Electronic dance music (EDM), in all its forms — from pulsing techno and euphoric trance to dusty bush doofs and psychedelic raves — is often framed as boundaryless, communal, spiritual, even liberatory. It promises transcendence through rhythm, a dissolving of borders, and ecstatic connection beyond the constraints of modern life. But in the shadows of the dancefloor, something deeper plays out — especially in settler-colonial and post-fascist states.

Why are countries like Australia and Israel — two of the most notorious colonial projects still operating — among the largest per-capita consumers of EDM? Why do genres like psytrance and doof flourish in militarised and dispossessive societies, often on land actively being stolen or occupied? And why are former fascist states like Germany and Spain home to such vast, influential rave scenes — scenes that rarely grapple with the fascist ideologies their countries once practiced?

The answer lies not just in the music itself, but in its social, political, and psychological use. In these contexts, EDM is not merely entertainment, but it also functions as a tool of disassociation, a ritual of forgetting, and a performance of spiritual longing and unity that disguises histories of violence and ongoing systems of domination. It is a space where stolen land becomes leisure, where sacred symbols are repurposed as decoration, and where settler and tourist bodies are freed from responsibility through rhythm and repetition.

This article explores how electronic music scenes reflect and reproduce settler-colonial and post-fascist ideologies — not overtly, but affectively and aesthetically. We will examine the role of cultural appropriation, the commodification of spirituality, the fantasy of the “global tribe,” and the politics of land use and pleasure. By tracing these patterns across Australia, Israel, Germany, and Spain, we uncover how EDM becomes a force where the contradictions of modern colonial and imperial projects are ignored.

This is not a condemnation of dance, trance, or communal joy. Rather, it is an analysis born out of the striking similarities between Nations that consume EDM, and the underlying factors influencing this consumption.

Settler-colonial societies are built on disconnection. The settler, by definition, is a person out of place. A settler is someone whose presence on the land depends on the removal, erasure, or subjugation of those with rightful belonging. Over generations, this rootlessness becomes cultural. The settler no longer sees themselves as foreign, but has no story, no land-based law, and no intergenerational relationship with Country. The result is a deep psychic hunger: a longing for culture, for ritual, for meaning, for place — all things that have been abandoned or destroyed in the making of the settler.

EDM scenes are fertile ground for these longings. They offer curated connection and artificial ceremony — presenting rhythm as ritual, repetition as trance, a crowd as kin, and a sense of culture, albeit one that is co-opted, appropriated and perverted. The dance floor becomes a surrogate for community, for spirituality, for ancestry and for connection to Country. It simulates the very things that have been lost or stolen in the settler project, but does so in a way that requires no reckoning with how those losses occurred, or who they were taken from.

This longing is rarely acknowledged directly. Instead, it emerges as aesthetic desire: the craving for "tribal" symbols, for imagined Indigeneity, for mysticism borrowed from other cultures. The sacred becomes a spectacle. Cultural signifiers are collected like souvenirs — not to be honoured, but to be worn. The settler, desperate for meaning, identity and community, reaches out for what they have historically destroyed in others.

What emerges is a form of spiritual vampirism. Symbols are drained of their cultural life and repurposed as vibes. The deeper the emptiness, the more hunger for the sacred — but never the responsibility, the kinship, or the law that comes with it. Rather than confronting their own place in a lineage of dispossession, settlers turn to the dancefloor for absolution.

In this way, EDM becomes a space not only of escapism, but of compensation — a prosthetic identity for those whose belonging was built on erasure. But this identity is always hollow, always aesthetic, and always borrowed. It allows the settler to feel ancient, tribal, connected — without ever having to ask: to whom, to where, and at whose expense?

Settler-colonial societies are not just marked by their theft of land and destruction of Indigenous life — they are also defined by their inability to offer any meaningful alternative to what they have erased. In place of deep cultural rootedness in Country, they offer private property. In place of collective identity and community, they offer individual achievement. In place of giving, they offer consumption. And in place of culture, they offer hedonism.

