Prague’s new rave scene trades ecstasy for espresso and early starts

There is a train leaving Prague’s Masarykovo station on an evening in May. It is private, it is heading to a converted coal mill outside the city, and what awaits inside is a curious concoction of chefs, performers, and ravers.

This is Frying Room – a gastro rave by the ZE MĚ projekt, billed as "exaggerated in absolutely every way,” where the question of whether you are attending a dinner or a party has no clear answer. Upon arrival, a line of chefs will greet you with a drink, and a ten-course meal at a long table will be followed by propulsive sets by Czech electronic artists.

It sounds like a one-off provocation. It is not. Across Prague, a generation of collectives and organizers are running electronic music through an entirely different context than the familiar venues of the city; say, a coffee shop at 11 a.m., a pilates class, or a boat. The "hybrid rave" is fixating at the center of an inventive moment in the party scene.

Sam Gittis pilots Part Time Locals, a collective that has probably done more than anyone in Prague to test this idea in practice. They have taken their parties to rooftops, boats, parks, winter gardens, and most recently The Miners coffee shop on Komunardů one unassuming Saturday morning.

“We see a large audience that loves electronic music but doesn’t feel like nightclubs are their favorite space,” Gittis explains. “Prague has incredible nightlife but not many spaces built around that feeling, so we built them ourselves, from DJing on Bluetooth speakers at numerous parks to organising pop-ups with large sound systems.”

What Part Time Locals understood early is that the venue is never just a backdrop. “The thing that ties it all together is that it’s temporary,” Gittis says. “You had to be there. That’s what makes it stick.”

The morning and daytime formats, he argues, do something specific to the music itself that a conventional club night cannot. And with more and more people, particularly in the younger generations, shifting away from alcohol consumption, he says it’s an opportunity to bring club music to a bigger audience.

This attention to what surrounds and shapes the experience of electronic music runs through all of Prague’s most interesting hybrid events right now. A growing cluster of them center not on where you listen to the music, but on what your body is doing while it does.

Recently, the BAVSE collective’s Wellness Rave & Coffee event at Goodlok espresso bar started with a communal 5 kilometer run through the city before opening into a DJ-led session with specialty coffee and food, pitched explicitly at people who want to “party differently” without a hangover.

This week, Fitvibe’s Techno Pilates are taking over Roxy on April 24, structuring its session like a DJ set: a slow warm-up that builds through a peak of intensity to a cooldown stretch at the end. “If participants feel like dancing, they dance; if they feel like pushing hard, they push hard,” organizer Maria Bohusova explains. It will be their first Prague event after a successful run in Bratislava.

The crowd, she explains, is more mixed than you might expect – roughly half regular exercisers, half people who "come mainly for the music, combining the enjoyable with the beneficial."

Not every experiment is about place or body. Some go further, fusing electronic music with an entirely different art form.

The RUN OPERUN collective has been pursuing this question since 2015, with the founding principle: “if you won’t come to the opera, the opera will come to you.” Over the years, they have “smuggled” their opera concept into clubs, Stalin Cultural Centre, and the Estates Theatre.

Their OperaVe event returns to Švehlovka this Friday for an Almost Closing Party, fusing opera singers with DJs and a techno atmosphere.

Hovering over these unique conceptual events is the question of whether it’s all an enrichment or dilution of the rave culture that is so beloved in this city. The techno scene especially comes with its own codes, history, and hard-won sense of belonging. Does running that through a pilates class or a coffee shop dissolve that?

Gittis does not find this concern very compelling, and in fact turns it around entirely. “Exclusivity is what quietly dilutes a culture. Part Time Locals exists to push back on the elitism that can creep into electronic music. The music quality never drops, the curation of the lineups never drops – we just change the context." 

The proof, he argues, is in what happens next. "People who find us during the day end up going deeper into the scene and into the music." The hybrid format is not a watered-down version of the real thing. It is a different on-ramp to the same destination.