Be transported to an illegal Acid House rave by the Barbican's new immersive experience

I’m bombing up the motorway in the wee hours in a mate’s boxy red Peugeot, following cryptic instructions to meet in a layby near an industrial estate. We’ve got our chewing gum, our sweets, our whistles, our well-thumbed AtoZ map. Our night is soundtracked by Joey Beltram’s Energy Flash and Orbital’s Chime. Our destination: a large-scale party somewhere on the outskirts of Coventry.

This is what I was doing yesterday morning when, in the bowels of London’s Barbican Centre, it was simultaneously summer 1989 and spring 2025. My trip to the light fantastic was made possible by In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats. It’s a new immersive virtual reality experience that, with the aid of headphones, goggles and haptic vests, takes users, in groups of four, back to the future. To a time when 1000s of British youngsters were congregating weekly in fields, warehouses and industrial estates to dance till dawn to repetitive beats – a time when these 'illegal Acid House parties', and the authorities’ attempts to curb them, were the lead item on the Nine O’Clock News.

The 45-minute piece – part Acid House documentary, part really trippy experience, all killer dance music – is the brainchild of Darren Emerson. He’s not the DJ Darren Emerson who was a member of electronic music dons Underworld. But, with his brilliant deployment of tomorrow tech to recreate an analogue time pre-mobile phones, this Darren Emerson has an equal grasp of the magic of the dancefloor.

'It’s about that night out where you take a chance on something, where you get in the car and see what happens,' the 48-year-old artist and director says of his piece, which was commissioned by Coventry City of Culture. We’re talking a few minutes after I’ve emerged, genuinely buzzing, from the basement Pit space in the arts centre. A veteran of music television (he worked at MTV), Emerson explains that he wanted to make something that celebrated the Acid House era – but not anything reminiscent of a trad music doc based round a bunch of talking heads wanging on about the good old days.

'I wanted to be there. So this was an attempt to make a living documentary, something you could be in. Be present in. Have agency in. Feel like you’re on a journey. But all the while, the doc element is around you.'

That means finding yourself in a late-Eighties living-room where, using hand controllers, your avatar can 'pick up' a cassette of a mixtape, or pluck a record from a DJ box and put the needle in the groove – and then you’re actually in the record, your head spinning at 45rpm and 138bpm. Throughout this and subsequent 'scenes' – in the car, ducking police, at the rave, through the post-party dawn – the testimonies of I-was-there ravers bleed in from all directions.

'We can do that with all the affordances that VR allows: interaction, immersion, spatial sound, moving your body, multi-sensory [stimuli]. All these things that can really take you down the rabbit hole.'

In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is part of the Barbican’s new, summer-long Frequencies season. That programming also includes Feel the Sound, an exhibition comprising immersive installations positioned around the building (including in the underground carparks) that promises to 'rearrange' our perception of sound. There are also DJ events, workshops, talks and record label takeovers.

Every strand will be attempting to foster something at the heart of In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats: a sense of community, a collective experience forged by a shared passion for music and dancing. More than one clubbing veteran interviewed by Emerson hymns the magic of the quasi-religious oneness they felt on the dancefloor – a sweaty, you’re-my-best-mate feeling of, yes, ecstatic togetherness.

'We live in a time when we feel very connected by our devices, GPS, CCTV everywhere,” he says. “But at the same time we’re lacking human connection. So it’s an interesting juxtaposition to use all this cutting-edge tech to try to bring people back to a space where they were just with each other.'

The result is a truly transporting adventure back to the heart of Generation Rave, one without the risk of arrest or comedown. As Emerson puts it: 'This is a cinematic experience that has moments of abstraction and transcendence. That tries to get you to that moment of excited feeling of ‘I’m going into a club’ – or ‘I’m coming up a little bit…’'

In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats runs at Barbican until 3^rd August, then tours Leeds, Warwick and Cardiff. Frequencies runs until 31^st August