Lorenzo Valente
2024-03-01T12:00:04+01:00

The culmination of an era can only happen with a striking event: in 2007, the biggest rave ever marked the end of a decline that the movement had been dragging along for years. Riccardo Papacci recounts for STORIA VERA the finale marked by the Pinerolo Teknival and the enigmatic new beginning: a leaderless movement crouched and ready to spring.
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CULTURE 01.03.24

THE DIE IS CAST

WRITTEN BY: RICCARDO PAPACCI

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ZERO

The Teknival of August 2007 in the former parade ground of the Nizza Cavalleria barracks in Pinerolo was certainly one of the events that would rightfully belong in a hypothetical “Great Courtly Novel” of the rave movement. Firstly, because the Teknival itself is not just any typical field or warehouse rave, but a festival of enormous dimensions, almost like a village, bringing together several of the most important tribes in the scene. Secondly, because the Pinerolo event is still considered today the largest rave ever organized in Italy and one of the most attended in Europe, with estimated peak attendance of around thirty thousand people—and some even claim forty thousand. It was a temporary city, peaceful, nonviolent, and with a great deal of self-control.

The Pinerolo event came after more than fifteen years of raves in Italy, with a phenomenon that was already well-established and frequented, debated, and ostracized by the majority of European governments. But the story here tells of a mayor, the mayor of Pinerolo, who supported the Teknival by providing water trucks and outdoor chemical toilets. The die was cast: if the best adversaries are seen through fair play, the best stories are consolidated in the epic that events draw to themselves.

With what was recognized as “the greatest rave ever,” an era was completed. These were the years that followed the decline of an idea. The enthusiasm of the straight bass nomads was gradually fading away, in a methodical decadence that had forgotten the power of physical and psychic expansion provided by substances. The old ones now dreamed of Goa, and some of the early tribes had reached it, taking their mammoth sound systems elsewhere to eject free music for free people. Tekno struggled to break free from tight and chalky sampling, becoming mainstream among arcades and video games. The era of constant migrations of tribes, border struggles, and a society liberated by music gave way. The free party became a mere celebration. But like every legend and every epic, it maintained its myths. The Roman and Bolognese scenes once again set all of Europe ablaze, blending tekno with Mad Max, gathering nearly fifty thousand people for the city that became “the place to get high,” the street parade.

It was only in Italy and France that parties of this scale took place. The twenty thousand people in Viterbo in 2021 came directly from Pinerolo. The four thousand from the fateful October of Modena in 2022 as well. The same people who participated in intellectual and ideological decadence renewed the fuse of the future revolt, teasing the established power and escaping it through the meticulous organization of a headless and tailless movement, provoking it to wield its weapons, to remove its velvet gloves and reveal to everyone its true and everlasting iron fist.

The struggle and escape from Capital in the idea of collective autonomy still prophesy today, not only in raves but also in clubs where tekno poured in to transform. Something extraordinary remains beyond judgments, something that continually eludes every statistical, musical, or sociological canon. Nothing can be taken for granted yet. Nostalgia cannot be spoken of yet.

The counterattack that began with the withdrawal and mediatization of Pinerolo in 2007 is only the beginning. The pulverized movement has dispersed into the air, into towns and cities, clubs and house parties, fanzines, and the aesthetics of movements, reaching even intellectual thought. The heretical knights on horseback of flames and metallic monstrosities await.

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