“… a fluid togetherness that manages to hold the shape of a heterogenous and unconnected crowd.”

Rivers, crocodiles and secrets

I’ve tried to put my month of July into words. For the short version, go here, for the audio version go there, for the long version go below <3

“Je suis liquide, je suis mélodie”. I am liquid, I am melody are the first words of Le Chant de la Rivière (W. Delorme). In To The Savage Side (T. McDaniel), the river too speaks. And keeps secrets. It knows, thinks, feels and is compared to “The Eye of God”. I spent the month of July not just near rivers, but on, in and with them.   

Earlier this month, Laura and I cycled from Gaia House to Sharpham Meadow where Rob had been buried. His grave - slim, modest and covered in wild herbs - looked onto the river Dart. Of course, this is the view Rob would have chosen. “So, this is where you’re hanging out forever now, pal?” I asked before welling up. I sat near him in between silence, sobs and a melody: “I miss you, and I haven’t met you yet”, trying to summon the courage to read that poem I’d written.

I wish Rob was still around. There’d be so much to ask. I wonder, for example, how it felt to be so sensitive to the feelings of rivers and all sentient beings, to care so deeply about justice and fairness, to have given up on flying for years and continue to be part of a culture that normalized -even hyped!- hypermobility. But maybe that wouldn’t even be my first question and maybe it matters less how he was that person, than that he was that person. 

There are too many things I needed to thank Rob for to fit in one poem - even a very long one. Beyond the way he carried his ethics, I owe so much to the ways in which he embedded music, creativity and connection into his life. A sense pervades that, of all people, he would have seen me (and still does!) in my desperate attempt to find and share that very specific sound I have been after.

There’s a trope according to which journalists are failed musicians. I encountered it numerous times when I was doing my research on words, music and the ineffable. The implied hierarchy of the trope never fitted my worldview, nor my lived experience. My relationships with words and sounds are both traversed by frustration - a sense of limitation that is probably characteristic to any artistic endeavor and isn’t devoid of sacredness. Yet, I most envy those who have the ability to choose and assemble words precisely, especially when it comes to describing music. I find that there are things that I need to share, spaces I feel called to sketch, stories that want to be told through me. And for these, it seems music is the only medium truly to my reach. 

In the months running up to Freero, I was obsessed with certain sounds and sensations. I realized how hard it was to describe them because whenever I tried to, someone would think they’d get it and send me songs. Those songs -although amazing in their own way- rarely fitted the vision. As the selection was taking shape -large, generous, perhaps discrepant- I became aware of how liquid that vision itself was. There’s a D.H. Lawrence poem that says:

“Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, 

But there is also a third thing, that makes it water

And nobody knows what it is.”

What obsessed me -kept me awake at night but also helped me out of bed- was that third thing. After visiting Laura and Rob, I made my way to London where I was hosting a Fictions party in Ormside. I remember picking up Luis-Manuel Garcia-Mispireta’s book, Together Somehow, on the train and crying so much that I had to get off at an earlier station because other passengers were worried. (Hi to everyone else who cries more days than they don’t!!) I felt touched and teary when Luis shared his difficulties as an academic which -despite my white privilege- I got a certain taste of. But what derailed me were those passages of acute precision: “the tactility of sound emerges from the murky perceptual zone where solid sound masses dissolve and individual sound particles melt together.” 

That, to me, is Room 2 captured in a fragment of a sentence. Steevio is very secretive about the timetable of the festival he programs, even with the artists. I’d received the news that I would play in Room 2 just before getting on the train to London. That stage is usually the bassy one at Freerotation. It’s also the space which, without a shadow of a doubt, entirely shaped the dancer and musician that I am today. That in itself is huge. 

But there’s more to Room 2, and I don’t entirely know (or want to know?) what it is. In the last decade, my diaries, dreams and various meditation practices have perpetually brought me back to that specific dance floor - a fantasy, a fiction but also a physical space on planet earth. There is something I've felt in my body, there, that I have not felt in other places. I think it’s also been the place where I’ve experienced some of the deepest raptures, openings and insights. I guess Luis gets closest to how and why this might be when he describes “liquidarity: a fluid togetherness that manages to hold the shape of a heterogeneous and unconnected crowd.” While life can feel brutal in its separateness, memories of Room 2 have become the archetypal place I retrieve to, to remind myself that we can be together, somehow. 

It’s not so much about becoming one or going beyond our differences and divergences, it’s about dancing and coming together exactly with and within them. It’s precisely in this dance that the attraction and desire lay. Rob defines eros as a wanting of “more contact, more connection”. And so I needed the sounds to bounce into space, have depth and relief, be warm, loose, liquid and sensual-an ode, too, to “the freero crushes”. (*Naga’s voice*: “Come on Nono, your sets are always horny anyway!”). 

