MATERIALISTS VS MORALISTS AND THE FORECLOSURE OF POSSIBILITY
PART IV of THE DANCE MUSIC REFORMATION
Read the previous sections of Modern Rituals Vol. I: The Dance Music Reformation:
The Introduction, Rave as Rapture, Rave as Resistance
Part I, Social Media and Social Tensions
Part II, Content Consciousness and the Degradation of Craft
Part III, Reframing “Commercial” vs “Underground”
Each article is accompanied by original abstract paintings, also by Whitney Wei. All essays are available, read aloud, in audio format.
Moralists retain their values but ostensibly lose in the game of capital accumulation. They are political, at times even to their financial detriment. Nevertheless, there are artists who can simultaneously reach great heights while honouring electronic music’s socially disenfranchised origins. Upholding the history of their queer Black and brown forebears is what gives their work its gravitas.
In our left-hemisphere, technologically driven world, there is a profound loss of being able to grasp the implicit or suggested or covert, argues philosopher Iain McGilchrist. But music, beautifully, is one of the last remaining art forms that still masterfully negotiates what can only be felt and intuited through its transmission. There is an immaterial quality to it that is irreducible.
Yes, it is possible to explain the gear used in its creation, the technical skill of its creator, the arrangement of notes, perhaps the music theory behind it, and yet each component, dissected unto itself has no inherent meaning. All together though, in the full gestalt of music experience, is where the depth of soul emerges.
In one of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote about the metaphysical aspects of art during a time when mass media threatened the sanctity of the visual image—not unlike now when artificial intelligence threatens the sanctity of all cultural production, including, but certainly not limited to, music.
What makes an original Mona Lisa singular in a sea of duplicate copies? Or a dubstep track particularly resonant among its various structural replicas? “The uniqueness of the work of art is identical with its embeddedness in the context of tradition,” he wrote. “Tradition itself is of course something very much alive, something extraordinarily changeable.”
The traditional context of a work of art can vary depending on the perspectives of the people apprehending it, but it is absolutely crucial in the work’s felt authenticity. Tradition is what gives music its ineffable specificity and what Benjamin described as “aura.”
Dance music might be an immaterial art form, but you could cite, for example, how various subgenres attended to Jamaican sound system culture from their own subjectivity. The German pioneers of dub techno, Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, borrowed its atmospheric echoes and reverb, whereas London’s Godfather of Grime, Wiley, exalted its juggernaut bass and the role of the MC. What they bore was revolutionary, yet reverential in its innovation.
“The genuineness of a thing is the quintessence of everything about it since its creation that can be handed down, from its material duration to the historical witness that it bears,” Benjamin wrote. He argued that material duration and historical witness is what grounds the unique aura of an artwork. This applies to music, too. A track that carries substance channels the creative inheritance of house and techno’s originators and the historical legacy within which it is embedded.
In the age of reproductive technology where traditional and cultural lineage are rendered invisible, artists who intentionally allow themselves to stand separate from such a legacy will find their music orphaned from meaning. And while their work will sound like music, for all intents and purposes, it is by no means an expression of what is genuine and true.
Moralists in electronic music intuit this, even if they can’t fully articulate it. This divide between materialists and moralists has been acutely exposed throughout the course of 2025 in the Boiler Room and KKR cultural boycotts, because this split exists not only in individuals, but in institutions within the scene as well. This article published a few months ago in The Guardian reveals the demise of a company that once championed the vibrant global underground, only to be sterilised into another portfolio item for capital accumulation by its investors.
As pointed out by journalist Phin Jennings, the moment Boiler Room was acquired by ticketing platform DICE was the moment they “relinquished control over who would benefit from its success and who its performers are, in some sense, working for.” By pursuing financial security, Boiler Room inadvertently fell out of integrity and began haemorrhaging its cultural power.
In January of last year, DICE sold Boiler Room to Superstruct Entertainment, a company owning over 80 festivals across Europe and Australia, including Sónar, Flow, and Field Day, for upwards of 20 million pounds. Superstruct Entertainment is owned by private equity conglomerate KKR, known for its morally suspect investments in Israeli surveillance firms, arms manufacturers, and in Axel Springer SE, a right-leaning media company that advertises real estate in illegal West Bank settlements.
The cultural boycotts from artists around the world protesting KKR’s involvement in the Palestinian genocide reveals an aspect of music culture that the conglomerate certainly wasn’t expecting—that is, a lack of complicity. On their about page, Boiler Room responded to this in a statement akin to a cry for help:
No Boiler Room staff at any level held any ownership or voting rights in the company and had no control over the sale [to Superstruct Entertainment].
Boiler Room has been through various changes in control, investors, board, and ownership, and through this our commitment to editorial independence has never wavered. No investor, past or present, has ever influenced our output, this will never change.
We will always remain unapologetically pro-Palestine.
Now, it appears that Superstruct is gutting Boiler Room from the inside. Late last year, Resident Advisor reported a round of company lay offs in the double digits. In early January, its founder and CEO Blaise Bellville left the company. There is a distinct cruelty in seeing the music broadcaster fall to the destruction of materialists, when its early reputation and reach was likely fostered by moralists. This also means that many of the real-life financial consequences of the protests falls on powerless former staffers while their profiteering investors remain unscathed.
