The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance (Routledge Studies in Ethnomusicology)

“Psytrance is an intriguing transnational phenomenon for anyone interested in popular music, subcultures, and alternative spiritualities and lifestyles. Although still relatively unexplored, it is an increasingly significant area of study in Sociology, Cultural Studies, Popular Music Studies, and Religious Studies. A dynamic feature of a multi-faceted, global, psychedelic occulture, psytrance presents the scholar with a fascinating, if bewildering array of musicological, cultural, and spiritual confluences. Edited by Graham St John, the foremost EDMC theorist, this stimulating collection of essays by some of the key researchers in the field provides a genuinely insightful and engaging contribution to the study of psytrance, which students, tutors, and researchers will be turning to for many years to come. I warmly and enthusiastically welcome it.” Christopher Partridge, Professor of Religious Studies, Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University, UK

“The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance is a rich collection, full of pieces that combine the results of detailed fieldwork with up-to-date theorizing. I particularly like the way this volume goes beyond the longstanding preoccupation of popular music scholars with subcultural expression, and into a whole set of other, interdisciplinary issues. This book is very much about music, but it also tackles such phenomena as the global “festivalization” of culture, emerging forms of music-based religiosity, transformations in the nature of cultural labour, and shifts in the social meaning of travel. Psytrance comes across here as much more than just one more interesting musical niche. Interweaving technologies and bodies, the archaic and the contemporary, the local and the cosmopolitan, psytrance condenses within itself many of the key cultural dynamics of our time. The articles gathered here delve into those dynamics with skill and commitment, and the result is a book that should interest any scholar of present-day cultural expression.” Will Straw, Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Canada

“Graham St John has assembled a thought-provoking and rewarding collection of essays that explores the rarely considered musical and cultural practices that make up psytrance. Dedicated to its local variants and its global tendrils, this collection frames psytrance through scenes, subcultures, neo-tribes, political economies, cultural politics, and aesthetics, as well as movement and mobility, giving us an engaging contribution to the nascent study of electronic dance music cultures.” Geoff Stahl, Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa-New Zealand

The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance

Routledge Studies in Ethnomusicology

1. Popular Music of Vietnam The Politics of Remembering, the Economics of Forgetting Dale A. Olsen 2. The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance Edited by Graham St John

The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance

Edited by Graham St John

New York

London

First published 2010 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Taylor & Francis The right of Graham St John to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The local scenes and global culture of psytrance / edited by Graham St John. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in ethnomusicology ; 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Trance (Underground dance music)—Social aspects. 2. Trance (Underground dance music)—History and criticism. I. St. John, Graham, 1968– ML3918.U53L63 2010 781.64—dc22 2010000912

ISBN 0-203-84787-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-87696-4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-84787-9 (ebk)

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Psytrance: An Introduction

ix xi 1

GRAHAM ST JOHN

PART I Goa Trance 1

Goa is a State of Mind: On the Ephemerality of Psychedelic Social Emplacements

21

LUTHER ELLIOTT

2

The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes: The Case of Psytrance in Goa

40

ANTHONY D’ANDREA

3

The Ghost of Goa Trance: A Retrospective

55

ARUN SALDANHA

PART II Global Psytrance 4

Infinite Noise Spirals: The Musical Cosmopolitanism of Psytrance

69

HILLEGONDA RIETVELD

5

Psychedelic Trance Music Making in the UK: Rhizomatic Craftsmanship and the Global Market Place CHARLES DE LEDESMA

89

viii Contents 6

Re-evaluating Musical Genre in UK Psytrance

114

ROBIN LINDOP

7

(En)Countering the Beat: Paradox in Israeli Psytrance

131

JOSHUA I. SCHMIDT

PART III Liminal Culture 8

DemenCZe: Psychedelic Madhouse in the Czech Republic

151

BOTOND VITOS

9

Dionysus Returns: Contemporary Tuscan Trancers and Euripides’ The Bacchae

170

CHIARA BALDINI

10 Weaving the Underground Web: Neo-Tribalism and Psytrance on Tribe.net

186

JENNY RYAN

11 Narratives in Noise: Reflexivity, Migration and Liminality in the Australian Psytrance Scene

203

ALEX LAMBERT

12 Liminal Culture and Global Movement: The Transitional World of Psytrance 220 GRAHAM ST JOHN

Contributors Index

247 251

Figures

I.1 I.2 1.1 1.2 1.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 7.1 7.2

DJ Tristan at Boom Festival 2008, Portugal. Photo by Alex Canazei: www.alexcanazei.com.

4

Ozora Festival 2009, Hungary, Main Floor. Photo by Alex Canazei: www.alexcanazei.com.

12

Disco Valley, Vagator Beach, Goa, India, January 2004. Photo by Luther Elliott.

22

Vagator clifftop party, Goa, January 2001. Photo by Lia Philcox.

31

Goa Gil at his 57th birthday party, October 2008. Photo Goa Gil.

37

Boom Festival 2008, Portugal. Photo by Alex Canazei: www.alexcanazei.com.

111

Fusion Festival, Germany 2007, Dub stage. Photo by Sam Rowlesky.

112

Rainbow Serpent Festival 2009, Beaufort, Australia. Photo by James Wall: www.fl ickr.com/photos/jamard_flamand.

112

ln Prayer, Rainbow Serpent Festival, 2009. Photo by Johnathan Carmichael.

112

Winter Solstice Cairns 2009. Photo by Jonathan Carmichael.

113

3rd Empire Purim party Israel 2006. Photo by Joshua I. Schmidt.

132

3rd Empire desert party, Israel, 2007. Photo by Joshua I. Schmidt.

144

x

Figures

8.1

Partygoers Sharing a Bottle. Come Together Festival 2007, The Czech Republic. Photo by Botond Vitos.

152

DJ Playing Night Trance. Bios Festival 2007, The Czech Republic. Photo by Botond Vitos.

160

Chianti Summer Solstice, Italy 2008. Designed by Chiara Baldini.

172

11.1

Bush Doof / Online Forum Chart. Alex Lambert.

216

12.1

Main Floor, Ozora Festival, Hungary 2009. Photo by Alex Canazei: www.alexcanazei.com.

231

12.2

Sonica Festival 2007, Italy. Photo by Susanne Riemann.

234

12.3

Opening Ceremony, Rainbow Serpent Festival 2009, Australia. Photo by Jonathan Carmichael.

237

Eco Centre and Liminal Village, Boom Festival 2008. Portugal. Photo by Jakob Kolar: www.jacomedia.net.

239

Liminal Village, Boom Festival 2006, Portugal. Photo by Jakob Kolar: www.jacomedia.net.

241

8.2 9.1

12.4 12.5

Acknowledgments

Much of the work produced for this collection was performed during my role as a 2008–09 Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Interactive Media and Performance (IMP) at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan. I wish to thank Charity Marsh and IMP and also the University of Queensland’s Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies where I was an Honorary Research Associate over this period. I also thank the collection authors for their contributions to a stimulating and worthwhile project. Appreciation also goes to the photographers and artists—Chiara Baldini, Alex Canazei, Johnathan Carmichael, Luther Elliott, Goa Gil, Jakob Kolar, Lia Philcox, Susanne Riemann, Sam Rowlesky, Joshua I. Schmidt, Botond Vitos and James Wall—who made this a visually appealing project. Special thanks to Alex Canazei whose photo of Ozora 2009 is used in the cover design. I also acknowledge the support of event-management crews and scene participants in various locations around the world without whom my research and this collection will not have been possible. Many thanks to Botond Vitos who assisted me to compile the index.

Psytrance An Introduction Graham St John

In 2008, I travelled to Boom, the tenth anniversary of the biennial Portuguese psytrance and alternative culture festival operated by Good Mood Productions on Lake Idanha-a-Nova in the Castelo Branco district to the east of the country’s Centro region. During that week, my second consecutive visit to Boom, I shared one of the world’s largest electronic music dance floors with habitués holding passports from over eighty countries (in excess of 40,000 people). This festal massive is symptomatic of an intriguing transnationalism in music culture. As the premier event in the global psychedelic trance (or psytrance) calendar, Boom is connected to a wider industry of music production and performance, independent labels, micro media and event-management organisations, communities of visual, sound and healing artists, and seasonal networks of local parties and regional festivals held in dozens of countries. Like Boom, many of these events carry a pattern of cultural, musical and stylistic integration that has come to characterise psytrance, an electronic dance music culture (EDMC) that evinces a fusional integrity and paradoxical disposition downstream from its much vaunted, and yet often maligned, site of becoming—beaches and hinterlands to the north of the former Portuguese province of Goa, which was annexed by India in 1961. This complexity is indeed integral to the counterculture in which psytrance is rooted, a counterculture whose ecstatic and conscious impulses shape its proliferation and mutation in the present. Yet, efforts to produce tight defi nitions of psytrance (often by way of untreated and unclarified concepts like “scene”, “neotribe”, “subculture”, “genre”, “counterculture”, “spirituality” and “religion”) meet with peril, in no small part due to its sophisticated cultural and musical roots, shimmering aesthetics, and a broadening transnationalism. That psytrance constitutes a shifting sonic quilt of genre influences as well as a diversity of national/regional populations and scenes in which recognisable sounds have emerged, or distinct fusions formed, has not been well understood by researchers. We need look no further than Boom to fi nd evidence of this musical and social diversity. Over four dance floors, event-goers are exposed to various genres, or subgenres, available on the “psytrance” palette. These include “progressive psychedelic”, “full on”, “dark”, “spugedelic”, “psybreaks” along with

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“electro” (electronic funk), ambient or “psybient” styles (including “psydub”), “trance fusion” bands (electronic and acoustic fusions) and traditional “trance” acts (playing djembe, gamelan or didjeridu, for example). Many of these acts attract enthusiasts who are dedicated fans of specific styles and who will attend events in domestic regions throughout the year becoming members of metropolitan, regional, national, or continental “psy” communities. Some styles have emerged or taken root in specific world locations—thus “soumi”, or “Suomisaundi” (and also “spugadelic”, a freeform sound originating from Finland) and dark trance (or “darkpsy”, a fast and dark style with industrial and gothic horror sensibilities originating in Germany and Russia). Enthusiasts from a multitude of cities and regions make pilgrimages to Boom to become immersed in the identifiable timbral aesthetics of their obsession. But there is another strong motivation—participants are enthused to become exposed to difference. Festival culture illustrates a heterotopic, carnivalesque and synesthetic context in which participants may upgrade or retrograde their selves through national “flavours”, sonic “colours” and other available techniques of the self (e.g., drugs, dance, textile fashion, piercings, hair styling, tattooing, alternative diets, etc.). Indeed this interest expressed by Boom participants is consistent with a disposition towards difference within psytrance more generally. Though not without contradiction, this ideal forms part of an “alternative” repertoire that distinguishes psytrance from so-called “commercial trance”, or that which is more commonly identified in the global marketplace as “trance” (with the associated labels of “progressive trance”, “hard trance” or “Euro trance”),1 the distinction from which is embodied in the difference participants often make between “travellers” and “tourists”. If a festival is, as Erik Davis suggests (2008), a cultural “petri-dish”, then psytrance festivals are cross-fertilised seedbeds, ecologies of sound in which multitudinous styles coexist, sonicities where enthusiasts, with sensibilities already shaped by different genres, are exposed to ever-newer combinations and become accomplices in aesthetic fronts, willing instruments “played” by artists, perhaps even becoming “new humans” engineered by electronics.2 While larger music festivals possess this potential, the events that carry a free pretention are sites where such rhizomatic cross-fertilisation seems likeliest. That is, the festival which is not necessarily “free” of charge, for most contemporary psytrance events possess entrance fees, but which are temporary contexts that permit habitués freedoms from a host of trenchant (regulatory and repressive) circumstances in the life-world, and from the interventions of authorities (“cops”), outsiders (“tourists”) and conventions (“cheese”) that may otherwise actualise the reach of the “mainstream” into the free space of the event. This is the “underground” socio-sonic aesthetic so often articulated and defended as “the vibe” (see Taylor 2001: ch. 8; St John 2009a). And while its “underground” status is perennially contested, an immediate and relatively autonomous space enables habitués freedoms to sample from

Psytrance

3

and experiment with alternative modes of thinking, acting and being—and concomitantly to experiment with new and different styles of music. This is not to argue that a completely “free party” is possible, for, as participants routinely insist, elements continually jeopardise the party vibe, and producers, designers, and habitués continue to rail against agents of predation (sexual, commercial and governmental) with the goal of optimising and re-optimising the psytrance experience. The history of such optimisations is complex, though most agree that it is rooted in “full moon parties” held on Anjuna beach in Goa in the 1970s and 1980s and incubated within “Goa trance” scenes flourishing around the world from the mid-1990s, after which it developed as “psytrance”. Sharing music production technologies and DJ techniques with EDM scenes psytrance would develop distinct sonic and visual aesthetics. By 2010, psytrance music, style and textile fashions have become evident in scenes the world over, with the music and culture translated among populations across Europe, in Israel, North America, Australasia, South Africa, South America, Mexico, Japan, and elsewhere. This cultural proliferation has been dependent upon the growth of exotic sites of travel, exchange and performance (e.g., Goa, Koh Phangan in Thailand, Bahia in Brazil and Bali); cosmopolitan centres (e.g., London, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Hamburg, Melbourne, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo); the emergence of the Internet (enabling forums, blogging, networking platforms, p2p fi lesharing, netlabels, etc); and a vast network of underground urban and open-air events and larger dance festivals infused with the “Goa vibe”, a psychedelic aesthetic transposed from Goa and inflected through these exotic sites, cosmopolitan centres and cyber-domains. The psychedelic character of the psytrance festival (and its culture) should be recognised as critical to understanding its fluidity of genre, scene and style. Although cardinal to its emergence, this is not simply a matter of LSD, though consciousness alteration is foundational to psytrance (and LSD has been one of the chief tools adopted to this end). Alongside a host of psychoactive substances besides LSD, various methods of consciousness alteration have long been adopted within alternative cultural and spiritual movements. Mid-west US party network, Chilluminati, express this awareness, partly in efforts to counter standard prejudicial reflexes to the word “psychedelic”. While recognising that the term was first coined by Humphrey Osmond in a letter to Aldous Huxley in 1956, after which it would be applied to consciousness altering substances such as mescaline and LSD, Chilluminati state: “fifty years later we still use the term ‘psychedelic’, but in a much broader sense. We refer to as psychedelic anything having the effect of transforming our mode of consciousness. We embrace every such legal technique which includes dance, music, techniques involving light and sound, sensory deprivation, breath control, exercise, fasting, art, meditation, prayer, sex, and yoga”.3 Arun Saldanha also addresses what he calls “psychedelic practices of self” in his research on Goa trance, Psychedelic White (2007: 13), though

4

Graham St John

his strong association between “psychedelic” and “whiteness” overlooks the significance of Afrodiasporic artists in the electronic music legacy to which psytrance is greatly indebted (see St John 2010a). The investigation of a psychedelic aesthetic is necessarily integral to the study of psytrance, however, as it is to earlier and ongoing music cultures (e.g., Bromell 2000), and in this volume contributors open up important discussions on trance culture, genre, technology, ritual and psychedelicisation.

CONCEPTUALISING PSYTRANCE These discussions should assist the development of heuristics around which psytrance (and other EDMCs) can be properly addressed. While prominent in the theoretical toolkit inherited by youth and popular music culture researchers, for some time now researchers have, with varying rationales, challenged “subculture” (associated with the Birmingham Center for Contemporary and Cultural Studies) as a perspective suited to the study of music cultures. For example, in a systematic rebuke of one-dimensional and hermetically sealed structuralisms, along with postmodernist or “postsubcultural” accounts thought to pass over the actual experience of youth, Dan Laughey (2006) offers an interactionist study of the “everyday cultures of music and youth”. In another approach, David Hesmondalgh (2005) argues that music is not the privileged domain

Figure I.1 DJ Tristan at Boom Festival 2008, Portugal. Photo by Alex Canazei: www.alexcanazei.com

Psytrance

5

of young people as received heuristics (like “subculture”, or indeed Laughey’s alternative) readily assume. The position is instructive since, as a music culture, psytrance retains enthusiasts into their twenties, thirties, forties and older, a complication which also poses a challenge to standard “youth” and “adulthood” classifications. Others have conveyed that producers and participants in EDMCs and other music cultures are networked across sites, oscillate between nodes of identification, accumulate and shed multiple stylistic influences, with such fluidities constituting the “neotribal” present of participants. The amorphous quality to the shape of participant behaviour within EDM scenes is illustrated by Andy Bennett (1999) in his study of the urban dance music scene in Newcastle upon Tyne in north-east England, where clubbers were observed to sample from diverse musical genres and visual styles in a fashion analogous to the digital compositional techniques employed by the music’s producers. The observation that clubbers, inheriting the eclectic consumption sensibilities of post-WWII “style tribes”, become involved with “a series of fragmented, temporal experiences as they move between different dance floors and engage with different crowds” (Bennett 1999: 611), resembles the fluidity of identity formation within psytrance. Indeed the psychedelic aesthetic of psytrance music culture almost guarantees that identities reliant on rigid stylistic preferences of the kind articulated by “subculture” theorists will be subject to liquidation. Furthermore, that psytrancers are communities of “users” of technics (technologies and techniques) demands the search for suitable hermeneutics. Fluidity may be the modus operandi of clubbing crowds but, as indicated, it is also characteristic of production, a characteristic that psytrance shares with other EDMs, where producers often hold down or pass between multiple artistic identities, which, in some cases, obtains rather bewildering proportions as in the fifty-plus aliases that shapeshifter Jake Stephenson (most commonly known as Shamanic Tribes on Acid) produced under in less than ten years.4 Sometimes artists will undertake incremental and other times dramatic shifts in musical direction, associated with new aliases, and in such fashion they produce special versions of themselves, iterations evoking the dub-plate “versions” fi rst produced by Jamaican sound engineers, thereby generating shifting sonic-personalities tested out on the dance floor. Circulating in a climate of independence, self-management and flexibility, taking advantage of the rapid developments in audio production hardware, digital audio software, virtual instrumentation, and, thus, home studios, by contrast with the managed multi-member band format, artists collaborate in multiple music projects—often simultaneously, as is the case with Simon Posford (aka Hallucinogen) who has been a member of Shpongle, Younger Brother and nearly thirty other acts. These practices enable artists to maintain different sonic identities in various regions, or even over one club night, according to varying audience preferences, enabling longevity within rapidly changing climates of taste.

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Such malleability is most clearly apparent within EDMCs, and arguably most apparent within psytrance, which has shared its evolution with that of the Internet—no small consideration given the networked and computer mediated lifestyles of its producers and participants. Early Goa trance tracks anticipate the coming proliferation of “virtual reality”. Thus the fi rst release from Goa legends The Infi nity Project was infused with excited anticipation: “Virtual Reality Is Here” (B-side of the 12-inch Hyper-Active, Atmosphere Records, 1991). And, in the valorisation of “cyberspace”, these sonic cheer squads were also celebrating the virtual worlds of Goa parties (especially those in Goa) which they would seek to reproduce harnessing an evolving ensemble of cyber and audio-visual technologies. Within Goa trance, as with other EDM developments, cybernetic mediation enabling the distribution of music was immediately embraced as a means of maintaining artistic independence. Thus in 1997, just hours after completing their fi rst track, psytrance duo Analog Pussy, made it available as a free MP3 (releasing their fi rst full album, MP3 Release 01, through that means in 1999). From early use.net groups to social networking platforms, the Internet would, furthermore, be adopted as a tool to re/produce the party space. Attention to stylistic malleability, transnational fluidity and participant networking skills should, therefore, not be taken to mean that psytrance enthusiasts are without ongoing identifications, strong patterns of sociality or shared sensibilities. And the exercising of “choice” should not be taken to infer that individuals are necessarily ticket holders for the postmodern style-orgy (Muggleton 2000), especially when consumer choice is patterned around desires for modes of independence and autonomy. Fluidity may characterise the sociality of its enthusiasts, but this does not mean that primary sites of experience, spaces of performance and wider cultural investments are without an ethos counter to dominant life-world valuations, or inconsistent with alternative cultural movement discourse and practice. While it has been widely recognised that subcultural analysis is ill-suited to these circumstances within popular music studies, especially EDMC, researchers continue to adopt “subculture” as a key heuristic, though now a “postmodern subculture”. The term belongs to Greener and Hollands (2006) whose work is all the more pertinent given their exclusive attention to psytrance. Holding that existing templates are inappropriate for psytrance, Greener and Holland’s study appeared amid a debate held at the Journal of Youth Studies between proponents of “subculture”, “post-subculture” and other commentators unsatisfied with either (see Blackman 2005; Hesmondalgh 2005; Bennett 2005, Shildrick and MacDonald 2006). While psytrance is recognised to be neither localised nor specifically working class, as in CCCS subculture theory, and thus characterised not by “tight boundaries and distinctive shapes”, neither is it “depthless, transitory or highly fragmented”, as in the “postmodernist” theory adopted by scholars working in association with Steve Redhead (1993), since participants demonstrate,

Psytrance

7

for instance, “common value systems and beliefs, the centrality of music, the construction of identity and community” (2006: 396). The value of this approach is that the authors seek a theoretical sophistication suited to understand that, for psytrancers around the world, “community” is maintained through face-to-face experience (at parties and festivals) and virtual interaction (Internet forums). But while the “permanent liminal space” of the Internet (ibid. 402) encourages the authors to experiment with heuristics of community, their depiction of a “global subcultural identity” turns out as a rather unadventurous paradigm somewhat remote from its research subjects. Greener and Hollands harvest impressive statistics (552 survey respondents belonging to some forty nationalities), to argue that the “connections between subculture members were not temporary” but “very strong—so strong that eighty per cent of respondents believed that they were part of a psytrance community” (414). The authors offer data that speaks to the significance of spirituality for participants, a welcome outcome given that the cultural studies of youth and music had long been inconsiderate to this development (see St John 2006). But while this is a departure from subculture studies, the view that identification is “strong rather than ephemeral” may offer a relief to those structuralists for whom fluid sociality is anathema to community. What appears missing in this analysis, and in the ascribed theory of a “global subcultural identity”, however, is an understanding of the diversity, flows and flexibility endogenous to psytrance. The recognition of such a fluid native state is thwarted by the unfounded dismissal of theoretical perspectives, notably “neotribe” (Maffesoli 1996), which would otherwise enable the analysis. Without a lens on the cosmopolitan characteristics of this phenomenon, the approach falls short of its “global” character. One of the appealing dimensions of the neotribal perspective is the impression afforded of the lasting sense of the miraculous character of affectual sociality within the wider tragedy of modern life; of a perduring “underground sociality” despite the neoliberalist individualism of the 1980s. In this view, upon which Bennett would strike note, individuals hold simultaneous membership in ephemeral micro-communities, the networking of which constitutes society’s ambiance, a recognition germane to the study of cosmopolitan culture, the ephemeral grounds from which EDMC and its vibrant disctopias emerged in the 1970s (St John 2010a). Empathetic nodes of identifications are obtained and maintained through the use (consumption, appropriation, repurposing) of commodities, media, art, technology. “Psytrance” is a complex techno-tribalism, with many internal differences and micro-taste cultures rapidly forming, merging or falling away, and in which symbolic capital is embodied and recognised in distinct performances and displays (e.g. those associated with various psytrance subgenres). Enthusiasts oscillate between sites of aesthetic appeal, accumulating signs and expressions of identity through their enthusiasm, for example, for particular “tunes”, DJs and drugs, but yet, within the context of the

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dance floor and the full broadside of its psychedelic assemblage, willingly succumb to a liquidity of the self. These processes of self-identification and dissolution are commonly deemed “tribal” by psytrance participants (see St John 2009b, 2011a). Moreover, identities are affected by many shifting influences in the life-world, and draw inspiration from multiple interests, passions and vocations (including other forms of music) as well as interwoven family, religious, and civic obligations. It is in such mobile cosmopolitan complexity that “community” can be recognised. Thus mobility is integral to psytrance, but in a number of ways. As indicated, the fluid movement of psytrance enthusiasts requires a conceptualisation of music and lifestyle practices structuralist frameworks are unable to provide. This is all the more evident given that commitments are typically not expressions of minority or marginal race, ethnic, class or sexual identity, as is common, for example, within hip-hop. Commitments are more likely articulations of a privileged middle-class dissensus and resourceful expatriation, though not necessarily “white” as the popularity of psytrance among Japanese and Brazilian enthusiasts attests. But while higher socioeconomic status enables the luxury of physical exodus to chosen sites of alternative performance and lifestyle, the movement of psytrance/rs is somewhat more complex. That is, they articulate the values and practices associated with social, cultural and spiritual movements, which subcultural and post-structuralist approaches have been ill-suited to handle. Research has illustrated a tendency towards the effacing of “counterculture” (and the alternative cultural and spiritual trajectories such might entail), with social movement practices often displaced from structuralist and semiotic approaches to symbolic resistance. Paul Willis (1978), for instance, rounded down hippie proclamations of transcendence to illusory practice, and more generally CCCS-influenced “subculture” research offered little to understand the cultural politics of music scenes evolving since the 1950s and 1960s. In studies of the conversion of clubber style into status (Thornton 1996) and the altered socio-sensuality of the clubbing vibe (Jackson 2004), post-CCCS researchers applied Pierre Bourdieu’s work in efforts to understand how actors within EDM club scenes effectively manipulate media, symbols and sensuality to generate distinct identities and seductive worlds. While studies of “subcultural capital” and the “habitus” have offered critical insights on clubbing scenes, there is much scope for the expansion or renovation of these approaches when considering alternative “clubbing” scenes such as those associated with psytrance, where stature, distinction and affect may also be recognizably derivative from active commitments to various causes. In addition to, and perhaps by contrast with, identities produced and expressed in inscrutable pockets of cool, carnality, and in making noise, dance scenes also form fronts, transmit messages, and make a noise. Psytrance culture illustrates tendencies towards insularity and activism, cultic and conscious practice, with status converted from activities across these commitments, or indeed from the evident multiplicities and

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contradictory behaviour that a simplified reading of “subcultural capital” is unable to identify. Such studies also point out the differing character of the socio-sonic aesthetic participants know as “the vibe”. While studies of clubbing variously address the revitalising, pleasurable or liberating sensibility of the EDM event (see Malbon 1999; Jackson 2004; Pini 2001), the vibe is shaped by responses to multiple social conditions, and thus is host to a range of responsibilities (see St John 2009a). While cultural Marxist and other models have typically dismissed the activities of bohemians, freaks, expatriates, anarchists and other middle class enigmas who reek of bourgeois pretense, or unproductive escapism, the subject of countercultural mobility and the nomadic utopia has not gone unnoticed by cultural researchers. In Vanloads of Uproarious Humanity, Kevin Hetherington (2000) addressed something of the mobile utopia performed by alternative travellers in UK seasonal free festivals. In Global Nomads (2007), Anthony D’Andrea traces the “civilizational diaspora” further afield, with expressive “neo-nomads” committed to expatriation in Ibiza and Goa. Perceiving themselves as “a marginal and vanishing culture requiring countermeasures of mobility and stealth against commodification and repression”, following Deleuze, these “techno-freaks” are reported to be “nomads” who “do not move” (D’Andrea 2004: 241–242). The implication is that, for psytrance enthusiasts and other “freaks” who harness an assemblage of communications media, digital arts and modes of transportation, along with holistic health practices, in the pursuit of alternative modernities, not only are specific global sites and regions liminalised as such, but the globe itself becomes a subjunctive sphere of experimentation and transition. As D’Andrea states These Global Nomads seek to drift away from their Western homeland, and, inspired by imaginations of a Romantic East, they asymptotically move towards a smooth, impossible space—“u-topia” by defi nition. By celebrating rootlessness and nomadism, global nomads shape cosmopolitan post-national identities that question the essentiality of the “local”, and embrace the “global” as the new home and reference (D’Andrea 2004: 244). These exotic bohemian enclaves in which psytrance has been implicated like Ibiza, Goa, Koh Phangan, Bahia and other locations become appealing to vacationers seeking offbeat expat realism. And this is indeed how sites are portrayed in tourist promotions whereby locales of trailblazing experimentation begin hosting high-end developments in proximity to authentic hippie chic, ironically evincing the exclusivism, divisiveness and elitism that dissidents initially fled. Yet, as various contributors to this book demonstrate, within transnational psytrance the “expressive expatriotism” explored in questionably “smooth spaces” off-shore have been re-imported to ignite domestic infernos. And while the development of psytrance in

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regions globally cannot be observed in the absence of the recognition of opportunity structures, as scenes settle within regions they have become attractive to a great many participants whose profi le does not match the privileged status of forebears. The child of a complex global cosmopolitanism, psytrance appears to have been elusive even for those who nominate the word “trance” as the key focus of their investigations of EDMC. The diverse cultural and musicological experiments native to psytrance contextualise both confl ict and alliance, and concomitant processes of distinction and compromise between aesthetic stakeholders who invest in differing stylistic sensibilities. Such processes are notoriously difficult to capture given the accelerated pace of exchange and the dispersal of this transnational network, over which no single observer could possibly hold a commanding view. Thus, this textual symposium in which researcher/participants venture into the regional and global terrain of psytrance is advantageous to a developing field. This is the fi rst volume dedicated to psytrance (let alone one which attempts to deconstruct its complex transnationalism). With a dozen chapters considering sites of psytrance emergence, production and performance in Goa, the UK, Israel, the US, Italy, Portugal, Czech Republic, Japan, Australia and elsewhere, the volume’s contributors explore iterated ephemeralities, utopian dancescapes, nonsensical logics, ambivalent reactions, contested liminalities and contradictory responses to local and global conditions. From various regional, methodological, disciplinary and heuristic vantage points, they unpack the local scenes and the global culture of psytrance. And as they survey an EDM cultural phenomenon possessing geographical and cosmopolitan vectors, underground aesthetics and transnational flows, transgressive carnality and mediated virtuality, their cartographical, historical, anthropological and literary interventions evoke the concept of “scene”, which as David Hesmondalgh (2005) has explained, has been a source of much confusion within popular music studies given its common usage to add conceptual leverage either to bounded places around which localised historical musical communities mobilise or complex flows of industries and styles across vast spaces in which diverse populations become networked. It has long proven difficult to imagine the coincident trajectories of these localised and global processes, yet this is what Will Straw (1991) attempted in his original articulation, a theme he would revisit a decade later in a useful update on the continuing ambiguity of “scene” when he wrote that “‘scene’ seems to be able to evoke both the cozy intimacy of community and the fluid cosmopolitanism of urban life. To the former, it adds a sense of dynamism; to the latter, a recognition of the inner circles and weighty histories which give each seemingly fluid surface a secret order” (Straw 2002: 248). Studies in popular music culture subsequent to the recognition of this dynamic have been configured through developments, for instance, in the understanding of cultural globalisation (e.g. Appadurai

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1990; Featherstone, Lash and Robertson 1995), postmodernism (see Lash 1990; McRobbie 1994), and cosmopolitanism (Hopper 2007). Such interpenetrating orders of experience have inspired popular music scholars who have approached their subjects across this dynamic (see Bennett 2000; Bennett and Peterson 2004; Baulch 2007; Kahn Harris 2007; Rivera et al. 2009). And while there are studies of local translations and transformations of style, notably hip-hop (see Mitchell 1996, 2001; Foreman 2002), and the translocal character of music and club cultures (see Carrington and Wilson 2002), the transnationalism of EDMCs has been under-investigated (cf. Rietveld 1998). Apart from the near absence of studies of EDM translocality, this collection is born amid the paucity of studies of psytrance itself. Goa trance culture is given considerable attention in two recent ethnographies (D’Andrea 2007; Saldanha 2007), the former exploring the careers of “expressive expatriots” across Ibiza and Goa (see also D’Andrea 2004, 2006), the latter a Deleuzian materialist study of race investigating the “viscosity” of “whiteness” in the party scene in Goa from the late 1990s (see also Saldanha 2002, 2004, 2005). Also important is the formative account of the “spiritual hedonism” of Goa trance produced by Erik Davis (2004), an early ethnomusicological commentary on Goa trance offered by Cole and Hannan (1997, and see Seb Chan’s response—1998), and commentaries by Des Tramacchi on Australian psychedelic “doof” culture (2000, 2001). With regard to more identifiable psytrance (i.e. post-Goa) developments, alongside Taylor’s chapter on New York’s psytrance “little culture” included in his Strange Sounds (2001: 165–200), my own ethnographic and cultural historic work (St John 2004, 2009b, 2010a, 2010b, 2011a, 2011b, forthcoming), the study of alternative spirituality, raves and psytrance (Partridge 2006; Till 2009), and research on psytrance and virtuality (Elliott 2002; Greener and Hollands 2006), there are relevant MA dissertations circulating in self-published or online form (see Meadan 2001; McAteer 2002), 5 and a few ethnographic styled fi lms and documentaries (e.g. Phonokol 1998; Rood and Kilmmer 2002; Lastlight Films 2003; Short 2006; Shalev 2008). In total, the research output on a phenomenon twenty years old is, therefore, quite small—albeit growing. While this is not the place to offer a detailed explanation for such paucity, it seems likely that sanctions (political, legal, academic) against controlled substance use associated with the field of research has had a prohibitive impact on state-sponsored research. This, combined with the secretive and understandably guarded nature of many participants, has made empirical research difficult for those not already “insiders” (i.e., those who are experienced, trusted, sensitive). Such “research” has tended to have been initiated in formative periods prior to the commencement of formal sponsored research. Ideally, research will also demonstrate a tendency towards maintaining critical distance. Most contributors to this volume are identifi able at the intersections of these patterns.

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Figure I.2 Ozora Festival 2009, Hungary, Main Floor. Photo by Alex Canazei: www.alexcanazei.com

VOLUME OUTLINE The volume is distributed across three sections. Part One, “Goa trance”, begins with Luther Elliott tracing the emergence of the “state of mind” of Goa trance, a particular relationship between place, affect and musical commodities that has characterised the proliferation of psychedelic music scenes since the 1960s, an ephemeral “structure of feeling” transportable, in his focus, from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, through Goa, to the world. In the following chapter, Anthony D’Andrea examines claims of “scene decline” in Goa. Excessive commercialisation, populism and surveillance certainly impacted Goa trance as experienced in northern Goa throughout the 1990s and into the present, but, as D’Andrea argues, claims of “decline” made throughout the presence of trance in Goa have been integral to the re/formation of psytrance. In a study of ongoing cultural practice within the context of complex globalisation, the chapter is instructive to understanding tactics within psytrance in the places of its emergence globally. In the fi nal chapter in this section, Arun Saldanha approaches similar territory by asking “what happens when the mother scene of a global cultural genre dies?” He argues that it was the success of Goa trance in commodifying itself which brought about the demise of the scene in Goa. In a retrospective Derridean deconstruction of Goa trance, its origins, development and cosmic rebirth, Saldanha

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adopts the ethical metaphor of the “ghost” to contend that “death” both haunts and revitalises. In Part Two, the transition from “Goa trance” to global “psytrance” is explored as the latter flourished in many parts of the world. Hillegonda Rietveld opens this section with her detailed exploration of Goa/psytrance as “a cosmopolitan emotional response to global information capitalism”. As a framework for a wide range of user-groups affected by global information and communication technologies, psytrance is figured as a complex cosmopolitan experience which is examined in relationship to sites and scenes in Goa, the UK, the US, Germany and Japan. Unpacking this cosmopolitanism through an ethnomusicological discursis which uncovers layers of influence through cross-Atlantic EDM scenes, psytrance emerges as a story of interpenetrating musical and cultural crosscurrents. One country (and city) integral in these global crosscurrents was (and remains) the UK (and London). Charles de Ledesma’s tour through psychedelic trance music production in the UK draws on interviews with some of the key figures in this scene centering around London, and uses Deleuze and Guattari (especially the “rhizome”) to make sense of the emergence, growth and the circularity of UK psytrance. Robin Lindop follows with an evaluation of psytrance as a music genre in the UK, concluding that it is simultaneously homogeneous (an “actual” genre) and diverse (a “meta” genre). Lindop uncovers a set of production techniques, a process he calls “psychedelicisation” which enables psytrance to appropriate and negotiate other music styles, an understanding which informs his observations of tensions around psytrance at several UK EDM festivals. Joshua I. Schmidt completes this section with his examination of the evidence of paradox he traces through another key international psytrance node—Israel. The principal contradiction he states is that while making countercultural gestures, the behavior of transistim (Israeli trancers) actually replicates the culture of late-modern, post-Zionist Israel. In Part Three, “Liminal Culture”, the volume shifts towards an exploration of psytrance scenes in national locations generally removed from (albeit intimately connected with) initial sites of Goa trance emergence, with contributions offering special dedication to the spaces of psytrance performance (co-present and virtual). Botond Vitos’ ethnography of Czech psytrance parties reveals a community “impregnated with a peculiar sort of psychedelic humour”. Apparent in a variety of communications, Vitos investigates a ritualised madness, or demence, which is associated with psychedelic drug use at these parties, and which “accomplishes the temporary demolition and perversion of cultural systems”. Vitos makes sense of this nonsensical logic and demented aesthetic with the assistance of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and grotesque realism. The “madness” continues as we turn to Tuscany, Italy, to the mountaintop site of a party co-organised by Chiara Baldini, who draws on Euripides’ The Bacchae, and the cult of Dionysus, to offer explanation for ambivalence in the reaction to the local insurgence of

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the “ecstatic experience”. The utopian yet contested space of the party is so often made possible through the communication and networking capacities of the Internet. Indeed Jenny Ryan explores the shared history of psytrance and the Internet which she argues is rooted in utopian visions of an interconnected global “tribal” community. Ryan explains how, with its demographic base centred around the San Francisco Bay Area, the online social networking site Tribe.net enables access to this “underground”. The Internet is not only critical to the cosmopolitan character of psytrance transnationalism, but is integral to the formation of local psy-communities. Shifting our attention to the Australian (Melbourne) psytrance scene, Alex Lambert suggests the local psytrance community moves between two primary social “places”: bush parties known as “doofs” and online discussion forums. Investigating how online communities facilitate representational narratives of the temporary party, Lambert contends that the discussion forum Oztrance prolongs the social temporality and influences the cultural significance of doofs. One of the outcomes of this research is the recognition that psytrance constitutes co-present and virtual spatial complexity. Serving as an anchor to the volume, my chapter charts this complex transformational experience with particular ethnographic attention to large psytrance festivals in three different countries (Italy, Australia and Portugal). Exploring the liminal culture of psytrance, the chapter accounts for the way a super-abundant festal life enervates the transitional lifestyles of psytrance participants. But, unlike the conventions of passage rites, the psytrance festival is reported to be a sophisticated realm, evocative of the complexities of the counterculture to which it is indebted. As a domain of excessive carnivalesque and conscious ritualising the festival provides the performative staging ground for diverse sacrificial logics and concomitant ideas of the sacred. If psytrance is transformative then this needs to be considered within the context of a complex cultural movement. In the local sites of performance, transnational formations and cultural tensions conveyed in the following chapters, this volume thus offers an introduction to the emergent field of psytrance studies.

