you were there, dancing alongside that shirtless man trying to move into one of the bass bins, a scene all too familiar for anybody who’s been at a party with a big soundsystem.
A big part of the success of the realism is the music. Oliver Laxe didn’t pluck some avant-garde composer from the high-art establishment, but went with Kangding Ray, an artist and DJ well ingrained in the clubbing community. Kangding Ray manages to score the whole scene like a night out in miniature. It goes through different stages in a timelapse through sound, moving from the deconstructed to 4/4 at peak time and eventually diffusing into some amorphous atmosphere for the morning. The whole sequence follows that narrative of the eight-hour dance floor.
The composer’s inherent feel for this music and his vast experience in the scene are imprinted on this truncated musical sojourn through a night out. In an interview with Eye for Film, Letellier described a “rawer and visceral sound” to his production approach, and while it’s hard to distinguish from the music he makes as Kangding Ray, it certainly lends an ephemeral mood to the whole scene.
According to Variety, it was Oliver Laxe who approached the composer for the film, the filmmaker clearly hearing something in his music that only enhances the whole scene. Laxe keeps the dialogue minimal and cuts away from the dance floor, while primal grunts and cheers suffice for whatever is happening on it. It’s a stroke of genius and something often missed in other films, where low-level dialogue overpowers loud music.
Kangding Ray’s score is allowed to take centre stage, taking over the narrative while setting the tone for the unsettling events to follow.
It’s particularly the nature of Kangding Ray’s sound that suits this scene so well. His music has always manoeuvred the rudimentary designs of techno through a gateway into more experimental realms. Emerging at the end of the first decade of the millennium, his music found outlets like Stroboscopic Artefacts and Raster-Noton, labels that were pushing the boundaries of the dance floor into alternative directions. As techno grew heavier and more formulaic, spurred on by what people heard at Berghain, labels like these and artists like Kangding Ray were offering something cerebral beyond the corporeal designs of techno and its instinctual rhythms.
Letellier’s records like Cory Arcane still stand as testaments to what can be achieved beyond the reductive properties of techno. It’s something that has died out by now as people went harder and faster, sacrificing that experimental slant in techno for something more primitive and archetypal of the genre. There’s not been much room for nuance, and techno like Kangding Ray’s has had to find its audience closer to the underground, where communities like the one portrayed in SIRÂT exist.
SIRÂT marks Kangding Ray’s second outing in film, and it’s no surprise that it’s in this realm that his music thrives today. It’s not what you’ll hear on festival stages or in big rooms in Europe this summer; it’s only available to those who seek it out in the subterranean bunkers of underground clubs and raves.
Much like SIRÂT presents in the film, it’s a culture not for the masses, but the dedicated few. These aren’t the thousands strong at festivals in reverence to the DJ, as their Instagram or TikTok profiles would suggest. These are the few hundred dedicated to the music, stomping to the sound, not the personality, dancers heliotropically seeking out speakers, not faces.
SIRÂT captures this instinctively, it seems, Laxe clearly having spent some time on dance floors. It’s only the first 17 minutes of the film, but it sets the tone perfectly, and as Kangding Ray’s soundtrack unravels with the film, it’s something that stays with you throughout and beyond.