This hollowness is not incidental. It is a product of both capitalism and colonisation — twin systems that isolate the individual from land, kin, culture, and ultimately from a larger purpose. In the wake of these forces, what is left is a desperate search for feeling, stimulation and intensity. What is left is a search for something that feels like meaning, even when it isn’t. These are the roots in which the global EDM scene has grown from.

Electronic dance music — particularly in its festival and rave incarnations — offers a high-sensation world where pleasure, identity and connection appears possible. These spaces promise escape from the rigidity of work, the alienation of urban life, the dull weight of modernity, and the grinding of capitalism. In the colonial core, pleasure becomes a managed commodity. The pursuit of it, unmoored from responsibility, becomes both a symptom and a weapon of empire.

In these settler societies, the unbridled desire for pleasure is itself an expression of colonial power. It is the self-entitlement to feel good while others suffer. It is the refusal to be burdened by history. It is the belief that ecstasy and enlightenment can be purchased, consumed, danced through — without ever having to stop and reckon with the cost.

The festival becomes a pressure valve: a place where the settler can release the tensions of occupying land, benefiting from genocide, living on stolen time, and being removed from a deeper sense of identity, culture and community. It becomes a place where, rather than transforming that tension into responsibility, it is sublimated into spectacle. The lights, the drugs, the sound systems, the crowds — all of it works to ensure that these deeper issues never have to be faced or reckoned with.

This is why EDM thrives under late capitalism and settler-colonialism alike: because it offers affect without action, sensation without consequence, community without accountability, and a supplemental identity in place of the lack of something deeper. The more alienated the society, the more intense the craving for release. The more violent the history, the louder the bass must be to drown it out.

The hedonism of settler dance culture is the soundtrack of a society that has nothing left to believe in but the moment.

Rainbow Serpent Festival. Credit Mark Owen

One of the most striking features of EDM culture in settler-colonial states is its physical relationship to land. Festivals, doofs, raves, and outdoor parties are not simply held on land — they take land, reshape it, aestheticise it, and reimagine it through settler fantasies of freedom, connection, and escape.

In Australia, bush doofs are marketed as spiritual pilgrimages into the heart of nature. Festival attendees travel from urban centres to camp in remote regions for days, often under banners of healing, consciousness, and “returning to the earth”, but this “earth” is not empty: it is Aboriginal land — unceded, sovereign, and sacred. The framing of these spaces as wilderness or spiritual commons continues the settler project of terra nullius. It reproduces the lie that this land was uninhabited, or that it belongs to everyone equally.

The doof ignores Aboriginal sovereignty and seeks to reclaim land through settler leisure. Where colonisers once fenced off bushland with wire and gunpowder, modern settlers do so with tents, speakers, and co-opted psychedelic aesthetics. Even when an Acknowledgement of, or Welcome to Country is performed, the event doesn’t shift its material relationship to the land and the power dynamics between Settlers and Aboriginals remain unchanged. It is still a settler-led occupation, albeit one cloaked in the aesthetics of connection, culture and community.

The same logic plays out in Israel, where psytrance festivals often take place in the Naqab (Negev) desert — territory violently seized from Palestinian and Bedouin communities. These raves are framed as spiritual or communal retreats, a return to the land, a place to dance and heal. But like in Australia, this is only made possible by the forced absence and exclusion of the rightful and original owners. The settler is not returning to land, they can’t return to what they never came from. Instead, they are reasserting control over it through and for pleasure.

This transformation of land into a site of settler escapism is central to the political function of EDM in these societies. Land is not engaged with or foregrounded as living Country, with its own law and spirit, and the responsibility that entails. It is instead consumed as background, as a canvas or aesthetic. The trees, rivers, dirt, and sky are re-scripted as passive decor in a settler performance of leisure.

The erasure here is a direct result of colonial structures. The land is made into a stage for white joy, Jewish transcendence, or Eurocentric catharsis — all the while Indigenous sovereignty is displaced, silenced, or reduced to spectacle and aesthetic. In this context, EDM festivals actively participate in colonialism as modern day, softer reenactments of conquest.

