Culture & history 7 min ago0Add to bookmarks
Cheyenne Clementi and Valentina Morandi publish more than 160 silver photographs of the European free-party scene, from Bologna to CzechTek. A visual heritage from the inside.
Two Italian photographers, Cheyenne Clementi and Valentina Morandi, publish a photography book titled Never Alone: 1997-2004 Raving in Europe. Over 160 original silver gelatin prints documenting, from the inside, the European free-party and teknival scene at the turn of the 2000s. The announcement is relayed by DJ Mag on July 16, 2026.
The uniqueness of the project lies in the position of the two authors. They do not tell the story of the scene—they come from it. Morandi co-founded the Tekno Mobil Squad, an Italian nomadic sound system crew, in 1997. Clementi and she are both participants and documentarians. This is what the opening line of the book, as quoted by DJ Mag, summarizes: “This was our life for nearly ten years. These photographs do not document someone else’s world—these are our photographs of our friends, our parties, our lives.”
The corpus covers nearly a decade of parties in several countries:
What we see there, if we are to believe the book’s presentation: the large sound systems, but also the moments by the side of the dance floor, the improvised kitchens, the early mornings. It is a post-UK, decentralized scene that spread across the continent when the British law—the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994—made it increasingly difficult to hold illegal raves on English soil.
The story is well-known but deserves to be recalled. After 1994, part of the British sound system collectives—chief among them Spiral Tribe—left the United Kingdom to cross the Channel and spread across continental Europe. Italy, the Czech Republic, France, Spain, and Portugal received, absorbed, and extended this movement. CzechTek in Bohemia became one of the emblematic gatherings; Tekno Mobil Squad one of the transalpine equivalents.
This is the genealogy that Never Alone documents: the trace, in photographs, of a cultural as much as musical displacement. For a DnB/jungle readership, it should be read as follows: the free-party and teknival culture is a cousin, not a twin, of British jungle—the same breakbeat roots, the same sound system culture, the same actors at times, but a sonic DNA that diverges toward hardcore tekno rather than the jungle idiom of Metalheadz, Reinforced, or V Recordings. Nevertheless: what we see in the photographs by Clementi and Morandi—the stacks of speakers, the DIY hanging, the logic of nomadism—belongs to the same world as that of the 90s jungle.
Two reasons.
First, because the patrimonialization of rave culture is underway, and it largely comes from the United Kingdom: Spiral Tribe exhibitions in London, Bristol jungle exhibitions, museum files on sound system culture. Never Alone is a useful continental counterpoint. It reminds us that the scene of the years 1997-2004 was not British, but European, and that the visual memory of the movement also plays out in Bologna, Prague, and Granada—not just in Bristol or London.
Then because the book is written from the inside. We are not in the sociological gaze of the outside photographer who comes to document “electronic youth.” We are in the family archive, that of two protagonists who lived through these years. This type of source—assumed subjectivity, but chronologically situated—is precious for the historiography of the scene, in addition to the classic works (Simon Reynolds Energy Flash, Matthew Collin Altered State).
We await the book to comment on the editorial quality of the print, the depth of the captions, and the critical apparatus. But in the meantime: this is the kind of publication that a magazine like DBN Link covers because it documents the common ground where, in Europe, the cultures that gave birth to jungle, drum and bass, breakbeat hardcore, and teknival—sometimes separately, often together—were formed.