Went to that rave, wish I'd gone to that one ... wait, or did I?
November 22, 2014 8:10 AM   Subscribe

Rave flyers from all over the world, mid-1980's thru the early 2000's. Over 20,000 pieces of original Underground, Rave, Club, and Disco memorabilia (rave flyers, rave posters, laminates, tickets, etc.). My first massive rave, Toon Town's UFOs Are Real. Find a party you've been to and post in comments!
posted by King Sky Prawn (26 comments total) 28 users marked this as a favorite
 
Man I was talking to some friends years ago about setting up a wiki to do exactly this.
posted by empath at 8:24 AM on November 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Can we just hold hands and talk in the chill out room? Do you have some gum?
posted by clvrmnky at 8:28 AM on November 22, 2014 [8 favorites]


US > Illinois > Chicago > N.A.T.O Presents Submerge - An Aquadelic Splash Featuring Sea Bound Siren Lady Kier

I made the watery text for that flyer for the guy whose name I can't remember who produced lots of parties under the name N.A.T.O and a few others. It was a terrible party. '96 or '97 probably. I didn't even make the whole flyer. Just sent a file with the rendered text.

At the time I did live video mixing and custom animated text for parties and club nights with a couple other people. Didn't do much print stuff at all. This is the only tangible evidence I've ever found of anything I made from that time of my life.
posted by Babblesort at 8:50 AM on November 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


I have so many of the originals of these someplace in my basement… I think. Not finding any of the Harmony ones I designed.
posted by migurski at 9:27 AM on November 22, 2014


Augh, I had years of flyers (and bracelets! ALL THE BRACELETS) and everything vanished in a move. So sad. And there are none in the Toronto gallery that I've been to I think.

But Vancouver... oh wow yes, Pascal! hahaha. I was at this one! Brent was the in-house DJ at the bar I worked at, Dave Seaman and James Boatman were blowing up at the time and both had releases (or maybe upcoming at the time, can't remember) on a friend's record label (Phatt Phunk, out of LA), and obviously Sasha and Digweed Are Who They Are. I remember being completely off my head and wandering into the backstage area, security coming to boot me out, and being rescued by my record label friend, who then went on to introduce me to some very fun people--Carl Cox gives great hugs! I had no idea who he was (who the hell knows what a DJ looks like?); still a bit embarrassed about that.

Noble House was the party company on Van Island and to an extent the Lower Mainland at the time... and oh, a pang of memory for Java, long departed coffee shop!

Thanks for this walk down amnesia lane!
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 9:59 AM on November 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


PLUR
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:01 AM on November 22, 2014 [3 favorites]


SCREAM i have a big box full of old rave flyers from nyc from like 91 to 96 prolly, i should do something about that
posted by poffin boffin at 10:22 AM on November 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


Oh hey, they have a staff badge made from my ticket design for the Otherworld/Cloudfactory New Year's party. It should be in the Otherworld gallery as well- if you turn it sideways it says "Cloudfactory" one way and "Otherworld" if you flip it. I have one copy of an unlaminated ticket with the proper design, but I don't want to send it away. Maybe I can send a scan.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:44 AM on November 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


I'm actually afraid to handle these flyers as surely at least one contains traces of lsd
posted by poffin boffin at 11:22 AM on November 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


adventure day at poffin boffin's house!
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:47 AM on November 22, 2014 [1 favorite]


could I have some of your water
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 11:47 AM on November 22, 2014 [2 favorites]


Why does everything smell like cloves, VapoRub, and smoke machines all of a sudden?
posted by mubba at 12:01 PM on November 22, 2014 [7 favorites]


Feckless, I too so miss Java. *sigh*
posted by hoodrich at 12:51 PM on November 22, 2014


If you were hanging out there 97-00, we may know each other. Java, Rumors, Ferris'!
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:59 PM on November 22, 2014


Those were the days.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:12 PM on November 22, 2014


