Tribalists in the Electronic Age

A daily "totem" built by artists from beach trash collected while cleaning up the beautiful Tribal Gathering site

---

“I’m ill-esha and I make beats.”

This is my default mode of introduction - direct, perhaps awkwardly cadenced, but an honest attempt to tell you who I am in a quick and unpretentious way. Like most others in these obsessively achievement-driven times, my career defines me, and as a self-employed entrepreneur, it’s natural for me to work relentlessly. As a free-spirited teen drawn to making electronic music, I was on the grind constantly - prioritizing work over relationships, friendships, family, downtime, and physical health. Work always took precedence over sleep.

A few years ago, my unrelenting, hard-push lifestyle started to break me, piece by piece. First, I discovered that no matter how many hours I spent in the studio I quickly became uninspired and exhausted, zoning out, getting frustrated at myself for my inability to keep going. I drank several jumbo French presses of coffee daily. I felt empty and lonely; my initial creative drive backslid from a blazing flame to a mere sporadic flicker that sometimes died out entirely until my stubbornness pushed me to relight it again.

'This feels forced', I thought worriedly to myself. 'I wonder if I just don’t want to do it anymore?'

I became obsessively involved with yoga, but not the relaxing kind – the kind where you push your body to obliteration, you sweat buckets, and thinking disappears because your focus is all on the extreme effort. I drank more coffee. I felt increasingly stressed and depressed. My recovery required me to take a good, hard look at my original motivations, and to try and really pinpoint what made me happy. In doing so, I discovered an ethos by and large forgotten or made irrelevant by today’s material standards – the concept of community or ’tribe’ as necessary for a balanced existence.

---

Clay faces made by tribal members on a tree at the Tribal Gathering site

---

We are not solitary animals by nature.

Humans require nurturing and protection by their mothers for survival quite a bit longer than other species. We’ve grouped together since ancient times to improve our living conditions, and we also create songs and sonnets and paintings to honor that very human phenomenon of falling in love. Connecting to others is instinctual and therefore fundamental to our nature.

The electronic music community was initially established through illicit parties, underground club nights, and the coming together of individuals who saw themselves on the fringes of society and longed for their own place and flavor of bonding. Early raves often relied on word-of-mouth advertising, handed-out flyers and non-broadcasted meeting points to maintain their secrecy; later on, we moved to using newsgroups and then message boards. All of these methods had something in common – you needed to communicate and interact with others.

In ancient days, we banded into tribes based on our birthplace and location – now, with the internet, we’re free to assemble into our own tribe based on our passions and values. And that was my aha moment –remembering the environment that existed when I discovered the magic of music and how it could transform the facial expressions and movements and vibe of an entire room in an instant. Music can bring people together despite surface differences and it can heal broken hearts and minds.

---

Where the river meets the sea on Playa Chiquita Beach.

---

Our Ailing Culture

I realized that my passion for creation of art was tightly interwoven with a passion for transformation, community, and healing through art. Simultaneously, I felt disconnected from the divisive and chaotic climate of our technologically advanced but troubled times. Since the creation of personal social media, anyone can create a ’Me Page’ with a constant feed of personal output, where all interaction is centered around people’s thoughts and comments to you.

Many people are addicted to checking social media and deriving validation from their ever-changing number of ’likes’ or ’follows’. We buy into packaged propaganda under the guise of truth or news in social, cultural, and political arenas. We’re brainwashed into believing that there is never enough, and we must fear what is different, protect what is familiar. It is then easy to be inundated with feelings of envy and jealousy, to be unsure who to trust, rally against those perceived as our enemies.

These whirlwinds of divisiveness leave many of us feeling burnt out, empty, and dissatisfied. We no longer have our tribe – we’ve reached Peak Me, and it's pretty lonely and boring, especially when our adulators are often bots or underpaid foreign youth getting cents for clicks.

---

I love my commute.. but I need to feel like I'm making a difference with what I do..

---

Building Community

As an avid moderator and curator of all these former music communities – online groups that would regularly burst into reality via our events – I had found the center of the hole in my heart. I wasn’t vibing with this stadium-rock-star-DJ culture that corporations and marketing entities had built up around us as we progressed from underground to mainstream, and I knew there had to be others feeling like me. After discovering the emerging chat platform Discord, I became determined to re-dedicate a significant portion of my time to building such an online tribe and doing my small part to reset the priorities.

