The Sarcastic 10-Second Guide to PsyTrance

Psychedelic trance (also known as “Psytrance” or “Goa trance”) is a form of electronic dance music that has been parting hippies from their hard-bartered cash since the early 1990s. It combines a pattern of repetitive beats and melodies, which lull the listener into a trance-like state, with high-frequency wave forms. These, when combined with various recreational pharmaceuticals, can induce visual and aural hallucinations that appear to follow the same pattern as the music, and which generally results in the listeners either staring vacantly into space, or dancing like a drunk elephant wearing too tight shoes.

It was born on the beaches of Goa, India, by expatriate hippies (such as Goa Gil), who combined the sounds of late-60s and 70s psychedelic rock with the beat intensive rhythms of house and techno, spilling out from Detroit and Chicago. (Further evidence that the US dropped nukes on the wrong 2 cities). Thus it has morphed into layers of weird sounds, over an 8-, 16- or 32-beat drum-line and what is called a “driving” bassline (However, the author has not seen its license and is not sure if its allowed to drive).

Once they realised that if people take enough drugs, they’ll dance to anything, they added the twisted sounds from the Roland TB-303. This piece of musical gear was supposed to be a bass line synthesizer, at which it failed miserably, but when the knobs are turned all the way up, it produces an unearthly (and allegedly “trippy”) wailing sound, much like a cat being fed tail-first into a blender. Of course, any electrical device that has its knobs turned all the way up, will do the same, even a microwave oven, but the 303 had better marketing.  http://www.blogsurfer.us/

From Goa, the music spread around the world, except for America, where its arrival coincided with the Crack House Laws, which made anybody organising a gathering involving loud, repetitive music decidedly nervous. Not as nervous, however, as your average rave bunny, suddenly finding themselves surrounded by hairy, dreadlocked, pierced, tattooed hippies… and the men were even scarier.

These days, psytrance producers who aren’t lying face down on a beach in Goa, can be found lying face down on the beaches of the UK, Japan, Russia, Croatia, Italy and South Africa. However, for reasons known only to them, 99% of all psychedelic trance comes from Israel. Famous bands (producers? frustrated electricians?) delight in subtle names, such as Infected Mushroom, Hallucinogen, Astral Projection and 1200 Micrograms to name but a few.

It’s also acted as a magnet for every type of New Age loony and it’s impossible to move at a party without having your chakras cleansed, your crystals read, a cup of chai with all the trimmings and if you’re really lucky, a pizza baked by Hare Krishnas, who offer a convert-you-while-you-wait service. Some have even cashed in on the woo-factor and there are now two Trance Institutes, studying trance (duh!). Most of the studies, however, appear to involve staring at the pretty pictures in the corner, or sitting on the floor saying, “Whee! I’m a tangerine.”

Required listening

Although these days, psytrance appears to have branched off into two subsets – one which sounds like an angle-grinder raping a combine harvester and the other which sounds like the bastard offspring of Euro-Trance (“Go on, swim into the light, fondle the dolphin, you know you want to…”) there are several notable classics that anybody who wants to be “with it” (i.e. not being stared down by a mob of glassy-eyed hippes) should know. These include: (Artist name first, because some of them are weirder than the song titles)

*Cosmosis – Down at the Crossroad
* Astral Projection – Nilaya
* Transwave – Trashish
* Electric Universe – Meteor
* Hallucinogen – LSD
* Infected Mushroom – Release Me (Oh, hell with it, everything of theirs is classic apparently)
* Etnica – Starship 101
* Chi A.D. – Eye am the I

…and so on…