It's July 2021 and clubs are open in the UK. Gutterring's first official party is taking place in a secret location in Hackney Wick. A Google Maps pin directs us to a remote location in the marshes. After stumbling through the dense woods for what feels like an eternity, we finally make it to a small clearing where punters have begun to emerge from the thickets at all angles. It's pitch dark except for the speckle of phone lights and a projector that's stationed behind the decks, which plays a surreal amalgamation of YouTube clips and TikToks on endless loop. Ravers dressed as medieval forest dwellers have begun flooding the forest floor, moving in time to the subsonic bass-throb of the soundsystem. Some sit atop manmade perches in the trees. One urban reveller leaves in search of the nearest off-license and returns almost four hours later – just in time for the police to turn up and shut the entire thing down.

There's a feeling of ecstasy in the air. Not only because this is the first government-mandated rave in over 18 months, but because the music is legitimately wild. It shudders out the speakers with deranged glee, a cathartic mix of heady hardstyle and progressive techno that pounds into your skull like a power drill. For all the moments of fear and anxiety that have punctuated the last year, this feels like a collective moment of letting go. The neo-medieval garbs, the pagan iconography and elf ears, only bolster the sense of mysticism.

Gutterring

The London collective, consisting of Val (DJ ANTIMANIFESTO), Luca (w0w cZ), Luke (whitetrashtray), Naz (XNBTNI) and V (zlaya), came together in 2020. Already familiar with one another through the London club circuit, through university and artistic collaborations, they decided to form an isolation bubble during the spring lockdown, bonding through their shared appreciation of hardcore and a rejection of the snobbery associated with parts of the scene. "It was a mutual exhaustion with the state of things, wanting something new, that organically grew into whatever it is now," they explain. "Lockdown was really a jolt to ask questions about established scenes, and we feel like this impulse feeds directly into the renewed interest in exploratory forms of ritual and community."

Meanwhile, in Berlin, another rave bringing together medieval aesthetics and hardstyle is taking off. Hailed as the city's "first and only medieval fantasy gabber rave," Mordorkore, a collective consisting of Nico Lim (Butters Club House), Dominic Mealy, Simon Villaret (s1m0nc3ll0), Tabitha Swanson and Nat Lall (DJ Fluffie), combines queer nerd culture and LARPing with epic sounds inspired by fantasy and folklore. Partygoers dress as dwarves and fairies, necromancers and mages, jesters and executioners. While predominantly gabber, the music encompasses a range of experimental, high BPM dance music. Orc-like cries and the sound of clashing armour intensifies the sense of magic. During one interval, performance artist Viviana Druga performs an occult ritual using a tarot deck, creating a magic potion which she proceeds to feed ritualistically to eager ravers.

"We felt there was something missing in the Berlin party scene, something which was more evolved than simply going to a party and dancing," explains s1m0nc3ll0. "We wanted to create a little circus in the club, where you can immerse yourself in fantasy and surround yourself with the sounds of an epic battle." The lockdown presented an opportunity for Mordorkore to rethink the rave experience: "Partying in Berlin can be very serious. A lot of the time, people are dressed in black and it's a very specific style," adds Lim. "It made sense to create an immersive fantasy world where people can lose themselves, not only in the music, but also in the environment and activities."

Neo-pagan aesthetics have been a part of the dance music fabric for decades, with roots in the free party movement of the late '80s and early '90s. But its renewed popularity within electronic music hints at a collective desire to create new and magical worlds through the medium of rave.

Mordorkore

Its presence stretches across a number of micro scenes, though most notably in leftfield and distinctly queer circles that favour heavier, more abrasive sounds. From the heroic synth stabs of Dorian Electra's medieval-inspired album My Agenda, to PC Music signee daine's emo-faerie aesthetics and the fantasy chops of Soundcloud producers Bartolomé, DJ David Goblin, and CL Golem, the artists at the forefront of this trend are terminally online. Rather than reproduce familiar sounds of hardcore past, their music is a genre-hopping mash-up of maximalist sensations and textures that cherry-picks sounds from across the dance music spectrum in a way that feels ironic and nostalgic, yet undeniably current.

With literal plagues ravaging the world, neo-feudal lords reigning over us in the form of private businesses and widespread natural disasters pointing to the End Times, it's no wonder ravers are donning on garbs from ye olde days and dancing freely to the extreme sounds of hardstyle. Made for smooth brains stewed within an inch of their lives across seemingly endless lockdowns, the music is grandiose and immediate. Less Paradise Lost, more paradise pummelled, it draws on a collective sense of pathos to hammer, eviscerate and push the listener into another realm. "I'm a euphoria freak, and the euphoria that I get from hardcore and other hard dance sounds is like no other. It makes it very easy to lose yourself," says Luca Wowczyna, creative director and Gutterring organiser.

"Our interest in sounds like hardstyle, progressive techno, etc. stems partially from a fascination with and appreciation of remix culture, post-irony of contemporary music culture, the way it engages with nostalgia in a way that reinvents the familiar," they elaborate. "But, also more practically, post-internet attention spans need the sensory overload of layers and layers of meaning."

It's unsurprising that post-lockdown ravers are gravitating towards harder, denser styles of music as a way of shaking off the stasis of the past year. Or as DJ David Goblin puts it, "It is a tough song for a tough period. It is the sound of the hammer that forges the sword. BIM! BIM! BIM!" The producer's 2020 album Ork Muzik is a medley of bork-ish tracks, complete with squelching, swampish samples and goblin-esque vocals emblematic of this memetic milieu.

