In the last decade, festival studies has developed into a distinctive and extensive field of research. There are numerous articles, monographs, and most recently, even a handbook, dedicated to an in-detail examination of the economic, sociological, and aesthetic environment of such events and their impact on certain regions, communities, and cultural scenes.Footnote 1 At the same time, a general ‘festivalization of culture’ has been observed since the end of the twentieth century. The number and range of festivals has constantly increased over the last decades, a development that seems to be directly related to globalization, the steady growth of a tourism industry, and the pervasiveness of ‘digitalized’ communication via social media and the internet.Footnote 2
From the very beginning, music festivals have been a focal point of this scholarship.Footnote 3 In addition to a majority of predominantly empirical or ethnographic works, which focus on marketing, management, and issues of sustainability, as well as the perception and the social or aesthetic experience of such events through field research and surveys, there has been a significant growth in historical studies on the importance of festivals and their role in certain contexts; for example, as part of the so-called Cultural Cold War or, above all, as a core approach to the historiography of rock and pop music in general.Footnote 4
Within festival studies, electronic dance music (EDM) has received increasing academic attention in the recent past.Footnote 5 This is all the more true since EDM is not only the English umbrella term for every kind of electronic dance music, but also an explicitly festival-oriented sub-genre that mainly originated in the United States, which gained immense success over the past decade and is currently seen as a new driving force in the mainstream of the pop music festival industry.Footnote 6 Even though larger, supra-regional gatherings have played a central role since the inception of rave and techno culture – to use early German and UK-umbrella terms for EDM – there is little research available on the long, lasting, and multifaceted history of these festivals.Footnote 7 In this study of the Eclipse Rave in Arica, which took place in the Chilean Atacama Desert in November 1994, I focus on one of the earliest truly international EDM events of its kind. As a collaboration of mainly German and Chilean musicians and organizers, this festival was confronted by a multitude of organizational obstacles and intercultural misunderstandings that led to it being a financial disaster for the organizing team. Nevertheless, the Arica Eclipse Rave has now achieved a kind of cult status and is mythologized as the ‘first techno festival ever’ in South America as well as a forerunner to the close connection between EDM culture in South America (especially Chile) and Central Europe.Footnote 8 Drawing on German and Chilean sources, this article aims to shed light on the background and impact of this festival. Of special interest is the ‘transatlantic’ character of the event, and the central role of young Chilean-Germans in exile as interpreters and cultural mediators during the rave needs to be mentioned. To a large extent, this article will also question the significance of studies on festivals considered ‘legendary’ in the scholarly and journalistic historiography of pop and EDM. In doing so, the article assesses the methodological conclusions that can be drawn from the mechanisms and motives that guide this type of research. Ultimately, I seek to uncover the different sorts of sources generated by festivals and similar events and, in consequence, ponder how can we write a transnational history of EDM, a music culture that on the one hand seems to be obsessed with the idea of providing moments of perfect presence, of being present, while on the other hand, creates constantly new, stronger myths and legends about its own history.
Between nothing and narration; or, what remains from a techno party?
One of the attractions of EDM as nightlife and party culture is the creation of so-called safe spaces to draw informal gatherings of clubbers and festival visitors seeking intense musical experiences, endless dancing, excessive drug use, sometimes eccentric costumes, gender bending, and perhaps, even socially stigmatized sexual practices. In other words, borrowing the language privileged by a majority of scene-goers and artists in EDM culture, the party itself is a temporary ‘work of art’, a ‘social sculpture’, or, to use a less charged term, a focal point and crucial format to which all participants collectively contribute. DJs and track producers, sound, light, and decoration designers and technicians, the dancing crowd, and some may say, even the bouncers and drug dealers interact in a much less hierarchical and directed way than, for example, in a concert.Footnote 9 Party here could mean both a club event as well as an open-air festival, and its duration may vary between one night and continuous parties of several weeks in length.
There are certain methodological and ethical problems in researching this culture given the explicitly ephemeral character of the events as well as the far-reaching prohibition of taking pictures, filming, and other forms of documentation – put in place to guarantee the events as safe spaces – which leads to a lack of sources, even when compared with similar scenes and cultures.Footnote 10 For example, it is often nearly impossible to gather precise information about the DJs involved and the order they performed in, let alone obtaining tracklists of individual sets played at historically important raves and techno events – not least because software for DJing that would allow us to track down this information was only developed a decade ago. Also, flyers or posters, often the only remaining traces of EDM events, are not sources of truly reliable information, given that last-minute changes in cast and order and, occasionally, locations and dates, are the rule rather than the exception in this scene. This is also true for the Arica Eclipse Rave.