The music in Room 2 was so scandalously good on Friday that I thought the festival should just stop then and there. But, and maybe this is an obvious thing to write, I also think there isn’t anything like “the best set of the weekend”. Some people might have special moments hearing one of them, but those experiences are so dependent on all those sets building on each other. As I opened that space the day after, I decided to try and avoid the 130-140 zone, partly because that area had been explored to pure perfection by softi, Yushh, CCL, re:ni and the dancers who accompanied them.

There’s purpose and randomness in the tracks that made it into The House of Crocodiles part 2. There are songs related to musicians and moments who made my Room 2, ever since I went in 2014 (!!!). There are sounds dedicated to the front row, the Friends of Fictions: Alice, Ollie, Ophélie, Tash, Ugo - “if you know, you know”. There are textures for Marylou, my other half, my forever fave Freero floor partner. And then there are the songs which never made it in there, perhaps the most important ones. There are always more sounds out there, and Jurango, Tristan Arp, rRoxymore and Pariah continued that thread with more elegance than I could ever have hoped for.

There’s so much to write about Freerotation, the work of Suzybee, Steevio and their community. Perhaps this will be the topic of one (or more) newsletters to come. Those who’ve been regularly describe it as the perfect party which keeps on marginally improving with every new edition. None of us quite understand how this is physically possible and yet, the miracle repeats itself year after year. One of the things that made 2024’s gathering so peculiarly joyful to me might have been its encapsulation between two political victories. The Tories were defeated in the UK on Thursday, and the Rassemblement National was kept at bay in France on Sunday. A friend of mine joked that I should be traveling to more countries, as if my presence in the UK during the election had worked as a lucky charm. 

As a lefty, I am aware that in both cases, the battles were only half won, yet I am very stubbornly using the word ‘victory’ here, for our political side of the spectrum would benefit from being better at celebrating (not just fighting)! And celebrate we did: friends cried in my arms when the news landed during Marylou’s stupendous set. Then it was a river running to heaven, from Joe Ellis, Steevio & Suzybee, Shackleton and Batu closing the Sunday. That night, I only left the front row for a short break, feeling our cute queer crew was called to do what we best do: the dance. After the last track ended in Room 1, someone screamed: WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO WITH OUR LIVES NOW?

My last six months had been entirely orientated towards Freero and I feared nothing more than the void it might leave behind. Yet, strangely as it seems, I felt like I had a stronger sense of determination than ever before. In the minutes after the music ended, I remember Ugo confidently declaring there could be no comedown, that he was gonna wake up every day for the rest of his life screaming: YES!!! THIS IS HOW LIFE CAN BE! THIS IS WHAT LIFE SHOULD BE. (Spoiler alert: nostalgia there was and, to a certain extent, nostalgia there might still be. Not less than 10 days ago, I found myself in the bathroom of a club crying because I missed the kindness of Freero attendees and their gentle “how are you love” that can cure mild party anxieties as well as lifelong Weltschmerzen. Why is Freero only once a year?) 

Yet a sense of beauty powers through the post-Freero fog. I have a “Rob samples” bank on my Rekordbox. In one abstract, which I’ve played a few times in my sets, he talks about: “... opening up a different domain, a range of experience, and giving us a different sense and idea of everything, everything. Actually, if you linger with this idea of art, I think … Even when it’s not obvious, when it’s not spelled out with words or pictures that make obvious sense, I think … That all art, that I would call, you know, wonderful or beautiful, meaningful, soulful art, even if it’s not in an obvious way, it has an ethical dimension. It has a dimension that addresses us in terms of value. That touches our sense of value, makes us want to live differently somehow, makes us want to be alive differently. You guys know I like John Coltrane. It’s just a guy playing some sounds … There’s nothing in the title, there’s nothing … And it does something to the sense of existence. And there’s goodness, and ethical values wrapped up in that. Art touches on that.”

Watching and hearing Steevio and Suzybee play touched me in that profound way. I’ve had so many conversations with them about the social and environmental impact of flying or, more generally, the dance music culture that we participate in. I know that they care about how the current forms of our hedonistic habits might, on many levels, affect marginalized communities and other species. I know that they care about plastic pollution in water or that the nearby river Wye has been polluted by agricultural waste. I know they are convinced and militant vegans. I’m so grateful for the courage and honesty that they’ve manifested when discussing these issues, some of which remain largely taboo in our industry. I know they also care about community, inclusion and diversity. And that, ultimately, they care about care, about healing and transformation! But the way all of that runs through Freero is not literal. It’s part of its DNA in both subtle and concrete forms. It’s part of the way the festival is trying to find its shape, pulled between different concerns - humble and daring, doing the thing rather than trying to sell it.