NOTES 1. While these marketing labels are sometimes capitalised, here, and throughout this volume, this inconsistent convention will not be observed. 2. See Kodwo Eshun (1998: 09[161]) for a discussion of Sun Ra, for instance. 3. They also state that “we encourage everyone to advance their consciousness through legal means, but we also encourage our community to become involved in their national societies in advancing the cause of a more rational and sane drug policy around the world, in every nation. We encourage dancers and trancers to support such drug policy and education organizations as MAPS, Drug Policy Alliance, and Erowid”. http://www.chilluminati.org/ (accessed 19 May 2009).

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4. See Jake Stephenson’s profi le on Discogs: (accessed 21 June 2009). 5. I only list English language research publications here.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”. Theory, Culture and Society, 7, (2/3): 295–310. Baulch, Emma. 2007. Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali. London: Duke University Press. Bennett, Andy. 2000. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music Identity and Place, Basingstoke: Macmillan. . 1999. “Subcultures or Neo-tribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical Taste”. Sociology 33(3):599–617. . 2005. “In Defence of Neo-Tribes: A Response to Blackman and Hesmondhalgh”, Journal of Youth Studies 8(2): 255–59. Bennett Andy, and Richard A. Peterson, (eds). 2004. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Blackman, Shane. 2005. “Youth Subcultural Theory: A Critical Engagement with the Concept, its Origins and Politics, from the Chicago School to Postmodernism” Journal of Youth Studies 8(1): 1–20. Bromell, Nick. 2002. Tomorrow Never Knows: Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press. Carrington, Ben, and Brian Wilson. 2002. “Global Clubcultures: Cultural Flows and Late Modern Dance Music Cultures”. In M. Cieslik and G. Pollock, eds., Young People in Risk Society. The Restructuring of Youth Identities in Late Modernity, 74–99. Aldershot: Ashgate. Chan, Sebastian 1998 “Musicology Needs a Context: Reinterpreting Goa trance”. Perfect Beat 3(4). Cole, Fred, and Michael Hannan. 1997. “Goa trance”. Perfect Beat 3(3): 1–14. Collin, Matthew (with J. Godfrey). 1997. Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House. London: Serpent’s Tail. D’Andrea, Anthony. 2004. “Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa”. In Graham St John, ed. Rave Culture and Religion, 236–55. London/ New York: Routledge. . 2006. “The Spiritual Economy of Nightclubs and Raves: Osho Sannyasins as Party Promoters in Ibiza and Pune-Goa”. Culture and Religion 7(1): 61–75. . 2007. Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures. London/New York: Routledge. Davis, Erik. 2004 [1995]. “Hedonic Tantra: Golden Goa’s Trance Transmission”. In Graham St John, ed. Rave Culture and Religion, 256–272. London: Routledge. . 2008. “The Festival is a Seed”. Pathways: Liminal Zine 02, 50–54. Elliott, Luther. 2004. “Goa trance and the Practice of Community in the Age of the Internet”. Television and New Media 5(3): 272–288. Eshun, Kodwo. 1998. More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet. Featherstone, Mike, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson, eds. 1995. Global Modernities. London: Sage. Foreman, Murray. 2002. The Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press. Greener, Tracey, and Robert Hollands. 2006. “Beyond Subculture and Post-subculture? The Case of Virtual Psytrance”. Journal of Youth Studies 9(4): 393–418.

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Hesmondhalgh, David. 2005. “Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above”, Journal of Youth Studies 8(1): 21–40. Hetherington. Kevin. 2000. New Age Travellers: Vanloads of Uproarious Humanity. London: Cassell. Hopper, Paul. 2007 Understanding Cultural Globalization. Cambridge: Polity. Jackson, Phil. 2004. Inside Clubbing: Sensual Experiments in the Art of Being Human. Oxford: Berg. Kahn-Harris, Keith. 2007. Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Oxford: Berg. Lash, Scott. 1990. Sociology of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Lastlight Films. 2003. The Outback Eclipse Story. New Zealand [DVD]. Laughey, Dan. 2006. Music and Youth Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Maffesoli, Michel. 1996. The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London: Sage Publications. Malbon, Ben. 1999. Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality. London: Routledge. McAteer, Michael. 2002. “‘Redefi ning the Ancient Tribal Ritual for the 21st Century’: Goa Gil and the Trance Dance Experience.” Paper for Division of Philosophy, Religion, and Psychology, Reed College. Available at: (accessed 2 December 2009). McRobbie, Angela. 1994. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge. Meadan, Bryan. 2001. TRANCENational ALIENation. Trance Music Culture, Moral Panics and. Transnational Identity in Israel. Lulu. Mitchell, Anthony. W. 1996. Popular Music and Local Identity: Pop, Rock and Rap in Europe and Oceania. London: University of Leicester Press. . 2001. Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA. Middletown, CT: Weslayan University Press. Muggleton. David. 2000. Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford: Berg. Partridge, Christopher. 2006. “The Spiritual and the Revolutionary: Alternative Spirituality, British Free Festivals and the Emergence of Rave Culture”. Culture and Religion 7(1): 41-60. Phonokol (directed by Ori Gruder) 1998. Karahana: The First Psychedelic Trance Movie. Israel. [VHS]. Pini, Maria. 2001. Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House. Hampshire: Palgrave. Redhead, Steve, ed. 1993. Rave Off, Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture, Aldershot: Avebury/Ashgate. Rietveld, Hillegonda. 1998. This is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and Technologies. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rivera, Raquel Z., Wayne Marshall, and Deborah Pacini Hernandez, eds. 2009. Reggaeton. London: Duke University Press. Rood, Billy and Torsten Kilmmer. 2002. Liquid Crystal Vision. US. [DVD] St John, Graham. 2004. “Techno Millennium: Dance, Ecology and Future Primitives”. In Graham St John, ed. Rave Culture and Religion, 213–235. London: Routledge. . 2006. “Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion: An Overview”. Culture and Religion 7(1): 1–26. . 2009a. Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. London: Equinox. . 2009b. “Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival”. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 1(1): 35–64.

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. 2010a. “The Vibe of the Exiles: Aliens, Afropsychedelia and Psytrance”. In tobias van Veen, ed. Afrofuturism: Interstellar Transmissions From Remix Culture. Wayne State University Press. . 2010b. “The 2012 Movement, Visionary Arts and Psytrance Culture”. In Joseph Gelfer, ed. 2012: Refl ections on a Mark in Time. London: Equinox (in press). . 2011a. “Tribalism, Experience and Remixology in Global Psytrance Culture”. In Courtney Bender and Ann Taves, eds. What Matters? Ethnographies of Value in a (Not So) Secular Age. New York: Columbia University Press (forthcoming). . 2011b. “Rave From the Grave: Dark Trance and the Return of the Dead”. In Cory James Rushton and Christopher Moreman, eds. An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays on the Zombie (Vol 2). McFarland (forthcoming). . Forthcoming. Global Tribe: Technology, Religion and Psytrance. London: Blackwell. Saldanha, Arun. 2002. “Music Tourism and Factions of Bodies in Goa”. Tourist Studies (1): 43–62. . 2004. “Goa trance and Trance in Goa: Smooth Striations”. In Graham St John (ed) Rave Culture and Religion, 273–286. London: Routledge. . 2005. “Trance and Visibility at Dawn: Racial Dynamics in Goa’s Rave Tourism”. Social and Cultural Geography, 6: 707–721. . 2007. Psychedelic White: Goa trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shalev, Shuki. 2008. Fused by Paradox. Short documentary fi lm. (accessed 1 May 2009). Shildrick, Tracy, and Robert MacDonald. 2006. “In Defence of Subculture: Young People, Leisure and Social Divisions”. Journal of Youth Studies 9(2): 125–140. Short, James (director) 2006. Welcome to Wonderland. Melbourne. [DVD]. Straw. Will. 1991. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Scenes and Communities in Popular Music”. Cultural Studies 5(3): 361–375. . 2002 “Scenes and Sensibilities”, Public, No 22/23: 245–257. Sylvan, Robin. 2005. Trance Formation: The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of Global Rave Culture. New York: Routledge. Taylor, Timothy D. 2001. Strange Sounds: Music, Technology & Culture. New York: Routledge. Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Till, Rupert. 2009. “Possession Trance Ritual in Electronic Dance Music Culture: A Popular Ritual Technology for Reenchantment, Addressing the Crisis of the Homeless Self, and Reinserting the Individual into the Community”. In Chris Deacy (ed) Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age, pp, 169–87. Ashgate. Tramacchi, Des. 2000. “Field Tripping: Psychedelic Communitas and Ritual in the Australian Bush”. Journal of Contemporary Religion 15: 201–13. . 2001. “Chaos Engines: Doofs, Psychedelics, and Religious Experience”. In Graham St John, ed, FreeNRG: Notes From The Edge of The Dance Floor, 171–88. Melbourne: Common Ground. Willis, Paul. 1978. Profane Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

DISCOGRAPHY Analog Pussy. MP3 Release 01. 1999. (MP3 Album): Mp3R01. Infi nity Project, The. Hyper-Active. 1991. Atmosphere Records (12-inch): AT-15.

Part I

Goa Trance

1

Goa is a State of Mind On the Ephemerality of Psychedelic Social Emplacements Luther Elliott

The many displaced, deterritorialized, and transient populations that constitute today’s ethnoscapes are engaged in the construction of locality, as a structure of feeling (Appadurai 1996: 199).

SUBCULTURAL DISLOCATIONS For more than two years between 2001 and 2004, I conducted participantobservation research among Goa trance scenes in Northern New South Wales, Australia, New York City and several locations in India. A one-off trance festival outside Lusaka, Zambia, provided an opportunity to spend a month following a group of forty international travellers on an overland, trance-themed tour from Cape Town to Lusaka. A persistent theme throughout my ethnographic research was the foundational role of Goa, India, as an almost mythic place of origins and pilgrimage site for so many trance music enthusiasts with whom I have spoken throughout my research in these locations. It was not until the end of my research in 2004 that my partner and I visited Goa for a winter season. Despite having collected narrative accounts, photos, film and video materials of the fabled origin of psychedelic trance culture for several years prior, I was unprepared for the rush of cosmopolitan psychedelic sociality and Royal Enfield motorcycles that still defi ned the holiday season, nearly two decades after the alleged heyday of psychedelic electronica parties on Goa’s northern beaches. In Chapora village, just inland along the bay from Disco Valley, in a modest villa rented for the season, a circle of Danish and German partygoers and seasonal residents screen an independent German documentary, Last Hippie Standing, on a laptop computer. The DVD case is passed around and the film’s subtitle, or epigram—“Goa is not a place. Goa is a state of mind!”—is submitted for group consideration, receiving hearty approval. Most of these travellers had fi rst come to Goa in the 1990s and are in their late-twenties and early-thirties when I meet them. Despite their neophyte status in the complex social ecology of the village, they acknowledge the changes witnessed through previous years: the steady growth of new resorts, hotels, beach shacks and restaurants. On the whole, they

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Figure 1.1 Disco Valley, Vagator Beach, Goa, India, January 2004. Photo by Luther Elliott.

remain committed to Goa and speak of their return the following year and of the intention among several to purchase a small inland Portuguese villa together. I struggle to make sense of their willingness to accept the statement that Goa is not, in all its complex geographical and social materiality, fi rst and foremost, a place. And, further, one unlike any other. The young Dane who owns the movie and the computer speaks at some length later in the visit about the parties he organises in Copenhagen and also of his business ventures in Goa involving a gram of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) powder (approximately 10,000 standard doses) and his somewhat less-impressive stores of MDMA and mescaline, all brought from the Netherlands. When I inquire about the chief “export”—the coveted hand-rolled hashish or the grey market pharmaceuticals I have watched him stockpile piecemeal—he turns on me in anger, perhaps fi nally pushed to the point of frustration by the nosiness of the aspiring anthropologist he’s regrettably invited into his circle: “Don’t you get it? It’s not about that! If it’s all this import, export, business, business, you don’t know what is Goa. We told you, it’s consciousness, it’s a state of mind. . . not all this!” David Harvey, one of the more widely read and cited of commentators on the era of post-Fordist “flexible” strategies in global capital, has offered some general observations on the plight of social movements whose inability to transcend space results in the commodification of identity and tradition. It is difficult, he opines, for place-bound identities “to maintain any

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sense of historical continuity in the face of all the flux and ephemerality of flexible accumulation” (Harvey 1989: 303). In considering Appadurai’s provocative suggestion that physical uprootedness from homelands— “deterritorialization” (pace Deleuze and Guattari 1987)—results in the production of locality as “structures of feeling” (Williams 1977: 128–135), this chapter aims to outline the flexible and ephemeral relationships to homelands that have defi ned countercultural production since the late1960s. More specifically, Harvey’s broad assertions about the difficulties of maintaining space-bound social identifications in the era of post-Fordist accumulation strategies is assessed via two brief historical case studies in the rise and fall of alternative culture-making in San Francisco and the newly liberated Portuguese colony of Goa, India—easily the two most significant sites for the proliferation of international psytrance scenes.

PSYCHEDELIC PRECEDENTS: THE SUBCULTURAL LIFE-CYCLE OF HAIGHT–ASHBURY For many nostalgic or critical commentators, the rise and fall of locations like Goa and Haight–Ashbury have turned on the performative efficacy of marketing and journalism neologisms for emergent subcultural and musical genres. A 1952 New York Times article, “This is the Beat Generation” by John Clellon Holmes, turned a Kerouac reference into an epithet for popular consumption. Unlike those of the preceding “Lost Generation”, who were “occupied with the loss of faith”, Holmes argued, the youth of the 1940s were “becoming more and more occupied with the need for it”. If generations could be defi ned in newspaper headlines, countercultures could be circumscribed by a neologism just as easily. The 1960s had more than its share to work with. Where “beats” had given way to “hippies”, sometimes seamlessly, as in the charismatic figure of Allen Ginsberg, it was in many ways psychiatrist Humphry Osmond’s “psychedelic” that proved to be the most enduring designator for the new countercultural generation, particularly in the hands of Harvard psychologist turned psychedelic proselytiser, Tim Leary, who, with colleagues, Metzner and Alpert, offered the fi rst manual and guidebook to LSD use in 1964, with Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In 1965 the fi rst mass protest against the Vietnam War brought Berkeley, California, to the fore as a hotbed of student-led communist agitation. Shortly thereafter, Ginsberg’s 20-point pamphlet poem, “How to Make a March/Spectacle”, appeared in an issue of Liberation, making explicit the aims and methods of a new brand of protest that would include loving entreaties to soldiers and police, music, dance, pantomime and the everpresent flowers (Ginsberg 1966). The years that followed made clearer the divergence of the hippies, centred in the Haight–Ashbury district of San Francisco, from the more militant student factions: Students for a

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Democratic Society (SDS) and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, both of which associated with the British New Left and were likely to perceive flower-power as part of the “end-of ideology” cant circulated by chief hippie ideologue Norman Brown (see Roszak 1969). If an ethos or ideology can be inferred from a reading list, the accounts of hippie literary predilections are worth briefly revisiting. One early journalist to interview many of the luminaries of Haight–Ashbury reported that the hippies had internalised the rhetoric of Marshall McLuhan and were committed to art forms requiring “total involvement” in the hope that the “cybernetic revolution” would make all men artists (Wolf 1968: xxix). A Luddite strain has always characterised American psychedelic countercultures, and McLuhan was just one of the diverse literary nodes in an informally canonised network of touchstones including Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-inspired Doors of Perception and psychedelic utopia novel, Island. Gary Snyder commented in a 1967 essay that those who could not travel to Asia but had great interests in its religious traditions got “great results” from LSD: the great texts of Hinduism and Buddhism suddenly became clear (cited in Fields 2002). In Haight–Ashbury, the Avalon and the Fillmore ballrooms, the Oracle newspaper, the Psychedelic Shop, the I and Thou Café and the Diggers, (an artist and activist collective offering free food, clothing and ritual theatre), provided the musical, dramatic and social infrastructure necessary to galvanise the so-called hippie movement. Perhaps the greatest catalyst for the transformation to come, however, was the emerging festal form. In January of 1967, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park hosted a demonstration by several tens of thousands. With performances by The Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, among others, the “Tribal Gathering for a Human Be-In” was radically different from the student demonstrations at Berkeley. Although the title “Be-In” evoked the civil rights movement’s “teach-ins” and “sit-ins”, it had clearly departed from the activist politics of the civil rights movement and the “Old Left”. The spirit of the event owed more to the dance-concert of the great San Francisco ballrooms or author Ken Kesey’s legendary Trips Festival or Acid Tests. June of 1967 saw what was widely hailed as the fi rst ever rock-and-roll festival. Held in the fishing village of Monterey, California, the Monterey Pop Festival launched the much publicised “summer of love” that followed (see Selvin 1992). Estimates put 200,000 spectators at the non-profit festival, itself equally successful on several fronts. Questions about the theft of the festival’s proceeds—earmarked for charity—later arose, but the complete lack of arrests and the generally peaceful atmosphere that prevailed are frequently cited as the primary indications of the event’s success. Behind the scenes, of course, success was measured in the signing of major record contracts by The Who, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and others who catalyzed the “San Francisco sound” for the music industry. Compared to

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this new formation of harder “psychedelic” rock that was to dominate the charts internationally in the years to come, McKenzie’s folk ballad, “San Francisco” (be sure to wear flowers in your hair), written by Phillips to promote the festival, became almost immediately a nostalgic signifier of an already fading social moment in which blues, folk and rock all shared in the vaunted psychedelic experience. With the formula for the “revolutionary festival” in place and LSD’s mass production by underground chemist Owsley Stanley, the celebratory rituals involving nonviolent protest qua joyous celebration and pageantry were loosed upon the nation. Downtown Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park emerged in mid-1967 as a place of assembly, and protests later that year were to display their debt to the Be-In and the ballroom dance-concert, as well as to Ginsberg’s flower-powered demonstrations. In Haight–Ashbury that autumn, drug raids marked the end of the summer long love-in, prompting U.S. News and World Report (October 23) to ask whether “the whole hippie movement may turn out to have been just another fad” (cited in Wolf 1968: 268–269). Little more than two years after San Francisco newspaper journalists popularised the “hippie” epithet, the movement already appeared in need of a proper eulogy. The day the Psychedelic Shop in Haight–Ashbury closed its doors was marked by a funeral parade commemorating the “death of the Hippie”. The Diggers’s Free City street sheet from October 6, 1967, opened with the accusatory headline, “MEDIA CREATED THE HIPPIE WITH YOUR HUNGRY CONSENT”. Emmett Grogan, co-founder of the Diggers, would later comment: “It was the media coverage of the Human Be-In that destroyed the spirit of Haight–Ashbury. The publicity precipitated a massive statewide migration of America’s runaways, outcasts and outlaws, and with them the heavy drugs, speed especially. That was the beginning of the end” (cited in Law 1987: 57). If Haight–Ashbury was a critical crossroads and an irrefutable place of origins, it was ultimately an expendable one. By the time the Woodstock festival was held, many insiders ceased to identify with the hippie “movement”, which increasingly appeared to early insiders as a co-opted semiotic cluster, a constellation of commodifiable catch-phrases, hem-lines and conventionalised understandings of what made rock–and-roll psychedelic. Yet, it is naïve to imagine that “hippie”, as an authentic set of cultural practices and orientations, died with the social infrastructure and integrity of Haight–Ashbury. What had clearly ended, however, was a period of intense culture-making during which experimentation in large-scale music events successfully resulted in a form of group participation that might easily transcend its attachments to particular places—here, the ballrooms, parks and a network of cafes, stores and local charities in San Francisco. While the trappings of the flower children were recycled as the latest youth trend, those with the means departed for destinations where ecstatic states of spiritual, artistic and sexual fulfilment could be experienced without the

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disruption of daily televised war coverage and prurient media attention. For Ginsberg, Leary, Metzer, Alpert, The Beatles and the countless international travellers who had in some way been touched by the events of the late-1960s, the obvious choice for such a departure was India.

SETTING THE STAGE IN GOA As some of my interlocutors have pointed out, the “hippie trail” connecting sites across Europe, the Middle East and Asia had less to do with identifying as a hippie than it did with touring the regions in which cannabis production and/or consumption attracted a considerable traveller population. The most common itineraries took travellers to the Balearic Islands of Ibiza and Formantera or across the Mediterranean to Morocco, while the extended voyage went “via the Eastern Mediterranean to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Nepal, and ultimately to India”. The more intrepid participants in this common rite of passage, cannabis historian Jonathon Green comments, “would go even further, via Burma and Thailand, eventually to wartorn Vietnam” (2002: 129). What is clear, whether or not one wants to reproduce the connection between a mass-mediated identifier and the cultural practices it aims to represent, is that the often sacralised consumption of cannabis and “psychedelic” substances for which the San Francisco youth culture of the late1960s was known became part of a traveller culture that moved with the seasons across Europe and the Middle East into Southern Asia. Though not for any links to the cultivation or processing of cannabis, it was during this time that Goa was “discovered” by the traveller mythos as an idyllic coastal haven completely lacking in tourist infrastructure and publicised only via word-of-mouth. Indian historian Teresa Albuquerque dates the “fi rst batch of visitors” to 1963, after which followed “the ‘freaks’, the flower-children, the junkies . . . ” Her brief account of the countercultural invasion holds few kind words for the hippies. Even more pestilential than the hippies in her characterisation, however, are the “oglers [who] rained aplenty” upon the more brazen Western revellers. Arab princes arriving in private jets and (male) desi tourists alike attended the full-moon parties on Goa’s Anjuna beach, and Albuquerque attributes the doubling of Indian tourism between 1967 and 1971 (against nearly no growth in international tourism) to the rising fame of the hippie spectacle . . . ” She quotes Goan journalist Mario Cabral e Sa, who ironically betrays his voyeur (mirone) status in order to describe the hippies and junkies of Anjuna beach, who indulged in nude bathing (in the sea and under the sun) and their moonlight orgies—oral, anal, frontal, mono, homo, hetero, what have you . . .

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tableaux a deux as often a trois . . . no qualms, no guilt, no shame— their only taboo ‘no mirones please’ (cited in Albuquerque 1988: 84). Equally coloured is William Dalrymple’s travelogue caricature of a senior Goan spokeswoman for the glorious Portuguese past, one Donna Georgina, who reinforces the representation of genteel offense in the public sexual congress for which the hippies became known: “Disgusting. That’s what those people were . . . Imagine: kissing in public and I don’t know what else. Disgusting” (Dalrymple 1998: 234). Her outrage, despite a modest approximation of the physical intimacies involved, befits a matriarch of the Portuguese speaking Catholic elite. As a travelogue presenting a range of vignettes illustrating the radical displacement and devastation that has characterised the postcolonial period in India, Dalrymple’s The Age of Kali nonetheless fi nds humour in the Goan amalgam of Christian morality, Portuguese names and architecture and Hindu prohibitions on public contact between the sexes. Not for nothing does Dalrymple travel to Georgina’s village of Loutolim, home of the heritage tourism attraction, Ancestral Goa, a mock-up of life under the Portuguese. A fi nal touch of ironic colonial nostalgia rounds out the Goan matriarch’s contempt for the fi rst wave of Western travellers: “Mr. Salazar would have known what to do with those hippies. He wouldn’t have let them behave the way they did” (ibid: 235). Surely a weakness for authoritarian dictators was harboured in certain privileged quarters post-independence, and mistrust of the new breed of long-haired, naturalist Western transplants was present from the beginning. Newman, whose late-1970s work is almost the only English-language anthropological commentary on the changing face of post-independence Goa, puts it plainly: “The closer a tourist was to the white suits, ties, Panama hats and aloof attitudes of the departed Portuguese officials, the more bona fide he was in some circles” (Newman 2001: 216). For their part, the new visitors possessed romantic stereotypes of their own; foremost was the image of the tolerant, affable Goan coastal villager. Goa Gil, long-time Goan resident and Haight–Ashbury roadie and guitarist turned prototypical trance DJ and Western sadhu, discusses the early hippie era in Last Hippie Standing: Now you know in those days the people, you know, were really simple so it was really nice . . . they lived mostly on coconuts, fish from the sea, milk from the cow, rice from the field, a more real, natural level (Robbin 2000). In an interview, Goa Gil details the “discovery” of Goa as a holiday site for the reunion of travellers who had met and parted on the hippie trail— whether riding horses in Afghanistan, studying Indian music, wandering with holy men or lazing on the beach in Bali. As the years progressed, Gil recounts, “A lot of people started to spend long periods of time there, and

28 Luther Elliott even live there. A whole scene. Because the people were tolerant, they were happy to have us there, ‘cause they had nothing going on” (Gosney 1997). Whether it was intrinsic affability or economic hardship that motivated the amicable relations, most accounts of the 1970s in Goa cast the villagers of Calangute, Baga, Anjuna, and Vagator as friends and business partners. Tolerance ranks high among the descriptors applied to Goans. The ubiquity of alcohol in Goa and relative permissiveness of the coastal villagers where nudity and hashish smoking were concerned resonated with a popular Portuguese idiom still in circulation; sussegado/socegado, a local variant on the Portuguese, sussegarde, and glossed most frequently as “relaxed”, “laid-back” or “easy-going”, aligned with shanti, the already popular traveller appropriation of the Hindi term for peace or tranquillity. Speaking of the sussegarde lifestyle, Gil refers to the endemic, “relaxed, one-day-ata-time state of mind” (ibid) that has come to epitomise representations of Goa’s siesta and tavern culture in travel reports and guidebooks. Drawn thus by the “simplicity” of an exotic coastal village life removed from the ever-growing tourist traffic of the beach, an increasing number of seasonal residents began to migrate upriver to the fishing village of Chapora. The casti, the fisherman’s thong, became a minimalist male fashion statement. However, the primitivist icon of the simple fisherman or villager was ultimately to prove an evanescent one; like the “savages” of the European coast of which Urbain speaks in his history of the transformation of the European beach between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (2003). The dugout, catamaran and other non-mechanised fishing vessels certainly live on in Goa, but function only secondarily as nostalgic signifiers of preindustrial village economies (as on the cover of the fi rst edition of Lonely Planet’s guide to Goa or the back of the fi rst volume (1995) of the long-running Tantrance CD compilation series). Many Western travellers to Goa speak with cynicism of Indian involvement in the party scene. Much of the contention appears to derive from the transformations that befell an emergent Western marketplace that revived the spirit of the formal Portuguese colony’s liberal import policy, if not the colonial apparatus to regulate it. The Wednesday bazaar in Anjuna quickly became a social scene for impromptu performances and a secondary market for electronics, watches and other high cachet possessions that might be sold or swapped, particularly to well-heeled Indians for whom the flea market served as an unregulated, duty-free market for desirable consumer imports. Frommer’s South India travel guide refers to the early days of the market when “Anjuna Beach became a rocking venue for party demons and naturalists who would sell their last piece of clothing at the local flea market for just enough cash to buy more dope and extend their stay”. As commerce accelerated, a growing vulnerability in the anti-material ideologies of the freaks and dropouts became evident to some. Playwright and social scientist, Raminder Kaur, offers one of the more scathing satirical portraits of the northern beaches in her short story, “Parking the Snout in Goa”. In

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her sketch, the hippies’ involvement in the Anjuna flea market establishes their hypocrisy: Moth-eaten hippies with one-way tickets to nirvana were selling anything that fell off the back of an autorickshaw to replenish their paths to material enlightenment. They nursed hallucinations of going dirty with the ‘natives’ when the ‘natives’ prized clean living (Kaur 1999: 166). The cynicism in Kaur’s story, replete with its “Jungle Barries, Lord Charlies, Wild-haired Shamans and other fugitives from the materialist West” (ibid: 162), tends to efface Western labour and craft, suggesting instead that stolen goods constitute the main trade for Goa’s Western “renegade yuppies”. Today, a considerable nostalgia surrounds the Anjuna flea-market, filled as it is with Kashmiri leather, Rajasthani patchwork, Kutch embroidery and countless stalls of semi-precious minerals, sea shells, statuary, incense, spices and tobacco. One merchant, who was in the process of converting his trade from antique hand woven woollens from Himachal Pradesh to inexpensive cotton women’s wear, repeated for me what seemed a nearly universal commentary amongst those that had followed the market’s development since the 1970s. “All the special things have gone. It used to be that all the Westerners had something different. Now everything is cheap copies”. Of those foreign travellers with whom I spoke, one complaint seemed nearly universal, namely that original handicrafts designed by the traveller or brought in from other travel destinations might be sold successfully for one season, after which the Indians would have duplicated the design for sale at a far cheaper price. Frequently, these critiques cast the “two-week” or “charter” tourist as the epitome of indiscriminate consumption and Western complicity with Indian expertise in the knockoff. As the 1970s progressed, it was not only the rapid growth and commercialisation of the flea market that was to threaten the sussegado character of the Goan coast. Even as the Latin-influenced budget paradise began to be sold to a new category of tourist, particularly after the introduction of electricity to many of the smaller coastal villages in the mid-1970s, Goa’s reputation as a drug entrepôt expanded in measure with the near trebling of foreign tourists between 1972 and 1977 (Angle 2001: 111). Amidst the growing rock–and-roll party scene of the late-1970s, large-scale smuggling operations arose, most with Anjuna as their base of operations. Albuquerque’s research on the subject is impressive, and her history of the village includes a lengthy enumeration of the large drug operations that met their end during the late-1970s and early-1980s (see 1988: 85). Even after the era of large-scale operations, false-bottomed boats, suitcases and cosmetic containers remained integral technologies in Goa’s underground commerce, and they appeared frequently in Goan newspaper stories and the occasional young-adult novel. One instalment of an English language Harper Collins

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India serial in the mould of the Nancy Drew mysteries casts its heroine, Saloni, as a holiday maker turned private investigator who watches a French traveller inject and smoke heroin—to later die of an overdose—and sets out to bust a local drug smuggling mafia (Kacker 1995). One of my primary informants on the Goa party-making of the late1970s and early-1980s, a Swiss organiser of large scale psytrance festivals, recounts his arrival with two close friends in Chapora village at the end of the 1979 winter season. His stories of outrageous parties—one with the DJ on a platform suspended in the palms—position him in an instrumental role in the emergence of what he calls a “psychedelic electronic disco scene” on Goa’s beaches, and his accounting romanticises the 1980s as an age of rebirth following the expatriate population’s drug-related decline during the late-1970s. He relates his circle’s efforts to “clean-up” the village by enlisting the help of village locals to locate and identify serious addicts and “flip-outs”, once seeing twenty-nine travellers to a mental health clinic by bus, and other times contacting parents overseas. Some of the more sensational accounts of heroin, cocaine and hysteria on Goa’s northern beaches—the late Cleo Odzer’s Goa Freaks, in particular— have provoked some skepticism as to their representativeness (see Saldanha 2004), but few would dispute the claim that by the late-1970s, considerable obstacles to the “simple utopian lifestyle” had arisen. Gil speaks of musical boredom, theft and the growing number of “leeches and hangers-on” (Gosney 1997), while Dalrymple refers to the “long hangover of the seventies” during which “the hippies either died of overdoses or went home” (1988: 235). As international tourism to Goa grew, from 17,234 arrivals in 1977 to 33,430 in 1980 and 97,533 in 1986 (Angle 2001), a younger traveller population brought new stylistic identifications, most notably those associated with punk, reggae and soul music. While some very visible changes did transpire in time with the dawn of a new decade, the commonplace reiteration of the pronouncement on the death of the hippie that circumscribes this era needs to be contextualised as well, I would argue, within popular political discourse of the day. Particularly when faced with the conservative neoliberal regimes of Thatcher and Reagan, cultural commentators on the Left seemed more inclined than ever to cast the social product of the aesthetically and sensually oriented late-1960s as escapist and clearly unsuited to progressive change. From a seasoned psychedelic traveller perspective, Goa’s fading reputation and authenticity as a site for alternative practices and consumption habits during the late-1970s had little to do with the decline of the New Left in Europe or the perception that a progressive politics had yet to be realised on Goa’s beaches. Complaints about the period in question are centred around the frequent interventions of corrupt local police, a growing mafia presence, particularly where hard drugs were concerned, and the abysmal standard of live music established by Anjuna’s resident Smag Band, a German-led rock ensemble so dubbed not for its own use of “smack” (heroin)

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but for the popular criticism that their slow, drawn-out, performances were best suited for those under heavy sedation. Reggae and independent label soul releases brought together under the rubric of Northern Soul, while a distinct part of the Goan coastal party soundscape, seem barely to warrant mention by those who “survived” the late-1970s to witness the advent of computer-mediated dance music and their accompanying chemical technology, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA).

THE DAWN OF GOA TRANCE Goa Gil remains the most vocal progenitor of what was to become most widely referred to as “Goa trance” music, though the credit for initiating a stylistic shift in the musical airplay on Goa’s northern beaches is commonly given to a French DJ duo, Fred and Laurent, who were the fi rst to use two tape-decks to “mix” or sequence together synthesiser-laden and experimental electroacoustic music. Author and journalist Erik Davis interviewed Laurent in Goa in 1993, when he was willing to divulge the names of several of the acts appearing in his early playlists—designed “for very heavy tripping people who have been traveling everywhere” (Davis 2004: 266–267). As Laurent’s short list is filled out with some of the other frequently noted musical acts that predated the rise of dance music forms, techno and house, it is clear that Goa’s earliest electronic dance party soundtracks owed few allegiances to any particular generic form. The emergent musical style was cobbled together from what was at that time

Figure 1.2

Vagator cliff-top party, Goa, January 2001. Photo by Lia Philcox.

