FR/EN
English rave flyers from the 1990s are witnesses of an iconic phenomenon in electronic music culture. There are countless of them with even more graphic styles movements and graphic designers. I chose to look at 100 flyers from my personal collection acquired on e-bay by a London collector named thegyminstructor. This selection of prints which I wanted to be heterogeneous is differentiated by the different types of paper (grammage, grain ...), the different types of printing (screen, quality, colors ...) the typographical choices, the composition and choice of visuals (photographs, illustrations, logotypes ...). The idea is to list in a catalog these cropped elements: photographs, illustrations, logos, symbols, maps and various typographies.
The opening of this edition takes place on the internet and invites spectators to experience a virtual evening in which they can listen to the music of the DJs present on the selected flyers. To have access, they had to make their own invitation, on an interactive music platform. On July 1, 2020, at www.juliavondorpp.fr/Ex-tracts, we could then find the cropped images, the participants and the playlist as well as a research page and a gallery of flyers.
The project was born out of an interest in archives and electronic music. How a movement that is now 30 years old can still fascinate and inspire contemporary musical culture as much as contemporary graphic design. Through this research I wondered about our relationship to these printed archives at the time of networks and digitization. The common experience of this web project tends to give new life to these flyers and put them in a historical context in the era at which we look at them.
A rave (from the verb: to rave) is a large party or festival featuring performances by Djs and occasionally live performers playing electronic music, particularly electronic dance music (EDM). The phenomenon is considered to be the last major young cultural movement after Punk in England. In a complicated social context, the community regained possession of its territory, often finding itself clandestinely in disused places, but also of its culture, by freely remixing old titles and creating brand rules. Music played at raves include house, trance, techno, drum and bass, hardcore and other forms of electronic dance music with the accompaniment of laser light shows, projected images, visual effects and smoke machines. The rave scene is mostly known worldwide for its use of club drugs, such as MDMA, LSD and psychedelic mushrooms.
Rave culture originated mostly from acid house music parties in the mid-to-late 1980s in the Chicago area in the United States. After Chicago house artists began experiencing overseas success, it quickly spread to the United Kingdom, Central Europe, Australia and the rest of the United States.