This is the settler condition: the desire to feel connected to land without being accountable to it, to access the sacred while denying the custodians, and to continue to take what was never theirs.

For many participants in EDM scenes — especially those drawn to psytrance, ambient, or “conscious” festival cultures — the appeal is not just the music, but the feeling of transcendence. The rhythm, the altered mind states, the visual motifs, and the shared rituals attempt to mimic the existence of spiritual experience. But in settler and imperial societies, this pursuit of the sacred never arises from connection to culture or Country. It arises from the absence and the erasure of genuine connection.

What fills this void is a curated spiritual collage. Festivals become marketplaces of mysticism, smashed together into the aesthetic are Hindu chants, Aboriginal painting styles, Native American feathers, African drums, Amazonian plant medicine, Buddhist mandalas, Tibetan singing bowls, and Andean flutes. These are not integrated with understanding, care or consent. They exist in these spaces to be consumed by the disenfranchised settler, where they are misunderstood, recontextualised, flattened and emptied of their true meanings, to be turned into decor and aesthetics.

This is often falsely described by the settler as cross-cultural celebration or cultural appreciation. In reality it is co-option, appropriation and spiritual tourism. It is a coloniser’s quest for meaning satiated by the stolen use of other people’s sacred forms, where cultures become costumes and the sacred becomes aesthetics.

The damage of this is beyond symbolic. These forms carry responsibilities, laws, and living lineages. When they are torn from those frameworks, EDM becomes a theatre of stolen and perverted spirituality. The performance is itself extractive, it allows the settler to feel wise without doing the work, to feel connected without building relationships or practicing kinship, to perform “humility” while enacting entitlement and ego, and to feel a sense of culture despite the absence of it.

Entire festivals brand themselves on this theft. Marketing materials promise “deep connection to ancient wisdom,” “tribal rhythms,” or “spiritual awakening,” while paying no respect to the peoples, lands, and cultures from which those rhythms were stolen. The path to enlightenment is paved with stolen and twisted iconography.

This theft serves a psychological function. It fills the spiritual emptiness of capitalist and colonial modernity with curated fragments of other people’s wholeness. It is a theft of meaning to patch a crisis of identity. It reinforces the same power dynamics that underpin colonisation itself: the right to take, to use, to benefit, without permission or obligation.

Settlers colonise land, and they colonise symbols, stories, and spirit. These raves become the rituals where this colonisation is euphorically disguised.

Among many EDM and psytrance scenes, there’s a common mantra: we are all one. One tribe, one people, one rhythm. It’s meant to sound liberatory — like a rejection of nation, race, or division, but in practice this fantasy flattens everything. It refuses to account for how some people arrive at the dancefloor through freedom, and others through displacement. It ignores who has access to “oneness,” at what cost, and who pays this price.

This idea of a “global tribe” is seductive to the settler imagination because it offers belonging without kinships, relationships and accountability. It washes over history and the ongoing dynamics of colonisation and dispossession. For those living on stolen land or occupying someone else’s homeland, it’s a convenient myth: if settlers belong, Indigenous people can’t assert Sovereignty.

The aesthetics of the “tribe” — the feathers, the face paint, the fire circles, the rhythmic drumming, and the sounds of stolen cultural instruments — are taken up without understanding or permission. It's reduced from its cultural roots and relegated as mere costume. The symbols of peoples with real law, culture, and lineage are repackaged for festivals that may talk about unity, but never talk about land back, reparations, or sovereignty.

This universalist language — oneness, unity, shared human experience — seems harmless, even hopeful. But it does violence by erasing the specific. It erases the names of Nations and the history of struggle. It erases the political demands that people are still fighting for.

There is nothing wrong with wanting collective experience. But pretending that it already exists — that we’re already “one tribe” — is a settler move to innocence that attempts to cover over the fault lines and bypasses conflict. It lets people feel radical and inclusive without ever having to risk anything or address displacement.

A politics that cannot name power, cannot name difference, and cannot name who is still dispossessed is ongoing erasure.