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called new wave, electro(disco), industrial, kraut-rock and synth-pop— often with the vocal sections edited out. It is perhaps best identified as an assemblage by the emphasis on rhythm and alien, exotic sonic palettes created by synthesisers, a heavy use of effects and the slowing down, speeding up and reversing of analogue tape playback. Since the late-1970s, the German act, Kraftwerk, had been producing what vocalist and composer Ralf Hütter has called “robot dance music”, exploiting the machine’s possibility for perfect repetition in the creation of a “trance” state. Methodologically similar to musique concrete and other early musical experiments employing tape loops and analogue synthesisers, their early work clearly set the stage for the techno music phenomenon that was to emerge in the US in the late-1980s. Often credited are Cabaret Voltaire, an English trio named after the Frankfurt haunt of Dada luminaries and specialising in manipulating recorded sounds on reel-to-reel recorder, and Front 242, a successful Belgian duo who coined the influential term Electronic Body Music. German strengths in fusing repetitive rock with electronics and noise were evident in bands like Can, Faust, Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia and Tangerine Dream. Even more anarcho-experimental exercises in atonality, dissonance and the absurd were supplied by English “transgressive art” group turned industrial music innovators, Throbbing Gristle. It has often been impressed upon me that the “hard”, “industrial”, and above all “psychedelic” sounds of these early pioneers had little in common with early Detroit Techno and Chicago House, which supplied many of the anthems for UK rave’s “second Summer of Love” during the late-1980s. Prior to that point, though, several key informants have insisted, much of the “Acid House” that was being played in London clubs and warehouses was also fi nding its way to Goa. The hippie legacy in India invariably dictated that the musical programming at all-night beach parties adhere to the varied sonic and stylistic expectations invoked by the category “psychedelic”. While this evidently ruled out such emergent subgenres as “diva house”, it might be safely said that rumours of Goa trance’s roots in challenging experimental music are considerably overstated. Similarly, in some psychedelic purist circles there has been a tendency to diminish the role of the new drug, MDMA/Ecstasy, in the formation of Goa’s psychedelic renaissance during the late-1980s and early-1990s. For the Goa/psytrance scenes in which I have moved, the substance has always appeared to figure heavily in the social stratification of the party— some being open advocates and practitioners, others adamantly opposed to the “too easy”, “artificial”, or “plastic” “club drug”. What is clear is that MDMA had made its way to England in some quantity by the early-1980s (Nasmyth 1985), at least in part by way of the Mediterranean island of Ibiza, renowned for its open-air nightclubs and mixed-genre DJ sets, popularised by Argentinian Alfredo Fiorillo (Reynolds 1998b: 58). Reportedly, the then legal drug had gained popularity through Western sanyassins, followers of Indian guru Osho whose principal 1970s ashram was in Poona,

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India (e.g., D’Andrea 2004), an important destination for many wintering in Goa. Whatever its origins and distribution pathways, MDMA circulated in Goa well in advance of its international popularity as “Adam”, “ecstasy”, “X”, or “E”. In addition to the new consciousness technologies, the development of a whole host of genres that might be collected under the umbrella “electronic dance music” (EDM) was catalysed by the 1983 joint venture of six major synthesiser companies to create a standard control protocol for their products, allowing a previously unachievable compatibility between electronic instruments from different manufacturers. The standard for instrument control data, named MIDI (musical instrument digital interface), provided a kind of cosmopolitan lingua franca allowing electronic instruments, like synthesisers and drum machines, to interface via a sequencer that recorded and played back multitrack scores as simple binary code transmitted along inexpensive cables (e.g., Théberge 1997). As MIDI orchestration could be saved and exported, it also provided an exchange medium for early EDM producers, many of whom were not formally trained musicians or sound engineers. Prior to the formalisation of the Goa trance genre and its attendant stylistic conventions and social boundaries, much of the music duplicated on analogue cassette passed between travellers without identifying artist or song names. For those who participated, renting villas year round in Goa or camping on the embankments above Vagator and Anjuna beaches and travelling north in the rainy season to the hill stations of Kullu and Parvati valleys in Himachal Pradesh, these were the golden years, almost univocally proclaimed as the height of alternative music and drug culture in India. Not until 1985 did India implement its Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act in which the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1930 was revised to reflect adherence to international convention, and, by all accounts, it was many more years until increased surveillance and border controls began to be felt. In accounts of the era, however, it is the fundamentally uncommodified status of the music, more than the freedom to smoke charas on public buses, that is most nostalgically recalled. This common claim about mid-1980s pre-commodity musical forms invariably overlooks the initial purchase of records by DJs and collectors. But Goa’s hot climate and the unsuitability of beaches for vinyl records did assure that much of what arrived had already been duplicated for circulation within a complex gift and trade economy of DJs and their benefactors, peer trading networks and owners of amplifiers, loudspeakers and cassette decks. Through the 1980s, dubbed analogue cassette remained the standard medium, preserving an indication of the distance from its “source” in the diminished frequency range and heightened distortion introduced through the multiple generations of duplication. The trading milieu upon which Goa trance was built resembled that of the followers of the Grateful Dead, a band that had recognised early on that inviting a taping section to their shows

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fostered an intimacy with their audiences that no doubt contributed significantly to their continued touring success. Digital audio tape (DAT), was released in 1986 by Sony/Phillips, but remained an expensive technology. Thus when digital media did begin to gain a foothold among the better-heeled of Goa’s expatriates, the problem of musical fidelity was solved without disturbing the exclusivity. A trickle of music began to be produced explicitly for the purpose of making “Goa parties”, an event structure that started gaining recognition outside Goa in the early-1990s. During his 1993 trip to Goa, Erik Davis interviewed German musician, Johann Bley (aka Mandra Gora), one of the few Goa trance artists to have actually produced music in Goa. Circulating his DAT tapes among friends and DJs, the artist commented on the “perfect feedback loop” between his music and the events while noting that the music Davis was researching was “already dead and gone”, safely on its way towards marketable genericisation (Davis 2004: 268–269). Mandra Gora tracks, “Gypsy Trance” and “Wicked Warp”, appeared on a 1993 Dragonfly Records compilation entitled Project II Trance, a release many cite as the first published collection of psychedelic trance. His comments from that year suggest that, among cognoscenti at least, disillusionment with the imminent commercial trajectory of the music considerably predated the fi rst published reference to Goa trance. Goa trance emerged clearly in 1995 as a commercial music genre label, appearing on a range of reissued CD compilations. Some dispute exists around the provenance of the genre label, but the earlier use of the term “trance” as a stylistic marker for some European dance music, employing anthem-like melodic sections, necessitated some qualification for the more exotic, more Orientalised music associated with Goa. Less likely to include “uplifting” or “triumphant” melodic development (realised generally through use of major scales), the rapidly coalescing Goa trance genre adopted Phrygian and diminished blues scales, setting up the trademark sixteenth (and syncopated thirty-second note) melodic “lead”—often programmed as an automated synthesiser arpeggiation of tonic, flat second, flat seventh, flat third and perfect fifth (see Cole and Hannan 1997). In 1994, Spirit Zone in Germany and Phonokol Records in Israel were founded as were Symbiosis, Matsuri, Transient and TIP Records in England. Australian born flautist Raja Ram (Ron Rothfield), formerly with the progressive jazz act Quintessence, takes credit for having co-organised (with partner Graham Wood) the fi rst free Goa party in London at the end of 1990. In the only extant musicological treatment of the Goa trance genre, Cole and Hannan identify the resistance of many early artists and Goan “trance-dance” participants to the perceived commercialisation of the parties and consequent emergence of a musical formula during the mid-1990s. England bore the brunt of the criticism, perhaps deservedly, as its nationals represented nearly half of the foreign arrivals in Goa in 1997. Artist Steve Psyko commented in a 1996 interview on the speed of the English to assign labels, asserting that, as with punk, “they have stereotyped Goa trance;

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they have decided that Goa trance is just one kind of music” (cited in Cole and Hannan 1997). New Zealand DJ and producer Ray Castle has echoed the anti-Anglo sentiment, commenting in an interview circulating on the Internet that “London is very good at whipping up fashion-fad-fusions with its infectious media (1995)”. With the soundtrack growing more predictable—anchored by a network of established labels and artists in close personal contact—very little remained by way of indissoluble attachments to Goa. A number of Thai islands (most importantly, Koh Phangan) and Bali had already emerged as satellite communities for “full-moon” beach parties by the time Goan parties began to be troubled by increasing drug busts, noise complaints and police corruption. During the summer months in India, parties moved to Manali and Parvati in the Himalayan foothills, while a large-scale festival circuit in Europe emerged during the mid-1990s to create and satisfy desires for Goa-style parties closer to home. Almost as soon as the Goa psychedelic beach party formula began to take root in satellite communities, Goa trance as a musical style and marketing label was abandoned in favour of the less confi ning, psy(chedelic) trance. On the ground in Goa, however, even new anti-trance party legislation, the 2000 Noise Pollution Control Rules, failed to curtail the arrival of a growing tourist throng drawn to Goa by reports of idyllic coastlines and countercultural entertainments. Tourism researcher Paul Routledge comments succinctly on what is perceived as the dissolution of Goa’s freak authenticity: The image of Goa as a haven for hippies continues even to the present, as some backpackers attempt to recreate the “hippy experience” while in Goa (and elsewhere in India for that matter)—through clothing styles, drug consumption, and more recently, through rave parties in a contemporary evocation of the “Freak” past. Indeed, even some charter tourists in Goa for just a few weeks can be seen donning their tie-dye clothes and indulging in drug and party tourism before returning to their office jobs—or the dole queue—in the west. In this sense, “hippy” has become another sign to be consumed as an integral part of the ‘beach’ experience, and the otherness of Goa (2000: 2652). Indian nationals comprised seventy to eighty-five percent of the total tourist traffic throughout the 1990s. Indian popular culture researcher, Arun Saldanha, reports, with perhaps a tone of cynicism: growing numbers of much richer youth from Mumbai (formerly Bombay) are discovering the rave Mecca in their own country. Weekends and holidays are spent basking in the festive glory, although they are careful to throw away their hippie clothes before returning to Dad, Mum and their yuppie jobs (Saldanha 2000: 52).

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Ironically, the senior musical artist and label owner most commonly credited with selling the “Goa trance” genre to English news media, Raja Ram has been one of the most vocal about Goa’s rapid “aging”: Goa. It went commercial and now it’s just gone fetid like an old cheese that has been left too long in the cupboard. The spirit has gone, the blue rinse tourists have arrived, the flea market has exploded into Regent Street. I suggest to everybody: fi nd new pastures, the world is out there! (in interview, Klimmer and Rood 2002). Ultimately, what was signalled in the 1990s, after the coalescence of a recognizable musical style for Goa parties, was the ability for events to be performed in other shanti, exotic (and preferably seaside) paradises that could invoke the spirit of Goa, provided of course the right sonic and chemical technologies were available. This passage into generic marketability marked the end of the smaller, more intimate circle of musical exchange and party-making. However, this was critical to the success with which an increasingly global network of weekly, seasonal and one-off events severed ties to their outmoded place of origin while retaining, in the preservation of its honoured cultural practices, much of its spiritual and psychedelic cachet. As with the Haight, what had ended was a period of intense culture-making during which experimentation in increasingly large-scale outdoor trance parties spawned a social, participatory genre that could easily transcend its emplacement on Goa’s northern beaches as a structure of feeling, or as Feld suggests, a feeling for form (1988).

FROM EPHEMERALITY TO FLEXIBILITY Goa appears here as one of those sites that, through its receptive and sussegado villagers as much as its geographic endowments and economic uncertainties, fostered the growth, adaptation and reproduction of the freak ethos or gestalt. Goa’s musico-industrial timeline is quite different from San Francisco’s, depending as it did upon overland international travel, small-scale import and export economies, and an international network of musical producers, record label owners and DJs. However, the extent to which the coalescence of a musical style signalled for many the beginning of the end—and a new beginning for the nascent psytrance genre formation—suggests a very similar trajectory in the dispersal of Goa’s alternative or freak authenticity. A local “death”, in the eyes of early taste-makers in Haight–Ashbury and Goa, was accompanied, in both instances, by a rebirth on a global stage. News media, tourism, music industry monikers, as well as the tendency of psychedelic drug scenes to attract more deleterious forms of substance use, all appear to guarantee the fragile place-bound social identities of

Goa is a State of Mind

Figure 1.3

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Goa Gil at his 57th birthday party, October 2008. Photo Goa Gil.

which Harvey speaks. For prototype subcultural emplacements, it might be argued, going global comes at a cost. How should such costs be accounted, though? Tourism researcher, Paul Routledge, refers to the “dispensable” nature of “local people’s space”, speaking in particular of the environmental degradation and loss of traditional forms of labour caused by unsustainable tourist infrastructure (2000). However, to truly entertain the notion of a cost benefit analysis—a funerary balancing of accounts—for scenemaking of this sort requires a willingness to consider disparate schemes of valuation and loss. Should we tally migrant chai vendors’ livelihoods, lost to noise control legislation, alongside Catholic school girls’ innocence, lost to an encounter with a hippie “love-in” en route to school in Anjuna (Mehta 1979)? Or account for Western would-be smugglers incarcerated in Goan prisons in the same column as those lost to motorcycle accident or overdose? However deep the cynicism and nostalgia that have surrounded the loss of authentic, small-scale psychedelic cosmopolitanism in Haight–Ashbury and Goa, my contention is that the explosion of psytrance on the global scene demonstrated that ephemerality was easily turned into a generative corporate value—flexibility—by a Buddhism-inspired social movement that was preconditioned to accept the transitory nature of local scenes as a fact of existence, or cost of doing business. The most obvious example of how ephemerality precipitates flexibility is evident at the level of music industry genres. From the perspective of Goa’s early DJs and producers cited above, what was lost by about 1996 was a diverse stylistic musical form sacrificed to the marketing performative, “Goa trance”, which drew an emerging network of musical artists toward recognizable musical conventions.

38 Luther Elliott Goa’s simultaneous downfall as hippie idyll and music genre, it might be said, fuelled a rapidly transforming set of classificatory categories capable of both fragmenting and reinvigorating local scenes. “Isratrance”, “neo full-on”, “Scandotrance”, “trauma trance”, “psyprog”, “psytek”, “Suomisaundi” and countless others, are “Goa trance’s” legacy, each a claim to a new form of national or transnational stylistic emergence and continuity; each a reason to travel to the woods, beaches or mountains at which new post-Goa psychedelic musics exist in their natural habitats. For many, of course, including the Danish and German travellers of whom I speak in the introduction, musical genre is beside the point; indulging in detailed analyses of musical form is what DJs are paid to do and what dancers ought to avoid if they intend to “lose themselves” in the music. This, I suggest, is partly because, for so many of its participants, a genre of social consciousness mythologised as emerging indigenously on the Goan beach is reducible only to a feeling, a vibe or a state of mind. When formerly space-bound social identities can be conceived as an eminently transportable feeling for affective and expressive form, it would appear that the production of new cartographies, new ways of feeling locality, can emerge. Made circulable in generic signifiers and, above all, in a kinesthetic-musical-ritual genre—the trance party itself—the cultural essence of Goa trance was guaranteed a kind of reproductive fitness. For now, at least, Raja Ram’s assertion that “greener pastures are out there” is a truism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Albuquerque, Teresa. 1988. Anjuna: Profile of a Village in Goa. New Delhi: Promilla & Co. Alvares, Claude. 2002. Fish Curry and Rice: A Sourcebook on Goa, Its Ecology, and Lifestyle. Mapusa: Goa Foundation. Angle, Prabhakar S. 1999. A Culture “Conceived” and Misconceived. In The Transforming of Goa. N. Dantas, ed. 5–10. Mapusa: Other India Press. . 2001. Goa: An Economic Update. Mumbai: Goa Hindu Association, Kala Vibhag. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Castle, Ray. 1995. “Psychic Sonic Harmonics”, Interview with DJ Krusty (Melbourne DJ), August 1995, available at: (accessed 17 March 2009). Cole, Fred, and Michael Hannan. 1997. “Goa trance”. Perfect Beat 3(3): 1–14. Dalrymple, William. 1998. The Age of Kali: Indian Travels & Encounters. London: HarperCollins. D’Andrea, Anthony. 2004. Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa. In Rave Culture and Religion, 236– 255. G. St John, ed. New York: Routledge. Davis, Erik. 2004. Hedonic Tantra: Golden Goa’s Trance Transmission. In Rave Culture and Religion, 256–272. G. St John, ed. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Feld, Steven. 1988. “Aesthetics as iconicity of style, or ‘lift-up-over sounding’: getting into the Kaluli groove”. Yearbook for Traditional Music: 74–113. Fields, Rick. 2002. A High History of Buddhism in America. In Zig, Zag, Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics. A.H. Badiner and A. Grey, eds. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Ginsberg, Allen. 1966. “How to Make a March/Spectacle”. Liberation (10): 42–43. Gosney, Michael. 1997. “Goa Gil: The Interview” by Michael Gosney. (accessed 13 February 2009). Green, Jonathon. 2002. Cannabis. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, distributed by Publishers Group West. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford, England/New York: Blackwell. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London/New York: Routledge. Kacker, Loveleen. 1995. Saloni in Goa. New Delhi: Indus. Kaur, Raminder. 1999. “Parking the Snout in Goa”. In Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics, 155–172. J. Hutnyk and R. Kaur, eds. London: Zed Books. Klimmer, Torsten, and Billy Rood. 2002. Liquid Crystal Vision DVD: Liquid Crystal Vision productions. Law, Lisa. 1987. Flashing on the Sixties: Photographs. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Leary, Timothy, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert. 1964. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. New York: University Books. MacCannell, Dean. 1976. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books. Nasmyth, Peter. 1985. Ecstasy (MDMA). The Face No. 66. London. Newman, Robert S. 2001. Of Umbrellas, Goddesses and Dreams: Essays on Goan Culture and Society. Mapusa: Other India Press. Robbin, Marcus. 2000. Last Hippie Standing. Germany: Tangiji Films. Roszak, Theodore. 1969. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Routledge, Paul. 2000. “Golden Goa: Tourist Site as Dispensable Space”. Economic and Political Weekly, July 22: 2647–2656. Saldanha, Arun. 2000. “Fear and Loathing in Goa”. Unesco Courier, July/August: 51–52. . 2004. “Goa trance and Trance in Goa: Smooth Striations”. In Rave Culture and Religion, 273–286. G. St John, ed. New York: Routledge. Selvin, Joel. 1992. Monterey Pop: June 16–18, 1967. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Théberge, Paul. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, published by University Press of New England. Urbain, Jean-Didier. 2003. At the Beach. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolf, Leonard. 1968. Voices from the Love Generation. Boston: Little Brown.

2

The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes The Case of Psytrance in Goa Anthony D’Andrea

“THE SCENE AIN’T THE SAME” Variations on this claim are regularly heard across electronic dance scenes around the world. The explanation, given by veteran and not-so-veteran insiders, is typical: the scene has declined, for the authenticity and quality of parties, crowds, music and drugs have deteriorated. As it is often added, the scene has become too commercial, tritely popular and stifled by state surveillance. Others, however, argue that the scene has not declined but rather transformed while its “spirit” has remained the same. Most strikingly, for any given scene, this debate tends to persist across time. Whether the late-2000s or the mid-1990s, the nature of complaints, explanations and sentiments is similar. This atemporality would suggest that this debate is fed by rumours that do not reflect the more persistent reality of the scene. However, tangible indicators of scene structure fluctuate over time, including the number and nature of venues and events in their physical, social and cultural aspects; the relationship between crowd types and outsiders; and, more widely, the relationship between the scene and political economies and major institutions (surveillance, the press and the “culture industry”). All of these variables thus suggest that scenes, in fact, change. Moreover, claims of decline are not mere informative statements, but also operate as powerful devices in shaping practices, identities and hierarchies that constitute any scene. Thus, rather than searching for the truth about claims of decline, it is sociologically more pertinent to examine the factors propelling the dynamic of scene formation and representation. Why such claims and counterclaims arise, and how scenes change, are questions to be investigated. This chapter analyzes the dynamic of transformation of electronic dance scenes, with a focus on the advanced period, often referred to as one of maturation or decline. As a privileged analytical site, the psytrance scene located in northern Goa (India) provides a strong case for the examination of how historical, subcultural, ritual and global processes converge into processes of scene formation and representation. Having developed from

The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes 41 the late-1960s counterculture, the Goa scene was reborn in the early-1990s partly due to global processes. Notwithstanding its countercultural origins, the scene is contradictorily enmeshed with political economies of tourism and surveillance operating locally and globally. This study draws on multiple data sources, including transnational multi-site ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Spain and India between 1998 and 2003 (D’Andrea 2007), ongoing interactions with psytrance fans and the monitoring of Internet discussions and press news on Goa and psytrance until 2009. Following a brief conceptualisation of “scene”, the chapter provides a thick ethnographic summary of the Goa psytrance scene, with particular attention to its socio-economic context, membership structure and codes of subcultural belonging. Factors underlying claims of scene decline are then discussed, including mechanisms of distinction and ageing processes at the micro level, as well as regional development and globalisation at the macro level. The seasonal and neo-nomadic nature of the psytrance scene in Goa is reinforced by globalisation processes, which thus contribute to the shaping of a transnational network of psytrance scenes. In this light, the topic of decline is reconsidered with reference to a global rhizomatic model. The concept of “scene” evinces the diverse interrelations between space, culture and context. Etymologically, a scene is a stage or structure for dramatic performances. In academia, it crossed over into cultural studies, where it has tended to replace “subculture”, which is seen by some scholars as a monolithic concept that occludes internal diversity (Bennett 1999; Bennett & Peterson 2004). However, while recognising agency, it is important to maintain the analytical specificity of scene. For a reason, the centrifugal forces of globalisation have paradoxically reintroduced space as a critical category of empirical and conceptual relevance. Therefore, in reinstating the centrality of space in the analysis of subcultural formations, the concept of scene must be envisaged in reference to urban and globalisation studies. A scene comprises the amenities, peoples (producers and consumers), practices, artifacts and symbols identifying a distinctive formation in a specific location. A scene has a spatial focal point, such as a cluster of urban amenities (bars, galleries, clubs, etc.) or a neighborhood where it can be recognised apart from other scenes, subcultures and the outside world. In the logic of distinction, space thus becomes an important marker of identity (Bourdieu 1979). As such, some sort of visibility (cultural and optical) is an essential feature of any scene, as, by defi nition, it is a stage on which actors make themselves visible for a performance. Due to its highly localised and interactive features, a scene revolves around a community; however, it is not a heritage society, as identities and traditions are now retooled as “neotribes”: affective formations animated by fluidic, occasional gatherings and dispersal, partly defi ned by the individuals’ fleeting drives toward experience and togetherness (Maffesoli 1988: 76).

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CONTEXTS OF THE PSYTRANCE SCENE IN GOA: BETWEEN COUNTERCULTURE AND TOURISM In addition to its internally social and ritual features, the psytrance scene must be understood within larger historical and socio-economic contexts. Due to a size limitation in this chapter, the psytrance scene in Goa is here examined from a genealogical (rather than chronological) perspective, highlighting its most critical features. Although the Portuguese were expelled from Goa by Indian forces in 1961, other types of Westerners have been seen in this land since then. The majority are tourists, backpackers and travellers with variegated interests in sightseeing, adventure or spirituality. After a fortnight or a season, they will have returned to the routines of structured life in their homelands. However, a residue of this larger long-haul travel populace will, in fact, become alternative expatriates seeking to integrate expressive forms of labour, leisure and spirituality in a holistic lifestyle. While some are privileged “drop outs”, others are less privileged “forced outs” (McKay 1996: 52). For them, transnational mobility becomes integrated in their life strategies, as a practice for evading modern regimes of labour, surveillance and morality. In various forms and degrees, they live within a global circuit of countercultural practice, paradoxically related with leisure industries. Over the decades, the profile of Western countercultures in India has changed significantly. “Hippies” and “freaks” provide the iconic examples (D’Andrea 2007). In their respective contexts, whereas the 1960s hippie exodus expressed a cultural rebellion against affluent technocratic societies (Roszak 1995), the 1990s rave diaspora evolved from digitalised, satirical and often contradictory forms of resistance against neoliberal capitalism (McKay 1996; Reynolds 1998). More recently, although international travel has become more generally affordable, the gradual decline of welfare/ labour systems in the West has hampered long-term travel opportunities for youth. More specifically, hippies and freaks differ in their valuation of subcultural practices. Whereas hippies expressed a flamboyant, optimistic outlook embracing daytime enjoyment, freaks by contrast embody a nihilistic, post-punk ethos centered on nocturnal challenges. As another basic issue, a tension between globalism and orientalism permeates the psytrance scene in Goa. Among many inexpensive countries around the world, India stands out for its mystical symbolism to Westerners. In contrast with central high-tech societies, India is romanticised for its “spiritual”, “affective” and “feminine” qualities (Airault 2000; D’Andrea 2007; Mehta 1990). Ironically, while fleeing the West, hippies and freaks have benefited from Goa’s Christian–Portuguese legacy. In fact, the Goa scene emerged amidst native families who spoke English and were willing to provide accommodation and other ancillary services to young travellers. Also in contrast is Goa’s current status as the wealthiest and most Westernised state in the country, hosting national film festivals and coveted media

The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes 43 celebrities. In sum, while overlooking the highly modern side of Goa, countercultural expatriates have inadvertently contributed to it, crafting much of the hedonistic charm of the place, expressed in self-fashioned terms, such as “Ibiza of Asia” or “Cannes of India”. The prolonged presence of “hippies” and “rave parties” (terms used by the Indian press, but rarely by scene insiders) have reinforced a belief that Goa is an exceptionally liberal place, as Indian visitors repeat ad nauseam. This is a topic of heated debate among Goans. While state authorities prioritise foreign investments in upscale resorts (Times of India 2004), a strident anti-tourism lobby (summoning elements from the press, the Catholic Church and urban and environmental NGOs) defends a more conservative approach in the sector. Consequently, in public discourse, “hippies” are frequently grouped together with prostitution, pederasty and school absenteeism, as social malaises of the state (Afonso 1989). However, low-budget tourism represents an important income source for local communities (D’Andrea 2007; Hausler 1995; Stabler 1997; Wilson 1997a, 1997b). By contrast to upscale tourism, villagers and alternative expatriates have developed long-term, amicable relationships, which may have initiated from economic transactions but often extend beyond these. In sum, Westerners have inadvertently contributed to a type of modernisation that is ambivalently valued by Goans. Despite high levels of drug consumption in psytrance and tourism settings, freaks are rarely involved in crimes against Goans. In fact, local villagers in northern Goa appear to be more concerned with decisions made in the capital Panaji to clamp down on the “party season”, their main source of income. The strict enforcement of the ten o’clock party ban in 2007 effectively eradicated the more visible and commercial (“mainstream”) segment of the psytrance scene. This episode was seen by many as the culmination of a long process of repression. With the growth of the tourism industry in Goa, the native population is no longer so dependent economically on the party scene.

CODES OF BELONGING: COUNTERCULTURAL MEANING AND PERFORMANCE Only a minority of Westerners in Goa would become directly involved in the psytrance scene. Charter tourists are largely unaware of any countercultural activity in India. Mostly from the UK, Germany and Russia, these tourists stay at inexpensive hotels on Baga and Calangute beaches (about five kilometres south of Anjuna) or in all-inclusive resorts on the Salcete coast (southern Goa). In two-week vacation packages, they confi ne themselves to the hotel swimming-pool and nearby bars, in addition to conventional sightseeing, which includes the Wednesday “hippie market”. A taxi driver may persuade a small group of young tourists to attend a “hippie party” at one of the licensed psytrance bars, though they usually grow

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uncomfortable with the monotonous electronic music in a proto-barbarian environment, whereas some of their inebriated friends will cavort around the dance floor and thus upset scene insiders. In an ongoing influx across India, backpackers show interest in the infamous psytrance parties referred to in popular traveller’s guides. Mostly from Western Europe and Israel, they take one of two typical trajectories. Those from more structured, middle-class backgrounds tend to favour daytime activities (beach, restaurants and sightseeing). In addition to fi nding psytrance music tedious, they complain about the unfriendliness of freaks. These backpackers usually depart a few days later, heading south or north (depending on the time of the season). By contrast, other backpackers totally embrace the psytrance scene. They rearrange travelling schedules according to the party season, and a conversion process follows. Usually drawn from working-class or troubled family backgrounds, these youngsters are often familiar with urban subcultures (punks, bikers, squatters, ravers, clubbers, etc.). Above all, they manifest great dissatisfaction with their lives back at home. By contrast with conventional tourists, they do not complain about the precarious conditions regularly found in India; quite the contrary, they apparently rejoice in self-imposed hardships. Though better accommodation may be available, they gladly choose adverse alternatives, such as sleeping on dirty mats in mud huts surrounded by sick animals. Their choice is rarely fi nancial, but based on seeking self-challenging experiences, which will later feed heroic tales back at home (Kaur 1999; Newman 2001). Another segment of expatriates in Goa, although closely related to psytrance freaks, favour a calmer (shanti) lifestyle in bucolic settings, away from the hedonistic bustle. Many are Goa regulars, and even residents during most of the year. Often involved in spiritual practices, they seek to cultivate and maintain a subjective state of “inner balance” or “spiritual purity”. Others just prefer a simple life centered on spending time by a peaceful beach hut. Close friends or relatives of psytrance freaks, older hippies eventually attend psytrance parties, where they may enthuse about how the countercultural “spirit” has remained or declined. This segment of expatriates provides a good picture of how psytrance and New Age scenes may interface in circuits of travel and spiritual tourism in India and beyond. Finally, the scene core is composed from a multinational populace of party promoters, DJs, their associates and regular fans—mostly Western, and a minor segment of young Goan villagers and wealthy diasporic Indians hailing from Mumbai and elsewhere. Many are regular multi-month vacationers, others are nomadic expatriates who live across the global circuit of countercultural lifestyle, working at the interstices of leisure industries. The scene thus operates as a node of translocal connections linking a multitude of psytrance fans moving across India and globally. On closer examination, the social life in the psytrance scene in Goa comprises a myriad of subgroups, vaguely resembling clan-like formations.

The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes 45 Affi nities between people develop or fade according to changes in taste and relations of reciprocity over music, drugs, prestige, connections, sex and affection. More generally, nationality functions as a basic criterion of subcultural aggregation, usually associated with language barriers and stereotypical representations that are very typical of the contact zone: “Israelis are stubborn”, “Indians behave like children”, “German freaks are chaotic”, etc. Nonetheless, veteran insiders can operate in a more cosmopolitan fashion. In order to better navigate the scene and its larger contexts, they may put aside such stereotypes, or manipulate them to their advantage, while establishing more genuine relationships with natives and other alternative expatriates like them. In this situation, they justify national preferences in a more pragmatic rather than ethnocentric fashion, as an insider revealed during an interview: “It is a question of language. When you get tired of speaking English, you join people of your country, with whom you have other things in common. But then you get tired of that too, and want to hang out with other people”. On the whole, adult expatriates with extensive travel and countercultural experience tend to be, at least pragmatically, more cosmopolitan than younger fi rst-time travellers in compact groups. Although presence in the psytrance scene is uncontrolled and fluid, a code of belonging clearly defi nes who is an insider and who is not. Based on empirical observation, interviewing and content analysis, it is possible to identify the main criteria. In numerous situations, I noticed freaks leaving the dance floor, apparently upset with the arrival of effusive village teens and tourists, usually Indian working-class males but also Western “lager louts”. While it has been suggested that freaks are elitist and even racist (Saldanha 2004, 2007), such claims miss the point. Despite the ethnonationalist preferences described above, racism is not intrinsic to psytrance practice or ideology. In fact, many Indians occupy a privileged position in the psytrance scene, as leading DJs, party promoters, diasporic insiders and even as revered sadhus with whom hippies learned chillum smoking (D’Andrea 2007). Furthermore, the same exclusivist attitude is verified in psytrance scenes located in Western countries, in the absence of any interracial encounter, yet always directed against outsiders and authorities of their own ethnic background. Psytrance freaks avoid outsiders in general, particularly tourists and state authorities, regardless of race, class and origin. Belonging in the psytrance scene is defi ned by the sharing of the countercultural problem, or by a relatively convincing performance of it. Countercultural expatriates confer a specific meaning to practices of travel, dance and drugs, a meaning that is significantly different than the frivolous usage seen in conventional sites of entertainment and tourism. To freaks, a psytrance party is not a recreational activity but a collective practice for entailing a transgressive spirituality of the self. As a veteran psytrance DJ has famously put it: “It is not a disco under coconut trees: it is spiritual initiation” (Goa Gil 1995).

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In sum, countercultural belonging (and exclusion) in the psytrance scene refers to adherence to practices and representations of subjectivity and sociality formation that actively seek to eschew the discipline of utility and reason. The effervescent nature of a psytrance party is disruptive of ordinary structures of self. For a detailed ritual and phenomenological analysis of psytrance practices and raves more generally, see D’Andrea (2007) and St John (2004). The problematisation of the modern self and society explains why psytrance freaks loathe tourists and authorities. Anyone who ignores the nature and goal of such countercultural experiments is deemed an outsider, and is thus unwelcomed even if just tolerated.

THE LOGIC OF SCENE FORMATION AND REPRESENTATION In the late-2000s, claims about the decline of the psytrance scene in Goa are empirically instantiated in the party ban which eradicated most of the scene in northern Goa. Nevertheless, the fact remains that such comments have been lingering for several years, at least since the late-1990s, at a time when the scene was still growing and police raids were seen as minor breakdowns in the system of briberies. Through ongoing interaction with psytrance freaks, it can be noticed that their discursive patterns are predominantly blasé, dismissive and skeptical. Enthusiastic remarks about a party or music track are acceptable but only if deserving. Cheerful comments or innocent curiosity are taken as marks of the outsider, and are reprimanded with short replies or sheer silence. In line, the predominant personal types in the scene, those who might be identified as role models or scene leaders—a handful of DJs, party promoters and veteran expatriates riding classic super bikes—turn out to be rough characters of unpolished, intimidating personalities, as duly expressed toward outsiders.

Status Mechanisms: Travel Talk and Coolness A combination of countercultural ethos with punk undertones, hedonistic excess, international exposure and social class anomie seem to factor into the psytrance attitude. A detailed analysis of all components engendering the dark mood is beyond the scope of this chapter. Nonetheless, despite its historical specificity, the dynamic of the social interactions in the scene can be examined with recourse to the analysis of status mechanisms (Bourdieu 1977, 1979). In order to be recognised as a true insider, the individual must internalise taken-for-granted assumptions of what is valued in terms of practices, gestures, appearance and preferences. Taste is shaped according to cognitive matrixes (habitus), which, in turn, are forged by regimes of class, education

The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes 47 and culture. These external structures—as well as the rules for resisting them—are thus internalised by the individual. These rules and structures are then translated into subcultural settings. Subjects will behave accordingly, seeking to accumulate material and symbolic resources (cultural capital) which will, in turn, grant them a better position in the field. Important to say, from an internal point of view, these resources are not means to an end, but lie at the core of one’s beliefs and self-identity. As such, the social game is played unconsciously. Its rules are seldom evident, but rather fused in the system of beliefs, as objects of desire and realities of life. Excessive reflexivity exposing the rules of the game and their effects would become an unbearable hindrance to full membership, even in highly satirical cultures. By showing a blasé attitude in the psytrance scene, the individual conveys a convincing familiarity with valued practices, experiences and attitudes. The banality demonstrated in relation to extraordinary experiences (psychedelia, mysticism, accidents, illegality) can be very baffl ing to the outsider. The “cooler” the teller is, according to scene rules, the more impressive he or she becomes, unconsciously signaling the presence of a real insider, to be respected and admired in the scene. Travel talk, party talk and drug talk are the main genres by which an insider accrues prestige, raising his or her status in the scene. It is not just a question of sharing information about certain resources, objects or skills, but mainly of causing an impression towards gaining cultural capital. In order to properly master these talk genres, not only is considerable practical knowledge required, but an attitude of stylistic indifference is fundamental. As Bourdieu reminds us, any indication of self-aggrandising is bound to become a self-defeating move. However, despite the predominant attitude, the psytrance scene is actually inspired by a fundamental orientation towards charisma, as evinced in the ecstatic nature of psytrance rituals (D’Andrea 2007; Corsten 1998, 1999). The scene is thus marked by a contradiction between charisma and coolness. On the one hand, it is propelled by a logic of agonistic competition among party promoters, DJs and their entourages. While navigating political economies of tourism and surveillance, they ultimately want to energise the scene, by throwing riskier and “wilder” parties, thus outdoing prior events, and gaining prestige as outstanding insiders. On the other hand, these thrill-seeking activities are contradicted by their blasé attitude. As psytrance DJs will remark, they have “been there and done that hundreds of times, so why the fuss”. According to them, parties are “just OK”, the crowd is infested with outsiders, and most neophytes are just mediocre. Not even their own DJ performances are to be evaluated too positively (even if they believe so at heart).

Ageing: Vitality and Rationalisation of Charisma Perceptions about the scene are specially influenced by veteran insiders, those recognised as being in the scene for longer than most. Despite the

48 Anthony D’Andrea important role that veterans play in the reproduction of scenes, issues of membership duration (longevity) and ageing are absent from the scholarship on electronic dance subcultures. While the socio-cultural effects of biomedical and pharmacological processes remain largely understudied in the social sciences, a subcultural scene is influenced by the age, membership longevity, vibrancy and even the health of its members. Over a season, climatic and other physical factors affect the vitality of scene members. Arriving from countries with a negatively valued weather (cold, rainy), they rejoice in sunnier climates of paradise-like places, such as Goa and Ibiza. However, as the season progresses, the growing heat starts to take a toll on the endurance of party goers. Poor diets and drug abuse are additional stressors on a large segment of psytrance freaks. Finally, a smaller segment work in India, preparing or trading exotic goods that are sold in “hippie markets” (for tourists) or exported to more upscale boutiques in the West. Over the years, a change of attitude on the part of ageing insiders can be noticed. Veterans become more selective in regards to scene events. They eventually give hints of some physical discomfort, which they associate with enduring work, hedonistic lifestyle, or a traffic accident in the past. In their fi nancial budgets, their focus gradually shifts into longer term considerations. They may patiently file into welfare programs during a visit to their homeland. Veteran couples with children count on the support from their extended family networks. As parents from differing nationalities, their travelling pattern outlines a geographical triangle with Goa. Perceptions over the scene can be thus related to the vitality of insiders in different ways. One possibility is drug abuse in segments of the subculture. Extensive drug abuse is often associated with depressive or paranoid claims about the scene, just as junkies may blame the scene for a supposed deterioration of drug quality (Odzer 1995; Reynolds 1998). Another possibility refers to the intrinsic psychological development of scene members. This does not refer to the large segment of individuals who claim to have left the scene because they had “outgrown” it with differing interests. The fact is that veterans’ appreciation of ecstatic practices transforms over the years. As the body develops tolerance to drug toxicity, it seems that the soul develops tolerance to charisma saturation. In a Weberian sense, extraordinary states are explosive but unstable, and thus temporary. Charisma must give way to rationalisation, the regulation of everyday life under cosmological explanations and institutional structures (Weber 1920). This cooling of charisma due to repetition is commonly observed in religious cults, both at individual and institutional levels. In the psytrance scene, in comparison with excited newcomers, veterans do tend to manifest a more measured and selective relationship with scene practices, events and novelties, even as they immerse in the subculture. Not for nothing, the rationalisation of charisma suits the blasé attitude, identified as a basic status mechanism. In line with Bourdieu’s model,

The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes 49 veterans have mastered the subcultural skills, experiences and modes of sociability which grant them recognition in the scene. In the opposite direction, however, veterans can be instead marginalised, either because their taste does not match the newest fad, or because they have developed external interests. In both cases, veterans may misrepresent their own falling out as the decline of the scene itself. Yet, it also may be the case that their claims derive from actual problems affecting the scene as a whole.

