Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The year is 1989. I’m in the back of a red Peugeot 205, speeding along the motorway outside Coventry in the middle of the night, looking for an illegal rave in a nearby warehouse. Somebody passes round a spliff, the euphoric bounce of Orbital’s acid-house track “Chime” fills our ears and I float out from the back seat, through the roof and gaze down on my friends, speeding through the darkness to an unknown party. The night’s adventure has only just begun.In reality, I am in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, wearing a virtual-reality headset during the opening moments of In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, an experimental music documentary that transports you to the heart of the acid-house movement. The film — or, as the producers call it, the “experience” — was created by Darren Emerson and East City Films for the Coventry UK City of Culture festival in 2022, subsequently touring international film festivals and scooping awards before beginning an eight-city tour around the UK.You walk into the gallery through a dark hallway decorated with neon flyers to the sound of pounding techno. Next you’re fitted out with a VR headset, headphones, hand controllers and a haptic vest that vibrates along with the music. It feels like a lot of kit, but you forget it the moment the show begins.In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats structures its story around a series of snapshots narrating a night out. In the age before social media and smartphones, it wasn’t always easy to find illegal raves, so you begin the evening hanging out in a mate’s bedroom drinking, smoking and playing cards, getting in the mood for the night ahead. The scene felt immediately familiar to me. Later you join your gang at a phone booth at a motorway service station, the glowing sign of a Happy Eater roadside restaurant in the distance, as you wait to call a hotline to get the precise rave location — party promoters at the time had to operate with secrecy so their events didn’t get busted by the police.The spread of illegal acid-house parties from 1989 sparked a moral panic in the media, with one BBC report citing a description of the movement as “a sinister and evil cult which lures young people into drug-taking”. This demonisation led to the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which aimed to ban raves playing music “characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. One section of the VR experience takes place in a police station as we witness the workings of the Acid House Squad — officially named the Pay Party Unit — a police division tasked with shutting down illegal raves.Where a conventional music documentary might narrate history using filmed talking-head interviews, here the speakers are playfully transposed on to paper flyers advertising parties, which are dotted around the 3D virtual space; you can even pick them up and move them around with your hands. The interviewees include DJs, MCs, promoters and ravers, who paint a picture of what acid house meant to them. The final year of the 1980s marked the dying days of Thatcherism: unemployment was high, class and racial tensions threatened to boil over, football fan violence was rife. The hypnotic churn of house music and the euphoric influx of ecstasy on dance floors combined to create a force for unity, ushering in what became known as the “second summer of love”.Interviewees also highlight the importance of setting this story in Coventry — the Midlands is not always acknowledged as a central part of the acid-house story alongside Manchester or London, but many of the scene’s pivotal collectives threw raves in the region’s industrial estates that had been abandoned following the decline of the local motor industry.The history lesson is certainly interesting, but the real success of In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is that you are not just hearing someone talking about acid-house parties. With the VR you are right there, feeling them for yourself. Despite graphics that look dated compared with modern video games, I easily felt part of the scenes and could walk round and pick up objects. At one point I found myself gliding along the grooves of a vinyl record; at another I walked back and forth to tune a radio dial, switching between real stations playing classical music, phone-in shows and pirate radio with the latest club tracks.Most exciting are the moments when the narrative departs into impressionistic sequences that communicate the feeling of the party. In one scene, you fly far above a convoy of cars looking for the rave, gliding through a landscape of cybernetic grids inspired by rave posters from the time. When you move your hands, coloured sprays of light fly from your fingers, encouraging you to dance — and you might as well, as 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 seen to date. Where critics sometimes claim this is a technology that isolates people, In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats tells a story that is fundamentally about togetherness, using the multisensory capabilities of modern tech to evoke the rush of partying till dawn at a rave.The climactic scene takes place in a shadowy nightclub, where you dance to the motoric throb of Joey Beltram’s rave anthem “Energy Flash”. The lights slowly turn golden and the music subsides into an ethereal choir, elegantly capturing the rare moment of a nightclub epiphany. It will resonate with dancers of any age who know how it feels to lose and then find themselves on the dance floor.To September 1, birminghammuseums.org.uk, then touring to Brighton, Belfast and CardiffFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
