On 3 November 2024, it will be 30 years since the notorious Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (hereinafter ‘CJA 1994) was given Royal Assent, illegalising raves, banning music that “includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” (section 63 (1)(B)). Under section 63 (1), a rave was originally defined as a gathering on land in the open air of 100 or more persons (whether or not trespassers), until it's amendment by Section 58 of the Anti Social Behaviour Act 2003 to a gathering of 20 or more persons, and on land which is not in the open air (i.e. within a building) as well as outside. 

Known for its draconian clamp down on alternative and outsider ways of life, from roads protest, to travellers, to squatters, football fans, hunt saboteurs and the rave scene, this exhibition would like to draw together artists from around the country (and beyond, as many sound systems fled to Europe after the law was passed), to reflect upon the impact this piece of legislation had on forms of resistance and aesthetics in the decades to come - bringing us right to the present day with rights to protest infringed more than ever.  Questions of access, protest and assembly have been live within political and legislative architectures in the UK in recent times. We have seen the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 closing in on protest rights through the statutory redefining of public nuisance under section 78, making the previous common law offence of public nuisance much broader, limiting demonstration noise levels and time limitation, with protestors now facing a criminal offence where they did not before. Criminal damage to memorials was raised from a £5000 fine and six months imprisonment to ten years imprisonment under Section 50 of the same act. These legislative interventions, moved in after the powerful waves of Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion protests, and the iconic toppling of the Edward Colston statue, arriving us full circle to land, heritage, power and legality found within resistances of today, and the law’s response.

We seek to temper the questions below, recreate the legal frameworks of banned music, in a series of events, interventions and research opportunities, that fall within and include the exhibition, and beyond.  

• What impact has the CJA 1994 had on music in protest?

• What impact has the CJA 1994 had on traveller communities and the legacy left for nomadic communities today?

• What role do conceptions of property have in the formulation of sound?

• How have collective notions of music been removed from sound through law?

• What role does the historical materiality of land have in the creation of sound?

• What role does sound play within nomadism and nomadic forms of property?

• What impact did the change from the banning of electronic music from outdoors to indoors within the legislation have on the scene?

• What impact did the change have on the kind of music produced, and the spaces created?

• What role does electronic music have in rural ways of life?  Is it part of or alien to rural lands?  

• What role does electronic music play in trespass and urban squatting scenes?

• What artistic research methods can be used to understand the interaction between sound, property and law?

• What alternatives to Part V CJA 1994 can be forged through legal artistic research?

Events around rave are in collaboration with, curated and organised with, LORE (Legal Origins Rights Education & Art), and Art/Law Network.

The first of these engagements is at House of Annetta, 3rd November 2024:

A Royal Dis-Sent – Re-Writing and Re-Imagining a Series of Repetitive Beats CJA 1994

This has been gratefully funded by the British Art Network.

This long established underground scene has a number of well known soundsystems, the form of soundsystem as that which we take as an inspiration for a geo-social instrument.

To list in its repertoire, there were those such as ‘Spiral Tribe’ in the early nineties and part-organisers of the Castlemorton Common Festival in May 1992, pulling a crowd of 25, 000 electronic music fans, new age types, hedonists, nihilists, travellers and protest partyers alike. The inevitable push and pull of dealing with the law has meant that by and large reactions are knee-jerk, politically arm-twisted to the point where the legal reflex becomes all out ban, just in case people were planning to open up their minds and have fun any time in the near future. Spiral Tribe as an example, were pushed out of the country by the changes in the law in the nineties, and continue to this day to do sets over the waters in Spain and France where responses to raves are less oppositional.