| Event | Sustain-Release 2025 |
| Date | September 11 – 14, 2025 |
| Location | Secret Location, Catskills, NY |
| Attended | 4pm Thursday – 1pm Sunday |
| Performers | Juliana Huxtable, K Wata, MORENXXX, Arushi Jain, Dorothy Carlos |
Peak Euphoria: Raving in a New Era
In retrospect, the Biden era was Peak Ketamine. Four years of cultural dissociation as neoliberalism lumbered its way to its inexorable end: a hotel strip in Gaza managed by that famed impresario, Mr. Tony Blair. The end of the major Marvel movies as escapism, their politics as films dissociated completely from any politics we’d recognize in our world; the end of social media as escapism, a dissociated simulacrum of the burning world it inflamed; and the end of deceiving ourselves that the club could in any way be a venue of escapism dissociated from the protests that would, in the wake of genocide, come quickly knocking at their doors. This is not to say that TikToked fascism has woken us up—lol—nor that fascism is much more than age-old neoliberal policies with more pizzazz. But that pizzazz is the point: A Trump World, unlike A Biden World, wants to fête how many people it’s deporting, to see and be seen. In the weeks leading up to Sustain, I am already getting the sense that the social subconscious is simply accepting that the way to fight one infernal celebration is with another. Liberalism is dead, and its funeral can only be a party. The club toilets, those prodigious markers of the passing years, are shifting out K and Coke for Molly and 4mmc and G, and “even the straight girls are doing it.” Still, I can barely believe it. Charlie Kirk is dead the day before I arrive at Sustain, and the dems, as usual, are falling in line to salute the greatness of the Right. And yet? Or as a result? We are living, somehow, in Peak Euphoria.
*
So let me acknowledge my taste here. What’s drawn me in the past year is a kind of spectral heterogeneity of wobbly-warbly texture without a fear of ambient distortions or bubblegum pop, music that feels like someone I love tapping their fingers down my back and brushing my hair. I don’t have a good name for it—const-elation? electro-de? no?—but it’s what a lot of New York DJs play, and it’s what I love. We’re all of us at a social moment where music feels like one of the few joys left, after all.
And this is why I’ve been struggling a lot with techno over the past year. On the one hand, techno has ostensibly completed its cooption as the mainstream’s EDM for endtimes: I went to Basement once this year, right after Babygirl came out, and there was a three-hour line of tourists visiting a movie set. On the other, within the higherbrow underground, it increasingly seems to have associations with an unsettling kind of musical and cultural purity: Europe thrives on a certain kind of stripped-down rhythmic minimalism that I started to find spiritually vacant after my mandatory service raving in Berlin. In New York, techno increasingly feels like the domain of parties for extremely homogenous ripped white men, the soundtrack for pumping iron. The body under techno, I think, is the body in an Equinox or a military march, a machine whose function is to fall in line in the factory of physical production we call dance.
But on the final night of Sustain, Juliana Huxtable teaches me I’m wrong, and reteaches me everything I thought I knew about techno. Formally, she operates in something like the guiding structural principle of deconstructed club, a complete dialectical chaos of opposing genres of pop and war, but tethered to techno’s four on the floor, bombs splattered on the beat. Here are the punishing distortions building like a nuclear siren, here is the blissful release of pop (I count Joy Division as pop, yes), and here is the incredible heterogeneity of intercutting back and forth between tracks at wildly different tempos and moods in a kind of firebombed-out fragmentation of sound that mean you continue hearing and anticipating one in your head even while the other is playing. Of course you could say, well, that’s a Juliana Huxtable set, and you’d be right. But something felt different from the New York sets, perhaps because of my own quite vulnerable state, perhaps because of the crowd, perhaps because of how she was building the set from choral-slow to punishing-hard, but also I think because she really had a proper speaker system to completely annihilate—not always the case at warehouse parties. The way she uses speakers is like how some painters use a canvas: you become aware of it as her medium through its obliteration.
