MUSIC OF THE MILLENNIA
“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”
— Joseph Campbell
On October 14, 2000, Johan and I traveled to South London to attend “The Incredible Warp Lighthouse Party.” Warp Records was the label that at the time, was releasing some of the most unexpected and groundbreaking music in the world.
Warp hosted the soundtrack to humanity’s digital transformation of reality, featuring artists and DJs like Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada, Plaid, Bogdan Raczynski, Chris Cunningham, Prefuse 73, and Mira Calix.
These sonic innovators were the global melting pot of experimental creativity, where the biggest stars in the world sought inspiration when they wanted to revamp their style—aural structures and synchronies intuitively crafted from sublimely innovative sounds.
Johan spent the week scouring obscure record shops, hunting down the rarest and most unique special vinyl editions. But now, here we were, in the midst of the chaos—a determined group of music enthusiasts lined up, waiting to enter the party. I wore my dark green Helmut Lang jacket and had a freshly shaved head.
Beside me in the queue was a short, slightly freckled girl who had styled her dark hair into several spontaneous tufts. She was dressed in a gray, bizarrely gown-like outfit and had an unusually bold demeanor for someone so petite.
I asked, “You’re Björk, aren’t you?” With a teasing smile and an Icelandic-British accent, Björk replied, “Not tonight,” while shrugging her shoulders flirtatiously. it hadn’t been long since I had bought all her music videos on DVD.
Sometime after three in the morning, Plaid had just finished a set and began pumping out melodies from ‘Porn Coconut Co’ across the dance floor—the orchestral, layered and compounded harmonies from their then-unreleased album Double Figure, now renowned for its resonances that in many ways resemble Bach’s more intricate fugues.
Like an Icelandic Pippi Longstocking, Björk skipped across the dance floor to its center, delivering the most bizarre, whimsical, and genuinely unpolished choreography imaginable. Simultaneously, Bogdan Raczynski, another of the evening’s musically eccentric geniuses, joined the dance and matched her with an equally peculiar display of spontaneous, spasmodic movements, in perfect sync with Björk’s wild outbursts.
Words fail to capture the superhuman, architectural vortex of sound, light, tastes, scents, and animalistic, mechanical, and electronic functions, all intertwining in endless emotional explosions before my eyes, within and beyond my heart, through my body. It was a creative process without equal, uniting microcosm and macrocosm in one of the world’s grittiest docklands outside London, late on the night of October 16, 2000.
Back in Sweden a few days later, I learned that the rave commission had raided my café on David Bagares Gata, where I was living at the time. How was I supposed to interpret this? The place seemed empty in the early morning light, and I saw no signs of police activity or any damage related to my or Dante’s belongings as I searched the rooms—until I opened the bathroom door. There, I found an Asian, somewhat androgynous guy with a mohawk, his eyes half-open, seemingly asleep, with a big needle in his left arm. “It’s time to get out of here,” I thought to myself once again, a thought I had had many times before.
And when I did, I had my religious dream.