The scene itself compensates the fleeting and transitory character of its ideological and aesthetic nucleus – the parties – and also the lack of source material with even greater talkativeness and gossip. A lot of events considered landmarks in the scene as well as some mythologized clubs are subsequently reviewed and commented on prominently (especially if individual memories are rather vague for various, mostly drug-induced reasons). In Berlin, for example, the restricted online platform ‘Restrealität’ was established for this particular purpose more than 15 years ago as a safe communication network and a space curated and protected for the club scene as well as a non-commercial and anonymous alternative to big social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.Footnote 11
Besides this talkativeness, which makes the history of the scene memorable and describable, it is not uncommon in the EDM context to have a small group of ‘professional’ contemporary witnesses, who appear again and again in books, TV shows, or other forms of documentary, to dominate the narratives and historical interpretation of both particular events and regional historiography in general.Footnote 12 Thus, it is mostly journalists, who, by gathering these stories and testimonies, set the master narratives that come to identify them. A well-known, although controversial, example would be the idea of Techno as the sound of German reunification (‘Sound der Wende’), a master narrative established by Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen in their interview book Klang der Familie. Footnote 13 A similar case, but one based on analytical descriptions of several tracks and releases, would be Simon Reynolds's label ‘Hardcore Continuum’ for developments of the British rave scene at the end of the 1990s.Footnote 14 As such, researchers of EDM should always discuss these master narratives critically and avoid further reinforcing them by taking them at face value. In a way, the task for EDM researchers is similar to the scholarly examination of historical opera productions: ethnographic or empirical data collection is a difficult (if not impossible) methodological approach, since the event under investigation has inevitably passed (although at least in this case it will usually leave behind a written score and libretto that may work as the basis for an opera re-staging). Complete audiovisual documentations of EDM events (especially from its early days) are available only on rare occasions. Accordingly, the only viable way left to have a glimpse into the aesthetic, political, and managerial ideas informing these performances is to evaluate the few remaining sources (flyers, posters, photos, letters/emails, locations) left by organizers, participating artists, and audiences. This limited documentation can then be related to the multitude of historical and contemporary stories circulating about the events, which are also to be evaluated as sources that may cover a wide range of different perspectives.
Arica documentation: a diversity of sources for the Eclipse Rave
Taking these methodological shortcomings into account, the Arica Eclipse Rave of 1994 actually provides the researcher with an unusually favourable set of sources. Because of the techno hype in Germany in the early 1990s, the event gained some public attention at the time, which led to a film crew travelling with the German group of organizers and DJs to Chile. The project generated at least two short TV clips; one of them was broadcasted on the private German TV channel Sat1, and about two hours of film footage, including interviews with members of the rave crew, is currently accessible via YouTube.Footnote 15 Furthermore, a delegation of festival participants was invited to a Chilean youth TV show, of which excerpts are also available.Footnote 16 At the time, numerous reports and articles about the Eclipse Rave were published in German techno fanzines as well as local newspapers from Arica, sources that are very revealing from a wide variety of perspectives. Furthermore, a Facebook account activated last year in order to promote a 2020 revival of the Eclipse Rave offers further source material, mostly in the form of photos.Footnote 17 In addition, I conducted interviews with one of the DJs of the festival, Martin Schopf, aka DJ Dandy Jack, and his sister, Paula Schopf, aka Chica Paula. They provided me with very valuable information about their family background as children of Chilean families in exile growing up in West Germany in the 1980s. At first glance, this quantity of sources about the Arica Eclipse Rave seems astonishing. However, to put forward an initial hypothesis, it seems to me that festivals are explicitly designed to generate specific situations, moments, and stories, with the goal of creating documentaries and memories as part of the self-assurance of certain subcultural scenes. In the field of EDM, such sources include powerful and iconic images and film footage (rarely audio recordings): the kinds of archival materials that, in order to keep the club a safe space, clubs themselves rarely allow.