Scene Development: From Bohemia to Massification If claims of decline were only effects of status-seeking and longevity mechanisms, then scenes would likely remain relatively stable, reproducing themselves with the arrival of newcomers socialised by the same rules. However, scenes appear to follow a cycle of birth, growth, maturation, transformation, decline and, sometimes, rebirth. Ibiza in Spain, Wicker Park in Chicago, Haight–Ashbury in San Francisco, Porto Seguro in Brazil, Bali in Indonesia and Goa in India are just a few examples of formerly exclusive countercultural scenes that suffered a dramatic process of transformation toward gentrification or massification, as explained below. As such, structural factors, both endogenous and external, largely defi ne the development of a scene in a given location. Underground scenes are forged by groups of bohemians, artists or hippies who move to derelict areas in the periphery of urban economies or tourist resorts. Their expressive practices are noticed by initially small, discreet segments of the middle-class (or travellers and backpackers) who may then decide to settle down in the area. Scene venues and practices gradually become objects of desire for larger segments of the population, while also being framed as business opportunities for real-estate developers, forprofit entrepreneurs and public authorities. A process of gentrification then follows, as upper middle-class professionals, retirees and other residential migrants arrive in increasing numbers. Besides clear investment opportunities, they wish to consume a “healthier” and “expressive” lifestyle in the form of convenient commodities. As a main consequence, higher taxes, rents and cost of living gradually drive out both native and subcultural communities. Alternatively, against their own will, they may try to adapt to the emerging conditions, which are often the same as those from which they initially fled. A variation from this process occurs when the bulk of economic investments in the region are directed to economies of scale or to lowering costs, rather than upgrading the quality of amenities. The probable result is an ever-increasing number of residents and tourists arriving at the place, compounding local massification. Even if prices do not rise as sharply as in the gentrification scenario, the impact is even more noticeable: environmental degradation, sprawling, impersonal (often predatory) relations and additional state regulations. A local airport opening to international fl ights

50 Anthony D’Andrea provides the decisive blow, by accelerating massification with a dual boom of tourism and construction. Following the historical presence of hippies and freaks in India, the Goa psytrance scene has suffered two diverse developments. On the one hand, alternative culture became a source of commercial activities in the region, as hippie and psychedelic clothes, drapes and CDs are sold to Western tourists at roadside shacks and hippie markets. Indian businessmen promote New Year’s Eve “hippie” festivals with psytrance music, catering to a large contingent of Indian tourists. Beach bars play psytrance (or quieter “chillout” music), serving a seasonal clientele of Western backpackers. While largely disconnected from the psytrance scene, these economic activities have benefited segments of the local communities. On the other hand, the number, size, duration and intangible qualities of “authentic” psytrance parties have decreased, as has been the case throughout the 2000s, culminating in the ten o’clock party ban effectively reinforced in 2007. With the growth of tourism, native communities have become less economically dependent on the psytrance scene. The success of marginal scenes thus contains the seeds of its own demise. By the end of the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century, apart from smaller and highly secretive parties thrown in faraway locations, the former visibility and bustle of the psytrance scene in northern Goa is no more.

Globalisation: Local Density and Deterritorialisation Globalisation refers to the centrality of transnational flows in increasing the interconnectedness and complexity of social life across the globe (Appadurai 1996; Beck et al. 1994; Urry 2003). It is intrinsically connected with the expansion of world-wide capitalism, requiring efficient communication technologies and transportation systems. This emerging reality has led many scholars to predict cultural homogenisation and the eradication of space. However, more recent global studies have detected that, in many instances, globalisation has actually promoted local heterogeneity as well as spatial concentration, as exemplified in the rise of the “global city” (AbuLughod 1999; Sassen 2001, 2006). Electronic dance scenes must be thus considered within the context of complex globalisation. Highly localised and globalised simultaneously, psytrance scenes are integrated into transnational formations that employ practices of mobility in order to depart from dominant regimes of market, surveillance and morality. Psytrance subculture provides an example in which highly mobile transnational flows (of people, practices and imaginaries) have contributed to the increased thickness of social life at the local level. Among the many ways in which globalisation and countercultures interrelate, this chapter focuses on the issue of scene formation. At a local level, globalisation has reconfigured the psytrance scene in northern Goa as a “contact zone”, defi ned as a borderline space of exchanges and inequalities

The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes 51 involving a highly heteroclite mix of peoples interacting in a precarious equilibrium (Clifford 1997: 195; Hannerz 1989: 66; Pratt 1992). The psytrance scene, in fact, hosts a plethora of social types concentrating in a remote area: native villagers, psytrance freaks, backpackers, Israeli ex-soldiers, Japanese hippies, Osho sannyasins, Goan businessmen, Nepalese workers, Karnataki beach vendors, Kashmiri traders, charter tourists, drug dealers, junkies, Hindu sadhus, etc. In a relatively poor rural area, the socioeconomic order was shaped by informal, often shady deals struck between villagers, businessmen and regional authorities. Nonetheless, as Western psytrance freaks have pointed out, even though the scene was potentially dangerous (due to drugs, lawlessness, marginal types and corruption), its overall situation was relatively peaceful. Interconnectedness is another constitutive feature of psytrance scenes around the world. Global processes have enabled transnational flows of psytrance fans, music, fashion and ideology around the world, thus contributing to the multiplication of psytrance scenes, notably in Europe, Israel, Russia, Japan, USA, Australia and Brazil. These flows have thus outlined a global circuit of countercultural practice linking a variety of scenes across those countries and regions. However, these global circuits take place within systemic regimes comprising a variety of economies, institutions and moralities across different countries, both at the centre and periphery. Psytrance formations have to navigate across the multifarious circumstances that mark each of the multiple nodes of this global circuit. Excessive surveillance in one region may unintentionally trigger socio-economic effects in a distant location. For example, the repression of rave scenes in the UK in the early-1990s had consolidated corporate clubbing in that nation, and also provided a renewed impetus to the party scenes in Goa and Ibiza, already in the wake of electronic dance music. Both places have enjoyed exceptionally high rates of growth and modernisation comparatively to their countries and sub-continental regions. The globalisation of countercultures is therefore correlated with gentrification and massification processes, as discussed in the previous section.

CONCLUSION: DECLINE AS A NEO-NOMADIC TACTIC The psytrance scene in Goa quickly fades in early April, against the incoming monsoon season. Most Westerners return to their countries of origin, while others move on to northern India, Nepal, Thailand or Indonesia (Bali). In the West, they resume conventional jobs in pubs, farms, factories and travel agencies, or carry on as exotic traders, handcrafters, artists, DJs, yoga teachers, therapists and drug dealers, preferably in sunny places providing economic opportunities. In the Indian Himalayas, the villages of the Parvati valley accommodate a discreet psytrance scene

52 Anthony D’Andrea in the mountains from June to October. A few dozen freaks and other expatriates remain in northern Goa, resting and socialising in intimate parties, and eventually travelling to their homelands. Many in this countercultural diaspora will renew passport visas, in order to return to India in the next or following seasons. Within these spatiotemporal gates and routes, “the nomad does not move” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 381): they are permanently trying to keep the smooth space of creativity and experimentation. As seen, the psytrance scene in Goa lies at the center of a globalised “contact zone” of diverging interests and meanings. State authorities consider it an epicenter of criminality and social problems. For villagers, businesspeople and corrupt segments of the police, the scene is an important source of income. For tourists, psytrance parties are consumed as innocuous entertainment. In particular, Indian tourists see these events as an opportunity to have a taste of the West at home. By contrast, for backpackers, the psytrance scene provides an unexpected way to overcome existential dilemmas from home. At last, for hardcore insiders, a psytrance party is a quasi-sacred ritual, enmeshing hedonism, spirituality and technology as a political claim against and beyond modernity. The interplay between countercultures and leisure industries has paradoxical consequences in a given location. On the one hand, while fleeing the centre, these self-marginalised subjects unintentionally become the new centre of cultural life in the periphery, crafting much of the attractive charm of remote paradise-like places, which are then gradually embedded within leisure industries. On the other hand, the intense modernisation of such paradises transforms the highly valued work and life rhythms cherished by alternative residents. While leisure industries (tourism, clubbing, wellness, art, bars, etc.) create economic opportunities for marginal subjects to make a living, the excessive growth of these economies tend to stifle alternative spaces, practices and imaginaries in commodity form. As a result, countercultural expatriates are forced to reassess their position, either by resisting, accommodating or assimilating into larger systems. As such, this article has examined the development of subcultural scenes, with a specific focus on the so-called period of decline (or maturation), both in its representational and structural dimensions. The electronic dance music formations examined here are regulated by several factors operating at the micro and macro levels, as identified: status mechanisms, veteran ageing, regional development and complex globalisation. In contexts of complex globalisation, it becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain the precise status of “decline” of a psytrance scene through the mechanistic view of “life cycle”. While enhancing regimes of surveillance and commodification, globalisation also enhances the thickness of local life. It also integrates local psytrance scenes in a dynamic scene network, which indexes a global counterculture. Electronic dance scenes thus become ambivalent entities of a highly mobile and fluidic nature.

The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes 53 As a result, a period of apparent decline in one scene may be temporarily compensated by peaks of performance in other remote scenes. The situation may persist until external factors alter the balance once again, possibly reanimating residually maintained scenes. The dynamic of electronic dance scenes thus follows a model of rhizomatic network, where failing nodes are temporarily overtaken in order to maintain the smooth, isomorphic transmission of energy throughout the system. In this model, rather than a defi nitive stage of a reified life-cycle, scene decline is better seen as an open-ended process that can be tactical and transient, oscillating according to shifting circumstances of global and local conditions. BIBLIOGRAPHY Abu-Lughod, J. 1999. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s Global Cities. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Afonso, A. 1989. Tourism in Goa: Socio-Economic Impact. Institute of Social Sciences of New Delhi Manuscript Report 2. Airault, R. 2000. Fous de l’Inde: Delires d’Occidentaux et Sentiment Oceanique. Paris: Payot. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Beck, U., A. Giddens, and S. Lash. 1994. Refl exive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge, Oxford: Polity Press in association with Blackwell. Bennett, A. 1999. “Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship between Youth, Style and Musical Taste”. Sociology 33, 599–617. Bennett, A., and R. Peterson, eds. 2004. Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice ([1972]. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge. . 1979. La Distinction: Critique Sociale de Jugement. Paris: Minuit. Clifford, J. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Corsten, M. 1998. “Youth Dance Cultures: The Experience of Intramundane Salvation (innerweltliche Erlosung) in the Ritual Dance Practice of the Techno Youth Culture”. Paper presented to the International Sociological Association (ISA). . 1999. “Ecstasy as ‘this-wordly path to salvation’: the techno youth scene as a proto-religious collective”. In Alternative Religions among European Youth, 91–124. L. Tomasi, ed. Aldershot: Ashgate. D’Andrea, A. 2007. Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa. International Library of Sociology. London: Routledge. Goa Gil. 1995. “An Interview with Bustop Internet Radio”. Last Accessed on March 28, 2009. . Hannerz, U. 1989. “Notes on the Global Ecumene”. Public Culture 1, 65–75. Hausler, N. 1995. “The Snake in ‘Paradise’?!–Tourism and Acculturation in Goa”. In Retracing the Track of Tourism: Studies on Travels, Tourists, and Development. N. Hausler, ed. Saarbrucken: Entwicklungspolitik. Kaur, R. 1999. “Parking the Snout in Goa”. In World Travels: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics, 155–170. R. Kaur and J. Hutnyk, eds. London / New York: Zed.

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Maffesoli, M. 1996. [1988]. The Time of Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London: SAGE. McKay, G. 1996. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. London: Verso. Mehta, G. 1990. Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East. India: Penguin Books. Newman, R. 2001. “Western Tourists and Goan Pilgrims: A Comparison of Two Ritual Dramas”. In Of Umbrellas, Goddesses, and Dreams: Essays on Goan Culture and Society, 212–230. Mapusa: Other India Press. Odzer, C. 1995. Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India. New York: Blue Moon Books. Pratt, M. L. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London / New York: Routledge. Reynolds, S. 1998. Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. Boston: Little Brown. Roszak, T. 1995. The Making of a Counterculture: Refl ections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (includes introduction to 1995 edition). Berkeley: University of California. St John, G., ed. 2004. Rave Culture and Religion. London / New York: Routledge. Saldanha, A. 2004. “Goa trance and Trance in Goa: Smooth Striations”. In Rave Culture and Religion, 273–286. G. St John, ed. London / New York: Routledge. . 2007. Psychedelic White: Goa trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Sassen, S. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. . 2006. Cities in a World Economy (Sociology for a New Century). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. Stabler, M. J., ed. 1997. Tourism and Sustainability: Principles to Practice. New York / Oxon: CAB International. Stalnaker, S. 2002. Hub Culture: The Next Wave of Urban Consumers. Singapore: John Wiley & Sons. Times of India. 2004. “Restaurant Owners Protest Foreigners Doing Business”, January 12. Urry, J. 2003. Global Complexity. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Weber, M. 1920. Economy and Society (2 vol.). Berkeley: University of California. Wilson, D. 1997a. “Paradoxes of Tourism in Goa”. Annals of Tourism Research 24, 52–75. . 1997b. “Strategies for Sustainability: Lessons from Goa and the Seychelles”. In Tourism and Sustainability: Principles to Practice. M. J. Stabler, ed. New York / Oxon: CAB International.

3

The Ghost of Goa Trance A Retrospective Arun Saldanha

THE QUESTION OF ORIGIN The question of origin is foundational to much of popular music affect and discourse. A scene is demarcated through its sonic reference to geographic locations it is supposed to come from and traverse. In a classic essay, Will Straw (1991) observes that the cultural logic of contemporary music scenes cannot be separated from a tension between their cosmopolitan and localising tendencies. The marketing and folkloristic forces that attempt to place a genre or musical phenomenon—reggae in Jamaica, grunge in Seattle, The Beatles in Liverpool—have a conservative impulse, trying to fi x what is intrinsically nebulous. Meanwhile, the international diffusion of a genre into a network of diverse scenes indexes its vitality. The paradox of authenticity in popular music is that it is exactly because of the diffusion and commodification, hence transformation, of a genre that the question of its origin comes to the fore. According to this interpretation, the more the birth of a genre is occluded by commerce and spin-offs, the more that affective involvement in it will require expertise on its geographic history. This expertise cannot but conjure a certain mysterious aura around the birthplace of the genre at the time that it was still allegedly innocent and pure. Affective involvement then erects boundaries between those who claim to be connected by an umbilical cord to the place where it all began and the masses of wannabes who threaten to kill it. A scene’s place-constructing elitism undermines the cosmopolitanism that its diffusion was supposed to embrace. Of course, elitism can also emerge without seeking to answer the question of origin. In any case a truly cosmopolitan scene requires what Doreen Massey (1991) calls a progressive sense of place, an understanding of how its emplacement in global processes is intrinsically connected to power struggles and ambivalent identities. Instead of expertise, subcultural hierarchies and the romanticisation of origin, cosmopolitan music affectively conceives an egalitarian world through its very dissemination over many different places and publics. This chapter will use Derrida’s deconstructionist conceptions of cosmopolitanism, originality, identity, dissemination, justice and life to argue that

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cosmopolitanism in popular music is measured not so much by forgetting about origin altogether as becoming haunted by it in an ethical way. The question of origin is precisely that: a question, a forever-waiting for new answers that will return. If we treat the Goa trance scene to a deconstruction, its birth, death and future are all multifarious events whose fi nal truth will never arrive. While it appears that this electronic dance genre originated during the last decade of the twentieth century in a coastal village in India, this event was not a point in time and space, but a multiplicity. The ostensible beginning of Goa trance was already an entanglement of various musical developments and trajectories, spanning continents and ethnic and class identities. Deconstructing the origin of psychedelic trance now, years after we assume it has occurred, now that it has spread to most metropolitan areas of the planet, has to be retrospective in the etymological meaning of the term: not a simple looking, but a looking-back self-consciously from the present. By virtue of the spatiotemporal distance of the “retro” in retrospective we can only defi ne Goa trance’s origin by violating “it”, by selecting from the many strands of musical and youth-cultural mutations of the late-1980s and early-1990s, then calling the result of our selection “the origin of Goa trance”. We would have to mention Indian classical music, Front 242, Yes, acid house and Belgian New Beat, and we can more or less agree these were necessary for there to have been any Goa trance at all. But there can never be a “whole story”. There will always be an obscure remainder of influences and transmutations we can never retrieve. Deconstruction is skeptical but not defeatist. As there is no solid universal truth about its object available, deconstruction has to take full responsibility for what it does. Hence instead of drowning into some sort of historical nihilism (we can’t say anything about origins), this chapter will attempt to fi nd cosmopolitan possibilities in relating the evolution of Goa trance in a particular way, that is, in a way in which the storyteller is him- or herself willy-nilly implicated, so that an ethical future becomes possible. And responsibility within the global capitalist crisis, as Derrida tells us in Spectres of Marx (1994, esp. 100–105), implies acknowledging the geopolitical disparities that form the conditions of dissemination in the fi rst place.

TRAVELLING SOUNDS, SOUNDS TRAVEL Music and mobility are intrinsically entwined, especially, as John Connell and Chris Gibson (2003) show, in today’s world of MP3s, air travel and genre proliferation. Goa trance in many ways exemplifies music tourism, people moving to an exotic location mainly to be impressed by its unique sonic and dance culture, in this case itself imported (see Saldanha 2002a). The multiplicity of the birth of this scene exemplifies the “spacing” that

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every origin is, an intersection of flows instead of a point. International tourism started in Goa around 1966, when its coastline became one of the stations of the Asian hippie trail, including Kathmandu, Bali and ashrams spread over India. The motives for hippie travel have become part of mainstream popular culture: the escape from technocratic society, the romanticisation of independent travel and psychedelic mysticism made easy in India due to its traditional availability of cannabis (Saldanha 2003). During the 1980s, mass tourism developed rapidly in Goa but a countercultural avant-garde continued to eke out a heady scene in the northern village of Anjuna. The categories of “travellers” and “backpackers” have existed mostly by virtue of how some tourists distinguish themselves from mass tourism and consumer capitalism. Unlike mere tourists, the so-called Goa freaks share an interest in self-transformation; unlike hotels in Baga and Calangute, guesthouses in Anjuna enable interacting with the locals; unlike swimming pools, hanging out on South Anjuna beach has little effect on the environment. Music has always been an integral part of counterculture, largely embodied in outdoor parties, improvised gigs at people’s houses and festivals. In Anjuna the Christmas, New Year’s and full moon parties became bigger and bigger towards the beginning of the 1980s. Exactly when and how the psychedelic and progressive rock (both live and on tape) gave way to an unexpected prominence of new wave, industrial rock and synth-heavy pop is an interesting matter of debate, reflecting the mythologisation of origin. It is certain that deejays and LSD enthusiasts started bringing back a particular vibe from Goa to Europe and a distinct style of electronic music associated with “Goa parties” was taking shape by 1990. From about 1992 this music was revamped with the emerging trance/ techno music from the UK, Belgium and Germany, and christened “Goa trance”. The origin had been founded. By the mid-1990s the marketing category had stuck and Goa trance parties started popping up in just about every country with a large urban middle class, with parties organised infrequently in somewhat pristine locations. Whether in Mexico, Morocco or Malaysia, the music was accompanied with fluorescent decorations and paintings, circus-like performances, UV-lamps, “ethnic” clothing, chai and to enhance the experience of it all, all kinds of hallucinogenic drugs. Dissemination is transformation, of course, and Goa trance gave way to the darker and more minimalist “psychedelic trance”. The entwinement with serious mind expansion remains, concomitant with the distance from techno, house and mainstream trance. Following the paradox of authenticity noted above, the global flows of Internet and air travel only served to create a grounding of psytrance, however vague, in the place of Goa. The consistency of hallucinogenic commitment and the grounding in a simulacrum of place ensures that Goa/psytrance is perhaps the world’s most integrated global underground scene of discerning youngsters. Psytrance never attained the mega-club status of progressive trance and electro-house and

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never sought to, but it is undeniable “Goa” became a subcultural marketing category and hugely increased tourism to South India. Even if Goa serves as nebulous referent for a worldwide scene, it is important to note a key difference between the psychedelic trance scene in Goa and almost all the scenes elsewhere. In Anjuna, the large parties have never been enclaves of tranceheads secluded from mass tourism and law and order. Since the 1970s many Indians have been centrally involved in organising the parties and attending them, though they are positioned very differently in the party economy. For many travellers during Anjuna’s touristic heyday around 2000, notably the Israelis who arrived there en masse after military service, psytrance was a whole way of life. But there were also thousands of British youths and wealthy Indians brought from their hotels in taxis. Then there are the Lonely Planet-sporting backpackers and residual hippie elders, most of whom enjoy a party from time to time. Aside at each party there needed to be a huge area with mats in which the so-called chai mamas sold tea, fruit, cigarettes, omelette sandwiches and mineral water. Small-scale dealers roamed around the mats—the criminological underbelly of Goa’s scene has long been a favourite topic of conversation amongst locals, older hippies and backpackers. The parties even attracted beggar gangs from out of the state. Last but numerically not least, domestic tourists arrive in busloads in Goa to participate in what is to them a bit of the West on Indian soil, spurred by alcohol and half-naked white women. In short, the key difference is that this was India, a country of poverty, traditional mores and a sluggish state apparatus. In deconstructing the process whereby sounds and travellers constituted Goa trance, the conditions of its demise are already laid bare. The national group that embodied the tensions and misunderstandings best during the decline of Anjuna’s scene are the Israelis. There has been some sociological work enlisting the various components of the Turnerian “rite of passage” (Turner 1969) that Israeli travellers embark on after military service in places like India, Australia and Brazil, cohering them into a new community allegedly removed from the Zionist state (Noy 2007; Noy and Cohen 2005; Uriely, Yonay and Simchai 2002). Many Israeli youngsters say they feel liberated from parental and state control and part of a network based on solidarity, exploration and having fun. Yet we need to be careful not to take a subculture’s discursive self-construction at face value. At least in Anjuna the tight sense of “community” amongst Israeli backpackers belies the physical, mental, social and diplomatic casualties that many experience away from home (Airault 1999; Saldanha 2007: ch. 7). The studies note that everywhere Israeli backpackers created pockets of compatriots, but especially Goa, there are everyday tensions between them and most other people, whether local or tourist. There are differences of attitude towards tourism among the many thousands of Israeli backpackers, of course, but the strongly enclavic style of inhabiting places they

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inherit from the shared trauma of patrolling or combat has stood mutual comprehension in the way. Following Derrida’s deconstruction of Jewish identity, both his own and Israel’s (Derrida and Weber 2004), we would feel hopeful that some Israeli travellers rediscover the fundamentally itinerant and inventive nature of historical Jewishness, offering perhaps a countercultural alternative to the official and orthodox ideology of the Chosen People back home. But the heavily consumerist (even if money is carefully counted) rituals of dance and drugs of late-1990s Goa thwarted such progressive sense of place and identity amongst the young Jews. Understanding Israeli backpacking as a rite of passage begs the question, passage to what? Victor Turner’s study of the Ndembu tribe in Zambia (1967), which led to his theory of rites of passage and liminality, dealt with one cultural environment, making it easier to read liminal spaces and ritual symbols as marking maturation in a cohesive social order. Israeli backpackers are on the contrary away from their families, colleges, army and government, caught in between geopolitical, religious and legal orders. There is hardly a durable communitas they maintain upon return. In Goa, Manali, Hampi, Ko Panang and other popular hangouts in India and Thailand, their intention seems rather more nihilistic, to remain “in passage” for as long as possible. Israelis did not invent the desire for eternal liminality in India. Indeed, the more melancholic of older hippies say the Israelis merely follow an old subcultural tradition of enclavic living in Anjuna. The Stoned Pig (1975– 1976), a magazine that briefly circulated amongst the Goa freaks in the mid-1970s, shows that a nihilistic attitude towards drug-taking and others’ sensibilities had been present in Goa from the start. Already then, the season that electricity reached South Anjuna, freaks proclaimed the scene dead. Whether a scene dies or is born depends on your role within it.

SCENE SUICIDE The journalist Mark Tully (2007) observes that if India’s economy is booming, it is despite the immense inertia the state imposes on it. India is the biggest third world country. It is ironic that government corruption, party divisions, failing infrastructure and endemic rural poverty are to a large extent what enabled the psytrance scene in Anjuna to thrive. Goa freaks can stay for months only because their money lasts twice as long as in the West. Construction, hotels, restaurants and markets rely on tens of thousands of seasonal migrants from poorer states in India. At every level the Indian police was bribed exorbitant sums (baksheesh) to allow the parties to happen, even if they kept all of Anjuna awake whatever day of the week. This would not be possible in a coastal village in France or Japan. Through selling alcohol, renting sound systems and through entry fees, a handful of Goan and Bombay businessmen earned exorbitant sums. A deconstructive

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reading cannot conclude Goa trance was the imposition of outside economic interests on Anjuna’s virginal body. Without the income secured by various Indians, the panchayat (village council), landlords and local thugs would have resisted the emergence of Anjuna’s party economy. This defense of the parties by locals is chronically misunderstood by Indian NGOs and journalists decrying the noise pollution and “narcotourism” of the coastal belt (Saldanha 2002b). In fiction, newspapers and popular-historical literature, the hippies and ravers of Anjuna are portrayed as absolutely alien threat. This is typical of identity formation in the face of rapid economic developments, and tragically betrays a threefold ossification of Goa as unproblematic origin of identity. Firstly, Goa has been traversed by foreign influences for centuries, including Aryan, Kanara, Arab, Vijaya, Gujurati, Portuguese, British and fi nally American. Secondly, as the overflowing souvenir markets show, the hippies have contributed significantly to what Goa stands for, by introducing the place in an international music and alternative health economy like they did with Bali and Ibiza (D’Andrea 2007). Goa is known throughout the world probably more for its hippies and trance than for its vindaloo or Bom Jesus cathedral. And thirdly, the anti-hippie discourse is silent about the far more detrimental effects on Goa’s landscape of neoliberal policies, mafia-like real estate and rampant consumerism. From a Derridean stance it is comical that hippies and anti-hippie activists fi nd each other in a metaphysical adherence to the notion of a pure Goa. However uninformed and contradictory, the moralistic critique of the party scene grew steadily. By the late-1990s it colluded nicely with two other powerful social forces: the Goan Government has since many years planned to eradicate low-budget tourism and minimise charter tourism in favour of (structurally unrealistic) luxury projects, while the judiciary and intelligence officers increased their draconian and arbitrary efforts at eradicating drug trafficking and consumption. The tipping point—the fi nal death rattle—of Goa’s psytrance scene occurred with the biggest-ever and highly contested parties of December 31, 1999. Police raids, power struggles and massive though confusing coverage in the Goan and Indian press signalled the end of business as usual in Anjuna. Since then the parties have become increasingly infrequent, political forces having calculated that electoral gain amongst the conservative urban middle classes is more important than seasonal income from coastal bribes. By the 2005–2006 season, Anjuna’s trance scene had all but died. Israelis were abruptly scarce, barred from guesthouses and organising parties; the plentiful Russians had replaced them as a dominant subcultural group. Without large parties and regular venues (e.g., Nine Bar, Primrose Bar, shacks), there was little to do that could not be done better elsewhere. In February 2008 there was the death of the UK teenager Scarlett Keeling. She was found dead on the beach and the forensic report noted ingestion of Ecstasy, cocaine and LSD. Whether she was drugged, raped and murdered

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or drowned while swimming will probably remain uncertain forever. Whether sex and drugs were involved is not even certain, but so tightly interwoven are these themes with Anjuna in the Indian patriarchal imagination that it almost does not matter for the argument. For the case is sadly typical. Widely publicised and horribly managed by the Indian authorities, Keeling’s death points at the suicidal tendency that always accompanied the vital and positive tendency of Goa trance. There have been many mysterious deaths in Anjuna, but the fact that even with few parties a fi fteen-yearold can turn up dead is a reminder of how far away the utopian days of early Goa trance now are. The latest factor keeping tourists away from Goa is terrorism. The Goan government has been predictably eager to impose alerts, patrols and curfews since 9/11. As in Colombia, Afghanistan and Thailand, the authorities in Goa seamlessly link the “war on terror” with the “war on drugs” without understanding the geopolitical and cultural forces at the basis of what they’re trying to fight. There has always been a quiet chauvinist disdain amongst Goans towards outsiders. Now the ghost-like nature of terrorists and terrorist suspects instills a surveillance regime in which foreigners and seasonal labourers from outside Goa are newly suspicious. But equally important is the profound ineptitude of India’s police and legal apparatuses. The grisly terrorist attacks on November 26, 2008, on ten carefully chosen spaces of travel in Bombay/Mumbai—India’s most famous five-star hotel, most popular backpackers bar, most beautiful colonial railway station, as well as a Jewish house—mark a new and frightening phase in what extremist groups are capable of and how states react to them. The inspiration may have partially come from the suicide bombing of a resort in Bali in 2005. Tourism and terrorism share a dedication to mobility. Stoned white backpackers in coastal villages are by far the easiest target to gain international attention, many representing the hated state of Israel. If the Indian and Western governments allow chaos and injustice to persist in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Islamist groups may very well consider targeting the Westernised decadence of Goa. So added to the dangers of rape and poisoning, Anjuna now evokes a fear of being randomly shot. Of course, this aura of death will not deter the more dedicated backpackers and Goa freaks, who pride themselves after all on being unaffected by the sentiments of the masses. For some, the age of terrorism might even enhance the thrills of travel. To conclude, in hindsight there seems to have been a strong suicidal tendency intrinsic to the psychedelic trance scene of Goa. From the late Cleo Odzer’s revelations of hard drug culture in the 1970s (1995) to the many medical casualties amongst Israelis in the 1990s, from the necessary bribes to the circulation of the name “Goa” online and the commodification of Goa by Bollywood, Bacardi and Red Bull, the very success of the scene was its downfall. This is not to lay blame with anyone: it is amidst all the actors that the suicidal tendency is to be found. This is certainly not to belittle the

62 Arun Saldanha lively creativity exhibited through music, dance, dress and performance in Goa and by many thousands the world over. But now the mother scene is dead, a postmortem reveals the main causes of her demise: drugs, corruption, greed, arrogance, lack of planning. Because the scene was based on an illegal economy, and because it emerged primarily for white people in a poor country undergoing a rapid transition to modernity, this is, in a nutshell, why the scene was also always veering towards self-destruction. However genuine and beautiful the encounter between East and West was at fi rst, the cosmopolitan energies could not be sustained.

PSYTRANCE FUTURITY What happens when a scene dies? The same as with people: it turns into a ghost. The theory of ghosts or “spectrology” that Derrida (1994) unfolds contains a number of deconstructive operations which can help transform the sense of despair that the end of the parties in Anjuna invokes into an openness towards an ever-rebirthing psychedelic trance. First there is obviously a process of mourning, a keeping-alive of a memory of a life, and thereby reincarnating it (literally, becoming-flesh-again) in words, rituals and song. A funeral is the fi rst essential step for identifying the dead body: a unique life has passed. The more religious and repeated the mourning ceremony is, the stronger the ghost produced, with Jesus of Nazareth the strongest ghost ever. But if Jesus is reincarnated in a way that reinforces a Christian identity his spectrality is not working the way Derrida envisages its ethical possibilities. A ghost has to be multiple, identity-dismantling, cosmopolitan: it belongs to the cosmos. As the atheist philosopher Alain Badiou (2003) writes about Saint Paul’s organisation of a new international movement around the ghost of Jesus, the ethical singularity of a special death has to immediately connect to a universal affect. Grieving the demise of Goa trance similarly starts with selecting the cosmopolitanism—what was freshest, most creative and lifeaffi rming—in its music and early beach parties. Just like Paul was well aware of the prejudices separating Jews, apostles, Romans, Greeks and others in their estimation of Jesus, the global psytrance scene has to be aware of the tendencies towards segregation that accompany the ghost of Goa trance. Second, more profoundly, spectrality consists in being something inbetween material and immaterial. Derrida (1994; ch. 1) takes a spin on Shakespeare’s Hamlet with that most famous of lines, “to be or not to be, that is the question”. In summoning the dead back to life, what one encounters is neither a body nor an idea but the question of origin and of Being itself. The uncertain ontological status of ghosts is precisely what allows them to haunt the living. Spookiness cannot be analysed through straightforward psychology, anthropology or political economy; it is fi rst of all felt.

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The spectre of Goa trance is haunting electronic music the world over, but its im/materiality exists only insofar as it is summoned by its mourners. And like most psychedelic art, psychedelic trance has of course always contained a lot of spookiness (weird samples, cathedral reverbs, pitch-bending and unfamiliar scales, a frightening kick drum, extraterrestrial landscapes, fi re). Perhaps the ghost of Goa trance is the most ghostly of all music scene ghosts. Third, a ghost has to return. Someone who visits us once cannot be a ghost. Playing with another line in Hamlet, Derrida writes that this repetitive nature of ghosts makes their temporality “out of joint”, but space too is unhinged in haunting. Haunting happens again and again, in the case of Goa trance in an unmappable variety of material and cybernetic locations, and this makes it full of possibilities for future socio-musical directions. Fourth, as with all deconstructionist concepts, ghosts for Derrida invite a critical stance towards hegemonic discourses on purity, identity, originality and the opposition between us and them. Ghosts are shimmering entities and therefore fly in the face of nationalism, which is grounded on purity and clarity. For Derrida there is certainly something sacred (or sacred-like) about ghosts, but they are far from pure, and that is why they escape institutionalisation by religion or the state. From a deconstructionist retrospective, being haunted is not becoming oppressed by the sorrows and violence of the past, as tends to happen in India, Israel, the US, Australia and other traumatised places, but, on the contrary, being forced to ask smart questions about the mythologisation of the dead. Goa trance does not ask to be commemorated in a nostalgic or bitter way (it is the fault of the Indian tourists, the Goan police, the Israelis, the Mossad, the Muslim terrorists . . . ). Goa trance was never pure and then contaminated by people who should never have heard it. If we conjure its ghost it should be to disrupt the divisions of people into states, classes, races, religions, not creating new ones. Deconstruction follows the “spirit of Marx”, an Enlightenment legacy of critical universalism: careful, inventive, passionate and often humorous analysis of the world. Derrida then sketches the ethical repercussions of spectrology. In becoming haunted by the strangely living dead, one becomes immediately responsible for doing something with someone’s legacy, like an heir. Responsibility extends outwards and becomes hospitality, an openness to foreigners and the downtrodden (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 2000). All humans are haunted by the other amongst them, and this should lead to engagement rather than fear. Here Derrida introduces a kind of secularised messianism in his thinking: we should never stop welcoming strangers into our midst because there is a promise that democracy will one day come as a stranger. Since for Derrida this day will never actually arrive, justice and equality are forever of the future, always “to-come” (à-venir). If ghostly time and space are out of joint, there is a fundamental hauntedness that orients us to

64 Arun Saldanha the future and the cracking open of borders and walls. “Open, waiting for the event as justice, this hospitality is absolute only if it keeps watch over its own universality” (1994: 211). Absolute hospitality in psytrance is feasible when it helps create a new kind of universalism—in the “spirit” of Marx and the Enlightenment, but as Karen Armstrong (2007) reminds us, also in the ethical spirit of all major religious and philosophical systems. Universalism above all is critical of the claims to subcultural, religious, national purity. Popular music scenes are all imaginations of the future, different ways of striving for a communitas through transgressive rituals and shared symbols. With its conjuring of ancient and alien sound-ghosts through many hours of frenzied dancing, psychedelic trance is perhaps the most utopian and futurist of scenes. As the parties died out in Goa and Goa trance gave way to a global network of psytrance scenes, a spectral situation emerged. Haunted by the ghost of Goa trance, affective involvement in psytrance consists in taking responsibility for the promise of equality that all real ghosts evoke. What should be remembered about Goa trance is how the futurity it pledged to unfold was annihilated by the same capitalist inequalities and fl irtations with danger that gave birth to it. Goa trance cannot be blamed for anything, but its ghost will forever remind us to take care of sounds that travel between different continents.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Airault, Régis. 1999. Fous de l’Inde: délires d’Occidentaux et sentiment océanique. Paris: Payot. Armstrong, Karen. 2007. The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. New York: Knopf. Badiou, Alain. 2003. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Connell, John, and Chris Gibson. 2003. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. London: Routledge. D’Andrea, Anthony. 2007. Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultural in Ibiza and Goa. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. 2000. Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Elisabeth Weber. 2004. “A testimony given..”. in Elisabeth Weber, ed. Questioning Judaism, trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Massey, Doreen. 1991. “A global sense of place”. Marxism Today, June, 24–29. Noy, Chaim. 2007. A Narrative Community: Voices of Israeli Backpackers. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Noy, Chaim, and Erik Cohen, eds. 2005. Israeli Backpackers: From Tourism to Rite of Passage. New York: State University of New York Press. Odzer, Cleo. 1995. Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India. New York: Blue Moon.

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Saldanha, Arun. 2002a. “Music tourism and factions of bodies in Goa”. Tourist Studies 2(1): 43–46. . 2002b. “Identity, spatiality, and post-colonial resistance: geographies of the tourism critique in Goa”. Current Issues in Tourism 5(2): 94–111. . 2003. “Goa trance in Goa: smooth striations”. Graham St John, ed. Rave Culture and Religion. London: Routledge. . 2007. Psychedelic White: Goa trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Straw, Will. 1991. “Systems of articulation, logics of change: scenes and communities in popular music”. Cultural Studies 5(3): 361–375. The Stoned Pig. 1975–1976. 2 vols., 7 issues, available at . Tully, Mark. 2002. India In Slow Motion. New Delhi: Penguin. Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. . 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine. Uriely, Natan, Yuval Yonay, and Dalit Simchai. 2002. “Backpacking experiences: a type and form analysis”. Annals of Tourism Research 29(2): 520–538.

Part II

Global Psytrance

4

Infinite Noise Spirals The Musical Cosmopolitanism of Psytrance 1

Hillegonda Rietveld

In infi nity there is no beginning nor end, only the fluid moment called NOW! It is our purpose to reveal sonic platforms of frequencial and numerical vibration. SONIC ALCHEMY (sic: Dragonfly 1994: sleeve notes). Any attempt to capture this all-encompassing space in words and texts . . . invokes an immediate sense of impossibility, a despair that the sequentiality of language and writing, of the narrative form and history-telling, can never do more than scratch the surface of Thirdspace’s extraordinary simultaneities (Soja 1996: 57).

