Grief Rave

From Caves to the Chemical Brothers

Jul 18, 2025

Chemical Brothers 2022, Rome. Image by NME, Click on image for source. CREDIT: Roberto Panucci/ Corbis via Getty Images

I’ve been to a few good raves in my time. Some in old warehouses, some in the wilds, under a sky full of stars. I’m talking grass roots raves, not commercial ones with eye watering ticket prices.

When you go to an event like this, you bring all your emotion. Sure you’re there for fun and a good time but other emotions had a way of surfacing. What do you do with these emotions, you dance with them. You danced with them and through them, in a cathartic partnership.

Grief Rave

When I first hear of a grief rave, i didn’t even need an explanation. I got it. This project was the thought of Annie Frost Nicholson and The Loss Project in London. The original Grief Rave invited participants to bring a vinyl, CD or tape track connecting them to someone lost – whether personal, political or climate-related. The events have been happening since 2022, and are ongoing.

We brought people together to play songs that connect us to people we have loved and lost … songs for political grief, music for any kind of loss. - A F Nicholson

Her partner, The Fandangoe Kid, adds that some just want to express themselves physically without speaking: “Some people don’t want to verbalise it, they just want to dance it out.”

Photo from - David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Click on image for source

Dancing It Out

I’m all for dancing it out and I’ve spend many a wonderful night at ritual trance dances doing just that. If dancing makes us feel better, I can only assume we as humans have always done just that.

Are the scenes above an ancient dance? While we still debate whats going on in such scenes, I bet someone decided to record it in art as they had such a good time at the ritual dance.

I imagine them, dancing under a night full of stars, drummers, holding the rhythm, rattles and voice. Voices raised in praise, in ecstasy - and all the while, emotions surfacing, and purged and healed.

I have a long history of grief dancing, and perhaps you do to?

I guess some of the momentous dancing in my life was in the early days of the Chemical Bothers, who had a long standing residency at the Heavenly Social at Little Portland Street in London.

That was my cathartic dance floor. When that first synth note called, like a wall of sound it was like a piercing laser going through your entire body. Merged with a distorted bass, all combining like the beams of a UFO purging you of anything that ailed you. This was a two part healing, the first the music , the second the dancing.

I started Keening Circles, just like a grief rave. Music that took you on a journey. We began at the shore, awkward and a bit unsure. But soon we were engaging with grief, until we were brought together again, and reminded of the sacredness of grief. We lean into the songs, using them as a backbone to let our voice explore the emotion, holding onto them. Deeper and deeper until that point in the middle where we feel on the threshold of something. Some might turn around, not ready, while others eagerly lean in. This is the threshold point, it’s different for eah person, but this is the place we are most likely to encounter something that might start a small cascasde, chain of events that can offer us healing. Slowly we are brought back to the shore, and welcomed back onto dry land.

Imagine a grief rave where you bring that one song you always turn to as you know it will bring tears and then offer you comfort.

Raves have traditions in underground, hidden spaces. Across the world, secret revival gatherings are melding deep emotion with collective beat states.

“There’s been a real shift from talking therapy to movement and release and kind of shaking it out,” says Frost Nicholson. “Those non-verbal, less traditional modes of experiencing and releasing grief. For me, music has been a real speed dial to my sister and the past. You can be on the dancefloor and time freezes in the moment that you shared with someone.” But clubs are shutting down, she explains, “and these very precious places that we once used to have are becoming fewer and fewer, so we need to hold on to them or create them”. inews article

From a grief rave participant:

Rachael, who lost her baby son Archie 12 years ago, asks for “You’ll Be In My Heart” by Phil Collins. “The first time I heard it after I lost him there was this line, ‘For one so small you seem so strong’. And that was Archie,” she says. “[Today] it got me right into the place of thinking about him.” A grief rave is something she only recently felt ready for. “I couldn’t have done this five years ago and grieved with people I didn’t know. But hearing this song in this beautiful place…there’s hope. It’s not all grief and sadness.” - Via inews article

Have your own grief rave. Put together some music you like to dance to, add in a few that you turn to to release emotion - invite few friends..