First of all, with the help of the sources described, it is possible to extract basic facts regarding the Arica Eclipse Rave; and by double checking existing articles and reviews about the event, it is possible to correct some inaccuracies, exaggerations, or plainly false information.Footnote 18 The idea of the festival apparently arose at very short notice and its planning and implementation were correspondingly hectic and disorganized.Footnote 19 Inspired by the enormous success of the techno and rave movement in Central Europe and the subsequent exchange with the United States (mainly Detroit and Chicago) at the beginning of the 1990s, it was mainly Miguel Bustos Vergara who circulated the plan of organizing a rave connected to the last total solar eclipse of the century in northern Chile in November 1994. Bustos Vergara was a 20-year-old amateur DJ of Chilean background living in Denmark who had connections with Derrick May and other pioneering DJs and producers from the Detroit techno scene. At that time, he suggested his hometown of Arica as the location for the festival, arguing that the small but economically important harbour city offered the necessary infrastructure (a supposedly spectacular venue on Alacrán peninsula, local discos and sound equipment renters, and an airport at Tacna, just by the Peruvian border) and was close to the Andean village of Putre, which would offer an ideal view of the solar eclipse.Footnote 20 Martin Schopf, also a child of Chilean parents, who grew up in the Frankfurt area but still regularly spent time in Chile, spread this news throughout the local Frankfurt techno scene, one of the most important scenes in Germany. Soon after, the booking agent and promoter Katja Gowin took over as the main person responsible for the organization on the German side of the project. Gowin, who was also from Frankfurt, but had important contacts throughout the German techno scene, managed to secure at least one important German sponsor, the outdoor fashion label Pash, and, in collaboration with Miguel Bustos, put together an impressive line-up for the rave. It included Derrick May and Robert Hood, two very prominent representatives of the Detroit techno scene, John Acquaviva, also from Detroit, as well as Dr Motte (one of the iconic DJs at the Berlin Loveparade), John Meier aka Siddhartha from Santiago de Chile, and Ricardo Villalobos, who is currently a very well-known minimal techno artist but who was a young, largely unknown DJ based in Darmstadt (DJ Ricardo) at the time. However, numerous problems and last-minute cancellations ended up preventing Dr Motte from joining the German delegation, which shrank to a total of fifteen people. Robert Hood had to be replaced by Stacey Pullen at the very last moment. On site, setting up a professional sound system and getting a hold of a sufficient number of chemical toilets proved to be a great challenge, which, along with a lack of financial resources, also led to postponements and the eventual cancellation of an entire rave night.Footnote 21 In the end, two rave parties were held in Arica on 3 and 4 November 1994: one as open-air rave at the dusty and desolate Alacrán peninsula, and the second in a small local club called The Bunker, the Hotel Saint Georgettes’ discotheque.Footnote 22 The raves were followed by two more events in Santiago de Chile named Eclipse Rave II, with a largely reduced line-up, on 10 and 11 November.Footnote 23
To draw up an initial balance from an organizational point of view, the exchange between German and North and South American DJs and ravers was somewhat successful. Nevertheless, from an economic perspective, the entire enterprise ended rather disastrously as instead of the expected 2,500 ravers only a few hundred attended, despite greatly reduced, and, in the end, even free admission.Footnote 24 As a result, the significant financial losses of the festival had to be personally compensated by the organizers.
Besides these basic facts, it is important to keep in mind two important pieces of background information regarding the 1994 Arica rave. First, the rise of open-air electronic dance music events since the end of the 1980s, especially in Great Britain and Germany, was connected to the ideological framework of tribalism, modern pop paganism, and exoticism of rave and techno cultures. Second, the role of DJs and other artists from Chilean families living in Europe, mostly in German exile since the beginning of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1973, was highly influential for this particular rave as well as for the development of EDM in Chile in general. The following section explores these two contingencies in more detail.