This chapter will investigate psytrance in the context of cosmopolitanism through a rhizomatic musical genealogy, highlighting the complexity of the scene’s discursive field. The musical format of psytrance is an example of acute emotional response to an electronic and increasingly digital infosphere (Toffler 1981) that, arguably, goes hand-in-hand with processes of globalisation, enabling participants at a local level to make emotional connections between their cosmopolitan experiences of technological acceleration and the everyday. This is articulated in the electronic production techniques of psytrance and in the use of futuristic sonic palettes, which foreground a repetitive digital machine aesthetic that it has in common with trance, techno and acid house. With the exception of an occasional atmospheric break, the musical structure moves on relentlessly, in a repetitive weave of disco/techno kick drums (providing the motorik 4/4 beat), a hypnotising drone-like bass pattern and mid-range digital sequences in a pulse-rhythm of sixteenths in phased tonalities and resonant textures that produce the “acid”, or psychedelic musical element. Such seamless sequencing creates a sense of being hurtled forward, at an average speed of 140–155 BPM (beats per minute), the heartbeat of an excited person who is running fast. This is combined with cyclic structure, looped phrases that lull the listener into a sense of timeless “now”; “this predictability is what allows the mind to disengage and ‘trance out’” (Reynolds 1998: 184). By propelling itself forward, yet simultaneously repeating itself, the subjective experience is of

70 Hillegonda Rietveld travelling through an endless spiralling tunnel, into an infi nite vortex, a hitech sonic mandala, hypnotising the dancer into a trance. This sensation is often enhanced by the use of digital delay, which generates a soaring sonic space that seems much larger than oneself, comparable to a cathedral or the call to prayer from a minaret, reaching out to infi nity. In this way, the musical structure of psytrance produces a cosmic sonic environment that is at once cosmopolitan in its shared transnational electronic musical aesthetic, yet experienced in diverse localised settings. Cosmopolitanism indicates an awareness of cultural diversity, which used to be the privileged traits of global metropolitan citizens and world travellers (Hannerz 1990). Processes of globalisation, such as increases in worldwide travel, accelerated information networking and expansion of heterogeneous metropolitan areas have enabled a much wider experience of cosmopolitanism (Hopper 2007). Although globalisation is unevenly distributed, it affects everyone in some way (Giddens 2002; Tomlinson 1999). As a consequence, Regev has argued in the context of popular music: “aesthetic cosmopolitanism is not the exception in contemporary cultural practices, but rather the normal and the routine” (Regev 2007: 126). Robertson (1995) has introduced the term glocalization to the study of culture to indicate that globally distributed cultural values and artifacts are localised in a variety of ways, in which one can fi nd “the co-presence, of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies” (Robertson 1997: 221). In the psytrance scene, cosmopolitanism is enabled through a relatively privileged high-mobility of the psytrance scene, in which “global nomads” (D’Andrea 2007) travel from party to party, festival to festival, rave to rave and from web site to web site. At a micro-level, cosmopolitanism is forged on the dance floor where individual participants experience a shared subjectivity during long periods of dancing in a liminal cultural space, experiencing an acute sense of “oneness” with the crowd and with the present, the here and now. In this manner, a Thirdspace is produced (Soja 1996) on the dance-floor, which is wrapped in the clashing echoes of countercultural psychedelic electronica, hedonistic dance club escapism and noisy cultural resistance. In this sense, a “party is no more a field of micro-politics than a carnival of narratives, no more utopia than a heterotopia . . . ” (St John 2004: 34). The cultural spaces of psytrance are diverse and its scene is contested: at once porous and closed, open and protective, embracing and exclusive, explorative yet ring-fencing. For example, Gibson (2001) has shown that in Australia that participants attempt to patrol its self-imposed boundaries of underground hardcore against mainstream trance music, even though the distribution networks of electronic dance music circuits are implicated in the global flows of neoliberal music business. Globalisation is hereby simultaneously a process of diversification and of homogenisation (Robertson 1995, 1997; Tomlinson, 1999; Hopper, 2007). The fragmented multiple musical connections that inform psytrance, reveal the complexity of cultural cosmopolitanism. Straw’s (1991) notion of

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a musical scene is useful here, regarding this as a fluid crossroads in a multidimensional network of musical influences and ideas. As previous chapters in this volume have explored, psytrance is a global electronic dance music developed from Goa trance. Where “Goa trance” indicates a specific locality, a sense of origin, the term “psytrance” is preferred to address the global dispersion of this electronic dance music genre. Goa trance can be further differentiated by its use of electronic hardware music equipment, while the later psytrance is mostly created in a computer based virtual studio, which includes software that can sample and simulate analogue electronic instrument sounds from the 1980s. In addition, Goa trance features drone-like bass-lines, which are relatively “funky” compared to some of the techno minimalism of twenty-fi rst century psytrance. A threshold between the formats of Goa trance and psytrance can be found in the popular album Twisted by Hallucinogen (1995, Dragonfly Records); its psychedelic layers of modulated sequenced sixteenths (sixteen in one measure of 4/4) do not represent but, rather, induce a twisted state of mind. At the start of the twenty-fi rst century, psytrance has developed further towards a more streamlined aesthetic, such as the iconic “full-on” psytrance mixes of Israeli DJ Astrix, who is renowned in the global psytrance scene, whether in Japan, Brazil, Greece or his home country. The variety of directions that psytrance has taken is certainly due to contributions made by new generations in a variety of localities, but also because of the range of music that has contributed to its initial formation and that are, figuratively speaking, part of its genetic make-up. These musical connections are broken, rhizomatic, in which parallel musical developments and the effervescence of sub-genres and niche markets complicate attempts towards a linear encyclopedic understanding. For the purpose of the argument of this paper, a small selection has been made of crossroads on the fuzzy margins of psytrance, such as psychedelic rock, acid house, trance and Goa trance. DJ Goa Gil will fi rst provide a musical focus on the cosmopolitan Goa scene. This will be followed by an overview of relevant early musical formations, especially in London, Chicago and Frankfurt. The chapter will close on the psytrance scene in Japan, demonstrating how processes of glocalization are central to understanding psytrance in terms of a shared cultural cosmopolitanism.

GOA In 1994, the term “Goa trance” hit the main music and news media of the UK, showing that British rave culture and the acid house scene were still alive and well. Top UK DJ Paul Oakenfold played Goa trance as part of his progressive house sets. In London, club nights appeared, such as Return to the Source in Brixton, south London, which embraced this scene; punters could be seen in the early morning lights, huddled around little campfi res in

72 Hillegonda Rietveld a little city park in front of the club, the Fridge, which had closed hours earlier, waiting for the local pub to open so the DJ could plug in and the trance dance would continue. In December 1995, I made the trip to India’s Goa province to join the winter festivities. My investigation was soon directed to DJ Goa Gil who, one dark moon night, played a funky, swirling, psychedelic electronic set in a small open-air club. When I asked Goa Gil why he was playing DATs, rather than vinyl records (as was usual in DJ practices elsewhere) he responded that he only played material that came fresh from studios, which at the time used DAT for their masters. In addition, the tropical heat was not good for vinyl and difficult to send across the world to India by post. With tape, the tracks could not be beat-matched, as is common practice in club mixing. Rather than producing tracks that start with a simple beat, washes of synthesised sound were mixed at the start and end of each record. Although the music induced a trance-like state, I was surprised by the harsh electronic sonic textures and the relentless motorik beats that accompanied this psychedelic other-worldly dance music. Here we were, in a pastoral heaven: luminous waves lapped onto the palm-fringed beach, while jasmine garlands and coconut pancakes scented the warm night air. In contrast, the amplified electronic dance music sounded as though city dwellers had refused to leave their machine noises behind, instead immersing themselves in a musical representation of accelerated electronic culture. I needed to fi nd out more. Straw’s model of a musical scene resonates with Foucault’s (1984) notion of the author as a discursive crossroads, a mobile point in a network of ideas, rather than a unique individual originator. Such a model of authorship can be demonstrated in the practice of the DJ, who explicitly creates a new sound track out of existing recordings. Although not solely responsible for the formation of Goa trance, Goa Gil was certainly an important musical accelerator within the Goa party scene and is still an active DJ in the countercultural psytrance scene. His musical journey runs along the formation of Goa trance in terms of countercultural cosmopolitanism, ritualistic spirituality and hedonism, as well as of developments in electronic music. Goa Gil was part of an early generation of dropouts and freaks who found their way to this part of India in the 1960s and 1970s (Odzer 1995). Leaving San Francisco, “the birthplace of the hippies and the psychedelic movement” (Editorial 2001: web access 2009) for Amsterdam in 1969, he arrived with his acoustic guitar in India in 1970. Here he sought tuition in yoga practices before settling in Goa province, where a small group of ex-pats had found their tropical paradise. Hidden from mass media surveillance for a few decades, this liminal heterotopian Temporary Autonomous Zone (Bey 1991) enjoyed a relatively undisturbed longevity of over two decades. During the 1970s, party gatherings called the Music House took place on Anjuna beach, north Goa, where: “ . . . jet-set nomads, vagabond hippies, and dedicated travelers gathered during x-mas and full moons to party, make music and exchange stories” (Catchlove 2002: web access

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2009). The tastes of the Music House crowd helped them to articulate the cultural values and time–space dimensions of a rapidly changing world. Their musical aesthetics were in tune with the counterculture, resonating towards progressive and psychedelic rock, like Pink Floyd, Gong, Mike Oldfield, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Who, but also reggae, like Bob Marley and, of course, the dub of King Tubby and Lee Perry as well as the electronic space funk of Parliament or Sly Stone.

DREAM MACHINE Kai Mathesdorf suggests in Mushroom Magazine that electronic music may initially not have been the most favoured sound on Goa beaches: “In the season of 87/88 a French DJ named Laurent had the idea to play electronic sounds at a party. At fi rst this brought him hefty opposition, but sometime the spark turned into a fi re, and this bizarre electronic music hit with lasting impressions in the context of this paradise” (Mathesdorf 2002: 8). Complete opposition to electronic music by this rock, reggae and acoustic folk-oriented crowd sounds surprising, since the genealogy of psytrance and traces of psychedelic electronica seem to suggest otherwise. In the 1970s, cosmic and acid rock genres were intertwined with avant-garde electronica, which was widely listened to within an expanding cosmopolitan realm of psychedelic freaks. For example, electronic album An Electric Storm (1969, Island) is a cult classic that, from the early-1970s, slowly but surely seeped onto the hi-fis of countercultural homes. This album was created by the White Noise project, which included Delia Derbyshire, who in 1963 created, with Ron Grainer, the pioneering electronic theme tune for the British Sci–Fi TV series Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This avant-garde rhythmical electronic music, produced before the commercial availability of synthesisers, gave aesthetic and emotional shape to the sound of the arriving information society through painstaking manipulation of TV test tones. Alien, abstract and epic, it lodged itself into the subconscious of children in the UK and elsewhere in the increasingly global matrix of television networks. When the drug ecstasy appeared on the dance floor in the 1980s, enabling revellers to tap into their childhood subjectivity, electronic dance music may indeed have felt like a nostalgic homecoming into the Time Lord’s future. Avant-gardist experimentation in “krautrock” (1970s German experimental music) was also part of the psychedelic musical canon (Reynolds 2000) of the 1970s. For example, Can’s reverberating guitar-based acid rock in “Paperhouse” on Tago Mago (1971, United Artists), contains a lengthy middle-section jam driven by Jaki Liebezeit’s drums in continuous sixteenths, producing an ecstatic motorik. Ash Ra Temple’s 1971 lengthy psychedelic improvisation, “Traummaschine” (dream machine), which includes electronic pioneer Klaus Schulze, contains mesmerising half-note

74 Hillegonda Rietveld chord shifts. Such harmonics are, according to Cole and Hannan (1997), associated with a hypnotic Middle-Eastern tonality that later characterised many Goa trance recordings. The notion of a (super clean) dream machine heralds the concept of a consciousness-altering experience, which may not actually require psychedelic drugs. Ashra’s album New Age of Earth (1977, Virgin), a solo outing by founder Manuel Göttsching, is a good example of such a crisp clean trip; especially the track “Sunrain” twinkles its synthesised looped sequences like summer sunshine on a lake, at once pastoral yet embracing electronic culture. A similar dreamy futurist mood theme can be found on the 1981 track “Ruhige Nervosität” (calm nervousness), on the album E2-E4 (1984, Inteam) that, according to Reynolds, “paved the way for the ambient-techno watercolors of Carl Craig, The Black Dog and The Orb, and even became a Balearic anthem when remade by Sueño Latino” (2000: 31). Carl Craig is a well-known Detroit techno producer, while The Black Dog and The Orb have produced ambient house since the late-1980s in the UK, with connections to the emerging Goa dance scene. In 2006, twenty-five years after recording this track, a gray-haired Göttsching played the full version for nearly one hour, live for the very fi rst time, to an ecstatic Japanese crowd at the electronic dance music festival Metamorphose. Such musical associations and links are examples of “lines of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004), patchy rhizomatic network connections, that give shape to the formation of a musical genre and that are simultaneously its undoing, as they unwind and make new alliances, new connections. The psychedelic electronica of German cosmic rock band Tangerine Dream is also of relevance here. Their music remains popular in Ibiza, the Spanish Balearic island on the other side of the Euro–Asian hippie trail that connects with India and, eventually, Goa (see also D’Andrea 2007). For example, their music is still used in combination with a psychedelic light display to entertain regular tourists who visit Cova de Can Marçà, an old pirate cave in the north of the island. The title track of the album Phaedra (1974, Virgin) was a “novelty” record that reached mass audiences beyond the New Age scene. In the middle section, the unstable oscillator (sound generator) of the Moog synthesiser drifts, resulting in psychedelic electronic arpeggios that, in hindsight, are reminiscent of the modulated sequences of Phuture’s “Acid Tracks” (1987). Acid house developed ten years later in different circumstances, which subsequently directly influenced the psytrance aesthetic. Such independent, yet almost parallel, musical experiments seem to suggest that the accidental stumbling upon unruly machine noises articulate, on a subjective level, a bewildering experience of uncontrollable electronic technology. On Tangerine Dream’s album Force Majeure (1979, Virgin) one can even detect a proto-trance format, without drum programming, on the second half of “Thru Metaphoric Rocks” where, after a guitar rock introduction, arpeggiated sixteenths combine with synthesised drone washes and dream-

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like sound effects for over ten minutes at 138 BPM. By adding a 4/4 beat to an almost identical sequence, British outfit KLF created their trance experiment “What Time Is Love (Pure Trance 1)” (KLF Communications 1988) one decade later. This propelling arpeggio format was generated in the 1970s by the Synthanorma-Sequenzer. In order for the pitch of electronic sounds to remain stable, this sequencer was customised for Kraftwerk’s seminal “TransEurope Express” (1977, Capitol Records), in which the exacting tonality of the sequences produce the experience of travelling on an efficient, modern, fast-moving train: “Letting yourself go. Sit on the rails and ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. Just keep going. Fade in and fade out rather than trying to be dramatic or trying to implant into the music a logical order, which I think is ridiculous. In our society everything is in motion. Music is a flowing artform” (Ralf Hutter, cited by Toop 1992: 21). In its faultless execution, this track influenced pioneers in techno, electro and electronic pop; this was partly due to support on the underground dance floor in New York and because of David Bowie’s earlier attention to Kraftwerk during his 1976 Station to Station tour (Bussy 1993). Kraftwerk’s influence was also due to their timely man–machine philosophy, which explicitly articulated the changing relationship between humanity and its electronic technology. Earlier, in 1973, this futuristic theme had also been addressed by Klaus Schulze, by combining tape-edits of orchestral recordings with the unstable analogue VCS3 synth to create his spacey album Cyborg (2006, Revisited Records).

RITUALISTIC NOISE In the early-1980s, tired of the beach party routine, Goa Gil temporarily left India for San Francisco and London. Although he had already listened to Kraftwerk, he now encountered the electronic sound of post-punk and new wave, such as New Order, Depeche Mode, Cabaret Voltaire and Psychic TV; Yello’s dark twisted disco; electronic body music (EBM) of Front 242; as well as electro breakbeats and HiNRG. In short, he engaged with the pioneering electronic music that also inspired the parallel emergence of techno–trance in Frankfurt, techno in Detroit and acid house in Chicago. Goa Gil exclaims: “There was so much music!!! Music that reflected the times we were living in perfectly” (cited in Chaitu 2001: web access 2009). He returned to Goa with fresh musical ideas, which he combined with the spiritual sadhu skills he learned from his yoga gurus. Photographs showing a dread-locked Goa Gil and others in ritualistic settings, covered in ashes, confi rm an engagement with tantric yoga, a spiritual practice that aims to establish an acceptance of all aspects of existence, the fi nite and the infi nite (Shaw 2007). In 1970, Alice Coltrane and Pharao Sanders translated such trajectory towards enlightenment as Journey to Satchidananda (translation: “blissfully aware existence”) into gently looping acoustic jazz sounds, after encountering Hindu culture in India. However,

76 Hillegonda Rietveld although psytrance utilises similar looping structures, in contrast the electronic textures are amplified at almost physically unbearable noise levels, similar to the electronic post-punk music that Goa Gil encountered in the 1980s. Tantric meditation techniques may include rites of passage in which detached focus is demanded during an assault on the senses. This seems to partly clarify why Goa trance does not attempt to escape nor hide the information overload of accelerated global culture—the music enables a modern version of a tantric-inspired dance ritual that could enable the participant to fi nd a way to cope. As Goa Gil famously states: “the Goa party is not just a disco under the coconut trees . . . it is an initiation” (in Chaitu 2001: web access 2009). Playing long sets, which can last all day and all night, he and his peers set about to connect “beats with spirituality, yoga with music” (Mathesdorf, 2002: web access, 2009), in which “dance is active meditation. When we dance, we go beyond thought, beyond mind, and beyond our own individuality. To become One in the Divine Ecstasy of union with the Cosmic Spirit . . . This is the essence of the Trance Dance Experience” (Goa Gil, cited in Editorial 2001: web access 2009). The idea of a shared relationship to a universal, transcendent cosmos seems to hint at an emotional engagement with cosmopolitanism, based on the senses, on feelings that are given shape through music. Despite a diversity of ritual cultures around the world, Goa Gil enthusiastically annexes their perceived shamanic similarities into his privileged global nomadic perspective to redefi ne “the ancient tribal ritual for the 21st century” (Catchlove 2002: web access, 2009). Saldanha (2007) has argued in this context, that such “techno–shamanism” does not necessarily escape “white modernity” (73), but instead enables “whiteness reinventing itself” (74). Modelling his DJ role as a neo-shaman, Goa Gil takes the crowd into dark psychedelic places, just before sunrise, in order to bring about a sense of liberating rebirth when the new daylight arrives, “According to Goa’s more self-consciously shamanic DJs, the change of pace had a ritual function: after ‘destroying the ego’ with hardcore sounds, ‘morning music’ fills the void with light” (Davis 2004: 261). Davis describes his experience of dawn in Goa on New Year’s Day, 1993, “a deep resonating chant emerges on top of the lush, succulent beats: ‘Om Namah Shivaya.’ It’s a mantra devoted to Shiva, the Hindu god of tantric transformation and hence something of a freak favorite” (2003: web access 2009). To enable this type of dance ritual during the 1980s, Goa Gil and his French DJ colleagues, Laurent and Fred Disko, edited electronic music onto cassette tape (Chaitu 2001: web access 2009). This practice is comparable to that of New York club DJs, who (also during the 1970s and 1980s) customised tracks on reel-to-reel tapes to suit their dance floor, or that of hip hop DJs and turntablists, who created new dance tracks live from the instrumental parts of records. For the Goa parties, Goa Gil explains, vocal sections were taken out of 1980s electronic pop and body music, leaving the synthesiser and drum machine parts to produce a “continuous electronic

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groove” (Catchlove 2002: web access 2009). In addition, the available Indian sound systems in Goa were rather lo-fi, in terms of sound quality, leaving little room for subtle complex sound productions and, instead, encouraging a minimalist sound; according to Tsuyoshi, “How to make a ‘story’ in the night is different there” (cited in Champion 1995: 42). Despite its idyllic setting under the calm palm trees, the countercultural Goa scene thereby contributed to the formation of electronic trance, a soundtrack for an encroaching global information age.

COSMOPOLIS The Goa scene reached far and wide beyond its beach location. Although original edits were created by the DJs for their parties, no original music recordings were produced in Goa. Raja Ram (Ron Rothfield) of The Infi nity Project, who experienced the Goa scene for the fi rst time in the late1980s at the age of 50, states that in 1988, . . . you could go into a record shop, and it was impossible to buy any of this music. It didn’t exist. So the following year, I went back to Goa, as I did for the next eight years. But the next year I went back, I started meeting a lot of the musicians in Goa and it started getting a lot more serious ( . . . ) we ended up making I think 60 tracks or something like that with The Infi nity Project, with Graham [Wood] (cited in Jeff604: web access 2009). Goa’s seasonal winter visitors took their inspiration home, to the UK and Germany, where electronic dance music was developing at an exponentially accelerating pace. Of significance to the further development of Goa trance and subsequently psytrance was, fi rst, the emergence of rave culture at the very end of the 1980s. Second, a variety of electronic dance music styles, notably electronic body music (EBM), acid house and techno, morphed during the 1990s into acid techno, hard house and trance, and further into Goa and psytrance. Third, a process of global professionalisation has taken place, as DJ-producers mature and adapt to wider markets at the start of the twenty-fi rst century. Here, these three genealogical developments will be addressed in more detail. In the UK, the overwhelming presence of rave culture gave rise to a range of musical responses. For example, the protest scene that emerged in reaction to the suppression of UK parties listened to a range of electronic music, of which the compilation Taking Liberties (1994, Totem Records) is a good example, presenting ambient experimentalism of The Orb and System 7; dubbed-out excursions of music from Zion Train; sequenced psychedelic sixteenths by The Drum Club and The Shaman; and a call for cosmopolitan togetherness from Trans-Global Underground. System 7’s fi rst

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release, “Sunburst” (1990, 10 Records) with its relatively gentle analogue bass sound, muted sequenced sixteenths and atmospheric ambient sound effects, in addition to 1970s narrative guitar work by New Age musician Steve Hillage, would have been perfect at sunrise after a dark twisted DJ set on Goa’s Anjuna beach. The Orb function as an interesting musical crossroads. One of its founding members, Jimmy Cauty, was also involved with avant-garde interventionists The KLF (aka The Timelords), whose chart hit “What Time is Love (Pure Trance 1)” (1988, KLF Communications) made an important musical connection between cosmic rock and acid house; its instrumental backing track offers a proto-type for Goa trance, complete with propelling motorik and orientalist psychedelic half-note shifts. Yet, Goa trance did not have a name until 1994, after the establishment of several London-based underground labels, TIP Records and Dragonfly Records. These labels provided a focal point for this genre, featuring artists like Hallucinogen, The Infi nity Project, Astral Projection, Total Eclipse and Paul Oakenfold. The latter DJ-producer is currently more associated with the international club scene rather than with alternative culture, yet had been an influential early pioneer of acid house and Balearic beats several years earlier. In addition, a burgeoning party scene in London, UK, such as Return to the Source and Megatripolis, as well as a range of independent party sound systems, “where the Goa vibe is recreated and injected into the urban sprawl” (Champion 1995: 47), added to the momentum that shifted media attention to this musical format and its scene. In the sleeve notes of TIP’s fi rst compilation CD, packed with examples of Goa trance, Raja Ram boldly declares: So its happened. The apocalyptic megadelic techno explosion with its epicenter in London, hurtling towards some cosmic alien energy goal. The momentus resonating thrust in full hyperdrive, cross fertilization, neuronauts, merging membrains of consciousness, squidgy, spongey, squelchy, holographic multi-dimensionalized adventures in hyperspace (sic: Rothfield 1995: sleevenotes). This brief psychedelic declaration describes the music (“squidgy, spongey, squelchy”) and its connection to a cosmopolitan global info sphere (“techno explosion with its epicenter in London” / “hyperdrive, cross fertilization, neuronauts, merging membrains of consciousness”) from a populist futuristic perspective (“holographic multi-dimensionalized adventures in hyperspace”). It is not coincidental that London appeared as the “epicenter” of Goa trance and acid house, both genres that were forged in local conditions elsewhere, but for which cosmopolitanism is central to their creation and subsequent global spread. As a global city, both in economic and cultural terms, London has a well-developed music and media industry capable of packaging and marketing the latest statements of cultural difference,

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especially in relation to popular music and youth markets. Music labels, corporate global music distributors, club promoters, music journalists and international globetrotters mingle in London, spreading ideas in an accelerated pace, especially with other economically powerful global cities (Sassen 2001), New York, Tokyo and Frankfurt. From an Anglo-American perspective, it seems that the US invents electronic dance music and the UK markets it.

ACID HOUSE The “squelchy” sounds described above produce the psychedelic quality of acid house and trance, its “acid”. It can be argued that the perceived incompleteness of such a wobbly, yet regularly timed, sequence is at the core of the spiritual experience of psytrance. Its unstable tonality produces a gap (or door) in perception, an experience that can also be induced by psychedelic, or hallucinogenic, drugs (Huxley 1954), such as LSD, which since the 1960s has been colloquially referred to as “acid”. The modulating textures of the “acid” sequence create a sense of jouissance comparable to Barthes’ (1993) description of hearing the “grain” of the voice, which additionally raises an awareness of the body that generates the sound; in this case, the sound of the machine, the sequencer, is foregrounded. In electronic dance music, “acid” originally referred to the sound of a modulating bass synthesiser, originally generated by the Roland TB 303 Bassline. In the 1980s, this sound was introduced to the dance floor through the manic minimalist electronic textures of acid house. In Chicago, at the Music Box, between 1983 and 1987, DJ Ron Hardy played hard-hitting bass-heavy sets of imported European post-punk electronica, mixed with local house music and older funk and underground disco recordings. According to Bidder (2001) his lengthy sets, which could run over twenty-four hours, were incredibly intense. The psychedelic dance drugs were central to the experience of this club night. Yet, this was not a lifestyle experiment to produce a higher consciousness, but rather a form of urban escapist hedonism. It was here that a group of young DJ-producers, DJ Pierre, Spanky and Herb J (aka Phuture), handed Hardy a cassette tape with the recording of a Roland Bassline which seemed to have lost its mind: without being programmed, the machine produced its own random notes, while the resonance was modulated by hand and the madness was framed by a 4/4 beat programmed on a Roland TR 808 drum machine. The result of this accident was a psychedelic motorik, which seemed to mix well with Hardy’s eclectic taste in dance music. Phuture called this psychedelic track “In Your Mind”, but it became locally known as “Ron Hardy’s Acid Track”. When the remake, produced by Marshall Jefferson, was fi nally released three years later, their label manager, Larry Sherman, called it “acid house”, due to its similar sound to acid rock (especially, in retrospect,

80 Hillegonda Rietveld the unruly Moog synth of Tangerine Dream’s “Phaedra”). Despite its oddly minimalist structure, the recording of “Acid Tracks” (1987, Trax Records) became a huge dance floor hit, inspiring a wave of acid house records. This house subgenre eventually merged with techno, to morph into acid techno and hard house, the predecessors of trance.

TRANCE-TECHNO Meanwhile in Germany, electronic post-punk superseded cosmic “krautrock” during the early-1980s, as well as the electronic Eurodisco of Giorgio Moroder. In Frankfurt, Talla 2XL coined the term “Techno” in the early1980s in the record shop where he worked, to file the new electronic sound as “music created technologically”, such as: “New Order, Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk, Heaven 17, then later Front 242”. (in Sextro and Wick 2008: 3 mins), more or less the same music that, incidentally, Goa Gil enjoyed and embraced in a parallel world on his sabbatical from Goa. In 1984, Talla and Alex Azary opened Techno Club, which hosted the aggressive macho posturing of electronic body music such as DAF and Nitzer Ebb for a devoted techno–punk crowd; in 1989, the club moved venue to Dorian Gray. In this Frankfurt-based music scene, DJ Dag and DJ Sven Väth matured as DJs, combining this musical aesthetic with acid house and Detroit techno to produce hard house and, in 1991, the format of trance. For Berlin the story is different, due to its relative political and cultural isolation and Cold War occupation before 1989. There, a preference for guitar rock lingered until the arrival of acid and Detroit techno from the UK and the US, which was embraced by the Love Parade, a techno street parade to celebrate the re-unification of Germany in 1989. This small street parade, with a sound system on a lorry, developed into a huge yearly techno– trance event that attracted one million by the end of the 1990s (Böpple and Ralf Knüfer 1998). Here, the different elements of EDM were all brought together under the umbrella term “techno”. In the English-speaking world, techno was fi rst associated with Detroit, where the tag was independently introduced, in a parallel world, to distinguish itself from Chicago house music (Albiez 2005; Savage 1996). Within the trance scene, an exchange of ideas took place between Goa beach freaks and the related Ibiza party scene. This is partly evidenced in a range of sonic references on Sven Väth’s ambitious album An Accident in Paradise (1992, Eye Q Records), which connect the Goa scene with Ibiza, acid house and trance. Väth’s labels, Eye Q Records and Harthouse, have pioneered a European trance format since 1991. Hardfloor’s 1992 “Hardtrance Acperiance 1” (Harthouse) is a well-known example of how “trance revived the acid house sound of 1987–8” (Reynolds 1998: 184). This instrumental track moves away from the minimalism of acid house by multiplying and looping the modulating squelching acid sequences to

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produce ornate sonic shapes, exaggerating its psychedelic “feel” into a seemingly infi nite, yet tightly arranged, mirage. Breakdowns of the drum pattern allow these whooshing electronic textures of sequenced arpeggios to dominate. At the end of each breakdown, the kick drum is re-introduced by a snare riff, running in sixteenths, adding to the excitement of the crowd’s sense of anticipation, like the announcement of an amazing circus trick, in this case the return of the mechanical heart beat, the kick drum. In short, this track offers a blueprint for the structure of trance, providing psytrance with an imminent sense of drama.

SUNRISE The very association of the word “acid” in acid house with psychedelic drug cultures from the 1970s did not only rekindle an interest in acid rock, but also created a British moral panic in 1988 to 1994, which in turn instigated the further exponential success of rave culture (Collin 1997; Garratt 1998; Redhead 1993; Thornton 1995). The tight legislative response pushed DJs and sound systems abroad, to Amsterdam, Berlin and further afield. In turn, this dispersion of musical talent and party energy created waves of electronic dance music activity, which can be found as far away as Japan. According to Shigeki, aka “nickcage” (2002), British DJs started up parties in Tokyo in 1990, like Twilight Zone, initially catering for the nonJapanese expat community, drawing a small crowd of 200 to 300 people, but quickly drawing the interest of a Japanese crowd. Japanese musicians, such as Far East Acid House Quartet, had already explored the earlier acid house scene in the UK. However, according to Eiichi (1997), more were now encouraged to travel abroad to fi nd out about electronic dance music and culture, in London and, especially, Goa; when these “rave travellers” returned to Japan they set up a party scene that took off quite rapidly. Shigeki (2002) and Yoneyama2 argue that this success was due to the economic downturn that started in the early-1990s, leaving many young Japanese feeling disillusioned, comparable to the UK in the late-1980s. The Japanese Equinox raves in particular were a great success between 1994 and 1998. Local DJ Kotarp was joined by London promoter and acid house club pioneer Ian St. Paul from Spectrum and Future, bringing over his Goa trance connections from the UK, such as Blue Room label artists Total Eclipse and Juno Reactor and DJ Dino Psaras. These UK artists are of particular importance to the further global development of Goa and psytrance, due to their crossover with the acid house scene. This is wellillustrated by an early Goa trance compilation released in 1993 by Dino Psaras, called A.C.I.D. on a label of the same name. On the B-side of this vinyl 12-inch record one can fi nd an etching of the Hindu symbol Ohm, suggesting a tenuous connection between Goa trance and yoga philosophy (Ohm is the chant that often opens and closes a yoga session).

82 Hillegonda Rietveld Despite making fashionable references to Hindu culture, for the Japanese psytrance scene, “the ancient ritual for the twentieth century” is, occasionally, localised by making references to Shinto animism, in which every object is thought to possess a spirit. As a syncretic religion, Shinto coexists with Buddhism. In order to explain the concept of shamanism, Shigeki (2002) makes brief references to a Japanese fascination with African drumming as well as to imagery from nomadic Siberian and Native American cultures. This can be further illustrated by the name and concept of the successful TPE psytrance festival and label. TPE Summer Festivals are held in Nagano, a mountainous region known for its important Buddhist Temples, a few hours drive from Tokyo and close to modern Nagano City. A tepee is a Native American dwelling, which holds multiple symbolic meanings. In the fi rst place, it has inspired American countercultural ideas regarding alternative lifestyles since the 1960s. In the second place, in Japan it is felt that the indigenous population may be ethnically related to nomadic tepee dwellers. Yet, its pastoral context does not quite prepare for the music associated with TPE Festival, which includes the aggressive urban guitar trance party sound of the internationally popular Skazi from Israel. In the contemporary Japanese rave scene, then, one finds multiple rhizomatic connections between ancestral nostalgia, machine animism and global dance culture. The Japanese economic depression seems to have provided an incentive for escapist experimentation with psychedelic drugs and MDMA, which became fashionable beyond the older hippie generation as the parties started to draw larger crowds. In this sense, despite local differences, the global psytrance scene seems to tune in and drop out in a comparable manner in Japan, Brazil or Israel. For example, in the Vision Quest video of a Japanese forest party, Gathering 2002, one can see ecstatic facial expressions; raised circling hand movements; communal dancing in a individual subjective “bubbles”; and psychedelic multi-coloured visuals, framed by the sound of Israeli DJ Astrix. The latter produces a wide-open acoustic space with dramatic stops, sampled vocal statements (“he knew all my fears”) and crisp digital granular sound effects, supported by a galloping bass, fl anked by sixteenths. Telling is that the Vision Quest web site3 provides artists’ descriptions of the main internationally significant psytrance DJs (mainly from Israel, followed by the UK and some European countries) in Japanese, English and Brazilian languages, indicating the main areas of psytrance globalisation in 2009. In this way, psytrance production is professionalised and glocalised. Dochakuka (glocalization) is a Japanese business concept that refers to processes through which global product is localised (Robertson 1997). The Japanese economic slump of the 1990s additionally created a need for an individualist consumerism that is free of charge, encouraging the ready adoption of a DiY party philosophy. For example, in 2002, I walked into a free party on a Saturday afternoon, deep in the vast

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Shinjuku Central Park in Tokyo, where the DJ was placed on a large permanent concert stage decorated with colourful psychedelic banners, and the edge of the dance floor displayed traces of a cosmopolitan traveller culture, such as Indian chai tea, Thai curry, vegetarian food (announced in English), German army dump jackets or knitted baggy reggae hats on guys, fluorescent-coloured clothes on girls, an Italian flag, an African drum. For the Japanese scene, the crossover between punk and psytrance seems quite unproblematic, seeing it as part of a creative DiY melting pot of cultural resistance (Shigeki 2002). In 1995, author, rave traveller and DJ Seino Eiichi started a series of free parties in a Tokyo city park with his own sound system and further collaborated with DJ Yoda and DJ Junji to hold other large parties, based on donations. His Balearic Sunrise beach parties attract around 2,000 people, the name referring to Ibiza’s connection to the Goa sunrise trance scene but also to Japan, which self-identifies as “land of the rising sun”. One of the main DJs for the latter parties was DJ Tsuyoshi Suzuki. His musical career is a good example of a Japanese cosmopolitan psytrance trajectory. According to Champion (1995) he was one of the fi rst independent party organisers in Goa. In 1993, he went to London, where he became one of the fi rst DJs for Return to the Source. Together with John Perloff he set up Goa trance label, Matsuri Productions, in 1994 (matsuri means ceremony or ritual). He is, fi fteen years on, a successful DJ in the international psytrance scene with a busy DJ schedule, a record label and his punk rock band, Joujouka. His career seems to follow psytrance to a nihilist destination, as the track “psytrance is going nowhere” on his mix CD Global Psy/Trance: Matsurhythm (2007, Victor) seems to imply, although simultaneously playing with trance’s sense of eternity. Through the album title and the career trajectory of Tsuyoshi, this DJ mix is explicitly positioned within the context of psytrance, yet offers an emphasis on a (digitally simulated) distorted guitar rock aesthetic framed in a tight mechanical motorik. The sleeve design feels close to the German post-punk era: black clothes, the physicality of skin close-up and a cyborgian intimacy with technology. The acoustic space is “dry”, creating a more direct, intimate, man–machine encounter than one hears in the crisp spacious acoustics of, for example, DJ Astrix. Seeing the complex genealogy of psytrance, such diversity is not surprising; in time, such fragmentation can be expected to increase, weaving new musical forms into the digital network of musical relations.