A week after the festival, I spent seven days on a boat making its way between Brussels and Utrecht via the canals. Although I am not new to slow and slightly unusual modes of transport, this journey was distinctive in its psychedelic character. The uncanny beauty of the river banks - defiling in languorous torpor - resembled the meticulous and magical universes of Studio Ghibli movies. We moved with, lived on, felt and thought through the motions of water which, in more ways than one, continued to flood my whole month.

The residency brought together several individuals working across art and social justice issues. There were dancers, photographers, scientists, writers, and theater artists who had worked on festivals in Ramallah, housing rights in Romania, data collection on Lake Baikal, and with XR in the Netherlands, as well as providing medication for trans and queer people and organizing anti-fascist raves in Italy. One person carried the motto: “If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution!” (Emma Goldman) Dancing was meaningful to all of us in multiple ways.

Alongside our collaborations, we had numerous conversations: What allows activism to be sustainable and pleasurable? What makes an artful life? How can art and science learn from their respective methods? Should we grant personhood to rivers? What would that mean for the way we move on them? 

At that time, I was reading Roger Deakin’s Waterlog. Inspired by John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer”, the book tells Deakin’s journey as he swam through the British Isles. I’m fascinated by people, like John Francis, who turn the way in which they move through space into a certain activism. I think there is also art in that.  

Deakin wrote: “The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever more exclusively of water. Swimming and dreaming became indistinguishable. I grew convinced that following water, flowing with it, would be a way of getting under the skin of things, of learning something new. (…) The enterprise began to feel like some medieval quest. When Merlin turns the future King Arthur into a fish as part of his education in The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White says, “He could do what men always want to do, that is, fly. There is practically no difference between flying in water and flying in the air… It was like the dreams people have.””

Of course, I, too, dream of flying. I dream of getting closer to the sun and the stars. I dream of seeing the world from above. I dream of faraway places: of going right there, right now and experiencing “more contact, more connection”. Maybe we all do and sometimes I think we actually should. But I also wonder which of these dreams want to be received literally and how to figure it out. That I haven't followed certain desires in a concrete way does not mean that I ever abandoned them. More than any others, those are the ones which supported me in shaping new worlds. Sometimes, it feels like we’re expecting too much from life, but most of the time, I think we’re not asking enough at all. 

I stopped by in Amsterdam after the residency and came straight - teary but smiling - from the train station to the canal, for a late afternoon swim with Job. Karim and I played heads or tails over jumping from the 8 meter bridge. The following days, I came back to that shore with Matthew and Anne. Caught in deep conversations, we hugged and cried. Up to 60% of the human adult body is water, and our brains and hearts are composed of nearly 75% of it. I used to wonder what was wrong with me, why I always cry so much. July taught me to embrace the rivers inside me. 

As the month came to an end, I took my final train back home, immersed in Olivia Laing’s To The River. She borrows words from Seamus Heany, pointing out that they catch something of “the strangeness of water”. The line says: “Suddenly broadcasting through a green aerial its secret stations.” I think that’s how Venus As A Boy came to me (“a mossy-queer torch song if ever there was one”). It’s a bit of a Gigsta classic, as I’ve played it a few times. I certainly had not planned to play it in this set, but it suggested itself to me when a sound engineer hastily kneeled over to point at his phone and remind me that there were only 10 minutes left. I find I often need to play music to make sense of emotions and situations. During a set, feelings flow into place. Listening back, that full circle around Björk makes a lot of sense. How and why is a secret I’ll keep to myself. But I know that the crocodiles and other river creatures heard it loud and clear.

Now, “let’s have a bit of quiet together”. 

xx

Nono

Some gigs to come

30.07 - Panke, Berlin, DE

31.08 - Meakusma, Belgium, BE

14.09 - Quinoa Experience, Noordwaarts, Amsterdam, NL
21.09 - Fictions Equinox Party, Sameheads, Berlin, DE: friends, headlines, truffles, tunes and free zines. Join us <3

06.10 - TBA, Bagnolet, FR
12.10 - TBA, Berlin, DE < < < 3 3 3

15.11 - TBA, Berlin, DE
20.11 - TBC, Edimburgh, UK

06.12 - TBA, Nantes, FR

2025

02.02 - TBC, UK

Final and incomplete bow to the Friends of Fictions

Jojo recorded a book club show which echoes some of the ideas I explored in this newsletter.

Tobha covered Fictions with a Palestine special! Merci mon coeur.

Thanks to Larry for having mastered House of Crocodiles part 2 and having been so incredibly supportive before, during and after the recording of this set.

Grateful for Sinan, who proofread this newsletter and is a continuous source of inspiration.

Last hug for Ollie. I love you super mega much!