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Soundsystem

Freetekno

Since roughly the beginning of 2024 I have been a member of the NESER soundsystem (www.neser.sk).

Who NESER (NSR) are and what a soundsystem is

Neser is a collective of people - mainly DJs, artists (graphic designers, painters, ...) and other members who handle things like maintaining, setting up and upgrading the rig, transport and event logistics, and who jointly own, or rather share, the rig, the base and the name.

To explain the term "soundsystem", the tempting word at first was "band", but a more accurate and closer term - one that would reflect the fact that a soundsystem is not only the people who actually perform, as is usual with bands (in this case the DJs), but that the word covers everything that belongs to the group - would be "circus". So soundsystem stands for everything the group is made of, above all the speaker rig and the gear itself.

Another difference that makes the term "band" a poor candidate for naming the reality is the make-up of the people and how membership works in most soundsystems. Because a band always has to have every instrument its music was written for covered, a gig requires all the members who can play those instruments and know the tracks to be there, so there is a certain demand for a complete and stable team, whereas a soundsystem can live with a certain amount of volatility and turnover. That is why a soundsystem can have something like a "hard core" and "guest members" - and even who actually belongs to the "hard core" and who is a "guest member" cannot be pigeonholed, because the amount of time and effort individual members put into the soundsystem shifts over the years with life changes and circumstances: the oldest, founding members may not take part in everything right now, and the other way round.

My role and where I am heading in the soundsystem

In the system I mainly cover technical support, logistics and transport. In the future I plan to get into DJing as well, but given how much time I can give it right now, that is still a long way off.

For practice I use a fairly cheap Pioneer DDJ-400 console, which is really just a controller for software, but in the long run I plan to move over to vinyl - which is more or less the standard and the majority in the freetekno scene, a scene that never abandoned it.

If anyone is wondering whether it is any good to learn on a console and then switch to vinyl, under specific conditions I think it beats nothing:

  • the console needs software, and since I only run Linux, the one usable program there is Mixxx. What matters with it is that the magic "SYNC" button causes total carnage, so I do not use it. The same goes for the sampler, cues and effects, so what is left to play with are the bass, mid and treble knobs, the fader and the tempo - exactly as it is on vinyl
  • I will not wear out records and needles practising basic transitions; I will try playing it on vinyl afterwards
  • It will be a while before you see me behind the wall, though - you will run into me collecting the entry fee or pouring beer

The rig & odds and ends

  • People tend to call speakers stacked on top of each other a soundsystem or just a system as well - but the more accurate word would be "wall", since soundsystems often team up with each other (hello, BiPolar soundsystem) and one "wall" can therefore hold cabinets belonging to several soundsystems
  • Summer parties in meadows are often free - that is simply the spirit of freetekno culture, and certain unwritten rules say you make money on club parties over the winter and spend that money in the summer on putting on a party. This type of event is called a "Freeparty" - it can run in legal or illegal mode.
  • A party on rented land in a meadow or at a campsite that you pay to get into is an "Openair"
  • Club parties practically do not happen in summer

Basic types of speakers

The overwhelming majority of soundsystems always build their rig around 4 frequency bands:

Sub-bass

These are the deepest bass frequencies, the ones meant to shake the ground. The cabinets sit on the bottom floor of the wall, and the most common enclosure for this type of frequency is the scoop. These cabinets normally eat up the most power. The sound radiates both straight out of the driver and through the scoop enclosure.
In our system these cabinets hold one driver rated at 1600 W RMS.

Bass

This cabinet is called a w-bin. The name comes from its shape, since the drivers do not face outwards but are hidden inside an enclosure shaped like a double W - the sound first bounces off the back wall and then travels out along the ribs, and the middle may also hold a bass reflex port. These cabinets are responsible for the higher bass frequencies and should be placed at roughly chest and head height, to rattle your bones nicely.
In our system each w-bin holds two drivers rated at 750 W RMS.

Mids & highs

There is nothing particularly special about these speakers - a classic sealed cabinet with one ordinary mid driver and a horn for the highs. These cabinets are often built or mounted so that on the wall they look like they are about to fall on the people below them. That is not a mistake but the intention, because the floor of scoops and w-bins can already reach slightly above an adult's head and the sound needs to be aimed "at the dancefloor"

Frequently asked questions and controversies

Will I go deaf?

