Inside Taiwan’s underground rave scene, where music, mysticism, and fleeting trust pulse through the margins of the city
At a crumbling temple on a mountain slope in Taoyuan, music begins to hum. Smoke drifts between broken pillars, LED lights coil around shattered stone. It’s not a club, not a concert, not quite a ritual—but something that slips between all three. The dancers come with tents, speakers, talismans, cigarettes. Before the first beat, some bow to the spirits of the place.
This is Taiwan’s underground rave scene, now entering its third decade. In this piece from Initium Media’s ‘Reporter’s Notes’ column—a space for journalists to reflect on stories that moved them—reporter Chang Kai-hong steps into a world of pulsing music, improvised spaces, and temporary trust. He attends a rave at an abandoned family shrine-turned-party site, and what he finds is both stranger and warmer than expected.
Here, exchange isn’t about money. Chang trades peanut butter sandwiches for cigarettes, drinks, and conversation. Here, no one cares about job titles, degrees, or backgrounds. What connects people is rhythm—shared steps on the dance floor, and a mutual frequency in the music.
He meets a couple—one a young Taoist priest in flowing white robes—who light incense to greet the spirits of the ruin. The priest gives out talismans with hand-brushed script. The two met at a folk music festival in Miaoli, but techno brought them closer.
Across the scene, religion and rave are not in conflict—they’re curiously blended. A man named Ah Xuan recalls another party, this one behind a mountain temple, announced cryptically through Telegram: “The gods have spoken. Come dance in the hills.” Participants had to pass through a fire-walking ritual before joining. Entry wasn’t paid but gifted—each person brought something to contribute to the “resonance”: a drum, a joss stick, a mum-cooked rice ball. The DJ booth stood on a traditional banquet table, next to offerings and lotus lamps, under red temple lanterns modified to blink in sync with the beat.
One DJ, playing under the name Tāi-sîn-án (in Taiwanese:大神仔), mixed Taoist ritual sounds, Taiwanese dialect samples, and low-frequency techno. At 1am, the temple’s spirit medium arrived—not to shut things down, but to lead a trance-like dance ritual in the centre of the floor. Together, under techno rhythms, the crowd moved like a kind of electronic Pat-ka-chiòng (a traditional Taiwanese ritual performance troupe rooted in folk beliefs and myth).
A rave is a fleeting refuge for restless souls. Around the dance floor, someone reads tarot, someone else rolls lūn-piá (a form of spring rolls) by hand — It feels less like a party than a parallel-world marketplace, quietly blooming under the pulse of the music.
Yet this openness exists within boundaries. These are not public events. Most outdoor raves occupy spaces illegally—public land, private ruins—without permits, often with music that pushes the limits of legality, volume, or sobriety. As such, the scene runs on discretion and trust. Locations are shared via private messages or secret Telegram groups, often revealed only the night before. Sometimes, attendees must meet at a designated point and follow guides in.
This has created a kind of semi-secret membership structure—exclusive, but not commercial. You can’t buy your way in, but if you’ve danced together once, you might be recognised as one of their own. Over time, this forms an underground network, held together not by rules but shared memory and bodily resonance.
In this world, trust and unspoken consensus are more binding than regulation. No one bans photography, but most people simply don’t take photos. No one is forced to share, but most do. It’s governed by a quiet, mutual code of PLUR: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect.
At the centre of it all is the dance floor, a paradoxical space—tight, crowded, but strangely free. Bodies move in ecstatic synchrony without touching. “It’s like a shoal of fish,” Chang writes, “each moving to its own rhythm, but never straying from the current.”
For some, the freedom is transformative. Ah Zhe, a raver who once frequented nightclubs, says raves are different: “Nightclubs are about the chase, about sex and show. The music’s just wallpaper. A rave isn’t like that. Here, music is everything—and dancing is why we come.” What keeps him coming back isn’t the scene, but the spiritual release. “What really gets me hooked is the feeling of mental freedom when I dance.”
Not all seek chemical highs. One participant, Xiao Shan, identifies as a “natural high raver.” For him, the deep bass and extended movement are enough. “I think about all the things I never deal with,” he says. “Not necessary life-changing epiphanies—just the things that are always there, just beneath the surface.” In the darkness, emotions and bodies are released. “Sometimes I feel like I disappear into it,” he says. “Like I’m no longer myself, just part of the black.”
These parties don’t end with a final track—they vanish. “Underground parties are like dreams,” Chang writes. “They begin already on their way to disappearing.” Tents, speakers, lights are all cleared by sunrise. Even footprints are covered over. The only thing left is what stays in your body: the after-buzz, the lingering hum.
Ah Zhe recalls a small forest rave in Europe—location only marked with a hand-drawn map and the message: “At sunset, listen for the first beat by the river.” At midnight, the DJ reversed the entire set. The music ran backwards. Lights pulsed in reverse. The night turned inside out.
As the fire died down at 3am, no one spoke. It was a silent farewell. Before leaving, someone handed Ah Zhe a wooden coin inscribed: “You were part of something that won’t be recorded—but you will remember.”
Back in Taiwan, he searched for the party online. Nothing. No photos, no trace. Just the coin, still on his desk.
They danced on the ruins—not to rebuild, not to rebel, but to remind themselves that the body can exist another way. As long as people keep dancing, those nights will never fully end.
Original article (“章凱閎, ‘他們在廢墟上跳舞：在Rave派對結束後，我體內的嗡嗡餘震” / “They Danced on the Ruins: The Lingering Hum in My Body After the Rave”), by Chang Kai-hong was first published in Chinese on Initium Media on 17 May 2025.
It’s available here.
Initium Media is a Chinese-language digital media outlet based in Singapore.
Summary by KLT
