A Room Inside the Rave — Papua New Guinea and the Art of Staying

Rafi Mercer
2026-01-15T16:00:44+00:00

A Rafi Mercer essay on early rave as a place you could live inside — and why FSOL’s “Papua New Guinea” still starts small, then turns into a room you can stay in.

More

The night didn’t peak. It opened.

By Rafi Mercer

I remember standing in a club and feeling something rare: not just that the music was loud, but that it was habitable. You weren’t merely dancing in front of the sound — you were inside it, as if the air had been rebuilt around the rhythm. And at the same time, you were inside your own head, travelling without moving. Early rave could do that. It could make the crowd feel like company and solitude at once. A public room that still let you be private.

That double-state is hard to explain to someone who only knows the modern version of nightlife — the version that is filmed, captioned, reduced to highlights. Back then, the best nights weren’t about being seen. They were about being absorbed. You didn’t arrive to perform. You arrived to dissolve a little, to find that certain frequencies could rearrange your thoughts, and that a tune could become something you lived in for seven, eight, nine minutes.

The miracle was that it didn’t need to begin with a bang.

The track that carries this memory most clearly for me is The Future Sound of London’s “Papua New Guinea”. And what’s fascinating about it — what makes it feel almost designed for the way you described it — is that it starts as far less than what it becomes. It’s an opening line spoken under the breath. A suggestion. A pulse and a few fragments that don’t try to impress you. If you meet it in a hurry, you can mistake that restraint for simplicity.

But the entire point is that it doesn’t ask for your attention the way pop asks. It assumes a longer contract. It’s built on the faith that if you stay, it will open. And in a club, in that era, the staying was the whole ceremony.

There’s a particular type of patience that exists on a dancefloor when the room is really listening. Not just moving — listening. The bassline becomes structural. The drums become a hand on your shoulder. The melody doesn’t arrive like a hook; it arrives like a thought you didn’t know you were thinking. And as “Papua New Guinea” develops, you feel the track thickening in dimension rather than in volume. It doesn’t climb. It widens. It becomes less like a song and more like weather.

That widening is what made early ’90s electronic music feel like a frontier. The culture was young enough that it hadn’t yet hardened into strict categories. Nights could contain joy and melancholy without anyone needing to file it. You could be euphoric and introspective in the same hour. The music didn’t demand a mood — it made room for several. And the clubs themselves, for all their sweat and chaos, often held a strange tenderness: the sense that everyone was there for the same invisible thing, and that nobody needed to explain it.

In that context, a track like this wasn’t “at the forefront of an era” because it was fashionable. It was at the forefront because it changed the geometry of the room. It suggested that dance music didn’t have to peak and resolve. It could simply hold you — hold you steady enough that your own mind could unfold.

It’s worth saying plainly: this is part of a listening history, not just a nightlife memory. These tunes trained a certain kind of attention. They taught us to follow a line for longer than we’d been taught to follow anything. They taught us that repetition isn’t laziness — it’s architecture. That small changes, introduced slowly, can be more emotional than dramatic shifts. That music can be immersive without being overwhelming. That the “drop” is not the only story a track can tell.

I think about this now because the world has become hostile to duration. Everything competes for your focus in fragments — five seconds here, ten seconds there. Even music is often consumed as excerpts, as choruses, as content. The idea of giving a track seven minutes of undivided attention can feel like a luxury, which is absurd when you think about it. But it’s true: attention has become expensive.

That’s why “Papua New Guinea” still matters. It doesn’t just remind you of a time. It reminds you of a capacity — your capacity — to enter a piece of sound and remain there until it reveals itself. It still does what it did then: it builds a room inside the room. It invites you to step across a threshold and feel the outside world soften.

And perhaps that’s the deeper link, the longer arc: those early nights weren’t only about escape. They were about practice. Practising presence. Practising immersion. Practising the ability to be in a crowd and still be with yourself. Practising the kind of listening that doesn’t demand constant novelty because it understands that depth is a form of novelty.

Some tunes hit you instantly and burn out quickly. They’re fireworks. You remember the light, but not the shape.

This was different. This was a tune to stay with and get inside. A tune that began modestly — almost politely — and then grew into something you carried, because it was never trying to win you in the first ten seconds. It was offering you a longer life.

When I picture that club again, what I remember isn’t the decor or the faces. I remember the feeling of being held up by sound. The sense that the music was bigger than the moment, and that by the end of the track you had moved without travelling — that the room had shifted, and you had shifted with it.

Not a peak. An opening.