Psytrance is more than just popular in Israel — it’s woven deep into the modern Israeli cultural psyche. It emerged in the 1990s among a generation of young Israelis looking for meaning after mandatory military service. Many travelled to India, especially Goa, where they encountered a ready-made aesthetic in the form of trance music, spiritual tourism and psychedelic aesthetics. They brought it back with them, fusing it with their own nationalist context.

The Israeli psytrance festivals in the Naqab desert aren’t the apolitical retreats they are advertised as. The desert becomes a blank slate for settlers' spiritual performance. The military checkpoints, surveillance infrastructure, and demolished villages just outside the event perimeter are ignored — or worse, romanticised as part of the “mystique” of the place.

What plays out here is not a contradiction between Zionism and counterculture, but a merging of the two. Psytrance allows Israeli settlers to experience catharsis without consequence. It gives them a sense of depth and transcendence while reasserting their claim to land they do not belong to. It provides them with hedonistic escape from the ongoing genocide they participate in as IDF conscripts. The music may sound borderless, but the event is fenced in — physically, politically, and ideologically.

The crowd dancing in the desert is dancing on top of an occupation. The blatant display of leisure stands in contrast to the ruin and destruction it is built on top of. The Nova festival, just like the Warsar carousel, flaunts happiness on the borders of the oppressed.

There’s often talk in these scenes of peace, unity, and universal love, but there is no love for the people whose land was taken. There is no unity with the Palestinians living under siege or forced into exile. The dancefloor is unified only in its ability to temporarily forget the existence of the surrounding landscape.

Israeli psytrance culture demonstrates how easily pleasure, spirituality, and aesthetics can be absorbed into the settler-colonial project. Zionism is not interrupted by the trance scene — it is made palatable by it. The sacred is simulated, the land is stylised, and the settler seeks spiritual rehabilitation.

In this case, music doesn’t challenge the colonial order, it furnishes it through leisure and escapism.

In so-called Australia, bush doof culture has become one of the most iconic expressions of EDM’s fusion with settler-colonial identity. These multi-day festivals, held in remote bushland, are celebrated for their “connection to nature,” their emphasis on freedom, and their rejection of mainstream norms. But under the glow of lasers and the thump of bass, something older and more insidious is playing out; a continuation of the colonial fantasy of the land as empty, and the settler as its rightful inheritor.

The idea of the “bush” holds a particular place in Australia’s colonial imagination. It has long been portrayed as wild, mystical, and free. It is portrayed as a place for self-discovery and reinvention. This framing conveniently erases the fact that the bush is Aboriginal land. Every inch of it carries law, history, and responsibility. But to the doofer, it becomes a backdrop to a spiritual playground for white awakening.

These events rarely engage with this reality in any meaningful way. At best, they include a token Acknowledgement of Country or a brief Welcome to Country at the opening ceremony. But the rest of the festival — its leadership, its economic benefits, its relationship to land — remains firmly settler controlled for the benefits of the settlers. The aesthetics of respect are performed, while the structure of occupation is left untouched.

This is what makes the bush doof so dangerous. It doesn’t just ignore Indigenous sovereignty, it seeks to appropriate the land while continuing to deny the authority of the First Peoples who belong to it. The doof casts the settler as a new kind of pioneer: one who may not fence off the land or till the soil, but one who continues to dominate it all the same. The method of displacement and use may have changed, but the relationship to land remains one of entitlement and extraction.

Even the language used — “reconnecting with nature,” “getting back to the earth,” “feeling the spirit of the land” — echoes the settler pastoralists of earlier eras. The desire is the same: to feel at home on stolen land, to inherit the sacred without surrendering power, to access the mystical without reckoning with the colonial violence that enables that access, and to feel culture in the absence of it.

In this context, the doof supplements the colonial state. It provides cultural release for settlers disenchanted with capitalism, urban life, or political stagnation, without ever challenging their material position on this continent, repackaging occupation as enlightenment.

The bush becomes a stage again, the Aboriginal continues as merely a reference, and the settler seeks to become innocent.