OUTRO Throughout this discussion, the main issue has been to investigate psytrance as a shared cosmopolitan emotional response to electrified culture. It has done so by tracing some of the disjointed, broken, genealogical connections of this psychedelic electronic music genre, in relation to the globalised Goa

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trance scene. This method has unravelled a set of parallel musical developments and connections, showing that, since the 1960s, experiments in electronic music led to psychedelic cosmic rock, long improvisations that could last up to thirty minutes each. Although some popular sources, like the ever-changing Wikipedia, seem to suggest an unbroken connection to trance and techno, this investigation has found a more rhizomatic development. The post-punk generation of the 1980s rejected psychedelic hippie culture; instead of lengthy spaced-out jams, they produced energetic snappy electronic tracks of between three to five minutes each. In their turn, dance DJs would weave these relatively brief recordings into dance sets that could last for hours. Within the context of DJ mix practices, comparable forms of electronic dance emerged independently of each other during the 1980s. In Chicago, acid house emerged, which offered an opening for British producers to make retrospective connections to psychedelic electronica from the 1970s. In Detroit, techno indicated a funky embrace of electronica, while in Frankfurt, techno signified emerging electronic body music, which eventually became trance. Around the same time in Goa, DJs edited instrumental electronic music from the same post-punk electronic sources, forging an aesthetic that was further consolidated in the UK and Germany. In the 1990s, this process accelerated, due to an intensification of globalisation processes, such as cheaper air travel and the emerging Internet, allowing new centres of creative dominance to emerge in Japan, Australia, Brazil and, importantly, Israel. The investigation for this chapter encountered discursive tensions in the psytrance scene. These are rooted in its genealogy, which embraces psychedelic New Age notions of “love, peace and unity”, as well as punk’s aggressive stance of resistance, combined with carefree dance-floor hedonism. An important theme in psytrance is a psychedelic attempt to embrace the digital electronic age in a natural open-air setting to emphasise the redefi nition of an “ancient” ritual, a dance event that is postmodern in its glocalised eclecticisms. This liminal Thirdspace offers a chance of stepping away from processes of globalisation through a sensation of homecoming, whilst simultaneously depending on the very processes of globalisation for its existence: one feels at home with many strangers, exactly because of a shared cosmopolitan experience. In conclusion, psytrance offers an open framework for a wide range of user-groups, as well as locations in which dancers seem similarly affected by global electronic communication technologies. The psychedelic machine aesthetic of psytrance may be understood as an emotional response to global information capitalism, accompanying flexible lifestyles supported by digital technologies. Working out this response within neoliberal and neocolonialist frameworks, a cosmopolitan anarchic eco-political dance party scene has emerged. The great variety of user-groups that engage with the discourse of a global transcendental techno scene means that the

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technocultural cosmopolitan experience is contextualised at local levels, in a complex web of interconnected musical and cultural interests, which contradicts and frays in noisy infi nite spirals towards the dawn of new musical formations. NOTES 1. With many thanks to: Toru Yoneyama for research advice and translations from Japanese; Faculty of Arts & Human Sciences, London South Bank University (UK), for fi nancial support towards a Research Assistant; and the Dancecult-l forum, in particular Graham St John, for an ongoing stimulating academic discussion regarding psytrance. 2. Interview: London, 28 May 2009. 3. Vision Quest: . Last web access: 30 May 2009.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Albiez, Sean. 2005. “Post Soul Futurama: African American Cultural Politics and Early Detroit Techno”. In European Journal of American Culture, 24(2): 131–152. Barthes, Roland. 1993. Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana Press. Bey, Hakim. 1991. TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Bidder, Sean. 2001. Pump Up the Volume. London: Channel 4/ Pan Macmillan Books. Böpplem Friedrich, and Ralf Knüfer. 1998. Generation XTC: Techno & Ekstase. Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag. Bussy, Pascal. 1993. Kraftwerk: Man Machine and Music. Wembley: S.A.F. Catchlove, Lucinda. 2002. “Goa Gil: Redefining the Ancient Ritual for the 21st Century”. Remix Magazine, January Issue. Chaitu. 2001. “Interview with Goa Gil” (last access: 3 March, 2009). Champion, Sarah. 1995. “Goa”. In Tony Marcus, ed. Return to the Source: Deep Trance and Ritual Beats (CD Booklet). London: Return to the Source, pp 36–51. Cole, Fred, and Michael Hannan. 1997. “Goa Trance: A Psykotropic Trip Through Tribedelic Landscapes”. In Perfect Beat, 3(3): 1–14. Collin, Matthew. 1997. Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House. London: Serpent’s Tail. D’Andrea, Anthony. 2007. Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa. London and New York: Routledge. Davis, Erik. 2003 [1995]. “Sampling Paradise: The Technofreak Legacy of Golden Goa”. (last accessed: 2 May, 2009). . 2004. “Hedonic Tantra: Golden Goa’s Trance Transmission”. In Graham St John, eds. Rave Culture and Religion, pp. 256–272. London and New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum. Dragonfl y. 1994. Sleevenotes. Order Odonata. London: Dragonfl y Records. Editorial. 2001. “Interview with Goa Gil”. In Freeze Magazine. August, 14. Translated from Greek: . (last access: 12 May 2009).

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Eiichi, Otan. and Geoffrey Johnson (photographs). 1997. Ravel Traveler (踊る旅 人). Tokyo: Ota Shuppan. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “What is an Author?” In Paul Rabinow, ed. The Foucault Reader, pp. 101–120. London: Peregrine/Penguin. Garratt, Sheryl. 1998. Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture. London: Headline. Gibson, Chris. 2001. “Appropriating Means of Production: Dance Music Industries and Contested Digital Space”. In Graham St John, ed. FreeNRG: Notes for the Edge of the Dance Floor, pp. 237–255. Altona: Common Ground. Giddens, Anthony. 2002. Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Profile. Hannerz, Ulf. 1990. “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture”. In M. Featherstone, ed. Global Culture. pp. 237–252. London: Sage. Hesmondhalgh, D. (forthcoming) “Music, Digitalisation and Copyright”. In P. Golding and G. Murdock, eds. Understanding/Unpacking Digital Dynamics. New York: Hampton Press. Hopper, Paul. 2007. Understanding Cultural Globalization. Cambridge: Polity. Huxley, Aldous. 1954. The Doors of Perception. New York: Harper. Jeff604. (unknown) A Decade of Psychedelic Trance. . (last accessed: 9 May 2009). Mathesdorf, Kai. 2002. “A History of Psychedelic Trance”. Mushroom Magazine (International Edition No. 1), No. 81, January, 4–24. Odzer, Cleo. 1995. Goa Freaks: My Hippie Years in India. Crested Butte, CO: Blue Moon Books. Redhead, Steve, ed. 1993. Rave Off, Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture. Aldershot: Avebury/Ashgate. Regev, Motti. 2007. “Cultural Uniqueness and Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism”. In European Journal of Social Theory 10(1): 123–138. Reynolds, Simon. 1998. Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture. London: Picador/Macmillan. . 2000. “Kosmik Dance: Krautrock and its Legacy”. In Peter Shapiro, ed. Modulations: A History of Electronic Music: Throbbing Words on Sound, pp. 24–37. New York: Caipirinha. Rietveld, Hillegonda. 1998. This Is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and Technologies. Aldershot: Ashgate. . 2004. “Ephemeral Spirit: Sacrificial Cyborg and Soulful Community”. In Graham St John, eds. Rave Culture and Religion, pp. 45–60 London and New York: Routledge. Robertson, Roland. 1995. “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity”. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, R. Robertson, eds. Global Modernities, pp. 25–44. London: Sage. . 1997. “Comments on the ‘Global Triad’ and ‘Glocalization’”. In Nobutaka Inoue, ed. Globalization and Indigenous Culture (Gurôbaru-ka to minzoku bunka), pp. 217–225. Tokyo: Institute for Japanese Culture and Classics, Kokugakuin University. Rothfield, Ron (aka Raja Ram). 1995. Sleevenotes. Yellow. London: TIP Records. St John, Graham. 2004. “The Difference Engine: Liberation and the Rave Imaginary”. In Graham St John, eds. Rave Culture and Religion, pp. 19–45. London and New York: Routledge. Saldanha, Arun. 2007. Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

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Savage, Jon. 1996. “Machine Soul: A History of Techno”. In Time. Travel—From the Sex Pistols to Nirvana: Pop, Media and Sexuality, 1977–96, pp. 310–323 London: Chatto and Windus. Schäfer, Sven, Jesper Schäfers, and Dirk Waltman. 1998. Techno-Lexikon. Berlin: Raveline Magazin / Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf Verlag. Shaw, Scott. 2007. Yoga: A Spiritual Guidebook. Hermosa Beach, CA: Buddha Rose Publications. Shigeki, Kimura (aka nickcage). 2002. Psychedelic Trance Party Handbook (サイケ デリックトランスパーティハンドブック). Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-andImagined Places. Malden, MA, Oxford and Carlton Vic: Blackwell. Straw, Will. 1991. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Scenes and Communities in Popular Music.” Cultural Studies, 5(3): 361–375. Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity. Toffler, Alvin. 1981. The Third Wave. Toronto, New York, London: Bantam Books. Tomlinson, John. 1999. Globalization and Culture. Cambridge: Polity.

DOCUMENTARIES Sextro, Maren, and Holger Wick. 2008. We Call It Techno: A Documentary About Germany’s Early Techno Scene and Culture. (Documentary Film based on interviews and eyewitness footage). Sense Music & Media, Media Atelier. Germany. Vision Quest. 2002. “Astrix in Japan”, from: The Gathering 2002. (promotional festival document fi lmed in Hiwadakougen, Gifu, Japan). Vision Quest. Tokyo, Japan. . (last accessed: 29 May, 2009).

DISCOGRAPHY Ashra. New Age of Earth. 28 958 XOT. Virgin Records. 1977. UK. Ash Ra Temple “Traummaschine”. Ash Ra Temple. (1971). 14244. Temple. 1991. Germany. Can “Paperhouse”. Tago Mago. UAS 29 211/12 X. United Artists. 1971. Germany. Coltrane, Alice, feat. Pharao Sanders Journey to Satchidananda AS–9203. Impulse! 1970. US. Derbyshire, Della. “Doctor Who”. 1963. BBC Radiophonic Workshop: A Retrospective. Phonic3cd. BBC Worldwide. 2008. UK. DJ Tsuyoshi. “psytrance is going nowhere”. Global Psy/Trance Matsurythm (mixed by DJ Tsuyoshi). VICP–63678. Victor. 2007. Japan. Göttsching, Manuel. “Ruhige Nervosität” E2-E4. ID 20.004. Inteam GmbH. 1984. Germany. Hallucinogen. Twisted. bflcd 15. Dragonfly Records. 1995. UK. Hardfloor. “Hardtrance Acperiance 1”. HH 008. Harthouse. 1992. Germany. KLF. “Last Train to Trancentral”. KLF 004 T. KLF Communications. 1988. UK. . “What Time is Love (Pure Trance 1)”. KLF 004 T. KLF Communications. 1988. UK. Kraftwerk. “Trans-Europe Express”, 75001. Capitol Records. 1977. Germany. Phuture. “Acid Tracks”. X142. Trax Records. 1987. US.

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Schulze, Klaus. Cyborg (1973). SPV 305252. Revisited Records. Germany. System 7. “Sunburst”. TENX 335DJ. 10 Records. 1990. UK. Tangerine Dream. “Phaedra”. Phaedra. V 2010. 1974. Virgin Records. UK. . “Thru Metaphoric Rocks”. Force Majeure. V 2111. Virgin Records. 1979. Various. A.C.I.D. ACID 001. A.C.I.D. 1993. UK. . Taking Liberties. TTPCD 005. Totem Records. 1994. UK. Väth, Sven. An Accident in Paradise. 4509 91193–1. Eye Q Records. 1992. Germany. White Noise An Electric Storm. ILPS 9099. Island Records. 1969. UK. Zyon. “No Fate” (Back from Goa Mix, by Sven Väth). PRO 677. Eye Q Records/ WEA Music GmbH. 1992. Germany.

BONUS TRACKS Aphex Twin. “Didgeridoo”. RS9201. R&S. Astrix (‫)סקירטסא‬. Artcore. HMCD 37. Hom-mega. 2006. Israel. DAF / Deutsch Amerikanischer Freundschaft. Alles Ist Gut (1981). DAF1CD. Mute Records. 1998. UK. Prãnã “Scarab E.P”.. MP01. Matsuri Productions. 1995. UK. Various. Deep Trance and Ritual Beats. RTTSCD 1. Return to the Source. 1995. UK. Various. Goa trance: Psychedelic Flashbacks. TRIPBX1. Rumour Records. 1998. UK. Various. Order Odonata. BFLCD 13. Dragonfly Records. 1994. UK Various. Yellow. TIP CD1. TIP Records. 1995. UK.

5

Psychedelic Trance Music Making in the UK Rhizomatic Craftsmanship and the Global Market Place Charles de Ledesma

We see emerging, piecemeal and with the greatest ambiguity, the seeds of a new noise, one exterior to the institutions and customary sites of political confl ict. A noise of Festival and Freedom, it may create the conditions for a major discontinuity extending far beyond its field. It may be the essential element in a strategy for the emergence of a truly new society (Attali 1985: 133). Music has a life of its own, you can’t stick a rut in it or try and control it. It will roam wherever it pleases. Maybe we’ll be old and say it all sounds the same: it sounds like noise! (Simon Posford 1997).1

WANTED! THAT OLD GOA STUFF FROM THE MID-NINETIES “Hi. Really interested in listening to some old school style Goa trance, just wondering if anyone could give me some pointers as to what sort of avenues I should be looking into? Thanks”. The inquiry posted by Keta Miner to psytrance portal PsyMusic on July 10, 2006, triggered a few suggestions, including: “listen to astral projection”; “old cosmosis albums . . . check ‘howling by the moon’”; “‘twisted’—fi rst hallucinogen album. Didn’t need to say that really did I?”; “Doof—lets turn on; shamanic tribes on acid— whatever you can get hold of”.2 What is clear from this list is that, besides Israel’s iconic Astral Projection, all the artists are from Britain. Although you may expect a privileging of UK acts on a UK web site, it is fair to argue that the centre ground of old-school psychedelic trance is predominantly held by the British. The enthusiasm for revisiting the early years is not just limited to chat rooms. In late 2007, UK psytrance label, Twisted, hosted a party at south London’s Renaissance Rooms which featured an “old school Goa room”, where two of the three original members of the key early-1990s UK live act, The Green Nuns of the Revolution, 3 went through their back catalogue featuring numbers like “Megallenic Cloud”’ and “Conflict”. We might be reminded here

90 Charles de Ledesma not only of the circularity of electronic dance music forms, but also of the coherence of psychedelic—now psytrance—music culture. This account examines the development of UK styles and considers the practices of psytrance music making and the industry that exists around it. I suggest that music production in this multi-constituent genre has been continuously creative and particularly expressive, fi red and perpetuated by rhizomatic working practices. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari fi rst conceptualise the rhizome as a radically different way of envisioning thought and practice in the world: “a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles” (1987: 8). Deleuze and Guattari contrast the rhizomatic to arborescent structures, arguing that the latter, with their “trees” and “branches”, defi ne, stratify and delimit. In contrast, the rhizome basks in multiplicities, lines of fl ight and becomings which, by dint, promise a less territorialised and stratified, thus more creative, world. For Deleuze scholars Christa Albrecht-Crane and Jennifer Daryl Slack, lines of fl ight can be understood as the driving force for creative life. “Lines of fl ight are instantiations of desire, the primal forces upon which society is built. As such, they form a productive, affi rmative, and positive dynamism pointing to the nexus of change” (2007: 102). Although Deleuze and Guattari avoid popular music in their work, they did create a linkage between the rhizomatic and music in general: “Music has always sent out lines of fl ight, like so many ‘transformational multiplicities’, even overturning the very codes that structure or aborify it; that is why musical form, right down to its ruptures and proliferations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome” (1987: 13). A good case can be made for the rhizomatic character of UK psytrance on a number of levels: the alchemical merger of styles present at its inception; the exploratory, even anarchic, use of technology; the almost immediate global spread of its sonic motifs and the appearance on the scene of Australian born, and guitarist turned studio wizard, Simon Posford. However, in applying rhizomatics to UK psytrance music we will also see how producers have indeed struggled to maintain liberating lines of fl ight in the face of commodification, taste cultures and stylistic trends. As Deleuze and Guattari warn, “you may make a rupture, draw a line of fl ight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything” (1987: 10). In an interview I conducted in March 2009, Dick Trevor, from the British Goa trance act The Green Nuns of the Revolution, reflected on the creative fervour of those early years, 1992 to 1994, remarking that he had set out to make “fun, having it, party music which was ridiculously over the top”. But why were he and fellow producers drawn to this particular line of sonic flight and what precisely went into the construction of music of such an ecstatic ordering? And why, amidst the droves of current psytrance CDs and MP3s, are some fans thirsty to hear a return to the basics?

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RHIZOMIC MUSIC EXPRESSION: FROM DOWNTOWN NEW YORK TO LONDON VIA GOA Tracking detections of rhizomatic musical activity is a bit like looking for weeds in a neatly cultivated, arborescent-dominated garden. While Simon Reynolds suggest that “‘rhizomatic’ music might include the fractal, flow motion funk of Can and early seventies Miles Davis . . . and the cut ‘n’ splice mixology of hip hop, house and jungle DJs” (2008: 388), Marcel Swiboda, highlighting Davis’ genre-rupturing late-1960s/early-1970s period, suggests that “the combinations of trumpet, microphone, wah-wah pedal, Synthi, echoplex . . . open up a wider set of connections” (2004: 205). These connections, Swiboda argues, “tend towards a process of destratification, a deterritorialising of the territorial relationship pertaining to the human components” (ibid). Meanwhile Jeremy Gilbert tells us that Indian classical music is “a striking example of a rhizomatic musical culture” (2003: 133) before asserting that “Indian music was in some ways catalytic in the formation of the entire milieu of psychedelic culture during the 1960s” (ibid). But it is in an examination of New York’s artistic downtown assemblage that the rhizome becomes synchronous with musical processes. In discussing the multi-talented New York composer Arthur Russell, Tim Lawrence identified Russell’s lifestyle and music-making process as fitting squarely into the rhizomatic anti-structure of late-1970s and early-1980s creative artistic practice where buildings in downtown New York would morph between arts lab, squat and performance space, and musicians would double- or triple-up as artists, poets, DJs and audience. First, Lawrence highlights the value to Russell’s social and artistic milieu. “The collaborations and the network are more important than any purportedly individual contribution, even if the creative producers in the network are active agents and not mere products” (Lawrence 2007: 7). Next, Lawrence suggests that Russell “worked rhizomatically to the power of seven, inasmuch as he democratized the decision-making process” while working across lines of flight including post-disco, no-wave and post modern minimalism. His was an aesthetic that “was often decentered, loosely structured, non-hierarchical and non-teleological” (19). Finally, the ever-shifting array of components Russell used and accessed were ultimately an ever-shifting array of interlocking components, “sonic blocks of experimentation” (15), rather than distinct packages like CD releases, studio events and live performances. The artistic ferment of early-1980s downtown New York, as personified in Russell’s wildly eclectic creativity, was primarily an underground feeding frenzy; a set of ever-shifting components made understandable via another of Deleuze and Guattari’s favoured concepts, that of the desiring assemblage. But the assemblage was more inward-looking than exteriorising. Russell, Lawrence notes, was instrumental to the creative activity, but it is clear he was a minoritarian craftsman—a charismatic music maker whose work has been difficult to track down, re-released only in recent years on

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niche labels or accessible by persistent searches in digital domains. Following Reynolds’, Swiboda’s and Lawrence’s approach, I now turn to another desiring assemblage, that of UK psychedelic trance in search of an alternate musical rhizome, one which can “blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 16).

THE UK PSYTRANCE RHIZOME: SOCIAL NETWORKS AND WORKING PRACTICES The slowly gestating late-1980s Goa-inspired trance music production model offered contemporary methods of digital dispersal and rapidly globalising social connectivity to proliferate sonic mycelia. The UK would be the prime recipient of the unique Goa party event assemblage as it was transported by travellers of many hues, cultures, races and tastes. The model was technological as well as social. Working practices included musical sensibilities, instrument skills exchange, bags of DATs containing samples, hardware equipment and nowadays, software music-making programs and files bursting with music, usually cosseted within a trim Mac. Fred Cole and Michael Hannan (1997) suggest the parameters of early psychedelic trance evolved out of eclectic 1980s sonic components road-tested at parties held on Goa beaches Candolim, Arambol and Anjuna. The embryonic style—initially more a varied and enticing sonic palette suited for psychedelic experimentation—spread out from Goa to micro-nodes, especially London, as DJs including Martin Glover (aka Youth) and Crisbo returned from south India with cassette mixes. The two crews who would put on regular Goa style parties in and around London from 1989 onwards, were Ahimsa, in the city’s Eastern quarter, and Panjaea to the West. With a wide-ranging music policy, Ahimsa was set up by the duo, Anjim and Ack. They followed a quasianarchist ethos “opening up” buildings for a night or using insalubrious sites like an East London quarry and rubbish tip. In a roundtable discussion on the early-1990s at Gregory Sams’ house,4 Anjim described how, in their zeal to put on parties in potentially non-disruptible locations, they had arrived on one occasion under cover of darkness, only to realise in the light of day that the site was condemned as “contaminated”. From then on this was referred to as “the toxic party”. Ahimsa continued to grow, finding sites for early labels, TIP and Flying Rhino, as well as putting on larger and extravagant underground parties; one in the mid-1990s, held under the shadow of Battersea power station, has attained legendary status in the scene. Panjaea, on the other hand, was more of a semi-legal entity, hiring small clubs like Woody’s and The Sanctuary for a more purist Goa trance session. Run by Mark Maurice and Jason Smith, with house DJs Mike Maguire (from Goa trance band Juno Reactor) and Flying Rhino’s Dominic Lamb and James Munro, the aim, claimed Maurice in the documentary A Day with Mark and an Evening with Jason (1992)5 was to “tap into the

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shamanic realm”. Maurice suggests that “the shaman is a healer”, and “the dance”, furthermore, “has to be therapeutic”. Later in the documentary, Smith expanded on their party ethos: “we are wanting to promote positivity, individualism, free thinking; some sort of group unity. Basically we are trying to bring people together”. Meanwhile, the collective, Little People, which included George Barker who would set up Flying Rhino in West London with Lamb and Munro, opted for more rural sites. Author Gregory Sams6 remembers 1992 as the year when the Goa trance rhizome sprouted across London: “My warm up was a Whirl-Y-Gig party, or three. Then I was tipped off about a TIP party in a fi rst floor warehouse-type room that I think was off Clapham Common, south London—acid punch and very hot. I also got quite a few Ahimsa parties in. I remember the Pagan parties (1993–1994), particularly at Tyssen Street, with great nostalgia”. The Ahimsa crew would have identified with the spatialised ethics of Russell’s downtown New York approach: find a building, take it over, decorate and install the accoutrements needed for a party, put out the word, click play, enjoy, then move out and onto the next one. The Russell period had been defined by an anything-goes music aesthetic: slick, thin Eurodisco, lean, brooding electro, tunnel-shaped dub interiors and fragmented soul vocals characterised the post-disco dance music in New York City. For London, circa 1990 to 1992, the inspiration lay, first, in the mixes French DJ and longtime Goa visitor, Laurent, put together at parties on full-moon nights, and later in simple studio experiments, laid on DAT, where dub-inflected instrumentals and snippets of voice and ethnic instruments were paired with electronic pulses and noise from mutant synths like the Roland 303 and 909.7 The unique formula found common cause with emerging contemporary electronic music forms: ambient dub and Dr Alex Paterson’s8 The Orb; robotic but sensual Detroit techno; dubby Chicago house with sexy snippets of faraway vocals, and more besides. While Nick Jones summarised early trance as a “glorious collision of sliding analogue synths, gurgling 303s, racing kick drums and huge, powerful epic breakdowns” (in Gore 1997: 63), Cole and Hannan privilege tempo, sounds, form, tonal and melodic devices and rhythm division. In general, the structure of a Goa trance track reflects the idea of a journey, both in a mythological sense and as a reflection of the LSD experience. Paralleling the archetypical hero setting out on his quest, the tracks start with a subtle undulation of sound. These slowly intensify, with constant timbral evolution and accretion carrying the listener along the narrowly defined pathway of the trance experience (1997: 7). The transposing of a psychedelic sensuality into sonic form was a prime purpose of the early producers. And it was through experimenting with timbre that this aim was largely carried out. Whereas Cole and Hannan agree that timbre was a fundamental component in early Goa trance, Peter

94 Charles de Ledesma Jowers has gone some way in conceptualising it in electronic dance music (EDM). Jowers, picking up a cue from Deleuze and Guattari, believes the artist’s task is to capture “forces, densities and intensities” (1999: 342– 343), with the manipulation of timbre (in EDM) arriving directly from the fundamentally expressive synthesiser. “Timbre is ‘noise’ within sound waves. It is the ‘grain’, character or quality of any sound understood as distinct from its pitch and intensity. Combined with highly repetitive rhythm, timbres contain a key to dance music’s aesthetic, particularly its capacity to convey encoded human affect” (1999: 392). Not all authors shared Cole’s and Hannan’s enthusiasm for the playful, skewed noises of the transposed Goa party sound developed by Dick Trevor in his urgency to “pick you up with as much energy as possible”, or producer/DJ Tristan Cooke’s aim to get the crowd to “laugh at the sheer lunacy of it all”. In Energy Flash, pop music analyst Simon Reynolds claimed of Goa trance that it was mostly “ornate and cinematic, full of arpeggiated synth-refrains and mandela-swirls of sound” (2008: 151). And, in a denial of the evidently trans-cultural character of the expanding Goa trance culture, Reynolds added: “For all its cult of the mystic Orient, Goa trance is sonically whiter-than-white. All the creativity is in the top level (melody and filigree), with not a lot going on in the rhythm section”. In the 2008 updated and expanded edition of Energy Flash, however, Reynolds recognised that he had been too quickly dismissive. He had encountered a darker mood in late-1990s production, fi nding this more pleasing to his aesthetic palette—one driven by his penchant for, and identification with, the “hardcore continuum”.9 Interestingly, it would be in the arrival of a darker sound that would see signs of stratification in the rhizome, wherein the lines of fl ight would become less consistent, or deterritorialising. As Deleuze and Guattari remind us “unlike a tree, a rhizome is not an object of reproduction” (1987: 23). However, they also caution against any binary explanation, reflecting that there are rhizomes in trees, and trees in rhizomes. As long as “desire” is there then “the rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” (ibid).

THE ENGINE ROOMS OF UK GOA TRANCE: TIP, DRAGONFLY AND FLYING RHINO Dick Trevor remembers writing his first tune, “Megallenic Cloud”, then setting off to India for a six-month sojourn (1992–1993). Early versions of the track were played at a couple of Anjuna parties, before Trevor returned to find a request from TIP Record’s Raja Ram who wanted the track for the Blue Compilation (TIP Records, 1995), part of his iconic colour-coded compilation series. The main centre of action in late 1993 was Butterfly Studios, run by Martin Glover (aka Youth, former Killing Joke bassist), who had formed the label Dragonfly, releasing the key early Goa trance compilation,

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Order Odonata Vol. 1, in 1994. “The real buzz was what Youth was doing at Butterfly”, recounts Trevor. “Then, it was hard to buy equipment as it was really expensive. Youth would say to people ‘come down here and make the tunes and if I like them I’ll put them out’. Of course, there wasn’t very much money in it”. Trevor, along with fellow Green Nun, Matt Coldrick, would soon build a studio in their London apartment, sending the tunes off to be mastered professionally. “That’s how I’ve been doing it ever since”. Dick Trevor recalls that the early tracks had a certain structure codified by the pragmatic needs of the day. “They always started and ended with ambient bits because people DJ’d off DATs. No one was putting them originally on vinyl as they were all to be played primarily in [remote] places like Goa. After that, a good dance track would build to a peak before subsiding”. In 1994, another UK producer, Jeremy Van Kampen (aka Laughing Buddha), who has a background in classical music and sound engineering, teamed up with Bill Halsey to form Cosmosis.10 The duo’s debut album Cosmology (Transient Records, 1996), is a perfect example of Trevor’s emphasis on the pursuit of energy to fi re up dance propulsion, and Jowers’ emphasis on timbral distortion. Van Kampen contends that the panoramic colour field—the chromatics—of the early music had much to do with the analogue equipment used. “Making the tracks was more visual and tactile. The most immediate difference is the hands-on aspect of it; in the past you’d have all these physical knobs to turn. Now it’s a very different process. When you’ve got something on the screen and you’re doing it with a mouse, you can only move one parameter at a time”. Dick Trevor concurs: “The earlier material was in some respects simpler as you only had a few bits of kit”. The immensely varied music from mid-1990s production teams—Flying Rhino’s Slinky Wizard, Process, Green Nuns and Blue Planet Corporation; TIP’s Infi nity Project, Hallucinogen, Man With No Name, Antidote and Psychopod; and Dragonfly’s Prana, Total Eclipse and Black Sun—were then as much to do with the equipment available as an affective, Goa-infused psychedelic sensibility. Van Kampen remembers that in those days it was a new music form and that there were: no rules; no boundaries. People didn’t know what to expect; it was something new and they were open to wherever it took them. There’s nothing like plugging in an old analogue synth and hitting record and making lots of squelches and other noises. Then we’d cut it up afterwards, see what’s there, snip out the good bits and work them into the track. We weren’t trying to control it too much—just trying to channel it, to feed it. 11 In e-mail dialogue with me, Grover Smith (aka Ott),12 an engineer who worked at Youth’s Butterfly Studios and who would later produce the CD Hallucinogen in Dub, enthused about this period:

96 Charles de Ledesma Every producer had their own distinct sonic signature. You knew when you were listening to Martin Freeland (Man With No Name), or Simon Posford (Hallucinogen), or Graham Wood (Infi nity Project), or Total Eclipse. Everyone was using different gear in different ways and it really was a psychedelic feast containing fuel for your brain and fuel for your arse in equal measures with all senses catered for. Smith paints the picture of a creative, visceral and social music-making culture among a small group of producers in mid-1990s London. Youth’s approach was pretty spontaneous and I learned a lot from it. In the course of a day we’d fi ll up a 24-track tape with whatever took our fancy—some drums, a bass-line, and layers of stuff generated pretty randomly. We’d get it sounding as good as we could and then do multiple passes onto DAT, muting stuff, playing with FX and synth parameters in the style of a good old fashioned dub mix. When we had enough down we’d take it upstairs to the edit room where there was an early Sound Designer II set up—the forerunner to Pro-Tools—and edit the mixes down to about 8 minutes. Track fi nished! It was quick, creative and very good fun, even though the results weren’t always terribly impressive, sonically speaking.13 The music-making process in the London of the early-1990s fits the rhizomatic formula already identified. With collaborative working practices where sonic blocks of experimentation were central and where the sounds used were “non-despotic” (Lawrence 2007: 19), producers accessed exteriorised social networks and were building an artistic community. At the helm of this small group of UK music makers was a young Simon Posford, whose monikers have included Hallucinogen and, with Raja Ram, Shpongle. His early Hallucinogen 12-inch releases on Dragonfly, “LSD” and “Alpha Centauri”, showed a keen sensibility to form and melody as well as razor-sharp precision and lavish use of vocal samples. In a 1997 conversation with the London-based trance-zine Dream Creation, Posford commented on the music-making process. “I do (make tunes from start to fi nish) but I also come back to them. I might have a sample or idea to start with then you start arranging, deranging and put a structure on it”.14 Van Kampen goes into closer detail: “You start with a loop, decide the key and tempo and you write a bass and a kick drum. They dictate the engine of the track. You can then stretch that out, and add new sounds and sections. The arrangement stage thus spreads it out over a period of time: the dynamics, the breaks, and the punctuation”. In a later interview, Posford described a collective working method behind his Unusual Suspects project, reminiscent of Russell and the downtown assemblage. Posford might have been making music in a middle-class south England rural enclave but he was fi rmly plugged into the global portal of a maturing, cosmopolitan psychedelic trance scene

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utilising the skills of the veteran French producer, Serge Souque, Dutchman Shajahan Matkin (aka Riktam from live act GMS) and British DJ/producer Tristan Cooke. All the artists involved [on Twisted, the label he formed in 1996] are good mates, familiar with each others’ sound, and totally at ease in the studio. It wasn’t really planned as such; I just did tracks with whoever was staying at my house at the time. For example, Tristan came down to play Frisbee for a couple of days, so we started a track together . . . meanwhile Serge (from Total Eclipse) was doing a gig in London, so he came down to chill in the countryside and joined us in the studio. Then Riktam (from GMS) was coming into town. Since he was flying out the next day there was little point in starting a new tune, so he got involved in a different mix of the tune that was still sitting on my computer.15

FESTIVAL IN A CLUB: PSYCHEDELIC TRANCE AND RETURN TO THE SOURCE The groundwork laid by these pioneers blossomed in 1997 when “clubs the world over began to switch to trance nights” (Prendergast 2003: 464). The kernel of the London scene remained a host of venues ranging from the commercial clubs to uninhabited buildings borrowed for a night or two in the Ahimsa vein. Legal venues included south London’s Fridge and Tyssen Street Studios in East London’s Hackney district, a zone very much like New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980s, when it was as likely as not your car would be broken into whilst you partied the night away. No venue better represented the dynamism of the time than Tyssen Street. Dancers would alternate each weekend from Goa trance, to likewise UK-produced acid techno and onto a new style, techno trance, which profi led material mostly from North and Central European artists. Birmingham’s answer to Tyssen Street was Spacehopper, held in a mainstream space, which launched key DJs/producers, including Sebastian Taylor (Digitalis) and Tristan Cooke, who would often road-test material from innovative Central England-based label, 21–3.16 Urban trance parties also took place in quasi-legal or downright illegal bars, along with warehouses, pubs, houseboats and squats. Chris Partridge has pointed out that, after the Criminal Justice Act (see next section), “Easternized Goa trance went over-ground and exploded into media consciousness” (2006: 173). Eastern references in Goa’s visual and fashion tropes were being replaced by pagan or futuristic pastiches, leading Partridge to consider that “paganised romanticism and dance as meditation was surfacing in mainstream popular culture” (ibid). The engine room for this transformation was Return to the Source (RTTS), run by veteran Goa DJs Andy Guthrie and Crisbo, and Australian musician/healer Chris Dekker, who

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would go on to found Earthdance, a global network of events held annually on the same day, designed to raise planetary awareness through party communitas. The nights at the Fridge and latterly, at the massive Academy, both in south London, popularised and, to some degree, commodified psychedelic trance for a metropolitan audience. This micro assemblage was a good example of how the burgeoning UK psychedelic trance culture now needed to work less rhizomically and more arboreally, using stratification to expertly organise a platform for genre stylisation and neo-psychedelic culture promotion. Deleuze and Guattari had predicted this kind of fold in intensities, where an immanent “map” may be replaced by the more representational “tracing”: “The important point is that the root-tree and the canal-rhizome are not two opposed models: the fi rst operates as a transcendental model and tracing, even if it engenders its own escapes; the second operates as an immanent process and outlines a map, even if it constitutes its own hierarchies, even if it gives rise to a despotic channel” (1987: 22). With its no-holds-barred approach to design decor, music programming and fashion expression, RTTS was clearly perpetuating Dick Trevor’s “no boundaries, no rules” mantra, but within a grand, legitimised, psychedelic space. RTTS had two master DJs: Tsuyoshi Suzuki and Mark Allen. They would take turns to end the night, pounding out their signature fast, heavy, intense and multi-layered psychedelic trance sets, now deftly mixed on vinyl. Elsewhere in the RTTS assemblage, early-1990s ambient dub was reconstructed as “live” psychedelic chill-out by bands including Astralasia and Another Green World. Oxford Brookes University Professor Roger Griffi n attended many RTTS parties and contributed to the sleeve notes for the release Deep Trance and Ritual Beats (1995). “Big raves, small raves, expensive raves, free raves: going to raves, it became luminously clear that something very special is happening, not just to those who go, but to modern society. Essentially, I saw people going back to one of the original meanings of music, to the root experience of trance and dance: transcendence”.17 Dekker also set up an eponymous record label which, like Germany’s Spirit Zone, specialised in double album releases—one side power trance and the other flagging a new style of ornate, world-music chill-out. RTTS consequently offered a multi-generational, extensive base, pulling from New Age constituencies, the professional classes, folk fans and other dance music genre supporters to augment the Goa traveller and party-goer “in the know”. This was an ecumenical coalition, developing and deepening the spatial dynamics and ethical spirit of earlier festivalsin-clubs, like the late Fraser Clarke’s Megatripolis and the later club, Parallel YOUniversity. These events launched the psychedelic trance DJ and live act, as spectacle. Van Kampen assesses that, in just a few short years, party aesthetics had shifted from the warmer, psychedelic-inspired and individualistic sonic contours of Goa trance to a harder sound powered by kick drum, sub-

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bass frequencies and a chirping menagerie of treated, or time-stretched, voice samples. Party goers were now focusing on the stage, physically and psychologically elevating the DJ or live act, as shaman, digital shaman or techno-shaman. “I came from the early days of the Goa scene when you wouldn’t even know where the DJ was, or who he or she was. The party was literally the people who were there, wearing their crazy, fluoro costumes. There wasn’t the focus on the performer, on the show, just the music, colour and lights”.

