Two weeks ago in Gunma Prefecture, partygoers battled rain, mud and cold at the venerated electronic music festival known as The Labyrinth. Now more than 20 years old, the relatively small-scale event has managed to build a cult-like status globally, revered by techno nerds for its world-class sound system.

Yet the event’s sterling musical reputation is becoming increasingly at odds with the actions of one of its main organizers, who took a big misstep this year that cost the festival.

As German music magazine Groove first reported, in late August a person unaffiliated with the event emailed artists booked to play to alert them to transphobic tweets by Russell Moench, the most visible face of the event, of whom Labyrinth is the brainchild. (Moench’s X account has since been deleted.)

A firestorm of emails followed between Moench and the artists, in which Moench reportedly doubled down on his views, saying, “I find the trans right activist movement to be deeply illiberal and totalitarian in nature,” and calling it the “center of the biggest medical malpractice scandal of the generation.” The back and forth resulted in Carsten Jost, the alias of German producer and musician David Lieske, being disinvited by Moench and three artists canceling their appearances out of apparent solidarity with transgender people. (Another artist, Mathew Jonson, disappeared later from the final lineup, for unclear reasons.)

The backlash against Moench focused on how he had created an unsafe space for trans and queer people, a double betrayal given the community’s foundational importance to house and techno from their very beginnings. The festival’s subsequent apology reflected that: “First and foremost, the Labyrinth organizers and staff unequivocally support and work to protect Transgender, Non-Binary, LGBTQIA+ and any other marginalized persons and condemn any harm or violence against these communities.”

“Many different communities have come forward to help me understand that my activity was damaging and misguided,” the statement went on, adding, “I am 100% committed to becoming a better ally for the marginalized.”

It was Moench’s hostility toward trans people that most urgently needed to be addressed. But there’s a larger problem. Underneath this controversy is a pervasive belief within Japan’s highly regarded electronic music scene, one that’s ultimately holding it back: the insistence that art can and should be free of politics. It’s a belief I hear over and over, but as many critics before me have argued, it perseveres because it’s protected by a house of privilege.

Mixing feelings

Let me be clear: Labyrinth is a great party. I don’t know the first thing about sound engineering, but I know a thing or two about fun, and also about running events. The stage design, the community, the crystal-clear sound quality, the fact that the weather is consistently awful yet people keep coming back year after year — the fun is undeniable.

Which is perhaps why, as a fan, my response was so mixed. I support gender-affirming care and the protection of trans lives; so obviously I should have sold my ticket. I had friends counting on me and the promise of musical transcendence; so obviously I should have just gone and had a good time.

My own ambivalence troubled me, and failing to find answers or peers willing to debate the issue, I turned to a writer I admire deeply as much for her shrewd criticisms as her human flailings. “The desires of the audience’s heart are as crooked as corkscrews,” Claire Dederer writes in her new book, “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma.” “We continue to love what we ought to hate.”

The book is an honest attempt to understand what to do, as an audience, with the work of artists who for one reason or another have been “canceled,” figures like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and Michael Jackson, when we still like what they’ve made.

Moench hardly ranks in the 21st-century Monstrous Hall of Famers, but his transphobic tweets weren’t an isolated moment. Before he deactivated his X account, where he had over 10,000 followers, he would regularly post about his politics, which included criticisms of climate-change activists, whom he accused of victimhood and having “Greta Thurnberg mental disease.” In July, he retweeted a post that began, “You’re not autistic, you’re just an asshole. You’re not disabled, you’re just lazy....You’re not another sex, you just couldn’t tolerate that you’re an average person with zero special status; so you made one up.” It goes on.

During the height of the pandemic, he and the other organizers — known collectively as Mindgames — held small, invite-only events called Balance. One such event had an all-male lineup, which sparked major backlash in this admittedly minor scene. Writing on the Mindgames page in June 2022 (the page no longer exists), Moench defended his actions:

“I think booking artists based on their identity is patronizing and deeply insulting,” he said, saying that the reason he did later add a female artist, Sapphire Slows, was because he respected her as a musician, and not because she’s a woman. “Gender, race, religion, nationality, and sexual orientation are meaningless and distracting in musical programming. My events are not political statements or political games.”