No - not unless the system guy responsible for tuning the rig is deaf, an idiot, or a combination of both. On top of that, systems running parties of what you could already call a professional and commercial character have a separate role and post for a sound engineer, the way it works at concerts.
The sound engineer's job is to keep the mids and highs in check, because those are what cut unpleasantly into your ears; the bass is there to stretch and squeeze spacetime and be felt with the body.
In practice, at 10 metres or more from the wall you should be able to talk normally without shouting at each other, because those frequencies should not be that saturated.
Long, powerful walls are built mainly for the bass, which should feel good and also not be oversaturated, moving the body and starting the stomping all by itself.

That is not music at all

The most common musical definition of what counts as music says:

Organised sound (and silence), arranged in time with an aesthetic or communicative intent.

I think that definition is met. On top of that, rhythmic music is the most natural kind of music there is: apes are assumed to have been banging and hammering together in rhythm two to three million years ago. Objects made on purpose to be banged on go back some 100,000 years, and the first melodic instrument (a bone flute) is dated around 40,000 years into the past.
Rhythmic music, and the reaction to it, is already coded into human DNA.

People cannot sleep

People living where the event is held could not get any sleep - this is probably one of the nastiest of all the controversies that tend to come with an event like this: someone local is more sensitive to noise and does not get their sleep. But the point of holding these events is not to keep local people awake; the effort is always to find spots that are as remote as possible while still reachable by car, with as many obstacles as possible between the houses and the site to scatter the noise. Which raises two questions:

  • Why can there not be better access for tekno people to more remote places that even come with some infrastructure - former military bases in the middle of restricted zones, abandoned towns, or simply very remote plots of land, which as a rule are managed by the state? It is counterproductive for states to fight the freetekno phenomenon by refusing to rent out that kind of infrastructure because the effect is that parties move closer to where people live.
  • Is the noise level really that high or is it just an attempt by communists, fascists, religious fanatics and other radicals to grab the chance to make life hard for people who do not look the way they think people ought to look in their world, and what actually bothers them is the dreadlocks, the coloured and long hair and the punk mohawks ?

Drugs & junkies

Another controversy brought up a lot in connection with the freetekno scene is drugs. That claim cannot be called false - people who indulge in various substances can be found in these places, but not to the degree the media image and pub talk present, and 100% of the drug consumption in this country really does not happen only and exactly here.

  • If anyone were genuinely interested in real data, they might be surprised to find out how much consumption goes on at big commercial festivals and other "socially more acceptable" events (half the crowd in front of the stage in pitch-black sunglasses in the middle of the night - what could that possibly be about?)
  • What is more, when it comes to drugs, I take the view that the body of every human being belongs to them and not to the state or to any other society - if someone is an idiot and drinks washing-up liquid because they want to be a bubble blower, then that is their health and their stupidity - at most it should be subject to the general principle that "my freedom ends where the equally large freedom of another person begins" - so let them just make sure "their bubbles do not bother anyone around them"

Freeparty / openair / club / teknival ?

Where should you go? It depends on the kind of experience you are after.