"A lot of hardstyle music specifically has a lot of really huge and epic chord progressions that can sound very medieval or baroque," says Dorian Electra, who penned parts of My Agenda in a secluded British castle. Like a soldier in combat, such drastic intensification of the immediate presents a Dionysian thrill not too dissimilar to wielding a sword or performing an occult ritual. "If you pair that with even more dramatic visuals—medieval or fantasy—it becomes so epic and so extreme and so ridiculous that it can't help but show self-awareness," they add. "It allows the listener enough wiggle room to feel somewhat ironically detached but simultaneously deeply sincere about how epic it is. At least that's how I see it. Beyond based and cringe."

Fantasy aesthetics, Electra explains, allow for playful historical revisionism, drawing on Celtic and folkloric visuals to create an alternative reality where you have the power to weave your own narrative. This imagined world is, of course, far more inclusive and diverse than the reality, especially in terms of sexuality and gender fluidity—undeniably a big driving force for Gen Z teens. "I think for a lot of queer people, losing yourself into like, fantasy things is quite a common thing, especially when you're younger and you don't really know what being queer is. And you don't really identify with the world around you," says Lim. When put into the context of hardstyle—a genre that's predominantly straight, male working-class—this allows young queer youth to reclaim spaces that they have previously been shut off from.

The extreme machismo associated with medieval and fantasy visuals is subverted when filtered through a queer lens. "I love the exaggerated masculinity and the drama of medieval music and visuals. I am very bored by things that are not extreme in some capacity. I can't help it," Electra agrees. "I love traditional Christian religious and choral music and Gregorian monk chants. The same goes for religious aesthetics and symbols. There is great power in being able to reclaim something that has historically been used to oppress. Especially for queer people."

There's no doubt that the contemporary resurgence of this sort of neo-paganism has its roots online. TikTok, already a huge part of youth culture before the pandemic, took on new significance in 2020 as young people rushed to its feeds in search of connection. "A lot of people were at home bored out of their minds and going down rabbit holes on the internet," says Count Baldor, a British producer whose maximalist sound can be heard on My Agenda, as well as Lady Gaga's most recent remix album Dawn of Chromatica. "I guess there's a large community on TikTok for cosplayers and people showing their interests, and due to the (almost) random nature of the app, a lot of people are probably introduced to subcultures they weren't aware of previously."

But the pervasiveness of medieval aesthetics may also reflect a deeper pessimism towards the future. "The prevalence of medieval aesthetics in today's pop culture suggests a widely held sense that historical progress has stopped and we are now sliding back into an older model of society that resembles 'cloud feudalism'," explains artist and social media researcher Joshua Citarella, who's previously investigated the 'irony politics of Gen-Z. "As each generation does worse than the last, today's young people feel less like citizens of states and more like techno-serfs under the algorithmic rule of platforms. Themes of returning to older ways of organising society and human knowledge are a cultural response to the political failures of the present."

Mordorkore

These aesthetic gestures are ironic and hyperbolic. "But (they) point to very real problems," says Citarella. Consider TikTok microtrends like cottagecore, fairycore and goblincore subcultures, all of which emerged over the pandemic and hint at a wider discontent towards the world at present. "In a largely secularised world, with increasing economic precarity, social atomisation and breakdown of community bonds and identities, people are searching for answers and meaning online and are increasingly turning towards radical politics and extreme political ideologies to fill this need," explains Electra. "Human beings need epic meaning, epic music, epic causes to rally behind. If these needs aren't being satisfied in a meaningful, healthy way, because people's basic survival needs aren't being met, it will have disastrous, unhealthy consequences as people search for meaning and narratives by turning to things like nationalism, racism and fascism."

In his seminal 1995 essay 'Technopagans: May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace' , essayist and technopagan thinker Erik Davis links techno music to a form of neo-tribal ritual. He applies the "imaginative interfaces" of Pagan mysticism to the era's latent digital world, exploring the ways in which modern technology tends to inspire revivals of hermetic and other occult traditions. Technology, he argues, has the capacity to build bridges "between logic and fantasy, math and myth, the inner and outer worlds." When applied to rave culture, it becomes a means of transcending the limits of our physical selves. Within this digital-mystic sphere, the rave takes on a ritualistic quality, the decks become an altar and the dancefloor, a body-without-organs.

On his 2021 album Lei Line Eon, British producer iglooghost explores his hometown Dorset's secret tradition of Lei Music—a mysterious subgenre that's said to summon "hovering, drone-like organisms called Celles." "My whole shit is essentially trying to make sounds that feel super physical and earthbound in the way that feels realistic, while coming entirely out of a software synth," he says. "I think that whole mantra lends itself really naturally to a visual direction that explores the melding of ancient and new tech." Sweeping violin arrangements are positioned against mechanical whirs and deconstructed breakbeats in a way that feels both ancient and hyperreal. Glitching melodies and synthetic vocals are portals to mystical realms: "Some of my closest spiritual moments have been making music, sat in the glow of a laptop screen," he elaborates. "Just by pure association, computers feel mystical to me."

Just like the '90s generation of hardcore ravers whose minds were imploded by breakbeat pile-ups and brain-scrambling samples, we find ourselves in yet another mass malaise not too dissimilar from the post-Thatcher years. It's within this shadow of malcontent that the ineffable qualities of rave reveal themselves. When combined with folkloric and medieval visuals, the extreme sensations elicited by hardcore recall Davis's descriptions of "Dionysian nature worshippers who embrace the Apollonian artifice of logical machines." Through collective thrill-seeking, we ascend to loftier, MIDI-evil planes of existence.

Words by Günseli Yalcinkaya