I may disagree with a lot of Moench’s views, but this one in particular nettles. This belief is dripping with disdain. I can hear the bar argument, picture the tweets: “You people who mix politics with art, you philistines, you sheep.” This belief assumes a stance of artistic-moral superiority: that art can be “pure” and free of “outside” forces, like politics and the identity or biography of the artist.

“Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state,” writes Dederer. “Authoritative criticism believes in the myth of the objective response, a response entirely unshaped by feeling, emotion, subjectivity. A response free, in fact, of any kind of personal perspective.”

Dederer is talking about criticism and Moench about curation, but they’re both really talking about the experience of the art viewer.

Identity imprint

Art cannot exist in a vacuum, because neither do the artist nor the audience.

The viewer is subject to her own whims and context, and she has her own subjective — and yes, emotional — reaction to the work. “Gender, race, religion, nationality and sexual orientation” are neither meaningless nor irrelevant to her experience of life or art.

I once believed art and artist should and could be separate, having come of intellectual age on dicta like “art for art’s sake” and “the death of the author.” But as a journalist, which is a form of gatekeeper, I’ve come to see that because power funds creativity, identity matters when it comes to whom I choose to interview, review and elevate.

But it also matters because, well, where else does art come from?

An artist is made up of many forces — generation, parenting, language, race, gender, privilege, trauma, physical ability — in other words, identity. The artist’s work seems like the impression left by a unique fingerprint, but those lines are shaped simultaneously by love and power, and conversely, their absence. A work does not have to be an explicit treatise on injustice for it to be an expression of identity.

When art and identity appear easy to separate, it’s often because the identity that is “neutral” or “absent” actually belongs to the majority group that’s in power. We’ve been looking through this point of view for so long that it has become transparent. But in fact, if you slide a nail down the edge and start to lift away, you realize all this time there’s been a film there: Call it whiteness, call it maleness. Just call it.

Stacked set

At Labyrinth, identity very tangibly caught up with art.

In a matter of days, and with a month before the show, the organizers had lost four of their acts, one-third of the lineup. There was an apparent scramble to fill the schedule, and in the end, several of the artists played twice.

There was a sense of deju vu from one day to the next. “This guy has way too much hair,” I overheard someone say as one short-haired artist took the stage, a reference to the fact that three of the artists playing the event were bald, and one played twice. In fact, more white bald men appeared on stage than total women and nonbinary people.

While of course hair diversity is not essential to the creative or moral success of a music festival, the throwaway joke reflected how the program suffered from the fallout of Moench’s own real-life identity. The second day of the festival, which should have been the headlining day, was a confused meander. Dasha Rush, who had played a powerful, skull-numbing live set the first night — and I mean that as a compliment — closed the second night, and the additional two hours of heavy construction sounds were too intense. Acts were stretched too long and without enough variety to break up the schedule.

Was I reading too much into things because I was personally offended by the views of the organizer? Why couldn’t I just be chill and have fun?

I want to borrow another helpful idea from Dederer, which is the metaphor of a stain. Growing up reading the “Harry Potter” series, the only information I could get about J.K. Rowling was the paragraph on the book cover jackets. Now we are in a biography-saturated time; I have more biography than I could possibly want. And certain facts seep into view and then sit like stains, like child molestation or a history of bigotry. Or transphobia. Each of us might have a different threshold for what constitutes a stain and what doesn’t, but we don’t actually get to choose — it’s just there, and we can’t take it out.

(And to be clear: This wasn’t a stain I found by going around flipping over table cloths checking for water damage. Moench used a very public platform with his and the event’s name attached.)

Moench champions diversity of thought, but as a result of his actions, what the audience got was homogeneity. There is value in honing something that works well, but true creativity needs risk, expansion and fresh perspectives and voices. Despite the technical achievements of the greater techno scene in Japan, they’re being hamstrung by patriarchy and sempai hierarchy.

Still, the conversation may change yet: Electronic music spaces in the U.S. and Europe have adopted explicit policies against any kind of discrimination, and musicians are setting precedents by refusing to play venues whose politics don’t match theirs.

Perhaps there’s a future in which the gatekeepers of Japan’s scene sincerely reflect on how identity intersects with, not impedes, the creation and system of culture, and see that questions of race, gender and power are not just the complaints of some woke whackos in a land far away.