Tribes and shamans: early rave and techno festivals and similar outdoor events in Europe as models for the Arica Eclipse Rave
From the beginning, inspired by hippie, disco, and other earlier counterculture and club-culture scenes that developed after 1945, EDM events took place as either retreats into the closed rooms of clubs in often post-industrial and urban surroundings (think of legendary places such as the Warehouse in Chicago or Tresor and Berghain in Berlin),Footnote 25 or as outdoor events (raves in the forest, at beaches, or in other natural settings), where party, landscape, and the effects of elements such as wind, light, rain, and fire were supposed to merge into an intense and transcendental collective aesthetic experience. Street parades should be mentioned as a third, occasionally very successful, format. These kinds of events were at least partly taken over by the Pride Parades of the LGBT scene and can be understood as a special case within EDM culture, neither club nor festivals, with the aim of having a visible young dancing crowd temporarily occupy public urban spaces. These kinds of events, like the festivals, often also generated a huge amount of lasting iconic imagery.Footnote 26
Looking at EDM festivals in the early 1990s, which were the most important models for the 1994 Arica Eclipse Rave, one must differentiate between the few immense commercial party events with big sponsors (e.g., the Mayday or Thunderdome series in Germany and the Netherlands) and the more local and spontaneous outdoor raves in a truly do-it-yourself tradition.Footnote 27 In addition, some genre-specific particularities can be observed. For example, the psytrance and Goa scenes had a significant influence on the 1990s rave culture in general, since psychedelic elements that would become common in techno raves were central in their festivals – which often refer to hippie culture as a precursor. Besides trance as the preferred music genre, these elements also included psychedelic drugs, shamanist rituals based on natural religions (or certain clichés of them), and open-air locations (preferably in ‘exotic’ countries) in spectacular natural settings such as coasts, forests, or desert regions.Footnote 28 Finally, sound systems of the Freetekno movement, such as ‘Spiral Tribe’ mainly consisting of former London squatters, travelled throughout Europe and played a major role in the organization of often unannounced, illegal open-air raves and festivals. This particular practice brought a specific anti-commercial and political aura to the rave and techno scenes at that time.Footnote 29
The Eclipse Rave in Arica combined all these elements in a rather eclectic way. The issue of commercialization is perhaps most visible in the festival's sponsorship by the Munich fashion label Pash. The sponsor's emphasis on outdoor fashion may be a first indication of the ideological connections to the Goa and psytrance scenes, in which the combination of travel, outdoor lifestyle, and musical experience was crucial. Boris Hiesserer and his small company, Pyromania Arts, which was responsible for the visuals of the festival in Arica, had also strong connections to Goa and psytrance, and is still acknowledged in the company's website, where he is still currently described as a ‘media shaman’.Footnote 30 On the Chilean side, DJ Siddhartha gave a strong Goa flavour to the musical setlist. Finally, according to reports about the festival, there was a significant group of travelling Goa fans, mostly British, who attended the event in Arica. However, they were also partially responsible for some of the negative reviews, as it was precisely this group of participants who was characterized as using drugs excessively and actively provoking the local security and military forces.Footnote 31 Derrick May's contribution featured the described post-industrial aesthetics of Detroit techno for which he was well known in Germany due to his appearances at the Tresor club in Berlin. Other DJs, such as Jörg Henning aka DJ Terrible, a lesser known artist from Berlin who was also co-editor of Germany's most influential techno fanzine, Frontpage, were asked to participate at the eleventh hour.Footnote 32 Finally, some other participants, such as Ricardo Villalobos, were invited simply because of their Chilean background.
Stylistically, the DJ sets at the Arica Eclipse Rave turned out to be a rather random and chaotic mixture of early techno and rave scene elements, where almost any DJ could have participated – if only they had time and were willing to play without payment. Significantly, women DJs were totally absent from the Arica rave's playlists. This was not uncommon, especially during the early years of the techno scene. At that time, women very rarely held positions as DJs; and, like Katja Gowin in the case of the Eclipse festival, they were often present at festivals or in clubs in secondary positions such as booking or label agents, festival organizers, and event managers.Footnote 33 As can be observed in the pioneering days of techno, the organizers of the festival seem to have been less concerned with a coherent concept or with the financial success of the event than with making the event an idealistic and symbolic gesture to open up, in a missionary gesture, Chile and the rest of South America to EDM culture. The fact that significant differences in the perception and evaluation of the Arica festival can be observed among German, Chilean, and German-Chilean participants, will be discussed later. First, I intend to respond to the question of how did such a strong bond developed between the children of Chilean exile during the Pinochet regime and the German EDM scene.