Thanks for sharing, especially the designers!
posted by King Sky Prawn at 3:31 PM on November 22, 2014


grumpybear69, nice jungle soundtrack on that one!
posted by King Sky Prawn at 3:36 PM on November 22, 2014


I seem to remember this flyer (or something like it) Stompy. But I remember this lineup on New Years and a comely lass in a Mondrian Dress. Good times.
posted by xtian at 4:03 PM on November 22, 2014


These have a home at the Internet archive, if anybody wanted to go in that direction.
posted by jscott at 11:52 PM on November 22, 2014


Ugh their mobile site is totally busted :( i really wanted to see if there were any from the warehouse/"venue" my friend ran with his dad and his uncle that pretty much buttered it's bread holding shady raves at the tale end of this era. The kind of place that didn't have bathrooms for months, just a plywood and chain link wall out back surrounding portos with security. So many good parties and shows.

still mad at the landlord for kicking them out suddenly in a really shady way for nebulous reasons, seemingly pressure from the city, right when it was really starting to take off.
posted by emptythought at 3:24 AM on November 23, 2014


Thank you @King Sky Prawn for posting this. A lot of work goes into this project.

@emptythought The website is not fully optimized for mobile although the gallery is. Here is a screenshot how it looks on the mobiles I have tested.

Mobile Screenshot

and a link to the gallery

Gallery

ENJOY <3 And please consider donating your old underground, club, rave memorabilia.
posted by RavePreservationProject at 2:25 PM on November 23, 2014 [1 favorite]


@poffin boffin - Chuck me an email if you'd like to donate your old memorabilia to the project. :)
posted by RavePreservationProject at 2:28 PM on November 23, 2014


@migurski - I have a big bag of Harmony memorabilia that will make it on the site in the next few months. :)
posted by RavePreservationProject at 2:34 PM on November 23, 2014


@emptythought The website is not fully optimized for mobile although the gallery is. Here is a screenshot how it looks on the mobiles I have tested.

Yea, i just get this. No matter what i try and view, just that. Totally blank. There's no adblocking, whitelisting/blacklisting, or router/firewall level blocking shenanigans going on here either.

Phooey :(

as a quick update, wtf, now i'm having the same issue on my laptop...
posted by emptythought at 3:44 PM on November 23, 2014


@emptythought Looks like the link added the spacer %20 into the javascript that produced the link and therefore "bread crumbs".

Does the gallery load properly by clicking the link here?

If so, you should be able to navigate the galleries.

This problem happens sometimes when links are copied and pasted in specific ways. What I need to do is remove the spaces between names in each gallery so people can cut and paste links from specific galleries without having this problem. I plan to do this in the next few weeks to resolve this issue. :)

Sign up for email updates on the home page to stay up to date. I will send out an email update when I make this update.
posted by RavePreservationProject at 4:01 PM on November 23, 2014


jscott: These have a home at the Internet archive, if anybody wanted to go in that direction.

Where are they? I'll admit, I'm still not the best at navigating the Internet Archive, beyond the general areas linked from the front page. Otherwise, I'm searching at random, either through IA's own search, or through a Google search limited to Archive.org.

On this particular topic, I only found a focused search for rave images, and at the time of writing this, there is only one collection tagged as "rave fliers."


empath had contacted me a while ago about writing up a big rave flyer post, but he put more effort into it than I did. I only found three sites that seemed decent: I love electronic music, but I only went to one mini-rave, held in a local community center in a small coastal California town. The location was "hidden" behind the usual "call this number after this time to get directions" 1990s rave location "protection" scheme, which made everything so exciting for me as a rave newbie. A few years later, I would regularly go back there, but for community meetings to discuss planning and development projects in the community. It was rather weird.


I love the idea of rave culture, especially the old "let's play music wherever we can get away with it" style. PLUR!
posted by filthy light thief at 7:55 AM on November 24, 2014


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