And there’s such a joy in that destruction, in blowing out and blowing apart all these recognizable fragments of tracks into this hard, horrible, beautiful sound. It is the music of an artist going to war with herself, at one point mixing a left-right-left-right-left military march against what I imagine are the Boing-Boing sounds of a Looney Tunes wolf’s eyes popping from his face. Perhaps it’s just my own occupied imagination, trained by jingoistic heuristics to make sense of sonic abstractions as visual figurations. But Israel kills 215 Palestinians in Gaza over the four days at Sustain, and my elation at this set’s confrontation—with techno’s own internalization of geopolitical violence, with the actual geopolitical violence of our world, and with itself—is disturbed only by the fact of its own existence. What does it mean to keep dancing to the echo of bombs I’m hearing in my head? The set has an answer for this too, I think. If art must co-opt the violence of our times to castrate its cultural power, to sublimate it into something as safe as a sanctuary for us all here in the Camp Kennybrook Gym, let it do so by beating our enemies with cartoon Boing-Boing noises.
If music is just politics at the most local of localist levels, the reconciliation of democracy and freedom in one-hundred shaking asses, then that would explain why my body understands all of this well before I do. I find myself, towards the end of the set, turning away from the DJ booth, struggling to open the crowd into some kind of circle where we can all see and confront each other, and it is the only time I’ve tried this in my life that it seems to work: strangers swarm to dance with me, and then each other, like we’ve created a whirlpool that’s consumed us. And I realize not only that I’ve rarely heard a DJ play the way I want to dance until now, in a kind of kaleidoscopic frenzy of disjoined static and fluid release, trolling and earnestness, violence and love, but that I didn’t really know this until I heard this set, didn’t really know that this was how I’d always wanted to dance until the set taught me it was ok.
And so, on the final night of Sustain, Juliana Huxtable doesn’t just teach me how to stop worrying and love techno again, but to love it in a way I never really had before. An escape that refuses to be escapist. A violence we can microdose on our own terms. A way to use the body to transcend the body. Peak Euphoria.
*
Sustain Year 10 was a somewhat safe affair, a kind of greatest hits anniversary that broke out the legacy names playing legacy music for the crowd. Sustain Year 11 is here for risks, and a number of the DJs are barely known as DJs proper. Arushi Jain, who has refracted Indian ragas through reverberating soundscapes of electric winds and drones across two perfect albums, takes the decks in The Grove on night one to deliver a series of deconstructed synth arpeggios, descending on each other as a rose light falls over the trees, that is not the last time I will imagine a kind of spectral Bach fugue; the next night, cellist Dorothy Carlos performs a live set that seems to pluck each note from the fugue and let it linger, rebounding in the air, the inevitable progression of the piece paused like a hummingbird quivering mid-air. I am not sober, not in any kind of state the sober would even recognize. But I think, during both these pieces, that these artists are layering sound like light, a few monotonal wavelengths that add up into a splay of deeper color.
Here and there, you find this kind of witchiness. K. Wata follows Jain with what is the most erotic ambient set I’ve heard in my life, a gradual burble-shimmy that sounds like it’s being played on cauldrons, and I am not surprised to see my friends pole-dancing with the trees. But for me, the witchiest set is Sybil’s, which grafts a pots-and-pans trilling on a steady undercurrent of a hypnotic three-chord melody-gone-nowhere, and even I, an obnoxiously hypervigilant raver, am lost in the stream. You use the body to transcend the body, and this is Sybil’s magic too.
*
We used to kill MLK. JFK. Malcolm X. And now we kill… Charlie Kirk? Man, our culture has truly fallen.
Government is just a form of witchcraft, I think, perpetuated by incompetent witches. I am trying to read my book while the sun sets and I wait my 20-minute turn for a vegan burger. The group next to me is cackling. “Diva, did you get ketchup on this? Diva, did you leave off the mustard?” I apply pressure to the words as my book goes on, “And how can you know if the image existed before the bomb was invented? There may have been an underworld of images known only to tribal priests, mediums between visible reality and the spirit world, and they popped magic mushrooms and saw a fiery cloud that predated the image on the U.S. Army training film.”
“Trader Joes has all these things and you look at them and think, this will be fun when I’m tripping,” says one of the divas. “Olive oil scented pecans. Yes. Yes.”
Credit where it’s due, I think. We used to live in an era where only mainstream legacy institutions had the sort of power that the internet has since democratized to anyone. Now we live in a golden age of user-generated political violence. It’s a lot less work for the CIA when the masses can do its job for it.