The Arica Eclipse Rave as an important impulse: exile, return, and the EDM scene in Chile
As already mentioned with regard to DJs such as Matias Aguayo, Ricardo Villalobos, Cristian Vogel, Luciano, Andres Bucci, Dandy Jack, and Chica Paula, it is evident that a large number of influential and successful artists in the field of EDM come from Chilean families and grew up in European exile. In some articles, this group was even promoted as a ‘conexión chilena’ (‘Chilean Connection’), a group of artists who support and inspire each other.Footnote 34 Whether this is the best way to think about these musicians may be questionable given that some of them explicitly state that they do not wish to be reduced to that description.Footnote 35 For the Arica Eclipse Rave, the exile played an important role, as the whole event was developed and designed as a cultural exchange between Germany and Chile. That is to say, the event came about namely through the strong influence of people such as Miguel Bustos, Martin Schopf, and Ricardo Villalobos, who had all lived in Europe for a long period and could therefore act as cultural mediators and translators. This applies to the preparation of the festival, but was even more relevant on site, where language barriers could be overcome with their intervention, and where sensitive processes, such as planning the rave in coordination with the Chilean police and military, could be navigated.Footnote 36 Transatlantic ties, which were mainly maintained by second-generation emigrants, had a great influence on popular music culture in Chile already before the Arica Eclipse Rave, especially when it came to early forms of popular electronic music.Footnote 37 For example, stories repeatedly circulate about a legendary suitcase full of mixtapes specially put together for consumption in the Chilean scene and was brought along as a musical hawker's tray by Martin Schopf/Dandy Jack during his regular visits to Chile.Footnote 38 Nevertheless, for others, such as Ricardo Villalobos, the Arica Eclipse Rave was their first visit to Chile since their parents had left for exile in Germany. For Villalobos, the festival was the beginning of an intense relationship with his home country, both through numerous and longer stays, as well as in regard to his own artistic reflections about the Chilean exile and the years of the military dictatorship.Footnote 39
It is remarkable that the exile background of important participants in the Eclipse Rave was not mentioned at all in the contemporary Chilean reports about the festival. In fact, the topic sometimes turned out to be sensitive. For example, at the Chilean youth TV show mentioned previously, where the Arica techno crew was introduced, Ricardo Villalobos served as interpreter, especially when answering questions about the aesthetic ideas behind EDM. However, at some point during the interview with the host of the TV show, a clumsy moment happened when a certain irritation became palpable regarding Villalobos's nationality. When the host asked where in Chile Villalobos was active as a DJ, the musician replied that he was from Germany and that although he was born in Chile, he was now in the country only incidentally. After a very short but noticeable interruption and an awkward silence, the TV host quickly changed the topic of conversation.Footnote 40
It is known that in Chile, but also in the Chilean diaspora, pop music played an important role during the Pinochet regime. This was true during the years of the dictatorship – think of the existence of famous bands such as Los Pinochet Boys, founded in Santiago de Chile in 1984 – but also after its end.Footnote 41 In the field of EDM, the very early scene, with its strong international orientation, enabled many Chilean-European musicians to break away from the very strong exile culture of their family homes, especially to find an alternative to the dramatic and emotional songs of the Nueva Canción, which was the core musical repertoire of the Chilean exile.Footnote 42 EDM helped the second generation of Chilean exiles to overcome, or at least counterbalance, not only this very strong tradition, but also the exile itself, as they were able to develop highly mobile transnational lifestyles that allowed them more frequent and longer visits on both sides of the Atlantic. In this context, the Arica Eclipse Rave meant an important impulse in two ways. It showed that EDM festivals, with international participation, were also possible in Chile, and it brought some of the participants from exiled families, such as Villalobos, back into direct contact with their former homeland. The latter was to have a strong impact on their artistic careers and led to longer visits and further performances in Santiago de Chile in the second half of the 1990s.Footnote 43
‘Los ‘gringos’ del eclipse’: cultural misunderstandings and the contemporary reception of the Arica Eclipse Rave
The main sources for the study of the contemporary reception of the Arica Eclipse Rave are reports from the newspaper La Estrella de Arica. It should be noted first that the rave was only one of many regional activities that took place around the time of the solar eclipse in northern Chile in November 1994. Four years after the end of Pinochet's dictatorship, it was hoped that this event would provide an important boost for tourism in an otherwise extremely barren and poor region. The local newspaper started reporting about the rave only two day before the event, when it was confirmed after numerous difficulties that almost led to its cancellation.Footnote 44 From the beginning, the local journalists used the word ‘espectáculo’ (‘show’) to describe the rave, which shows that evidently the locals did not really know what an EDM event was about. Accordingly, a further article appeared later trying to explain the characteristics of techno and an event like this by highlighting the central importance of a ‘light show’ that rumour had it was supposed to be spectacular.Footnote 45 On the day of the solar eclipse and the first