In an email statement to Jennings, Ben UFO echoed a similar sentiment, writing, “If the goal is to materially impact KKR or the situation in Palestine, it’s not clear how boycotting events under Superstruct and petitioning individual artists not to perform achieves that goal.”
But here is where Ben UFO missed the nuance of the situation. Not everything can or should be evaluated through economic effectiveness. The cultural boycott presents itself as a material imposition, but in actuality, it is more so, I would argue, a moral one. A moral stance is an end unto itself.
Following a code of ethics does not have any tangible outcome other than its own completion, but doing so is a powerful declaration to others that there are parts of dance culture that refuse to be commodified, and will not prostrate itself before greed. Some actions are categorical imperatives that are done simply because they are right.
When culture is compromised for profit, something vital and essential within its existence dies. What that is cannot be measured, like nature or a work of art, but only felt. This contemporary world is a place where many of the immaterial, intangible, and unquantifiable sources of human meaning have been rendered obsolete by a constant and mechanistic optimisation of metrics. This reduces human life to a futile search for depth of connection within money and machines.
To illustrate what I mean by this, I refer to philosopher Max Scheler’s hierarchy of values, as mentioned in McGilchrist’s lecture. At the bottom are base values (utility, hedonism, and self-satisfaction). Ascending towards the top are values of vitality (courage, nobility, loyalty, and humility), then values of wisdom (beauty, goodness, and truth). At the very apex are sacred values (rites of worship, devotion).
When an individual or institution engages with electronic music through values of devotion or wisdom, they’re drawing from an innate, metaphysical human need to contribute to something larger than themselves. But if music culture is attended to exclusively through status or economic logic, it shrivels and degrades from the possibilities of transcendence or virtue or authenticity or talent into a numerical bottom line.
This is why both eastern and western ancient traditions always advised caution when it came to material pursuit. Confucius stated in The Analects, “The gentleman understands rightness, whereas the petty person understands profit.” Similarly, Jesus in Mark 8:36 said, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
The materialist cannot comprehend what is forbidden from short term extraction—even in some cases, at the expense of children’s lives. “What are ethics and why do they matter?” this perspective asks. The materialist also cannot comprehend that there is an entire implicit world beyond metric optimisation.
Their hubristic, left-hemisphere mode of cognition has atrophied their capacity to behold it. Hence why Bob van Heur, the founder of venue Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, mentions in The Guardian article, “Because of the corporate structures taking over everything, it becomes a monoculture,” he said. “Now, half of the agents book [based] on data. In the end, that’s not an opinion, that’s nothing new [...] as a curator, my job is to look into the future.”
As mentioned earlier, each of us exists along this materialist to moralist spectrum. It is not a binary distinction because, in pragmatic terms, we live in a world where many of the largest companies of our daily consumer goods are complicit in either human rights violations, modern slave labor, or environmental destruction. Moral purity in this case would involve extricating oneself away from society and renouncing participation in late capitalism entirely. Oftentimes, this perfectionistic stance is a financial luxury.
Also, given the effects of social media’s content consciousness, there are those who practice rigid moral superiority, not out of wisdom for its own categorical primacy, but as a performance of virtue as the ego’s manoeuvre of superiority over others. Meanwhile, fully succumbing to materialism results in a barren nihilism and lack of individual accountability. By playing by the same rules as our oppressors, we reduce ourselves to the emptiness of the living dead.
Our actions, however insignificant, truly do matter in the lives around us, as articulated by Carl Jung in the last chapter of his book The Undiscovered Self.
The effect on all individuals, which one would like to see realised, may not set in for hundreds of years, for the spiritual transformation of mankind follows the slow tread of centuries and cannot be hurried or held up by any rational process of reflection, let alone brought to fruition in one generation. What does lie within our reach, however, is the change in individuals who have, or create, an opportunity to influence others of like mind in their circle of acquaintance.
Neither extreme ascetic self-righteousness nor hedonic self-indulgence leads to personal enlightenment. The only sustainable path forward is what Mahayana Buddhist philosophy termed “The Middle Way.” It may involve developing a code of ethics by which to abide in order to reduce harm, but within the constraints of survival in a complex world.
There is also the coherence of integrity, whereby a person’s thoughts, words, and actions align behind authentic intention. Above all, this positioning implores the individual to develop true personal convictions beyond the veil of illusions, including the idolatry of money and visibility, that inundates the world around us. Where do we stand within a cultural tradition? To what forces greater than ourselves do we dedicate our purpose?
Dance music was once a rite of worship. It was a tool to access the divine. It was a church created by the oppressed for their own deliverance. When its founders apprehended the culture, they did so through the moralist perspective, that which encounters music as a wholly transformative, life affirming phenomenon that made meaning, surpassed language, splintered rigid social structures, and cherished lives instead of destroying them.
Through the widespread indoctrination of algorithmic consciousness and economic logic, there are exploitative forces attempting to drain the spirit of electronic music by desecrating its traditional values and institutional ethics. In this sense, materialists are in an ideological war against moralists, and the KKR boycotts indicate that a cultural Counter-Reformation is growing afoot.