The only thing crazier than a conspiracy theorist is someone who doesn’t believe in conspiracies at all. To be a media-trusting normie today is to live radically on the edge, a new form of insanity—sobriety in an online world. Once your faith in institutions breaks down, there is little left to believe in but your own body, and perhaps this is why we live in a golden age of biohacking, hookup apps, raves.
I am about 12 hours ahead of Juliana Huxtable’s annihilation, you see, but I don’t know it yet. “Watched from a safe distance,” my book continues, “this explosion is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man.”
“I can’t believe you 9/11ed me,” someone jokes around me, probably in response to another improperly ketchup-ed burger.
*
I am blitzed on the toilet as my bunkmates chit-chat the night’s lineup, cooking pasta in their kitchenette. It is an open-air stall I’m in, and I am trying to figure out whether I want to shit as quickly as possible, so I can get out of there fast without hogging the toilet, or try to wait for them to leave so they won’t recognize me as the olfactory culprit committing crimes against their meal. But the gummies are hitting now; I am transcending space and time. How many have shat where I’m now shitting, I presume the pose of a Rodin on this summer camp toilet, our excretions merged in some underground sewer?
Finally, I am out, going through the post-poop ritual: me, trying to sneak my way out, embarrassed even to have used a public toilet open to the kitchenette; them, approaching in open-arms from their rigatoni. “You should have some pasta with us!” they greet me a little too eagerly, trying a little too hard to demonstrate that they are inclusive spirits, not the discriminating sort who would be biased against an inveterate shitter.
“So, uh, you guys excited for Donato Dozzy?” I reply, wincing at my own answer. One thing this festival has taught me: sometimes when you’re in the middle of making bad decisions, the worst thing you can do is to stop making bad decisions. In the room they come and go, the gummies hit, talking of Donato. And to be fair, asking if you’re excited to see Donato Dozzy is clearly the go-to ritual this year for introducing yourself to strangers.
*
The one thing missing from Sustain, I think, is a fashion contest. Though to be honest, I see exactly two pieces of fashion that really excite me all weekend, the geodesic kaleidoscopes of a red and green sports jersey, and the tank top its owner has bleached in cryptographic lettering. Only when I look closer do I realize that both say “Free Palestine.” And no, I do not think this is an accident.
*
At every festival, I miss an older tradition not just of dance but song-and-dance. I find myself yearning, sometimes, for the lazy DJs, the shitty DJs, who give me the opportunity to remix their set by humming new melodies on top of their boring beats, secret refrains I like to imagine the rest of the crowd is humming along with me inaudibly. Sustain does not have that—the DJs are too good—and one common note is that it’s not a festival about community at all, really: the focus stays on the music, the cliques stay as cliques, and nobody appears to be hooking up. I’ve heard friends argue that it can lack intimacy, and this makes sense. In the best raves in New York, you either eat together and talk together before dancing together (The Wholesome Rave) or you simply fuck some stranger in the darkroom (The Degenerate Rave). These two types of raves mark two types of intimacy, the intimacy of family and the intimacy of partners, each mutually exclusive, I suppose, because you generally do not fuck your family (apologies to Pornhub). And while Sustain necessarily offers neither, it has one advantage you can’t get in New York: it’s DIY. At various points I encounter a curry night in a cabin, a Yoga hour at dawn, a block for crayoning, and finally, a makeshift Shabbat, where we all sit together in a circle and sing, many of us for the first time in decades after years of estrangement from Zionist cooption, our voices working to harmonize on the basketball court of Camp Kennybrook, a few candles and crackers on the concrete, as our bodies will back in the forest. That circle is ours, and ours alone. Do you see what I’m trying to get at? These, too, are spells, but they are, for the moment, our spells.
*
I find out that one couple has gotten married here. I find out that another has decided to get divorced. Do people jack off at this festival? Surely they must? I don’t, and by day three, I think I could probably fall in love with anyone in this cafeteria where I’m trying to shovel down curry chickpeas on my own. This is, I will realize a few hours later, right around the time I enter Juliana Huxtable’s set, only because i have not achieved total exhaustion yet, that point where feelings are no longer subliminal, they are only sublime, and all bodily hungers must be sacrificed to them. Staring at my chickpea goop, I have no idea that my horniness will soon dissipate. This evening has other things in store.