For the last two years, I’ve been running the EDM Production Discord (companion to the subReddit of the same name. At the beginning, it was a rather chaotic mix of trolls, edgy kids and spam/memes (like many internet chats today), but gradually, we started to attract like-minded individuals – today we’ve grown to a 4000+ member community of creators from around the world, ages 11-50. A 30-member volunteer staff mentors and moderates, and regularly holds Q&As, production contests, and feedback jams. Most importantly, we also provide 24-7 communication streams between absolutely anyone who is passionate about music creation.

Some magical friendships and selfless moments have emerged simply from the fact that everyone is giving their time to others. When one of our staff lived through several hurricanes in Puerto Rico, he was sent a care package from our British friends. Collaborations have happened between people thousands of miles apart across the world. I am constantly humbled by being able to teach and also learn from people, some of whom are half my age.

In the ancient tribal models, the elders would pass on their wisdom to the youth, and assist their parents in caring for them. The youth would innovate and bring strength and energy to the tribe. Community members helped each other and as much as you were part of a group, you were raised with love towards becoming a strong, healthy individual. Ancient tribal communities didn’t have the same incidences of mass murder, or crippling depression, or modernity’s prevalent malaise, alienation, isolation, and divisiveness. I believe the fundamental reason for these problems is a lack of community and love.

---

Me at Zen Awakening Festival meeting up with three young producers from the EDMP Discord for the first time

---

An Event Unlike Any Other

Most recently, I was lucky enough to be invited to play at Tribal Gathering, a
phenomenal festival in Panama that I believe is the only one of its kind. Over 60 indigenous tribes are brought in from around the world to share knowledge, build strategy together, interact with our Western culture attendees, and overall work on creating a better global understanding. There are also non-indigenous presentations on various topics including sustainable development, and other issues – all intertwined with a modern-day music festival, tying together ancient cultural tribes and modern creative tribes.

Throughout the year, the parent organization, GeoParadise, spearheads various projects designed to assist the diverse communities in sharing resources, preserving their culture, and becoming stronger through inter-cultural communication.

At the festival, I noticed so many details that left me in awe – the entry wristbands were made by one indigenous community, the food was locally sourced, toilets were composting – and none of this was done in a self-congratulatory or ’Me Page’ way.

It was all humble, full of laughter, and most of all truly rooted in action and not just ’thoughts and prayers.’ It was truly about connecting communities. As a musician, I was ecstatic to squat by a fire and make my own flute out of a piece of bamboo with the guidance of my new Guatemalan friend, Francisco; as a self-appointed ’online tribe leader’, my passion for sharing resources and honoring different artistic and cultural styles was strengthened by these experiences.

---

Crafts for sale in front of the Tribal Gathering pirate village

---

Clarity of Purpose

I’ve returned to my electronic screens with even more resolve that tribe building is an essential part of moving forward as a community. It’s the missing link that we’re all feeling deep in our souls as we pay for our stadium concert tickets or respond yes to yet another Facebook event.

Spending time with younger people, I see the patterns of their desired interactions speak for themselves – Twitter, where you must try and say something meaningful in a short bite that isn’t hierarchically ranked but rather a continuous, time-based feed; and Snapchat, where your contribution is instantaneous and ephemeral.

These types of moments are the rawest thing one can receive from a person in a time of over-curation, Photoshopping and paid marketing boosts. And the transformation I’m seeing happen in these young people – as they are mentored and supported with humility and generosity by those more experienced – is equalled by the fulfillment the mentors feel. Not only in giving back to our community, but also shaking up our patterns and set ways with constant streams of new knowledge and energy.

It is time to use our unparalleled ability to communicate and connect for that exact purpose instead of frenetically attempting to constantly drive traffic to our own spots of attention. It’s time to restructure our careers to include supporting and connecting with others looking for their ’tribe.’ It is well past time to actually look to ancient wisdoms to make the best of our modern technologies.

So actually...

I’m ill-esha and I curate humanity networks driven by art and inspiration.

That sits a lot better with me, and I hope to inspire you – either as an ’elder’ or a ’youth’ – with a passion to do the same.

---

Join us at the EDMP Discord!
GeoParadise, the year-round charity supporting Tribal Gathering