The popularity of EDM in Germany and Spain cannot be separated from the legacies of fascism. We must remember that, in the words of many great revolutionary thinkers such as Aime Cesaire, fascism is merely internalised colonialism, and herein lies the connection.

In both fascist and colonised countries, authoritarian regimes violently suppressed political dissent, erased cultural plurality, and dismantled community life. Traditions, subcultures, and alternative ways of being were either banned, absorbed, or destroyed. The state sought not only obedience, but uniformity — an engineered sameness that severed people from each other, their histories, their lands, cultures, and ultimately from themselves.

When fascism collapsed in Germany and Spain, the people didn’t rebuild what fascism had torn apart. The damage ran too deep, and what remained was a hollowed-out cultural landscape — a fragmented society with few anchors left. The desire for identity, connection, culture and meaning only intensified with nowhere solid to land.

Into that vacuum came EDM.

In Germany, techno took root in the ruins of reunification — abandoned factories, crumbling bunkers, and walled-off city blocks. In Spain, the underground rave scene gave way to state-sanctioned mass tourism. In both, EDM became a space where people could feel intensity, collectivity, transcendence and a sense of culture in a world that no longer knew how to hold those things.

Fascism had not only devastated lives; it had broken continuity. It replaced deep belonging with fear, and when the fear receded, what filled its place was the hunger to feel freedom and joy. But in the absence of repair, freedom is thin and the joy is temporary. EDM provided an emotional experience that felt like liberation, but didn’t demand memory. It didn’t require people to confront what had been lost, only to dance.

The scene adopted a language of borderlessness, freedom, and limitless pleasure. But without roots, this rhetoric mimicked the logic of empire: anything goes, as long as history stays silent. Clubs and festivals offered sensation without politics and unity without context, relationship or accountability. What had once been shared through cultural traditions, identity and community was now simulated through raves.

The Netherlands is often celebrated as a global capital of electronic dance music. It is home to massive festivals, superstar DJs, and a thriving industry. But beneath the surface of its professionalised rave culture lies the unresolved trauma of empire. Though not a settler colony or post-fascist state in the contemporary sense, the Dutch state was a brutal colonial power leaving legacies of extraction, slavery, and domination across Indonesia, Suriname, the Caribbean, and southern Africa. The political, cultural and psychological impacts of this past remain largely unprocessed and unreconciled.

There has never been a serious national reckoning with the violence that built the Netherlands’ wealth. The colonial worldview was folded into a liberal identity that values “tolerance” and “openness” while erasing the histories that produced its so-called multiculturalism. The result is a society that positions itself as global, progressive, and post-racial, while aggressively repressing cultural differences through internal assimilation policies.

Since the 1990s, Dutch assimilation policies have pushed immigrants and racialised citizens — many of them from former colonies — to abandon visible cultural identities in favour of integration into a white, neoliberal national imaginary. Diversity is permitted only when it is depoliticised and profitable. This has produced widespread alienation with people cut off from ancestral culture, language, and memory, while simultaneously never truly being accepted into the dominant society.

The EDM scene thrives in this vacuum. Its euphoric, borderless aesthetic reflects the psychological condition of a society that has lost connection to anything deeper than spectacle. It offers a synthetic form of collectivity, one that mimics community while reinforcing disconnection. The clubs, the festivals, the music itself become vehicles for affective release in a society that cannot or will not name what it is grieving.

Much like in post-fascist Germany and Spain, Dutch EDM culture surged in the wake of historical rupture as a form of emotional management. The repetition, the lights, the curated transcendence serve to distract from what has been buried: a brutal empire, the ongoing violence of enforced sameness and the loss that accompanies it.

Just like other scenes shaped by coloniality, Dutch EDM draws heavily from cultures that still carry the sacred. Symbols, sounds, and aesthetics are lifted from Black, Indigenous, and non-Western traditions and reassembled for Dutch consumption — disconnected from context, stripped of lineage, divorced from their original meanings and sold back as “universal.”

