Remembering to remember
Nowadays Nonstop April 27, 2025, ft Aurora Halal
This draft has been sitting in my CMS for two months, during which time I’ve somehow doubled my subscriber count, despite doing nothing on Substack. In any case, welcome to Craving Aversion, a reader-supported blog about the search for meaning and the cultivation of awareness in all its forms. (I.e., raving, meditation, and other stuff too.) New readers might be interested in my essays on how (and why) I got into raving and attending my first 10-day silent meditation retreat and existing ones may have missed my earlier post about Bread and Puppet theater.
It’s been a long and cold winter in the northeast, wherein the energy of the parties I’ve attended has felt numbed by factors beyond the weather. In the face of upheaval and uncertainty, we continue living our lives distracted and forgetful, fulfilling plans made in the past, unaware of why we made them.
I arrive at Nowadays alone from a gray and windswept afternoon, eyes watering from the cacophony of airborne pollens in search of pistils. Relief awaits indoors, where the towering figure of Dutch acid specialist Identified Patient is slashing his way through the last half hour of his set from behind the decks. The crowd is with him with each lunge and parry. He receives a heartfelt round of applause as Aurora Halal takes over.
Halal is a polymath of the New York scene, as respected for her talents as a promoter as she is for her DJing. Her name on a bill all but guarantees the dancefloor will be full, even if the quality of the crowd varies. On Sundays such as this one, however, familiar faces tend to outnumber ill-mannered gawkers, and we are looking out for one another. The sharp-elbowed men in collared shirts, with two left feet, are readily admonished for their misbehavior and encouraged to shape up or depart. Meanwhile, Halal is glowing.
Many of the DJs I admire have such a strong sense of style that a single measure played a certain way is enough to conjure their names in the middle of another performer’s set. “This one’s giving Traxx,” or “that was so Lena.” Halal is not like them, but this is no slight. I don’t look to her for a specific set of sounds at any given party. My only expectation is that it will be good, because it always is, as it was today.
She starts with a continuation of what Identified Patient was putting down, staying in the realm of acid house, but reaching back towards the ecstatic, bombastic bangers of the 90s and aughts. The crowd is loving it, perhaps a bit too much. The floor quickly packs beyond capacity before the end of the first hour, so I flee outside for air.
I step back inside with about 40 minutes to go and am immediately hit in the face by a groovy breakbeat sampled from jazz pianist Randy Weston’s “In Memory Of,” otherwise known as the main riff from The Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” — a measure I’d heard teased in so many sets throughout the winter, but never played in full, until now. This is the type of dancefloor moment that brings old friends together and forges new ones out of shared circumstance, setting an unabashedly nostalgic and freewheeling tone for the remainder of the set.
By the time the chorus of Alcazar’s “Crying at the Discotheque” rang out in the last minutes of the final hour, I felt my own eyes were as moist as those described in the song. I glance around the room, making misty eye contact with familiar faces belonging to people I’ve never met. These are the moments that remind me why I’m here. The joy cannot last, making its presence all the sweeter when I’m aware enough to taste it.