Nothing seems more appropriate today than thinking community; nothing more necessary, demanded, and heralded . . . Nevertheless, nothing is further from view; nothing so remote, repressed, and put off until later, to a distant and indecipherable horizon. It isn’t that the philosophies expressly addressed to thinking community were or are lacking . . . Yet not only do they remain well within this unthinkability of community but they constitute its most symptomatic expression.

These words from Roberto Esposito can equally be predicated on (electronic) music scenes, which have not been immune to “one of the most dominant themes debated internationally”, from the endeavours of a certain anarchist-type impulse to constitute Temporary Autonomous Zones (T.A.Z.) to the spectacular, static dynamics of the industry’s officially sanctioned segments. However, most of these movements have perished, failed in their attempt or hit the brick wall of commodity logic, either consciously crushed by the Juggernaut called Capital or kindly subdued by the effluvia of its heady mystifications. It is not that the achievements and struggles of the second group, which are still fundamental today, have not been important. But all of them have been determined to a greater or lesser extent by “identity thinking”, the strangest, subtlest and —precisely for that— most powerful case of which is that of the commodity-form domination, with its inherent inversions and its logic of the primacy of identity over difference, quantity over quality, thing over person, form over content, unity over multiplicity, teleology over process, sameness over otherness, presence over absence and so on; a logic socially and psychologically materialised in the accumulation of the different forms of capital and in the search for success à la celebrity through a carnival of perennial Balzac-esque tropes (favouritism, intrigue, exclusivity, impatience, farce, glitz, greed, egoism, idolatry, hypocrisy or cynicism), which —even further in the age of individualism, entertainment, consumerism and mobile telecommunications— atrophy sensibility, empathy and musing, and reduce the subject’s and work’s value to a mere mean or a discrete sign inscribed in the commercial code, or directly to pure nothingness.

In this context, CCL’s DJing style represents a fanciful metaphor for what a community that keeps identity thinking at bay might look like. Their mixes are the movement-image of tilted mirrors that show bold non-normative perspectives with which they reread or recontextualise genres, moving smoothly in-between them, thanks to a deep knowledge of some parts of electronic music history, mainly those strands built primarily on heavy bass and dub techniques, as on their mixtape A Night in the Skull Discotheque. Sometimes, the focus is on the twisting of the rhythmic material. At other times, the illumination of the melodic contour predominates. Or to put it with them: “liquefaction of rhythmic and melodic matter—combustive phase transitions through wiggle-steppers, cowgirl-breaks, trip funk, drum & face, neon wave.” CCL assemble non-essentialist devices that liquefy the ghosts of capital to set up aqueous virtual spaces where and through which the body and subjectivity are sensually constructed and manifested as multiplicity (“Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd”), a process that navigates the ambiguity of queerness as the “psychedelic dismantling of existing reality.” To paraphrase Stephan Mallinder, maybe it is not entertainment, but it is fun.

Baldman, Recho and Topanga Kiddo, three people who have contributed in different roles to the formation of communities, complete the line up.