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE ACT AND THE DAWN OF THE RURAL PSYTRANCE RAVE Outdoor psychedelic trance events in the UK have held a different story, but have survived through a shift in strategy. The Criminal Justice Act (1994) introduced key changes to the existing law over a number of areas, such as trespass and anti-social behaviour. But it was clauses sixty-three to sixtyseven which would have a cataclysmic effect on rave-style parties. As well as criminalising hitherto civil offenses, these clauses contained the now (in) famous defi nition of rave music as being “characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. The Act soon severely curtailed the rave party phenomenon, with a number of techno crews taking the extreme step of leaving the UK completely, touring Europe in search of freedom to party. Techno music culture was most expressive and vehement in Germany, particularly in Berlin, where harder-edged modes took on a distinctively political, even anarchist stance, with the vast, annual, outdoor event, the Love Parade, soon becoming a global brand fusing a gay pride agenda with sonic resistance. In the face of formidable legal obstacles, UK psychedelic trance promoters persisted in staging outdoor events, accepting that a successful outcome was never assured. However, with an emphasis on smaller parties, with less powerful rigs (compared with those normally found at techno or hardcore raves), and usually opting for remote locations, the open-air party ethos survived with all-night parties most summer weekends, either inside metropolitan London, in the tranquil suburbs, or further afield, notably in the West Country around Glastonbury and north Wales’ Breckon Beacons and Snowdonia. The need for secrecy and a careful approach to logistical planning paradoxically enriched British trance culture, adding to its mystique if not extending its base. Wingmakers, for example, continued TIP’s outdoor party tradition, but aimed for fewer attendees, using extremely remote West Country locations, while other discreet crews emerged rhizomatically to perpetuate the Goa party mould in other regions. These included Party People in Brighton, Toadstool in Gloucester, Cabbage in Leeds, Sunrise in Manchester and Tribe of Frog, from Bristol, most of whom are growing

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strong. Through the late-1990s commercial festivals, WOMAD and Glastonbury, included trance in their dance tents and twenty-four-hour licensed “raves” like Tribal Gathering18 profi led psytrance as prominently as techno, although both lagged behind house in mainstream popularity.

THE LATE 1990S: MINIMALISM AND MASSIFICATION IN PSYTRANCE SONICS An important strain in electronic dance music which intensified through the 1990s was a form of technologically sophisticated minimalism. With its roots deep in the work of contemporary composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass, 1970s minimalism in popular music had been as much a reaction against the macho posturing of revivalist rock forms as an early response to the potentially extraordinary sonic implications of synthesiser development. As Philip Sherburne explains, a core template for EDM development was sketched out by minimal German band Kraftwerk. The origins of most contemporary electronic dance music—found in Kraftwerk’s 1974 opus Autobahn and updated in the late 1980s and 1990s with the streamlined electronic funk of Detroit Techno pioneers like Derrick May and Juan Atkins—emphasized a pared-down palette that cut away all the excesses of a bloating rock and pop tradition (Sherburne in Cox & Warner 2004: 319). A minimalist vein now hit the UK psychedelic trance scene. It is difficult to state the exact reasons for the shift, but one was perhaps the over-exposure of the ornate music emanating from the RTTS portal and a loosely linked confederation of London-based techno trance clubs and labels including Escape From Samsara and Pendragon. They supported music many found increasingly “cheesy” and histrionic. Van Kampen has an alternate explanation. “A genre of music is going to get more and more restricted as it develops. A formula is created and then refined, and refined, to the point where people think ‘this is what we want’”. This process ran in tandem with the popularisation of psytrance on the global stage with vibrantly expanding micro nodes in Israel, Japan and Australia. This milieu showcased large events and expanded the availability of cultural products including CDs from successful labels, including Germany’s Spirit Zone and Israel’s Hadshot, and clothes ware from fashion retailers led by Australia’s Space Tribe. With refinement came the turn towards stylistic mimicry. Reynolds found EDM genres, which had gone down this route, “rigidly ritualized and conservative” (2008: 386). Our psychedelic trance rhizome was now going through a period of stratification, where enriching lines of flight and a freedom to deterritorialise was partially exchanged for “a segmentary, circular, binary and arborescent system” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 556) with the concomitant reterritorialising and

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stratifying tendencies. To continue to use their vocabulary, smooth space was being co-opted by striated space. The affective turn from emotion and warmth toward a colder, more technical aesthetic reflected a stylistic urge to pare down the core elements of trance. Van Kampen wanted “to do slightly darker, more underground stuff”. Sebastian Taylor, a multi-talented producer who recorded under various monikers including Somaton and Digitalis, told Dream Creation: “It seems to be the darker music that moves me the most. Minor based scales have always seemed more attractive than ‘happy’ major scales”.19 The immediate result for Taylor was evidenced on the Digitalis debut The Third State, which dramatically reduced propulsive drive to a tribal drum beat, overlaying skewed, chopped up break beats. The Third State was on a new label, Matsuri, run by Suzuki, who championed a stripped-down, sinister darkness. Suzuki would later completely reject trance, buying into a riff-dominated, dystopian techno. But it was the German duo X-Dream who would radically re-format the British sound, and signal a temporary end to the chromatically bright and emotionally thrilling era dominated by Raja Ram’s TIP, Youth’s Dragonfly and Flying Rhino (FR). Philip Sherburne says that minimalism in popular strains of EDM tended to take one or two paths: either skeletalism or massification. “The former term, until now, has tended to be the dominant tradition within minimal House and techno. Massification (rather) presents the strain of electronic dance music that attempts to create extreme densities with a relative paucity of sonic elements. In many ways, this strategy matches the movement of classical minimalism from simplicity toward an ever more complex array of shifting pulses and poly-rhythms” (Sherburne in Cox & Warner 2004: 324). X-Dream’s dominance in the field also reflected the then high popularity of German hard trance (Sven Vath, Hardfloor), and European techno. The duo’s release Radio (1998), with its long, broodingly indeterminant intros leading into a perfectly balanced sonic spectrum of effects, guttural synth stabs and multi-treated, fog-in-static, voice samples, become the lingua franca overnight. Dick Trevor remembers “everyone wanted to sound like them—moody, German techno. They were a massive influence on the whole scene”. Trevor had been releasing music on FR. Hitherto its main acts—Technossomy, Slinky Wizard and Blue Planet Corporation—had specialised in LSD-trip inspired tunes with warm, Easternised melodies and lush intros and outros. Now, FR released material from young producers like Darshan who aimed for a tighter oppressive feel. If supporters of the brighter chromatic material remained in the RTTS/ techno trance world, those who had a foot in harder house and techno styles bought into the darker, more minimal field enthusiastically. Simon Reynolds, who had eschewed vehemently the “cheesy” modes of early Goa trance, now championed the new mood. “By the late nineties, psy trance had plunged into a dark phase of minimalism and abstraction with

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X-Dream pioneering this harsh new sound” (2008: 436). Reynolds admired the organisational sophistication of X-Dream and drew attention to the dense, multi-layered studio explorations pioneered on The Lone Deranger (Hallucinogen, Twisted Records) and Forever After (Koxbox, Matsuri Records) both produced in 1997. Denmark’s Kox Box and the UK’s Hallucinogen are especially inventive, favouring grotesquely distorted and distended snippets of voice that sound like a human being literally stretched on a rack, harsh delay effects that create the aural equivalent of a drunk man seeing double or triple images, and moments when it sounds like the groove’s clockwork mechanism has exploded and is scattering coils and cogs every which way (Reynolds 2008: 436). There is little doubt that the impact of X-Dream and the minimal strain had much to do with the cohering of the global psychedelic trance network at a time when big budget, ticketed parties and festivals like Germany’s Voov, had lifted the lid on the hitherto enclosed character of trance parties and its concomitant milieu. 20

THE ALTERNATE CURRENT: RAJA RAM AND GLOBAL REFERENCES IN POST-GOA PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC The minimalist traits, via X-Dream, and the twisted studio trickery from Posford and Suzuki, may have been some of the more assertively rhythmic, masculinised sonic statements in the increasingly globalised psychedelic trance production field, but a more feminised melodic strain was to come back to the fore. The world—as in world music—returned to psychedelic trance, but in a less orientalist vein than in the early-1990s. CDs series with names like Global Psychedelic Trance (Spirit Zone 1995–2004) explored further the postmodern use of ethnic instruments and voice fi rst heard on obscure, early-1990s English releases on London’s Rising High Records. TIP founder, the flautist Raja Ram, developed lush, exploratory, worldambient, psychedelic music which suggested an opposite line of flight to the minimal. Infinite Excursions, and Softer Psychedelic Sounds (both released in 1996) offered a luminous direction with fi rst Shpongle track “Rumours of Vapours” and the “Mystery of the Yeti”, combining elements of drum and bass, ambient, dub and traditional tribal chant and percussion with a psychedelic trance sensibility; their beat cycles ricocheting from 4/4 to 7/8 and 3/4s with giddy speed and emotional power. Ram can be likened to Lawrence’s portrayal of Russell as a bone fide rhizomatic musician. Lawrence declares that “given the concepts, practices and effects of composition and genre have contributed significantly to the stratification and hierarchical division of music, an analysis that starts with the musician offers an alternative way of analyzing sound according to its immanent rhizomic

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potential” (2007: 4). Ram had blended East and West in his work with Quintessence, had followed innumerable paths whilst a flautist through the 1980s, returned with startling innovation in the early-1990s to make neo-psychedelic trance with tribal 4/4 beats, and next with ambience and breaks conjuring up yet another novel sonic hybrid for the dawn of the new millennium. And by so doing the quintessentially rhizomatic Ram brought rhizomatics—with dashing lines of fl ight—back to the UK domain. In 1998, Ram’s sonic philosophy had broadened out to a wider project— the fi rst of the three Shpongle albums, Are you Shpongled? (Twisted). Here his humanistic mission was aided by a softer side of Simon Posford’s studioediting prowess, allowing for a strikingly original and lavishly produced psychedelic musical foray. Ram, in conversation with Dream Creation magazine, 21 reflected on that debut release. The programming was a monster. It was very ambitious in that it goes through a lot of complex musical ties/timing which we were working on, we don’t just stick to 4/4 rhythms, there are weird movements through 6/8ths, 7/8ths and 5/4ths and then there’s a lot of space in the album to swell where it gets very ambient. But having said that it also gets hyper drum ‘n’ bass mega-beat and goes into severe rhythmic contortions. Eventually you’ll fi nd “Divine Moments of Truth”—the DMT track. It’s got about 70 South American samples on it which I collected. We down-loaded the electric voice program from the internet, where you can type words in and it sings them back to you. So we typed in Divine Moments of Truth (DMT). Ram added in the interview that “the great thing about ambient and the realm of ‘Shpongleland’ is that there are no rules like there are in techno”. This resonates with other producers’ views that the early UK Goa sound cultivated a “no rules” approach, in contrast with the building-brick structures of trance tracks in the minimal phase and the avowedly generic “full on” phase of post-2000.

PSYTRANCE GLOBAL POPULARITY: THE ECLIPSE OF THE UK PSYCHEDELIC SOUND By 2000, the term “psytrance” was coined, initially as an umbrella to corral a sector of sub-genres which were generically, if only in practise, slightly “psychedelic”. These included the complex time signatures codifying Shpongle, the northern European turn towards chugging, “progressive” grooves emblematic of the Spiral Trax label, the breaks-inflected work of late Blue Room Released, 21:3 and Matsuri, or the shiny, hook-laden sound emanating from TIP.World, which had bounced back after the earlier incarnation (TIP Records), had folded following the bankruptcy of London distributor, Flying. But despite these rhizomatic tendencies Smith—aka Ott—saw

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a depressing trend towards uniformity, reflecting formalist strictures rather than creative experimentation. At some point around the late ’90s or early ’00s, it all got frozen in time. Somebody—probably GMS22—released a track which did really well and everyone spent the next five years copying that. I started noticing that the tempos would stay the same for hours on end and the DJs would mix out all the breakdowns and lush bits until all you had left was a relentless 144bpm kick drum and 16th note bass line, with a smattering of boring buzz-wave noises and dreary filter sweeps, which would plough on and on and on, not changing appreciably over the entire 72 hours of the party. This then degenerated even further into “neo-full-on”, “post-neofull-on” and by the mid 2000s “Nitzhonot”, the latter being sufficient to make any rational person want to chew their own ears off. However, the argument was not that psytrance could, or should, remain a closely guarded secret. Global networks—now augmented by web sites, early fi le sharing platforms, list servs and chat forums—shrunk the world of globalised trance, bringing in a new generation of post-Goa supporters. Now tracks were being written more than composed. When, in 2000, Trevor and Coldrick moved from a one megabyte Atari computer to a six gigabyte, largely digital Mac console using Logic software, Trevor recalls “you could start to build a whole tune in your computer. That’s what we spend our whole life doing now!” Similarly, Van Kampen remembers when Apple acquired Logic from E-Magic, making it free to get hold of—as long as you bought the necessary Mac hardware platform. He puts the processing power and audio memory size into perspective. “The Apple’s G3 was a 6 GB. I now have half a terrabyte—that’s 500 gigs!” Producers were swiftly shifting from MIDI communication, where they mastered mixes down to DAT, to digital’s massive on-board capacity for audio inputs, loops, sampling and effects, as well as editing. Macs remained expensive, but in real terms had come down appreciably. Smith puts this revolutionary shift in the music-making process into perspective. “By the early 2000s, the technology had changed radically, in that you no longer needed hugely expensive synths and samplers to make music. Having a studio at home wasn’t just the preserve of rich kids and professionals anymore. Suddenly the world was flooded with home-made trance tracks by people who, a year before, had never sat at a piano or handled a microphone”. But the earlier working method of building music by creative juxtapositions of synths, drum machines samples and psychedelic inspiration dictated for Van Kampen the way the digital technology would be used. Like most of the producers inspired by the Goa period, he retained the spirit—and oftentimes the practice—of the former analogue process in the highly popular Laughing Buddha releases. Van Kampen still uses the analogue synths even though it’s

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more convenient to use the virtual versions where you can “automate all the parameters digitally—draw in automation curves and record in the curves”. An analysis of TIP.World’s output is a good barometer of the stylistic and populist development in global psytrance from 2003 to 2006. Pulling from an ever-widening stable of established and new artists, TIP.World’s compilations quickly became essential acquisitions for the burgeoning generation of fans who identified with “full power” tracks, primed for the dance floor—for fast vinyl/ CD DJ mixing. Although the first release, Movers and Groovers at the Temple of Dawn, was a colourful, warm set of Iberian-soaked “morning trance”, the series soon moved into denser territory, fashioning a racy, ecstatic style out of the various 1990s formulas—Goa, minimal and metal-trance (where screeching guitars would be added to the mix). The 2002 TIP.World singles compilation majored almost exclusively on Israeli trance “full on” whereas Spaceships of the Imagination (2005) showed a softer side and Imagi:Nations (Part 1, Day & Part 2, Night) showcased new “full on” acts with immediate appeal. The jacket notes of the latter spoke for itself: “Deeper than the metro, more underground than a car park and higher than any kite”.23

RE-EMERGENCE OF THE UK PSYCHEDELIC RHIZOME The focus on high-power modes had largely eclipsed UK stylisms as the key motifs of global psytrance sonicity. And for live events, attention too had shifted to previously peripheral nodes, such as Australia, South Africa, Russia, the US, Brazil, with parties reported in unlikely territories from Siberia to Mozambique. As supporters gravitated to other territories to attend larger and larger, and often meticulously planned and expensive psytrance spectaculars, the UK psytrance rhizome had time to re-assemble, with artists bouncing back, invigorated by global cross fertilisations. Since 2006, fresh groupings of artists have emerged, mostly concentrated around labels Wild Things, Liquid Records, Nano and Alchemy.24 Trevor welcomes this development. “What I like in England is that everyone’s got their own little label and they are all doing their own sound. It’s like a big family; this selection of small pockets makes up the whole thing”. Nano label manager Anselm Guise, who is also co-organiser of the UK’s successful annual Glade Festival, has encouraged acts to keep central psychedelic perspectives through effects, noises, timbre and samples, never in a pile-driven way, but rather using clean harmonics and accessible structures. Tristan’s 2006 release Chemisphere is a case in point. While the largesse of its production was functionally codified for a trance festival, or other massive rig sonic events, beneath the rolling riffs and vast breakdowns, lay a depth of detail. During an interview in summer 2006, held under a tree in north London’s Queens Park, Tristan told me that, while making the record, he had been preoccupied with the edges of sound, the point between and including, distortion and harmony. “That’s where the sub harmonics and resonant frequencies that appeal

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to me lie”. With over fifteen years of making psychedelic music, Tristan aims for a rapprochement between an inventively playful and functional spectrum of sonic shapes and for a union between the mind and the body. “If I need the sub, warm bass line for my body, it’s there, if I need a tingly sound for my top end chakra well, it’s there too, and if I need to swing my hips the music’s there to support me. In all, it should be uplifting and buoyant”. Another intensely crafted approach has been honed by Mark Young (aka Beardy), an experienced underground DJ from the late-1990s Liquid Connective stable, who formed Wild Things Records in 2005. The signature sound is fast and dark, but also spritely, oozing with psychedelic humour. The sound recalls the hard trance of mid-1990s Phantasm Records with a respective nod towards the acid techno of the same era, when for a short time, the label Stay Up Forever, run by the Liberator DJ trio, was the capital’s most thrilling hard dance music. Young’s philosophy recalls an early TIP stance: “You aren’t pulling loads of artists out of the global world of trance but sticking with a group and watching them progress. The UK scene is very unique and pioneering in its own right— boundaries always being broken. It has the international input—but very psychedelic as well”. 25 Like Wild Things, Liquid Records releases slowly and carefully. Label manager Ross March has a more eclectic foundational approach, but still believes strongly in grooming artists, to nurture their production development. As one of the UK’s busiest psytrance DJs, March has framed his releases from a DJ’s perspective. “I have not stuck to one style of music (across the compilations). It’s more a journey reflecting my viewpoint on psychedelic trance, so I go for contrast of styles”. The stable includes Mood Deluxe’s funky, yet classic, sample-rich excursions, and Mexican producer Tron’s dramatic, reverberating soundscapes incorporating a DJ’s sensibility for mixing congruent tapestries. Liquid’s trance then richly encodes the current stylistic variety inherent in the UK mould where “psychedelic” is freely and creatively interpreted. Another offshoot in Liquid’s output, one pioneered by March’s colleague James Anthony, is “psy-breaks” where a break-beat pattern replaces, or is juxtaposed with, 4/4 beats, creating angular contours which innovatively re-contextualise the chromatic design.

CONCLUSION: THE UK TRANCE SONIC SIGNATURE The global nature of psytrance production since 2000 has strongly affected the sonic character of the UK contribution. Much of the whimsy and melody—references to folk styles or nursery rhymes—has been cast adrift and by 2009 a power-driven density was in the ascendant. But whatever the precise shapes of future UK trance, its sonic signature is always in demand on the global trance-floor, believes Trevor, who plays

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live sets, as pointed out earlier, under the Green Nuns moniker, as well as in his solo live project, Dickster, or DJ-ing under his own name. “Much of the major part of the trance scene has come from England and people (across the world) go for it. In Brazil for example, they love it. I know the globe’s been swathed with the Israeli sound for years but a lot of promoters have now got bored of that”. It’s clear that the elongated structures, playful experimentalism and journey-rich narratives of British psychedelic trance have had to adapt to the requirements of a racier, more commercial, often less patient international crowd. In his current work with Tristan as Fearsome Engine, 26 Van Kampen has had to re-cut tracks for the live setting, editing out ambient build-ups. These are often the most psychedelic, and the best, of moments. “For many audiences it’s not about the psychedelic aspect. If you go to the Boom [Festival] it’s more a representation of psychedelic cultures. But in many places the music is not psychedelic at all: it’s all very well produced, physical, and banging, but there isn’t a single psychedelic sound to be heard”. Early examples of the psychedelic trance rhizome had been founded on collaborative working practices, a sensual, adventurous and serendipitous approach to sonic construction and healthy disrespect for convention. A commitment to “psychedelics” in the wide sense that Arun Saldanha uses the term, was pivotal, too. “Important though the taking of hallucinogenic drugs is to psychedelics”, according to Saldanha, “it follows from a more general sensual, romantic, and self-conscious framework” (2007: 12). Perhaps the act of spatialising the rhizome—by pinpointing its UK characteristics—is now a redundant, or at least superfluous, activity, as it has clearly been prone to substantial alteration over the period under discussion. And in cultural terms, to speak of a psytrance “underground” nowadays is also mostly irrelevant—the culture has succumbed to commodification and is “infi ltrated” by the “mainstream”, however distasteful this may sound to many early trance supporters. Clearly, too, a prior emphasis on Cole’s and Hannan’s journey metaphor, and its correlative, the LSD “trip”, is far less central for a contemporary psytrance party experience with party-goers more likely to choose from a far wider cocktail of stimulants than ever including ketamine. To paraphrase Van Kampen, the tune medleys may be “physical” enough but are they psychedelic anymore? Regardless of these pressures, UK psychedelic trance culture retains on balance more of a rhizomatic than arborescent identity; its mycelia exemplified by the sixty-something Raja Ram, still germinating from the spores of that desiring assemblage par excellence, the mid- to late-1960s. Finally, its music manifestations perpetuate idiosyncratic traits of humour, wit, technical flourish and an obsession with twisted and eccentric timbral contours, leaving a unique chromatic imprint which continues to re-connect with, and re-assemble, the Goa sonic legacy.

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NOTES 1. Dream Creation, Oct/Nov 1997, p. 17. 2. PsyMusic: . Post available at: (accessed 10/07/2006). 3. Green Nuns of the Revolution (GNOTR) are Dick Trevor, Neil Cowley and Matt Coldrick. Matt Coldrick, also a session guitarist for the singer Gabrielle and Neil Cowley, played keyboards for rock band Brand New Heavies. “Green Nuns of the Revolution” might be a reference to Libyan leader alGaddafi’s personal guards: the original title of their album was supposed to be “Black & White & Green All Over”. Their best promoted album Rock Bitch Mafi a (Flying Rhino) failed to gain much mainstream attention, remaining a classic of the genre. Although primarily Goa trance, it encompassed electro, a punkish attitude and techno power. It also shared the very British sense of humour apparent in other electronic artists, notably Eat Static. 4. The group interview was held at Gregory Sams’ home on March 24, 2009, in Kensal Rise, Northwest London. Those present were Anjim, Martin Glover (aka Youth), Gregory Sams and Jeremy Van Kampen (aka Laughin Buddha). 5. A Day With Mark and an Evening with Jason (parts 1–9) can be viewed on You Tube: part 7: ; part 8: ; both accessed 10/03/08. 6. Gregory Sams is an American thinker who invented the VegeBurger when working in the alternative food scene in London from 1968 to 1982. He is the author of two books: Uncommon Sense: The State is Out of Date (1998 Chaos Works) and Sun of gOd: Discover the Self-Organizing Consciousness that Underlies Everything (2009 Weiser Books). 7. The Roland TR-909 Rhythm Composer is a partially analogue and sample-based drum machine built by the Japanese Roland group in 1984. Only around 10,000 units were ever produced. As with the TB-303, its synthetic sound was exactly the characteristic that led to its popularity in EDM genres, including Goa trance. 8. Alex Paterson and Youth (Glover) formed WAU/Mr Modo Records in Sheffield, north England, in 1988. Some of their releases, as Glover told me in the group interview, had been used in Goa DJ Laurent’s famous late-1980s Anjuna party sets. 9. “Hardcore Continuum” was a term outlined by Simon Reynolds in the fi rst edition of Energy Flash (1998), where it was used to connect a series of 1990s electronic music genres which have “hardcore” commonalities such as loud bass, abrasiveness and noise. 10. The interview with Jeremy Van Kampen took place at the producer’s studio in Northwest London, February 26, 2009. 11. Analogue equipment in Jeremy Van Kampen’s studio, Northwest London, includes a Roland TB303 drum machine, a Juno 106 synthesiser, a Roland SH-101 synthesiser, an Akai S300 sampler and a 48-track Ghost mixing desk. 12. Grover Smith (aka Ott) answered a set of e-mailed questions on February 23, 2009. 13. In the interview, Smith listed the equipment used with an engineer at Butterfly Studios: “we were using Akai S3200 samplers and Atari 1040 computers for sequencing, as well as quite a respectable selection of synths, including a Korg MS-20 with the SQ-10 analogue sequencer, an Oberheim OBX-A, an OsCar, a Waldorf Microwave, Roland JD-800 and Juno 106, plus I had my collection of synths which at the time was a Kurzweil K2000, three Roland MC-202s, a Roland TB-303, a Roland MKS 70 and an EMS vocoder”.

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14. Simon Posford interviewed by Stuart DC; Dream Creation, Oct/Nov 1997, p. 17. 15. Simon Posford interviewed by Damion Brown for the web site NAJM, 2002. <www.globaldance.com/InterviewHallucinogen.htm>; accessed 26/02/09. 16. The 21–3 label released psychedelic trance and breaks between 1996 and 2000. Its tremendously innovative compilations included All Boundaries Are Illusion (1997), Elastic (1998) and 21–3 Selected Highs 1996–1998 Vol 1 (1998). 17. Roger Griffi n’s comments on Return to the Source were posted in 1995 at (accessed 2/3/2009). 18. Tribal Gathering, June 1996, took place at Luton Hoo, a country house in Bedfordshire, southern England. At 30,000, the gate represented the largest UK audience for a specifically EDM event. The Tribal Temple psychedelic/ hard trance tent featured Tin Tin, Nuw Idol (live), James Munro, Technossomy (live), Hallucinogen (live), Dominic Lamb, Green Nuns (live), Slinky Wizard (live), Disco Volante/Cosmosis (live), Fabio Paras, Fluke (live), Phil Perry, Justin Robertson, and Jon Cooke & Matt Tangent. 19. Sebastian Taylor interviewed by Stuart DC, Dream Creation, June/July 98, p. 21. 20. For a discussion on the genealogy of the micro genre, darkpsy, and its interfusing of and parallels with, minimal techno, post industrial, metal and noise elements, other acts, particularly Germany’s Xenomorph, are perhaps more appropriate and bracing forerunners than X-Dream. 21. Raja Ram interviewed by Stuart DC, Dream Creation, Jan/Feb 99, p. 23. 22. GMS are an-Ibiza based duo, Riktam (Shajahan Matkin) and Bansi (Josef Quinteros), a pared-down version of the four-piece psytrance act, Growling Mad Scientists: . 23. TIP.World: ; ; 24. Wild Things Records: ; Liquid Records: ; Nano Records: ; Alchemy Records: . 25. Wild Things artists EVP and Error Corrective, who prime exponents of the muscular UK psytrance strain, held their own at 2008 trance festivals including Boom. 26. The debut Fearsome Engine CD release was expected late 2009 on Nano Records: .

BIBLIOGRAPHY Albrecht-Crane, C., and J. D. Slack. 2007. “Towards a Pedagogy of Affect”. In Anne Hickey-Moody and Peta Malins, eds. Deleuzian Encounters, 99–110. Basingstoke, Hamps: Palgrave Macmillan. Attali, J. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cole, F., and M. Hannan. 1997. “The Phenomenon of Goa trance”. <www.scu. edu.au/schools/carts/contmusic/mh/goa.html>. (accessed 1/12/2006). Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone. Gilbert, J. 2004. “Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation”. In Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda, eds. Deleuze and Music, 118–139. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gore, C. 1997. “Trance, Dance and Tribalism in Rave Culture”. In Helen Thomas, ed. Dance in the City, 50–67. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

110 Charles de Ledesma Jones, N. 1995. “The London Trance Underground”, Mixmag, No. 51: 48–50; . (accessed 25/03/2009). Jowers, P. 1999. “Timeshards: Repetition, timbre and identity in dance music”. Time & Society 8(2–3): 381–396. Lawrence, T. 2007. “Connecting with the Cosmic: Arthur Russell, Rhizomatic Musicianship, and the Downtown Music Scene”. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies. 3(3): 1–82. . (accessed 03/12/2007). Partridge, C. 2006. “The Spiritual and the Revolutionary: Alternative Spirituality, British Free Festivals, and the Emergence of Rave Culture”. Culture and Religion. 7(1): 41–60. Prendergast, M. 2003. The Ambient Century. London: Bloomsbury. Reynolds, S. 2008. [1998]. Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. London: Picador. Sherburne, P. 2004. “Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno”. In Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds. Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, 319–328. New York, London: Continuum. Swiboda, M. 2004. “Cosmic Strategies: The Electric Experiments of Miles Davis”. In Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda, eds. Deleuze and Music, 196–216. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

DISCOGRAPHY Cosmosis. 1996. Cosmology. (Transient CD604). Digitalis. 1998. The Third State. (Matsuri CD16). Hallucinogen. 1994. Alpha Centauri/LSD. (12-inch single, TIP Records BFLT 14). . 1997. The Lone Deranger. (LP/CD; Twisted CD001). . 2002. Hallucinogen in Dub (re-mixed by Ott). (Twisted CD16). Koxbox. 1999. Forever After. (Matsuri CD24). Laughing Buddha: 1998. Astral Traveller. (12-inch; Transient 043). . 1998. If You Think You’re Psykik. (12-inch; Transient 047). Raja Ram. 2000. Spaceships of the Imagination. (TIP.World CD05). Shpongle. 1998. Are you Shpongled? (Twisted CD24). Tristan. 2007. Chemisphere. (Nano Records CD017). Various Artist. 1994. Order Ondata. (Dragonfly CD13). Various Artists. 2006. Build Your Own Reactor. (Liquid Records CD001). . 2007. Divine Inventions. (Liquid Records CD007). Various Artists. 1995. Deep Trance and Ritual Beats. (Return to the Source CD1). Various Artists. 1996 Infi nite Excursions, Softer Psychedelic Sounds. (TIP Records CD07) . Various Artists. 1999–2004. Global Psychedelic Trance, Vols 1–10. (Spirit Zone Recordings). Various Artists. 1995. Yellow Compilation. (TIP Records CD1). . 1995. Orange Compilation. (TIP Records 2). . 1995. Blue Compilation. (TIP Records 4). Various Artists. 2000. Movers and Groovers at the Temple of Dawn. (TIP.World CD007). Various Artists. 2002. Unusual Suspects. (Twisted CD14). Various Artists. 2005. Imagi:Nations Part 1 Day. (TIP.World CD41). Various Artists. 2005. Imagi:Nations Part 2 Night. (TIP.World CD42). Various Artists. 2005. Wild Rumpus. (Wild Things CD001). . 2006. Alpha Rhythms. (Wild Things CD003).

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. 2006. Digital Music Therapy. (Wild Things CD006). X-Dream. 1998. Radio. (Blue Room Released CD66).

Figure 5.1 Boom Festival 2008, Portugal. Photo by Alex Canazei: www.alexcanazei.com

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Figure 5.2

Fusion Festival, Germany 2007, Dub stage. Photo by Sam Rowlesky.

Figure 5.3 Rainbow Serpent Festival 2009, Beaufort, Australia. Photo by James Wall: www.fl ickr.com/photos/jamard_flamand.

Figure 5.4 In Prayer, Rainbow Serpent Festival, 2009. Photo by Johnathan Carmichael.

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Winter Solstice Cairns 2009. Photo by Jonathan Carmichael.

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Re-evaluating Musical Genre in UK Psytrance Robin Lindop

Sunday afternoon, 4:30 p.m. As I stand at the brow of the hill, I am presented with a myriad of musical choices: to my far left lies the Project Storm tent, playing out a thunderous concoction of drum and bass, techno and hard trance. Next along is the Tribe of Frog trance arena, organised by Bristol’s premier psytrance organisation of the same name. Directly in front of me is the Archangel stage, for most of the weekend presenting a selection of breaks and dubstep, but today offering the significantly more chilled sounds of dub reggae. To my far right is the Main Stage, a hive of eclecticism all weekend, the small crowd currently being entertained by the roots reggae grooves of Nucleus Roots. Behind me, free festival veterans Ozric Tentacles are preparing for their performance in the Gaia Chill area, while people in the adjacent cafe sit drinking to the ambient sounds of Red Earth. Finally, the soothing sound of acoustic folk drifts from elsewhere on the site, providing an odd accompaniment to the otherwise electronic onslaught that surrounds me. A small number of people drift around from stage to stage, making sense of what is presented to them. This describes the 2008 Waveform Festival, now in its second year as the UK’s “sustainable dance music festival” and part of the global Earthdance “prayer for peace”. On paper and to the more casual observer, Waveform is a general electronic dance music festival comparable to other EDM (electronic dance music) events in the UK such as Glade. Encompassing crews from a variety of different genres, the event offers a diversity that caters for fans of a wide selection of dance music styles. While not a psytrance event per se, the festival epitomises many of the current issues surrounding the defi ning of that particular subgenre, brought about as a result of the rapid development, expansion and hybridisation of the last ten years. What was initially a relatively homogeneous sound (Goa trance) has now diversified into a plethora of sub-subgenres, making any defi nition of psytrance decidedly problematic. “Progressive”, “dark”, “morning”, “psy-chill”, “psybient”, “psybreaks”, “Suomisaundi” (a Finnish variant) and “South African style” are just some of the subsets that have emerged over the course of this period. While this process of diversification can be observed in countless other musical genres, the

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fact that psytrance parties—with their distinctive decor, visuals, fashions and styles—are now often multi-genre events featuring non-trance styles (ranging from drum and bass to techno), complicates any attempted defi nition of the music. In addition, certain regulatory musical processes have emerged which question existing perceptions of psytrance as a style. Indeed, this raises the question: what is psytrance? Over the course of this chapter I will explore this issue, with the focus on the UK scene, an important psytrance “engine room”. Despite the relatively small scale of the scene, much of the original Goa trance was made in the UK, which remains an important locale in the development of the music. Central to my argument will be a discussion of the nature of the genre itself, examining a number of different approaches to musical categorisation. Following on from this, and in light of the diversity of music within the psytrance scene, I will investigate the presence of common musical codes or characteristics, with the intention of developing a psytrance rubric. Finally, these fi ndings will inform a discussion of how these codes—despite the presence of what I will refer to as “pure” dance styles—have reinforced the concept of a psytrance scene, one that is protective of its identity, mindful of outside influence and with a desire to consolidate an aesthetic. As will be made evident, these measures can be viewed in terms of “negotiations” with other EDM scenes, ensuring the continuation of core psytrance aesthetics while simultaneously allowing for development.

