As part of the Barbican’s summer-long Frequencies series, a curated season about the power of sound, you can be transported back to an acid house rave on the outskirts of Coventry in 1989. In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is a VR experience created by immersive artist Darren Emerson that places you directly in the action. “It’s a love letter to being young and going on your first adventures,” Emerson told us at the press preview of the experience.

In a group of four, you don VR goggles, headphones and a vibrating vest as the interactive documentary places you in the back of a red Peugeot in search of the fabled rave. “Coventry has this really underrepresented history in acid house and rave,” Emerson says of the initial ideas behind the project. “People know about Manchester, Blackburn and London, but you don’t hear about Coventry.”

“I’ve had lots of the younger generation coming out of it going: ‘I feel nostalgic for a time I never lived through.’…”

The experience then takes you through a series of scenes – you’re in a bedroom, acid house posters all over the walls, the television in the corner playing news reports from the time that fed into the moral panic around the acid house scene. Then you’re in a police station and you’re hearing from actual police officers who tried to shut the raves down.

What feels so stark about the journey to the rave is how incredibly lo-fi it all was. Mobile phones were still in their infancy as a bit of technology, you usually had to find a payphone on the side of the road and ring a specific number to find your first meeting point. As you got closer, you just had to let the sound of the music in the distance lead the way. As Emerson put it – “I’ve had lots of the younger generation coming out of it going: ‘I feel nostalgic for a time I never lived through.’ I think there is a fatigue about being connected all the time.”

At the climax of the experience, you’re immersed in a warehouse rave, left entirely to your own devices. Your vest vibrates to the beat, the rhythms pulsing through your body as if you’re part of the music itself. It feels like there are hundreds of people around you, the energy is overwhelming in the best possible way. After the experience ends, you wander through a collection of rave memorabilia, and you can pick up the receiver in an old phone box to hear stories from those who were there. “People leave their memories. They’re like, ‘we went on this night and we did this.’ These great memories that people have, and I think that lives with you forever.”

In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats is at the Barbican until August 3rd, after which it will tour to Leeds, Warwick and Cardiff. More info can be found here.