Freeparty
  • + adrenaline, the true spirit of freetekno and of punk rebellion against the system, the state, the surroundings - the only place to meet the hardcore and genuinely interesting people
  • + more exotic and more beautiful places
  • + money saved on the entry fee
  • + these days these parties are mostly smaller, with an intimate atmosphere
  • - a newcomer without friends who already "get around and are known in freetekno" will not get in - they have no information about the party
  • - it may not work out; the cops can turn up
  • - basic facilities may be missing, such as toilets, a source of drinking water and so on
  • - no entry fee and no secured site can considerably raise the share of the very worst antisocial cases, junkies and thieves
  • - no entry fee and no secured site can considerably raise the proportion of locals who come to harass people and start conflicts in the hope of shutting the event down
Openair
  • + no hassle, basically a festival type event
  • + usually a better equipped site - beer and Kofola on tap, at least portaloos, a water supply and so on
  • + it can even be held at a campsite - the best facilities of all, with somewhere to stay
  • + however low the entry fee is included, it works as a reliable repellent against the very worst antisocial elements, since people of that nature are permanently broke and could not hold on to a million crowns for an hour without shooting it up, drinking it away or gambling it away in some shack, let alone the price of a ticket
  • + lower chance of being bothered by cops and the powers that be - private land
  • - the original spirit and adrenaline are gone
  • - in the future, if the scene develops the way Drum and Bass or teCHno did, you cannot rule out festival manners like frisking cars and rucksacks against bringing your own alcohol - the whole thing can get a lot more expensive
  • - there can be considerably more people
  • - word has it that more and more people are showing up at these festivals who have no relationship to freetekno itself and are only striking a pose - find something weird enough and still unknown, and that is cool. I do not know what the motivation behind this phenomenon is supposed to be; maybe that nothing new, and above all nothing phenomenal, comes into being these days. The generations that lived into the 90s, maybe the 2000s, got to watch styles and movements being born (bigbeat, rock&roll, punk, metal, acid house and rave, hiphop and so on)
Club
  • + It is less cold than outside
  • + Anyone living in the town can go home from the party at any time
  • + More kinds of alcohol
  • - The entry fee
  • - The night can get considerably more expensive
  • - A lot of people in a small space
  • - The highest demands on conforming behaviour of all three types of event (you cannot just lie down in the grass or in a tent for a while to rest)
Teknival
  • This is basically the top discipline of everything you can attend. It is essentially a "festival" in a meadow with several walls (stages), and as a rule it is the main event of the year for the whole subculture - the most people, the most walls and soundsystems, and the most noise.
  • It is a nod to the traditional spirit of this subculture, whose nature and past are nomadic - the first soundsystems came like a herd, in living trucks with their rigs, from Western countries, and put on a party in a different country every weekend. The journey usually ended in the Balkans, in Bulgaria, but there were far bolder and more ambitious expeditions too, especially in the early era of freetekno, with that particular 90s freedom and the discovery of a new world after the Iron Curtain fell.
  • It is usually not legal, so everything said about freeparties applies.
  • + Compared to a freeparty - if some music does not do it for you, you move on... and on... and on. In the golden era you could count maybe 20+ walls in a meadow; not even the biggest European or world festivals, like Ozora, Pohoda or others, had that many stages and backstages to choose from.
  • These days teknivals in some countries run more in freeparty / openair mode and the name is only symbolic

In favour of freeparties, though, it should be said that how a party actually goes and what atmosphere it has depends a lot on who organises it - Czech soundsystems like Rotor, Tatramat or Swamp, which also put on "commercial" festival events such as Summerave, recently threw a freeparty in a meadow by the village of Horní Bolíkov, not far from the town of Telč, and the event went off perfectly fine.

The Czech vs. the Slovak scene

The difference between the Czech and the Slovak scene is striking, above all in size. I have no idea who this guy is, but as a knowledge base he ought to be preserved for future generations:

In practice it looks like this: in the Czech Republic a small part of the scene is already turning into festival events, while the Slovak scene still puts on smaller legal open airs, always under the banner of some soundsystem or cooperation, and the atmosphere is still more intimate. After a while you notice that you meet 50% of the same people at the various events.
In terms of the number of people, the size and the power of the rigs, parties in the Czech Republic are somewhere else entirely, and the biggest ones could hold the whole installed power of the Slovak scene.
On top of that, a Slovak speciality is soundsystems that are more like DJ crews, because they do not have rigs of their own yet and either borrow or rent them.

Learning more about freetekno, history

Among the materials that circulated in the scene back in the day, on websites that no longer exist, serving as an encyclopedia, you could also count the 2006 thesis by Lukáš Wilmer, in which he explains the basic terms and traces the birth of the scene and its arrival in the Czech Republic https://dspace.cuni.cz/bitstream/handle/20.500.11956/170572/120115140.pdf?sequence=1

A very valuable documentary series filmed by the soundsystems who could be considered the founders of this subculture is called "World traveller adventures" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9C_Dswi9SE&list=PLUIiW7PCAyXuye8h4YmjBUtXNfjkOErBb - the very first episode on that channel also covers one of the first parties in the Czech Republic, back in the 90s

The YouTube channel "Short tekno movies" is also valuable for information and opinion, and it includes the documentary of the same name: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtzbdItIsi8&list=PLUawqev1d1vklJDfNlbb7cprlgwemZ-7h&index=1

Events 2026 (sk)

FireWall 02 [ NSR + BiPolar ] - https://neser.sk/sk/akcia/firewall-02

Slovak free artists & performers gathering (SlovTekk) 2026 - to be announced

Events 2026 (cz)

WetField 2026 [ Rotor, Tatramat, Strojobal, Swamp ] !freeparty! - https://www.facebook.com/events/1260749812705047

Summerave 2026 [ Rotor, Latekks, Deposit, Nucleus, Morfa Crew ] - https://www.facebook.com/events/havli%C5%A1%C5%AFv-ml%C3%BDn/summerave-2026/787581383841192/

Breakfest 2026 [ Cirkus Alien / Spiral Tribe / Mayapur - olschools systems DJs and more ] - https://www.breakfest.org/en/homepage/





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