*
The only DJ who could conceivably follow Juliana Huxtable is MORENXXX, who has covertly been redefining techno over the past few years: yes, yes, they’ll give you your pounding baseline, your kaleidoscopic off-rhythms that suddenly cohere into a dominant beat, but they’ll give you something else too, an almost house-like sense of melody like kernels cracking soil; what they have in common with Juliana Huxtable is this feeling of techno breaking under itself, under its own pure perfectionism, to allow a new growth of circling, choral dissonance. They quote Fred Moten: “Disorder is our service, our antidote and anteroom, our vestibule without a story. We can’t survive intact. We can only survive if we’re not intact.” It’s that not-intact-and-here-to-survive that defines the politics of euphoria. Use the body to transcend the body. Even the idea of creating a safe space for us here feels dangerous, just as danger begins to feel safe, because at least we are no longer trying to escape confrontation.
I feel the crowd rippling around me: some moving away, some coming to dance. My energy signature is maybe just a little too pronounced. But a few minutes later, I am adopted. A could-be couple takes me in; I’ve met one of them briefly that day; they’ve just met on ecstasy, or something like that; it turns out we all have a close mutual; we talk how much we love the mutual; I fall in love with both of them as spirits, knowing nothing about them; and then eight hours go by, and we are all still dancing. I lose my phone and find it hours later, I lose my shoes and find it hours later, I lose my dance partners and find them hours later, and the art of losing, on a diet of powders and insomnia, seems just a tad too easy to master. I am almost grateful for these losses: too much happiness, at times like this, can make you queasy. Reality is a welcome intruder, as long as she swings the door behind her.
*
The last age of Euphoria—not the euphoria of a paranoid acid trip or paranoid coke trip or paranoid buying-and-selling-penny-stocks trip, but the euphoria of waltzing on a sinking ship—was probably the late 20s and early 30s a century ago. And I am struck, hearing the pop bangers from Sedef Adasi’s Mariah Carey remixes by the pool and Maara’s live singalong to her own melodies (“Sorry that I fucked your ex/ I would have been down to fuck you next”), that just as we got The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Orlando then, we are once again in a golden age of queer femme chaos. This is what I mean by euphoria too. An artist who doesn’t sound chaotic in 2025 is like that person on social media who doesn’t sound like a conspiracy theorist: that is, completely out of touch with their time.
How is this even happening? It’s no secret that America is not making good movies. America is not writing good books. America is not painting good paintings or sculpting good sculptures or coding good digital art. America, here at this kid’s camp upstate decorated with hand-drawn parody TV programs for local 13 year old boys (hello “Jefferdy”), is making good music. Why? Well, probably because I haven’t slept and am on 4, I think. And then I remember, wait no, that’s not it. It’s capital, stupid. This is probably the one remaining cultural industry where not everyone is expected to be a trust-fund baby to make it.
*
I’m trying to say something here. Which is that the experience of music—unlike the experience of movies or books or paintings or sculptures or digital art—is an experience of something that is rapidly dissipating in a digital age, an experience of circles. An experience of the crowd joining hands to face strangers with more intimacy than they’ll face many friends; an experience of choruses humming together inaudibly under the noise; an experience of the crowd’s dancing casting a spell back onto the DJ, a kind of symmetrical call-response between artist and fan that isn’t really possible in any other medium. In the morning, I join a circle dancing to Katerina Kouka’s Stou Paradisou Ta Orea at what a friend terms Nosedrip and OKO DJ’s “Around the World in 80 Tracks” Bossa closer and then again, another circle in a sandpit to OK Williams’ geodesic laser B2B with Ben UFO at the official closer.
On the bus ride home from Sustain, every whoosh of the wheel and bump on the freeway is cohering in my mind as techno, and as I drift into the shittiest sleep of my life, I think of the grace of this couple who invited me in to dance, to triangulate what might or might not have been a burgeoning romance. So did my triangulation give them necessary buffer room, or did it block them… or both? Of course it doesn’t really matter. Of course we all had our own relationship for the night. Use the body. Transcend the body. Reassociate from too many years of dissociation. Like so much of remixing, like so much of politics—like so much of euphoria itself—the process of putting the puzzle pieces together is also the process of taking them apart. A triangle, after all, is the first time that points suggest a circle.