Spiral Tribe and Mutoid Waste, Bedlam etc in the Czech Republic Summer '94 Nel Stroud. The anarchic free party organisers, Spiral Tribe have allied with the Mutoid Waste Company, a group of artists who sculpt with scrap metal and reconstruct abandoned engines, their medium the effluent of modern society, mutating waste to configurations hailing the millenium, all the post apocalyptic iconography of Dan Dare and Mad Max, Robocop and a warrior sensibility whose ancestor may well have been the mighty Beowulf, Spiral Tribe too have crawled from the underside of the facade that is `civilised' life - their creation is music and that too a mutation, sound generated by computers, a vast nightmarish arcade, twenty K of sound and Bass to make your eyes water. there is certainly no ethno vibes no strumming of guitars around camp-fires with soulful memories, no whimsical talk of the hereafter, for if there ever were a group of people into the here, it's these. From this virtual, military world they emerge and that they reflect, wired up, driving riot vans, camped under camo netting, heavy boots and shaven heads. A rapid growth of the popularity of a few parties in England, and a sweeping hysterical paranoia in the minds of the straight population has lead to the witch hunt of Spiral Tribe and their followers. At a party in an empty house in Acton, the Police feigned a sympathetic attitude, and then late in the night, started banging on the walls and came smashing through breeze blocks, batons flailing. They smashed up the musical equipment and knocked people to the ground. The Criminal Justice Bill validates this fascist Bully boy attitude. It legislates Gypsies and travellers, gatherings, peaceful protests, against techno itself- "music wholly or predominantly characterised by a succession of repetative beats". The result is an exodus to the promised land, Europe and beyond; as England tightens the screws, enforces its consumer monoculture of civil obedience, and staticism, the energy of the scene flows out - tendrils of techno energy and here we are, its the late twentieth century and Spiral Tribe and the Mutoids are in a scorching field way out in the Czech Republic, Eastern Europe. The free party scene in England we left behind, ketamine babies with far away Goa eyes. We took the coach East from Victoria station and within twenty-four hours we were in Prague. We met a man from Preston who had done the same thing only sold his ticket home! What did that mean for him? A lost job, abandoned by his girlfriend, Preston nightlife. Other people we met; a boy called Luke, whose brother was living in Prague, promoting nights and organising DJ's from England to play venues in Prague. In bars at railway stations we met school children, the baby faced followers of Spiral Tribe, students wandering Europe on holiday, a trio of hard drinking Irish boys, mohican faces familiar from the party circuit. We heard news from the festival site, rumour and hearsay were exchanged, Spiral Tribe had connected with the Prague underground network. The allegory for the Spiral method to the uninitiated are the Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey, Mountain girl et al. That is rewiring of neural circuits through the use of LSD -25, a reconditioning of consciousness as old notions dissolve in the acid surge. They are the descendants of the Pranksters. The concept of hippy has lost all potency- the subversive cannot be old-fashioned, this is an impossibility, a contradiction. What is disturbing however, is that the Pranksters is that the Pranksters were weird and unconventional and frightening, painted as they were, dayglo-bright, tumbling and flowing in Prankster positivity. The world shone around them and man flew triumphantly to the moon and around them everything was changing from 1950's battleship grey to 1960's Technicolor. But this new lot, they are all together more fearsome and dark, a nihilistic vision of Police oppression, an explosion of vibrations that express the fear of every child in the Western world, cityscapes rotting concrete and steel, life like a warzone as in a shout of alienation we scare each other to death. the dreams of a generation are being expressed by these outlaws and what dreams, what nightmares! On the site in Hostomice, Czech is a MiG, a 1940's Russian fighter plane, mounted on a trailer. Military vehicles, with wheels taller than a man, cluster around it. In a four pronged, ten foot high cage hangs a metal creature, bolted and welded together, its head twisted to the sky like Bacon alien scream. In the confusion of night, as the dust rises through lasers, the Mutoids tear back and forth amongst the screaming crowd in a deconstructed car with fire shooting out the windscreen and the exhaust pipe, surrounded by fire-jugglers and breathers. Under flapping suspended tarpaulins sit rows of people, some with babies, others barking at excited dogs. "The Police 'ere, zey elp us" says one diminutive french girl wit brilliant eyes, "uzzer places, dey shoot you bang like zat" airgunning the air. By day it is too hot to move. A lake near by slowly fills with people and panting dogs. In the shade lie sleeping bodies. Inertia wakened only by the setting sun. A particularly hot day evolved through twilight into an electric storm, and all present emerged from various camps and vehicles and danced on a plateau of dust with electricity crackling in the air, and amongst gusts of cold and hot wind the vibes built and built, acid all around, tangible, the Spirals attuned themselves with immaculate precision to the breathless brilliance of the night. It is impossible to convey but the rhythms, promising something and then screaming ultrasonic violent chaos were the atmosphere. Rhythms careering forward piling into the future, bellowing into the sky, and then a voice sampled YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DEALING WITH. That was the Spiral Tribe experience, blazing rocks, sky, dust, people, all one and firing right on out there in the cosmos, to the never, never land of the number 23. For some paranoia took an unshakable an insidious hold. A 15 year old boy from a London public school took fright and longing for the safety of Megatripolis announced that Spiral Tribe had selected five young people of which he was one, and all around him, in the grass and the stones and the dirt was lettering and all the letters formed words and all the words referred to him. Spiral tribe will make you paranoid but then you should be. Their existence so they reckon, has a wider cosmic significance in a world that is losing touch with its arcane ancestry they the self-styled shamans of the 20th century, here to alert us that something is going very wrong out there. "It is time" they threatened "to wake the planet up". And to the most bitter cynic there is something superglactic/futuristic about them, something cynicism can't quite penetrate. Certainly while standing in front of stacks of Bass bins I had the feeling that they were declaring war on the rest of the world. And no-one knows how to throw a better party... On the fifth day Spiral tribe turned off their music and the Mutoids packed up all the sculpture on request from the lord mayor to end the musical entertainments. To all concerned it will be a mystery as to whether they were ever there at all. The strange entourage moves on validated to suspicious border checks as a travelling circus. In fact it is a travelling circus with all the paradoxes of circus imagery. It stands outside society; and yet it parodies society. It is a pantomime of clowns and dancers, bumper cars in a dusty arena, a fighter plane, like a substitute elephant, incongruous and huge in a field in Eastern Europe, an unexpected crash-landing in a flight west.