actual night of the rave, another article was published, providing details about the entrance fee, the programme, and featuring extensively the very modern technical infrastructure of the event, even speaking about the wattage of the sound system, the number of loudspeakers, and so on. The tone of the writing shows a certain pride that the region of Arica would be capable of producing such a futuristic event.Footnote 46 Yet, in the following article, which came as a review of the first rave night, the journalists’ disappointment was evident. Above all, the small audience was the focus of the review. One of the reasons given for such low attendance was that the local population perceived the entire event as strange and inappropriate. To underline this assumption, an attendee described the musical experience by saying, ‘there was a very monotonous and repetitive vibe; at the end there were only four women dancing … without a partner, which shows that people did not take the show very seriously’ (‘Hubo una onda mónotona y repetitiva, terminaron bailando cuatro mujeres … y sin pareja, lo que demuestra la poca seriedad con que se tomó este espectáculo’).Footnote 47 Also, the visual effects and the sound quality of the ‘espectáculo’ did not fulfil the expectations of the journalist in terms of their presumed ‘futuristic’ and technical character.Footnote 48 In the following days, another short article about the Arica Eclipse Rave was published, focusing on the second night of the festival, which for organizational reasons and because of the very small audience was moved to the hotel discotheque mentioned previously.Footnote 49 Finally, the local newspaper gave a summary of the events organized in the context of the solar eclipse, including a longer report about the rave. The note drew the following conclusion: ‘La música Tecno cautivó a los “gringos” del eclipse’ (‘Techno music fascinated the “foreigners” of the eclipse’).Footnote 50
Thus, while the rave was described by the local press in Arica as a total disaster and a temporary ‘gringo’ invasion, the German public was presented with a completely different picture. In a short television report of just under one minute featured in ‘Super News’, a news outlet on the private TV station Sat1, the rave was described, using a quite nationalistic and colonialist rhetoric, as a phenomenal triumph of a youth culture that, having already made big waves in Germany, was now apparently about to conquer the world.Footnote 51
Besides these mainstream press and TV statements, intended for the general public, contemporary impressions by actual participants are especially revealing. These have been preserved in various video interviews, which were recorded by the camera crew during the first night of the rave.Footnote 52 While Bustos, as an Arican by birth, strongly emphasizes the pioneering and developing character of the event for the region and for Chile and its emerging EDM scene, Gowin considers the rave, despite all its organizational problems, a success at fostering international exchange. Besides several statements about the impressiveness of the solar eclipse, some of the German participants’ comments focus on the intensity of having a rave in Chile, because it provided ‘another feeling here in South America compared to a rave in the affluent society in Frankfurt’.Footnote 53 A very interesting statement finally comes from Martin Schopf/Dandy Jack. It is perhaps no coincidence that he, as one of the participants with a German-Chilean exile background, takes a very critical position, as he is able to see the event from a different point of view, the extraterritorial perspective of the emigrant:
People from Arica came to me and told me that techno is a mentality light years away from their own mentality. It doesn't fit into the ambience of the area. It's like Fitzcarraldo 2000. It's an attempt to introduce a completely foreign form of culture somewhere else. And then it happens that the people stand around and look at it and think “fine…” – and even try to understand it, and some people would even like to take part in it. But in the end, it [the rave] is actually in complete contradiction with the lifestyle of the people who live here.Footnote 54
The impact of Arica; or, festivals as history-making events
It is difficult to answer whether the Arica Eclipse Rave was a failure or a success. From an organizational point of view, the event turned out to be a complete disaster, and the direct musical impact of the few rave nights was likely very small. Nevertheless, from a different perspective, the event turned out to be a long-lasting success. First, it started an era of intense international exchange between the nascent EDM scene in Chile and artists from other regional scenes all over the world. This is particularly important because it led many of the DJs of Chilean exile background to resume or strengthen their contact with their former homeland. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the most important achievement of this festival is that it took place at all, since it generated conversations with long-lasting effects in both Germany and Chile. In the cultural environment of EDM, stories and narratives, as well as iconic pictures are often more important and more lasting than the in-situ effects of the events themselves. The Arica Eclipse Rave provided a very powerful myth of origin not only for some techno scenes in Latin America, but also for the historical narratives about the internationalization and globalization of EDM in general.Footnote 55 In this respect, festivals and similar events can be understood simultaneously as generators of as well as nodes for these narratives. Festivals are always conducive to the condensation of certain rhetorical motifs and the creation of master narratives. An event such as the 1994 Arica Eclipse Festival presents an opportunity for the narratives of local, national, and international scenes to come into contact and be interwoven, allowing a transnational history of techno to emerge.