What makes the Netherlands unique is its dual position: both as a site of post-imperial dislocation and as a new centre of cultural export. Today, the Netherlands exists not just as a participant in global EDM culture but also as a major curator of it. Through festival monopolies, DJ rankings, corporate media, and state-sanctioned branding, the Dutch scene shapes how the world hears and sees electronic music, shaping the modern day Dutch empire as an exporter of cultural imperialism.

The Netherlands, like its German and Spanish counter-parts, continues colonial extraction from non-European cultures in an attempt to mask its deep longing for real cultural and community connections.

Pleasure is never neutral. In settler-colonial and militarised societies, it is often weaponised by redirecting emotion away from accountability. The overarching colonial structures remain intact; they just feel better to live in for settlers.

In places like Israel and Australia, where occupation and dispossession are ongoing, pleasure acts as a pressure-release valve. The psychic tension of living as a settler, the discomfort of knowing whose land you’re on or whose lives are being destroyed in your name, doesn’t disappear. Instead, it becomes managed, and one of the most effective tools for managing it is affect: joy, excitement, ecstasy, transcendence in large-scale collective rituals — raves, festivals, doofs — where emotion is intensified, history is silenced, and settlers can temporarily appease their deeper desires for community and culture.

EDM culture offers a perfect vehicle for this. Its repetition, its sensory overload, its immersive atmospheres, and its often associated drug use all generate powerful feelings. But those feelings aren’t inherently liberatory, they’re not freeing, and they don’t reflect true and deeper communities and culture. In settler societies, they often serve to naturalise the conditions of occupation. The festival becomes a space where settlers are temporarily reborn, emotionally reaffirmed as innocent and as connected, and can feel unburdened.

This is especially clear in militarised settler societies like Israel. Far from challenging Zionist militarism, the trance scene coexists with it. Soldiers commit war crimes in uniform one week and attend a festival the next. The joy experienced serves as recovery. It’s part of how militarism sustains itself — by offering moments of reprieve that allow the violence to continue unchallenged.

In Australia, the pleasure of the doof is often framed as spiritual reconnection — but in truth, it’s a carefully managed feeling of ease. An emotional state that lets the settler feel “at home” on Country without doing the work of belonging. Affect becomes the mask that covers the ugly face of colonisation while doing nothing to address it on a deeper level.

Even in post-fascist contexts, like Germany or Spain, pleasure serves a similar function. It lets people feel free, even if the historical conditions that required that feeling of freedom have not been reckoned with. The past becomes weightless, the disconnect is temporarily mitigated and the politics evaporate in smoke machines and strobe lights.

Pleasure is not the enemy, but in these settings, it’s often just another form of settler comfort. A way to keep living with the contradictions without having to confront them.

If the only way to feel joy is to forget what made that joy possible, then that joy is part of the problem.

Electronic dance music may present itself as borderless, collective, and liberatory, but in many of the places where it thrives, it is deeply entangled with histories of conquest, authoritarianism, and cultural erasure. Its scenes — whether in settler-colonial states like Australia and Israel, or in the post-fascist landscapes of Germany and Spain, or in post-empires currently engaged in assimilation like the Netherlands — are shaped by the unresolved legacies of violence.

EDM offers sensation in the absence of substance, ceremony and culture without lineage, belonging and community without responsibility and accountability. It thrives in societies that have severed themselves from land, culture, community and memory — and instead of addressing that rupture, it stages a simulation of healing on top of it. Its aesthetic vocabulary is built from stolen symbols, its pleasure is made possible by displacement, and its spirituality often emerges from the very emptiness produced by the systems it quietly sustains.

Across the dancefloors and festival grounds, colonial affect is managed. The settler, the soldier, the tourist all find themselves swept up in rhythms that offer catharsis without change. In these spaces, forgetting serves as a primary function.

This is not a music scene that exists in spite of colonial conditions. It is a scene that has adapted to them, reflects them, and in many cases, reproduces them.

Dancing on Stolen Land: EDM, Settler Hedonism, and the Aesthetics of Dispossession

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Dancing on Stolen Land: EDM, Settler Hedonism, and the Aesthetics of Dispossession

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