Syncopated Green

Syncopated Green calls on the history of outdoor free parties to re-describe the English Countryside. The film listens to rave music, past and present, to help forget the official portrayal of England as picturesque, nostalgic, white, and rural. These traditional images of a “proper” England not only prop up the walls of national museums still today, but they also feed a growing conservatism that sustains Imperial fantasies, slavery legacies and Brexit realities. Music, especially music inspired by nature and designed to be played in the outdoors, has a unique way of expressing the landscape. Syncopated Green aims to include rave music into the English landscape genre and tradition – turning imperial history inside out. Rave music and its wider culture, importantly, celebrates black and brown artists and audiences, and has done so since its inception. Somewhere between a music video, a memoir, and an essay, the film asks, how might the current socio-political situation and looming future be different if we had other histories to lean on and dance with?