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The year is 1989. I’m in the back seat of a red Peugeot 205, hurtling along the motorway outside Coventry in the middle of the night, searching for an illegal rave taking place in a nearby warehouse. Someone is spinning a joint and the heady bouncing of Orbital’s acid house track “Chime” fills my ears. I float through the roof from the back seat, looking down on my friends as they hurtle through the darkness towards an unknown party. Our nocturnal adventure has only just begun.
In reality, I’m at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, donning a virtual reality headset at the start of In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, an experimental music documentary that takes you to the heart of the acid house movement. The film, or “experience” as the producers call it, was made by Darren Emerson and East City Films for the Coventry UK City of Culture festival in 2022, before going on touring international festivals, picking up a number of awards, and then embarking on a tour of eight UK cities.
You enter the gallery through a dark corridor decorated with neon flyers while thumping techno blares blare, then you’re strapped into a VR headset, headphones, hand controllers and a haptic vest that vibrates in time with the music. It feels like you need a lot of gear, but you forget all about it the moment the show starts.
A simulated drive on the Midland Expressway in “In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats” View the music selection in 3D space
In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is built around a series of snapshots that tell the story of a night out. In the days before social media and smartphones, illegal raves weren’t always easy to find, so the night begins with friends in their bedrooms drinking, smoking, and playing cards, getting into the spirit for the night ahead. The scene felt immediately familiar to me.
Afterwards, you’d meet up with your buddies in a motorway service station phone booth, watch in the distance as the glowing sign for roadside restaurant Happy Eater flashes, and wait to call the hotline to tell them the exact location of the rave. Party promoters back then had to run their events in secrecy to avoid being detected by the police.
The spread of illegal acid house parties from 1989 caused a moral panic in the media, with one BBC report describing the movement as “a wicked, evil cult that lures young people into drug taking”. This demonization led to the Criminal Justice and Policing Act of 1994, which sought to ban raves that played music “characterised by a succession of repetitive beats”. One section of the VR experience takes place in a police station, where you witness the activities of the Acid House Squad (officially known as the Pay Party Unit), a section of the police tasked with shutting down illegal raves.
Whereas a traditional music documentary would tell history using filmed interview footage, here talking heads are playfully replaced with paper flyers promoting the parties, dotted around a 3D virtual space – you can even pick them up and move them around. Interviewees include DJs, MCs, promoters and ravers, describing what acid house meant to them.
The final years of the 1980s marked the end of Thatcherism. Unemployment was high, class and racial tensions were explosive and football fan violence was rampant. The hypnotic swirl of house music and the euphoric buzz of dance floor ecstasy combined to create a unifying force, ushering in what became known as the Second Summer of Love.
The experience takes visitors inside a darkened nightclub, recreating the atmosphere of an illegal rave in 1989 © Birmingham Museums Trust
Interviewees also emphasise the importance of the story’s setting in Coventry: while the Midlands isn’t always recognised as a centre for the acid house story alongside Manchester and London, many of the scene’s core groups held raves in the area’s industrial estates, which were abandoned following the decline of the local car industry.
While the history lesson is certainly interesting, the real success of In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is that you’re not just listening to someone talk about an acid house party. In VR, you’re there, experiencing it for yourself. Though the graphics look dated compared to modern video games, I easily felt a part of the action, walking around and picking things up. At one point, I found myself gliding along the grooves of a vinyl record. At another, I walked back and forth to tune the radio dial, switching between actual stations playing classical music, phone-in shows, and pirate radio playing the latest club tracks.
The most exciting moments are when the story switches to impressionistic scenes that convey the atmosphere of a party. In one scene, you fly high above a motorcade searching for a rave, gliding through a cybernetic grid landscape inspired by rave posters of the time. As you move your hands, colorful light explodes from your fingers, encouraging you to dance. And you can dance, too, because everyone else in the room is wearing a VR headset and can’t see you. It’s one of the best uses of VR I’ve ever seen.
Critics may argue that this is an isolating technology, but In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats harnesses the multi-sensory capabilities of modern technology to evoke the excitement of partying at a rave until the crack of dawn, to tell a fundamentally togetherness story.
The climax scene is set in a dimly lit nightclub, dancing to the driving rhythm of Joey Beltram’s rave anthem “Energy Flash.” As the lights slowly turn gold and the music settles into an ethereal chorus, the film gracefully captures that rare nightclub moment of revelation and will resonate with dancers of all ages who know the feeling of being defeated and taking to the dance floor.
Until 1 September, birminghammuseums.org.uk, then touring Brighton, Belfast and Cardiff
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