TWO THEORIES OF GENRE For most people, including those in the scene itself (promoters, DJs, producers, general party-goers), the word “psytrance” refers to a specific musical style. Often recognised as “full-on” psytrance, this is the music typically featured in the main room of a party. “Full-on”, as the core of UK psytrance, is the subset of the genre most closely connected with Goa trance—in terms of tempo, timbre and harmony. Indeed, many of the original Goa trance producers (e.g., Dick Trevor, Cosmosis, Man with No Name) now make “full-on” psytrance. The style can be summarised in terms of the following features: • Tempo of around 145 BPM • Four-on-the-floor, “trance-y” sounding bass drum (i.e., the coupling of a sharp attack or “knock” with a low, bass “thud”).1 “Driving” or “galloping”, 16th-note orientated bass line featuring a typical psytrance synth bass sound 2 • Usually centred on one tonal centre or drone (i.e., little or no harmonic variation) • Use of the flattened 2nd degree of the scale (particularly in bass and lead lines)

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• Swirling, “squelchy” synth sounds, quirky sounds and samples. Frequent use of a “stutter fi lter”3 on (particularly Eastern) vocals, etc. • Synthesis favoured over sampling • An abundance of breakdowns, stops and build-ups • Incorporation of speech samples, typically those concerning psychedelic experience Therefore, in general, this type of psytrance is relatively easy to defi ne. Indeed, “full-on” is notorious for being sonically homogeneous, a common criticism of psytrance compilations and artist albums. In this respect we can view psytrance in terms of what Roy Shuker (1998) calls an “actual” genre—genres that “arguably exist in a purer, more easily understood and specified form” (Shuker 1998: 147). Within this category he includes styles such as disco and funk (i.e., names that refer to a set of relatively consistent, specific musical characteristics). One would expect disco music to include some, but not all, of the following: • Four-on-the-floor bass drum patterns, most likely played rather than sequenced • Sweeping, melodic, pseudo-orchestral string sections • Extensive percussion including congas, bongos, etc. • High pitched, male falsetto vocals • Simple, ostinato bass lines featuring octave patterns Examples of the above can be heard in songs such as “Disco Inferno” by the Trammps and “Boogie Wonderland” by Earth, Wind and Fire. Although not stated by Shuker, most EDM subgenres could be viewed as “actual” genres. As Kembrew McLeod (2001) has argued, EDM is notable for its emphasis on categorisation, often in rather sophisticated ways. New styles (or at least new names) are continuously generated, some becoming more established than others. The main reason for this is because EDM cultures are inherently DJ cultures. Categorising tracks is the role of the DJ, enabling the selection of the exact sound they are searching for—an important factor in the building of a set. In most cases a DJ will want to string together tracks that are relatively similar. The categorising of records enables them to perform this task while at the same time allowing for changes of direction or variation. Secondly, the abundance of categories serves as an indicator to club or party-goers (on flyers, posters, etc.), informing them of the type of music to expect at a particular event. Individuals then choose whether they want to attend that club or party. Unsurprisingly, therefore, within EDM, the names of innumerable subgenres generally refer to fairly specific musical features, and can therefore be considered to be “actual” genres. While stylistic variations are present in styles like drum and bass (“liquid”, “techstep”, “jump-up”), these are in most cases fairly subtle. In psytrance, similar observations can be made; “dark”, “morning”

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and “suomisaundi” are all essentially variations of “full-on”. The names “dark” and “morning” might imply a binary opposition, but in actual fact, there is much in common between them (i.e., sixteenth-note bass lines, bass/kick drum sounds, unexpected stops/quirky sounds, etc.). The counterpart to Shuker’s theory of an “actual” genre is what he refers to as a “meta” genre. These are “loose amalgamations” (Shuker 1998: 147) of styles that fall under a given genre category (i.e., world music or progressive rock). In most cases, “meta” genres can be defi ned in terms of “extramusical” elements. For example, some “meta” genres are centred around particular, shared ideologies, i.e., alternative rock or indie. Although musical commonalities exist between artists associated with such categories, the unifying element can be attributed more to attitudes and values than sonic elements. In other instances (most notably that of world music), “meta” genres exist as marketing tools, a means of “explaining” musically disparate styles. The term “world music” is in effect a “catch-all” term used to “package” music of the non-Western world, facilitating its presentation to the consumer. Although under-defi ned, the crux of Shuker’s argument is that genres exist in “actual” or “meta” form. There is, however, significant evidence for the application of both concepts to psytrance. In addition to the existence of “full-on”, psytrance is notable for its seemingly insatiable appetite for appropriating other, sometimes contrasting, EDM styles into its canon. What are advertised and promoted as psytrance parties often feature an array of styles including breakbeat, progressive, ambient, dubstep, techno, hard house and even drum and bass, in addition to “actual” psytrance. Typically, these events will include a main room (playing “full-on”) and a second room with an eclectic mix of nontrance styles (i.e., dubstep, breaks). Larger nights might also have a third space as a chill-out area, playing ambient and dub, etc. However, despite this, the promotions of these parties are targeted at the psytrance community (via Internet forums and social networking sites, etc.), rather than other EDM communities that might appreciate the range of music featured. Furthermore, the decor and visuals at these events—UV inflatables, elaborate hand-painted wall-hangings, visual projections—along with elaborate flyers, are typically “trancey”. They also follow the established, “more than a club night” format of a psytrance event, which often features a pre-party gathering (i.e., a BBQ), then the main party, followed by an after party. Psytrance entertains a strong visual identity and a distinct format, to the point where an event may adopt the aesthetic of a psytrance party despite the absence of “psytrance” music. For example, a benefit for the 2008 Northern Green Gathering festival in Bradford, West Yorkshire, featuring several known psytrance DJs and live acts, failed to deliver much in the way of “actual” psytrance. Instead, the choice of music was downtempo electronica, ambient and electro, “full-on” only being played at the very end. Therefore, contrary to being defi ned in relation to a particular style of music, the diversity and distinct format/style of psytrance parties suggests

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otherwise. Although the “actual” genre of psytrance may be the focal point of the scene, the above observations imply that “extra-musical” elements are fore-grounded within the overall psytrance aesthetic. Yet, these observations require clarification. What holds interest is the presence of what I earlier referred to as “regulatory” musical processes. More specifically, rather than incorporating other EDM subgenres in their purer and more understood forms, psytrance tends to psychedelicise these styles. Examples of this include “psy-chill”/“psybient”, “psybreaks” and even the occasional drum and bass or dubstep track that has been “adapted”. Progressive trance is a case in point. Although it is not commonly acknowledged, the “progressive” style of trance that is popular in psytrance is not the more widely accepted version of the term championed by the likes of Sasha, Sander Kleinenberg and James Holden. Instead, it is essentially “progressive psytrance”, although party flyers often distinguish between “progressive” and “psytrance” (i.e., “full-on”) 4. Therefore, although the music at psytrance parties may be diverse, a common thread runs through it (i.e., the “psy” aspect), thus questioning Shuker’s theory regarding the “loose amalgamations” of styles typical of “meta” genres. The process of psychedelicising can be understood as a set of production techniques; a musical “code” that is unique to psytrance. Before discussing the components within this code, it is necessary to examine the use of the term “psychedelic” within the psytrance scene. Internet forums are rife with discussions about whether tracks are “psychedelic enough”, as if the word has an established set of characteristics, that a piece of music has to meet certain prerequisites to be situated as “psychedelic”. In reality, however, the term “psychedelic” is vague, having been applied to the work of artists as disparate as Jefferson Airplane and De La Soul (see Derogatis 1996; Whiteley 1992). To complicate matters, dance music in general (i.e., everything from acid house to techno) is often viewed as “psychedelic”, another development intensely debated on psytrance forums. Users often present the opinion that certain non-psytrance EDM tracks are more deserving of the tag “psychedelic” than some psytrance tracks. With this in mind, the use of “psychedelic” in the phrase “psychedelic trance” is almost irrelevant. While highly ambiguous, the term has come to designate a style of production that is endemic to psytrance; techniques that characterise the music across its “actual” and “meta” genres regardless of whether the end product is “psychedelic” or not. These can be summarised as the following: • Use of playful, intricate, quirky synth sounds that have “texturological” effects (i.e., sounds that have a texture that makes the listener want to touch them) • Sampled elements from non-Western music, especially vocals (that are frequently cut-up, distorted and transformed, especially with “stutter” fi lter) and percussion

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• A focus on the creation of atmosphere, achieved via attention to texture rather than melodic or harmonic elements • Very high production values; multi-layered, expansive pieces of music • Use of drone effects (single tonal centres in “full-on” psy; dub reggae bass lines in “psychill”, etc.) • Speech samples that focus on psychedelic experience, transcendence and the supernatural If anything, the “psychedelic” nature of psytrance music can be understood as an overt or cartoon psychedelia (i.e., the use of deliberately “wacky” sounds and speech samples about the LSD experience). As a result—as is often suggested on Internet forums—psytrance occasionally tries too hard to be “psychedelic”, thus having the reverse effect. While the above characteristics are common to music labelled “psychedelic” (use of drones, the focus on texture), it is important to remember that the “psychedelic-ness” of psytrance is very subjective. In some ways, it may be better to view the “psy” prefi x as a way of establishing a distinction from other, EDM subgenres, rather than a claim on a “defi nitive” psychedelic music; a musical code that serves to claim other EDM styles for the psytrance scene. The process of psychedelicising other styles serves to extend and strengthen the boundaries of the scene, while maintaining a distinction from the “purer” forms of these styles. As DJ John “OO” Fleming writes in the sleeve notes to his Psytrance Euphoria compilation, “the psy tag was used as a filter to keep things away from the commercial masses”. This idea of “keeping things away from the masses” is recurrent in UK psytrance. It remains a “hidden” form of EDM, a status cultivated both by those within the scene and the dance music media, among which psytrance continues to be viewed with suspicion. This is partially due to the “hippie” stigma attached to the UK scene. In short, psytrance is perceived as “uncool”, far away from the glitz and glamour of superstar DJs and super clubs like Ministry of Sound. Instead, psytrance favours the “rough ‘n’ ready” atmosphere of a festival or the ad-hoc, DIY riskiness of a free party—indoor clubs merely being a necessary surrogate.5 While there has been a shift in this attitude towards the scene, such as the series of DJ magazine articles entitled “Give psy a chance” that appeared in the May 2007 edition, or the aforementioned Psytrance Euphoria release (Euphoria being a compilation series previously associated with more commercial, “non-psy” trance), on the whole, psytrance remains a clandestine phenomenon. Despite growing popularity, it has yet to be fully acknowledged by the dance music industry. For example, there is no dedicated reviews section in EDM magazines, it is not marketed in high street record stores (even specialist EDM shops), there is a lack of support from big name DJs, and it is not featured at EDMorientated festivals like Creamfields and Bestival. This circumstance has been compounded by the protective measures of those within the scene,

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ensuring that the psytrance ethos is not diluted via outside influence. In particular, the self-distancing from commercial trance (i.e., the popular idea of “trance” music marketed as “progressive trance”) appears to be a primary commitment. In order to achieve this, psytrance has established a presence that is markedly separate from other forms of EDM. Parties in the UK tend to be promoted primarily to psytrance enthusiasts (via the Internet) rather than the general public; and psytrance has its own specialist network of labels, distributors, retailers and management companies. In 2004, DJ magazine covered this “detachment” from the rest of EDM in an article sub-headed “The last bastion of underground dance music”. Via interviews with leading figures on the UK scene, the feature attempted to investigate why this “divorce” had occurred. Among the reasons were the following: you have to promote the parties through the right outlets, otherwise you will not attract the right people, which is why mainstream magazines are not relevant outlets to us for promoting these parties as it will not necessarily attract the right people (Enrico Sorbello, promoter, Antiworld vs. Psygate). Psychedelic trance will not pass over to the mainstream audience partly due to its high BPM . . . but it also contains far too much information in the form of intricate production to appeal to a wider audience It is too much for the mainstream audience, a crowd that always looks for easy solutions inside the music (Marios Trivizas, organiser, Samothraki Festival). Our scene is a lifestyle thing. It is a culture, not a fashion or fad like most dance genres have been (Richard Bloor, T.I.P. World records). The quotes seem to imply a degree of elitism within the psytrance scene, that it is something misunderstood by a “mainstream” audience, that the music lies above the comprehension of those outside the scene. Similarly, the practice of attracting the “right” people to parties tallies with the idea of psytrance being wary of outside influence, hence the process of psychedelicising existing dance music subgenres. The appropriation of other styles, therefore, ensures that the integrity of the scene remains intact, and that divisions remain between itself and other EDM styles. A useful point of reference here is Sarah Thornton’s (1995) theory of “subcultural capital”. Drawing from Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital”, Thornton argues that “subcultures” operate in a similar way. In the same way that a well-spoken accent, a university degree or an impressive art collection might be indicators of “cultural capital”, a fashionable haircut or a comprehensive record collection may confer status on an individual within a given milieu (Thornton 1995: 11). The process of psychedelicisation is analogous to the means by which knowledge, style and taste generate

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“subcultural capital” among participants. By adapting a given style to suit the expectations of a psytrance party crowd, the music takes on a greater level of authenticity. It becomes enculturated; part of the scene. As Thornton suggests, “authenticity is dependant on the degree to which records are assimilated and legitimised by a subculture” (1995: 66). This is the same in psytrance where psychedelicising is a means of assimilating other EDM styles, ultimately leading to their legitimisation within the scene.

ACCOMMODATING THE “PURE” Despite the “regulatory” process of psychedelicising, it should also be noted that psytrance parties in the UK do often feature other EDM subgenres in their “purer” form. For example, a recent “Hybrid UV” event in Manchester featured a main psytrance room and a second area playing hard house. This event was promoted primarily to the psytrance scene and was marketed as a psytrance event. So how can the presence of “non-psy” music be explained? First, the second room was organised by a specialist hard house promoter, featuring specialist hard house DJs (i.e., people who would not normally be associated with psytrance). Second, the difference between the two rooms was particularly noticeable. The main room featured the usual psytrance-style décor, while the second room was completely unadorned. The psytrance room was packed throughout, with many party-goers adhering to typical psytrance style (dreads, combats, hippie chic, etc.), while the hard house area attracted a much smaller, different crowd (e.g., girls in short skirts, men in shirts). Therefore, given the contrast between the two areas, the role of the second room in the psytrance scene is unclear (an issue to which I will return). Moreover, despite the two rooms being part of the same event, it was obvious which area was the more popular. Similar observations can be made regarding the 2008 Shamania event, the UK’s “spiritual psytrance festival”. As one would expect, psytrance provided the core of the music at the festival: it was performed on the main stage (progressive and full-on), the chill-out area (psy-chill) and in a host of cafes where music was amplified (many of which were run by psytrance crews from the north of England). In addition to this, the festival featured an “alternative” dance tent, run by a collective from Leeds called Riff Raff, who specialise in hard trance, acid techno and NRG. As with the event in Manchester, the tent seemed separate from the rest of the festival, hidden away at one end of the site. The crew running the tent, in their matching t-shirts and clean-cut appearances, seemed at odds with their slightly dishevelled psytrance counterparts. Even more striking were the crowd attracted to the tent. On the Sunday of the event, this venue hosted several of the original acid-house DJs from Blackburn, with two-thirds of the audience being middle-aged and clearly from that era. A small yet appreciative audience proceeded to enjoy something of

122 Robin Lindop a nostalgia trip, mouthing along to the words and dancing enthusiastically to the soulful sounds amplified, all in contrast to the “full-on” psytrance performed elsewhere. Given their dressed-up demeanour (as if they were on a night out at the clubs) and mud-free appearance, these patrons appeared to have attended the festival for the day only, and specifically for this occasion. Indeed, I did not encounter them at any other time during the festival, odd given that the attendance was merely one thousand people. Once again, despite the event being a self-proclaimed psytrance festival, it is debatable as to whether the music encountered in the Riff Raff tent can be considered to be an intrinsic part of psytrance. While two DJs played in the psytrance area and Riff Raff tent, these artists (both from Sheffield psytrance promoters Planet Zogg) are known for playing on both sides of the psytrance–acid techno divide. These DJs, alongside the likes of Manchester’s Strange Daze, have adopted a less “precious” attitude to psytrance, regularly putting on parties that feature everything from techno to hard dance (in their “purer” forms) in the same room. This “genre-blending” is a feature of psytrance in the North of England and may be explained by the fact that, outside of London, psytrance is not vastly popular. Therefore, featuring other EDM styles widens the appeal of parties, although this approach is not representative of UK psytrance as a whole and has come in for criticism in some quarters. The following web forum exchange between a party-goer and promoter (following a Hybrid UV/Strange Daze collaborative event that featured a main psytrance room and a second, dub reggae/dubstep-orientated area) concerning the lack of décor in the second room illustrates some of the anxieties experienced by psytrance participants. Participant: Thought a little more attention.love could of gone in the StrangeDaze room, though with warm-up duties, perhaps the ambience they are going for, and a few other factors I am sure there were very good reasons for this. I guess I have been spoilt by the attention that normally get paid to the traditional chill.ambient.second room in the more traditional format, though with the smoking changes I can see the need to evolve. Promoter: Indeed I see your point in the issue with back room decor . . . but its just not part of the music that gets played. Dub is all about the bass. . . . I’m not sure where over UV’d environments and giant pictures of Shiva fit into that??6 The above illustrates the value placed on a “unified” party aesthetic by psytrance participants, and also the importance of décor within this experience. Although not critical of the music itself, the views of the participant suggest that even if “traditional” second room music (i.e., ambient/chillout) is not present, the décor should continue to adopt a psytrance aesthetic. However, the response from the promoter refutes this, the individual being

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of the opinion that “non-psytrance” music does not necessarily warrant psytrance décor. The comment also highlights an interesting issue regarding the changing role of the second room in UK psytrance, following the enforcement of the smoking ban in July 2007. Prior to this, secondary “chillout” spaces were typically where people would go to break from dancing in the main room; for many this would be an opportunity to smoke7. Since the introduction of the ban, smokers have been forced to move to designated smoking areas outside the club; consequently this has drawn people away from chill-out rooms. As a result, promoters have begun to feature other, more up-tempo styles in second rooms, in order ensure a healthy crowd and to justify the continued existence of these areas. The incorporation of “purer” dance styles is one way of overcoming this issue and perhaps suggests that this approach will become more widespread, particularly given that the psytrance “meta” genre (perhaps with the exception of psybreaks) is centred around down-tempo styles. Another method of interpreting these observations might be to examine the insider/outsider distinctions that are maintained by psytrance; how participants respond to the presence of “non-psytrance” music. Thornton’s (1995) discussion of “mainstream” versus “alternative” distinctions is critical here. In her examination of clubber discourse concerning their social worlds, she observed that participants were generally disparaging and dismissive of a perceived “mainstream” or “other”. Comprised of subjective values that replicate “political associations and journalistic cliches” (Thornton 1995: 115), the “mainstream” was viewed as homogeneous, false and conformist. On the other hand, the participants’ own culture was seen as heterogeneous, although simultaneously “like-minded”, thus allowing for a “sense of shared identity” (Thornton 1995: 111). To a degree, this attitude is prevalent in UK psytrance. As we have seen, participants are wary of outside influence from a perceived “mainstream” (i.e., the self-distancing from commercial trance). For instance, the television advertisement of the aforementioned Psytrance Euphoria compilation was criticised8 on Internet forums (“It’s the beginning of the end of a genre that has always maintained and stated it’s independence from the mainstream”9), suggesting a fear of “popularization by gushing up to the mainstream” (Thornton 1995: 5). However, the “other” apparent at the psytrance events under observation did not so much represent the “mainstream” but other EDM genres, which were not denigrated but rather treated with respect. The emergence of the psytrance “meta” genre is the principal manifestation of this; rather than being rejected outright, the influence of other genres is enculturated into the scene, ultimately authenticised. Similarly, at the Shamania festival, the alternative dance tent was “marginalised” rather than actively opposed. Indeed, in the aftermath of the event, discussion on psytrance Internet forums generally failed to mention the tent, instead focussing on the psytrance area (although those that did reviewed it favourably). Instead, the primary motive of psytrance appears to be the maintaining of a distinction

124 Robin Lindop from these other scenes, not to conquer or to disparage them (although these attitudes do occasionally exist, as we’ll see). This mentality is evinced by the term “party” which distinguishes psytrance events from a “club” or “night” (the terms favoured by many other EDM genres)10. While Thornton’s argument that “the mainstream is the entity against which the majority of clubbers defi ne themselves” (Thornton 1995: 5) holds some resonance with psytrance, the psychedelicising of these other genres is suggestive of practices not considered by Thornton. As opposed to an outright rejection of these other forms, psytrance attempts to “negotiate” accepting musical elements that can be integrated into the scene while discarding those that conflict with its aesthetic. One example is the “psybreaks” sound that has emerged in psytrance. By “smoothing over” the “unexpected discontinuities” (Rose, cited in Chapman 2003: 3) that have historically characterised the breakbeat (achieved via applying rhythmically consistent, “nu skool breaks” derived patterns) and eliminating the more “real”, sonic elements (i.e., “diva” style vocals and sampled instruments), breakbeat becomes compatible with the psytrance aesthetic (i.e., one that values circular, rhythmic coherence and synthesised sound that avoids reference to the “real” world). Via this process of “negotiation”, ultimately psychedelicisation, the breaks subgenre is incorporated into psytrance. Once again, this is illustrative of the respect, rather than disparagement, that is afforded other EDM scenes (i.e., the entities against which psytrance defi nes itself)—rejecting the elements that contradict, absorbing those that complement.

THE UBIQUITY OF PSYTRANCE Another interesting case in point is the aforementioned Waveform Festival. As already stated, featuring crews from a variety of EDM subgenres, Waveform is not a pure psytrance event. Yet psytrance almost dominated and dictated the aesthetic character of the festival. For example, the Main Stage featured a plethora of psytrance acts; DJs such as Ed Tangent and Avalon covered the “actual” genre of “full-on” and progressive styles, while live acts including Orchid Star (“psychill”) and Mood Deluxe (“psybreaks”) epitomised the “meta” genre. Even more interesting were the sets by Eat Static and Zubzub. The performances by these artists incorporated both the “actual” and “meta” categories, comprised of psychedelicised versions of trance, techno, drum and bass and dub reggae styles. Admittedly, there were numerous non-psytrance acts on the bill (such as Supernature and Nucleus Roots), but these were in a minority. The breaks tent also presented an interesting scenario. Once again, there was a distinct psychedelic aesthetic exemplified by the “psybreaks” stylings of Far Too Loud, Agent Smith and Liquid Djems. Alongside these acts were “purer” breaks DJs (such as Ctrl Z), but as with the main stage, it was a psychedelicised form of the style that was the most prominent. In retrospect, this was to

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be expected as the organisers of the tent, Archangel, are closely associated with “psybreaks” and psytrance, in general, although this was not highlighted in any publicity for the festival. The Gaia Chill area was also notable for the fact that nearly all the performers over the course of the weekend were associated with psytrance in some way—ranging from “psychill” DJs such as Red Earth to dub artists like Gaudi. This highlighted the fact that “psychill” is perhaps the most coherent and fully formed style within the psytrance “meta” genre—in effect an “actual” genre within the “meta” genre—offering a contrast to “actual” (“full-on”) psytrance. Elsewhere on site, only the Project Storm tent (featuring techno, drum and bass and hard trance) was devoid of psytrance leanings, which may explain why that venue was poorly attended. The conduct of those involved in this area was also criticised by posters to the “Psymusic” forum following the festival. For example: I found the whole festival very enjoyable but couldn’t quite see why they’d invited the Project storm lot. They didn’t give a shit about saving anything and I think most of the trouble came from that side of things (maybe asumpsious [sic] of me) but certainly no world peace kinda vibes coming from there. I thought maybe it was there to try and show the alternative to being a positive person and show the extreme opposite? I don’t know.11 By comparison, The Tribe of Frog (“actual”) psytrance arena was near capacity more or less throughout. On the Saturday afternoon of the festival, despite the other music areas being near-empty, the stage and surrounding area became a focal point for the festival; the crowd spilling out of the tent up onto the hill in front of the stage, where people sat socialising. However, the psytrance fl avour of the festival was not only dictated by the music. In other aspects, too, Waveform demonstrated the widespread influence of psytrance. The decor of the festival was typical of the subgenre: the UV decor in the Tribe of Frog tent; the fractal hangings in the breaks area; the delicate intricacies of the fairy garden. Elsewhere, chai cafes and stalls selling psytrance fashions were in abundance. It is also unsurprising that the CD stall at the festival largely marketed psytrance releases. In addition, I encountered many familiar faces from the UK psytrance scene, ranging from DJs and producers to stall holders and general party-goers. This scenario is also true of the Glade Festival. Once again, while Glade is a general EDM event, psytrance is predominant. Of the nine or so music arenas at the festival, three cater for psytrance: the Origin Stage (the “actual” genre), Inspiral Chill (the “meta” genre, in this case “psychill”) and the Liquid Stage (the “actual” and “meta” genre), and the overall aesthetic of the event has a pronounced psytrance influence. Indeed, the organisers of the event are associated with Nano Records (a psytrance record label) and are experienced in producing psytrance parties.

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These observations can be interpreted in a number of ways. Firstly, the ubiquity of psytrance at the events in question might be viewed as a logical occurrence. More specifically, given that the scene is often referred to as a “genuine subculture” (Reynolds 2006: 443) or “lifestyle” (Jenkins 2004), its distinctive features—encompassing music, party format, fashion, drugs, visual style, travel, etc.—make for its dramatic presence at EDM festivals. While it would be questionable to argue that psytrance is more a “lifestyle” than other EDM scenes, it is fair to say that other dance cultures do not have the same visual identities, or diverse cultural, and countercultural, interests. Taking this into consideration, it is logical that psytrance possesses a strong cultural influence. However, it is easy to overstate the influence of psytrance in the UK, at festivals, in particular. Moreover, the foundation for festivals such as Glade, Waveform and Shamania is not psytrance, but what might be termed “alternative” festival culture. This “movement” can be traced back to the free festivals of the 1970s and 1980s (with festivals like Stonehenge), forming a trajectory through to the festival/ rave crossover in the late 1980s (i.e., Spiral Tribe, and the 1992 Castlemorton rave) and involving hippies, punks, New Age travellers and ravers at various points (see McKay 1996; 2000). As Partridge (2006) suggests, there is “significant evidence for the continuity between psychedelic hippie culture and certain aspects of 1980s and 1990s rave culture” (2006: 45). In addition to more obvious links (such as the countercultural/free festival backgrounds of numerous dance musicians12), he identifies the continuation of an “indigenous spirituality” (2006: 50) and “countercultural ideology” (2006: 41) between free festivals and raves. Although the free festival scene was in effect extinguished following the introduction of the 1994 Criminal Justice Act (which partly aimed to clamp down on illegal festivals and raves), the scene survived via “festi-clubs” like Megadog, Megatripolis, the Goa trance scene and legal festivals. It is this culture that provides the backbone of UK events such as the Sunrise Celebration, Northern Green Gathering, Solfest, Shambala and the more “alternative” parts of Glastonbury, along with the aforementioned EDM festivals. This “alternative” festival culture has a strong “freak” aesthetic—links with the “green” movement, entertaining notions of an idealised lifestyle (living on the road, travelling from festival to festival), leaning towards anarchist politics, etc. The culture is a blend of the young and old, a mixture of free festival veterans and newer converts. Musically, the scene is a curious blend of acoustic folk, psychedelic rock, dub and psytrance. Indeed, psytrance can be viewed as the EDM “axis” of “alternative” festival culture, holding prominence at many of the aforementioned events. Therefore, when it comes to the EDMorientated festivals that are vehicles for this culture, it is once again logical that psytrance is the most prominent style. It is this which may lead some to exaggerate the presence of psytrance at an event, mistaking certain cultural signifiers (e.g., dreadlocks and hippie chic) for “psytrance”, when they are better viewed as indicators of “alternative” festival culture in general.

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However, the presence of psytrance itself at these events should not be underestimated. Another useful approach derives from Timothy D. Taylor‘s (2001) study of the New York psytrance scene. Taylor uses Grant McCracken’s (1997) concept of a “little culture” in order to explain how that scene functions, an understanding which could be applied to UK psytrance. McCracken uses the term to describe the different groups that he identified in a study of teens. He concluded that each group differed from another, not merely on the surface (fashion, clothing, etc.), but on a deeper, ideological level. McCracken encountered “dramatically different values, outlooks, points of view” between groups, ranging from skaters to goths. Furthermore, each of these formations had “its own reckoning of the world . . . carrying its own view of the world” (McCracken 1997: 25). However, at the same time, “little cultures” are fluid entities, although when “mixing and matching takes place, it is always the mixing and matching of preformed materials” (McCracken 1997: 25), implying a degree of coherence to these formations. Taylor uses this model to describe the New York psytrance scene, referring to “little cultures” as “cultures that are relatively whole in and of themselves” (Taylor 2001: 179), playing down the dependence on a dominant culture that the term “subculture” implies. Indeed, the term “little culture” stems from McCracken’s own theory of “plenitude”. That is, that we live in an era of “everything”, where youth groupings are characterised by diversity and independence, as opposed to being a homogeneous mass reliant on a “whole”. In this sense, “little cultures” differ from Birmingham’s CCCS defi nition of “subcultures”. Rather than the essentialist assumptions of the “Birmingham school” approach—one that privileges the viewing of youth culture as a vast, monolithic collective (Taylor 2001: 179)—McCracken’s theory of “little cultures” acknowledges the variety of different groups within the broad category of “youth”. Second, as opposed to the emphasis on “resistance” and the “heroic winning of space” (Thornton 1995: 25) espoused by subculturalists—characterised by a focus on binary oppositions between the “dominant” culture and “subculture”— the concept of “little cultures” removes the notion of hegemony, maintaining that each group is self-sufficient and independent. Certainly, there is scope for applying this model to the UK psytrance scene. As Taylor observes, psytrance is an especially “hidden little culture” (2001: 165), a view consistent with the observations in this chapter. As we have seen, the scene is notable for its “self-sufficiency” and detachment from the rest of EDM. Psytrance maintains a hermetic existence that ensures the continuation of its identity, while simultaneously allowing for outside influence. Indeed, the 2009 Glade Festival would featured a self-contained, “psychedelic area”, featuring the aforementioned three psytrance stages.13 Similarly, the psychedelicising of other EDM styles serves to “assimilate” other EDM genres into the psytrance canon. These measures, in addition to psytrance’s distinct visual identity, style, textile fashions, discourse and practices, serve to offer participants a unified cultural experience. If

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desired, every aspect of life can be lived through an aesthetic that is unique to psytrance. In this sense, psytrance can be viewed as a cultural “movement”, where the music is connected to ongoing cultural, political and spiritual causes; this also supports the notion of the “logical” nature of the scene’s widespread influence at events. If anything, although the term “little culture” could be applied to other EDM scenes in the UK, in its defining of difference, psytrance is exemplary.

CONCLUSION In conclusion, therefore, UK psytrance embodies a complex set of ideologies, cultural politics and aesthetics that are embodied by theories of musical genre. The existence of “actual” and “meta” forms of the genre presents a dichotomy that complicates defi nition of the music. On one hand, psytrance is homogeneous (the “actual” genre), and on the other it is diverse (the “meta” genre). This contradiction supports the notion of the paradoxical nature of psytrance identified by Erik Davis (2004) and Joshua Schmidt (2006). Davis uses the term “spiritual hedonism” to describe the “pseudo spiritual” (261) nature of Goa trance parties (i.e., a curious mix of religiosity/ritualism and psychoactivated revelry), and Schmidt identifies a series of oppositions within the behaviour of transistim (Israeli psytrance followers). Over time, these contradictions have become the norm, leading to a unified mindset and mentality. The idea of a musical paradox serves in a similar way. Although the simultaneous existence of “actual” and “meta” genres within a given category is contradictory (i.e., that the music can be at once homogeneous and eclectic), in psytrance the two are united by a particular musical code which imbues a common/shared aesthetic. The emergence of the “meta” genre within UK psytrance, the result of the negotiations with and psychedelicising of other EDM genres, supports the “actual” genre, while at the same time extending the musical boundaries of the scene. In addition to other regulatory practices, this serves to protect the cultural identity of the community while generating “subcultural capital”, preventing absorption into a broader category of Electronic Dance Music. The post-rave era has seen the rapid hybridisation of EDM styles, dissolving many genre boundaries. Although genre-specific dance communities persist, it is increasingly difficult to differentiate between them. House/electro/breaks are becoming ever more interlinked, as are drum and bass, hip-hop and dubstep, or acid techno, hard house and NRG. While many of these styles are present at psytrance parties, as we have seen, a distinction is maintained between them and psytrance. With its “self-sufficient” aesthetic, UK psytrance stands apart from these other subgenres as a distinct “little culture”. This is a status forged by a mixture of wariness on the part of those within the scene (of its dilution, etc.) and suspicion by the

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general EDM media. In addition, this position has been aided by an apparent inevitability; the idea that its influence, particularly at festivals, will be more pronounced as a result of the culture’s strong visual identity and status as a bona fide “movement”. Similarly, psytrance’s position within the broader category of “alternative” festival culture can create the illusion of a psytrance aesthetic. Overall, it can be argued that psytrance is a unique subgenre of EDM with direct links to the 1960s counterculture, a continuity integral to its cultural identity. The festivals documented here exist as vehicles for the progression of this aesthetic, and while the UK scene will no doubt continue to evolve and diversify, it is highly likely that this identity will persist for many years to come.

NOTES 1. This is achieved via treating a sinewave waveform with a high-shelf EQ. This waveform is then pitch bent several times over the length of the note (Peacock, 2008). 2. For example, using a sawtooth waveform, experimenting with the fi lter and amplitude envelopes and using a low-pass fi lter (Peacock, 2008). 3. This is essentially a “noise gate”, involving the rapid shutting on and off of the volume of a sound, creating a “stuttering” effect. 4. Despite this distinction, “progressive” psytrance will be viewed as part of the “actual” psytrance genre. Progressive is usually featured in the same room as “full-on”; the transition from the former to the latter traditionally being a key part of the musical progression of a psytrance party. 5. This is due to the intolerance of illegal, outdoor events by the authorities, the erratic UK climate and also for the convenience of urban psytrance followers. 6. (accessed 06/03/08). 7. In my experience, a high proportion of psytrance participants are smokers, making the issue even more critical. 8. The overall reaction was favourable, although this appeared to be attributed more to the quality of the music than the nature of promotion. 9. (accessed 20/03/09). 10. Another reason for the use of this term stems from the fact that psytrance is synonymous with the “free party” scene, although the majority of psytrance events in the UK are legal and take place in clubs. 11. (accessed 06/03/08). 12. Most notably this includes Merv Pepler and Joie Hinton of Eat Static, who came to prominence in the free festival-orientated psychedelic rock band Ozric Tentacles, and Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy of System 7, formerly of the 1970s space-rock band Gong. 13. This idea has also been implemented at the Life Festival in Ireland, which featured a separate “trance village”. This enclave was separated from the rest of the festival by a stream (accessed via a footbridge) and included a “full-on” stage, chill-out area and market.

130 Robin Lindop BIBLIOGRAPHY Chapman, Dale. 2003. “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion”. Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 5(2) Online at (accessed 25/2/2010). Davis, Erik. 2004. “Hedonic Tantra: Golden Goa’s Trance Transmission”. In Graham St John, ed. Rave Culture and Religion, 256–272. London: Routledge. Derogatis, Jim. 1996. Kaleidoscope Eyes: Psychedelic Music from the 1960s to the 1990s. London: Fourth Estate Ltd. Hughes, Claire. 2007. “The Roots of Psy”. In DJ 4(4), 33–35. Jenkins, Tom. 2004. “Trance Scene Overview”. In DJ 64(3). Malbon, Ben. 1999. Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality. London: Routledge. McCracken, Grant. 1997. Culture By Commotion Book One: Plenitude. Toronto: Periph Fluide. McKay, George. 1996. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties. London: Verso. . 2000. Glastonbury: A Very English Fair. London: Victor Gollancz McLeod, Kembrew. 2001. “Genres, Subgenres, Sub-subgenres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation Within Electronic/Dance Music Communities”. Journal of Popular Music Studies 13, 19–75. Partridge, Christopher. 2006. “The Spiritual and the Revolutionary: Alternative Spirituality, British Free Festivals and the Emergence of Rave Culture”. Culture and Religion 7(1), 41–60. Peacock, Aaron. 2008. “Music Production Info”. . (accessed 10/12/2008). Reynolds, Simon. 2008. Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Techno Culture. London: Picador. Schmidt, Joshua. 2006. “Fused by Paradox: The Challenge of Being an Israeli Psytrancer”. M.A. Thesis, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Shuker, Roy. 1998. Key Concepts in Popular Music. London: Routledge. Taylor, Timothy D. 2001. Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture. London: Routledge. Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press. Whiteley, Sheila. 1992. The Space Between the Notes: Rock and the Counterculture. London: Routledge.

DISCOGRAPHY The Trammps. 1977. Disco Inferno. Atlantic Records K50339. Earth, Wind and Fire. 1979. I Am. CBS Records CBS86084. Various Artists. 2008. Psytrance Euphoria: Mixed by John “00” Fleming. Ministry of Sound EUPCD22.

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(En)Countering the Beat Paradox in Israeli Psytrance Joshua I. Schmidt

The aim of this chapter is to explore Israeli psychedelic electronic dance music culture (PEDMC) by discussing what is “Israeli” about the Israeli psytrance dance music community. I examine the behaviour and attitudes of “transistim”—Israelis who attend all-night dance parties where psychedelic trance music is played. The parties, known in Hebrew as mesibot, typically are staged without proper permits and participants openly use illicit drugs. Even though they view their participation at mesibot as purposefully defiant, a closer look at transistim conduct reveals that, paradoxically, their behaviour actually reflects, as well as counters, mainstream Israeli sociocultural norms. Thus, despite outward appearances, a paradox foremost in Israeli psytrance culture is that a major influence on transistim behaviour stems from their own source culture (i.e., late-modern, post-Zionist Israel, whose standards and values transistim integrate into their conduct and attitudes). This is unexpected because both the establishment and transistim view participation in mesibot as countercultural, and the idea that transistim are actually replicating the conventional Israeli social framework seems counterintuitive. At the same time, since transistim actually duplicate what they often profess to refute, it is understandable that they are ambivalent towards their actions and hence behave in an inconsistent manner. This ironic pattern was uncovered by juxtaposing ethnographic impressions of transistim activities (based on seven years as a participant/observer at mesibot) with a linguistic analysis of transistim language based on the sign-oriented Columbia School and Phonology as Human Behaviour language theories (Schmidt 2006; Tobin 1990; 1995; 1997; Tobin & Schmidt 2008). Although sparse, the minimal language collected at mesibot (e.g., in track samples, on banners, stickers, t-shirts, tattoos, party flyers, transistim/DJ aliases) was sufficient to locate the extralinguistic message in this “text”, which corresponded with—and thereby enabled—empirical verification of the ethnographic data. The chapter illustrates these ideas by briefly describing some of the key features in Israeli PEDMC and then grouping transistim behaviour into a series of dichotomous pairs. The next section interlinks these contrastive

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units with the socio-cultural revision/transformation currently taking place in contemporary Israel. Combined, these three parts act as a platform for discussing and validating the ways in which the behaviour of transistim is motivated from, replicated in, and manifested by various forms of paradox.1

TRANSISTIM AND MESIBOT: INTRODUCING ISRAELI PEDMC PEDMC, a transmodern youth-based global subculture, was introduced in Israel in the early 1990s by Israeli backpackers who returned from their post-army trips abroad (mostly to the Far East) and attempted to re-create locally what they had experienced overseas. What these travelers found was a subculture made up of the Western “technomad”—modern cosmopolites, global travelers who participated in spectacular no-holds barred parties which encouraged the use of “mood enhancers“ (especially Cannabis, LSD, MDMA) and the consumption, particularly through dance, of electronic music (St John 2009). The music showcased at these early electronic dance music parties became known as psytrance, a genre of electronic dance music distinguished by its hard-hitting “4X4” bass-rhythm whose mind-altering hypnotic cadence works to propel listeners/dancers into shared states of ecstatic audiogenic harmony.

Figure 7.1

3rd Empire Purim party, Israel, 2006. Photo by Joshua I. Schmidt.

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By the time the Israeli backpackers arrived on the scene, the gatherings had become semi-ritualistic; typically held on full-moon nights at attractive natural locations which neighbored the laid-back guest houses where many of the participants lived “on the cheap” for extended periods. Fresh out of the army and eager to liberate themselves from their pressure-filled lives back home, the young Israeli travelers enthusiastically embraced psytrance culture by “dwelling” at these backpacker havens and attending parties for months on end (Bloch-Tzemach 2005). After being present long enough to be duly “infected” by the revelrous PEDMC mindset, many of these “tranced-up” neophytes returned home and began laying the foundations for what subsequently evolved into Israeli psytrance culture. Though psytrance communities exist in well over thirty-five countries across the globe, Israel is arguably the place where this subculture has attained its highest degree of national/cultural prominence. PEDMC’s primary cultural expression—illicit underground outdoor dance parties—is an exceptionally popular leisure pursuit in contemporary Israel. While Israelis are involved with many styles of electronic dance music (e.g., “House” and “Ambient”), their specific contribution to the “Full-On” psytrance genre (140–45 BPMs) is immense. Israeli psytrance artists, DJs, record labels and party promoters dominate the global party scene, while local mesibot are thought to be on par—and sometimes even more intense—than their European and Anglo equivalents. Moreover, transistim are highly regarded both for their enthusiastic behaviour on the dance floor and for their brazen and often audacious drug use. In fact, transistim enthusiasm for key PEDMC features—music/dance/drugs/travel/fashion—has earned them international acclaim and the global trance community relates to Israel as a prominent “trance power” (Regev 2004). Since its local inception, psytrance music and culture as expressed via mesibot have permeated the Israeli cultural fabric at all levels of society and participation in these types of events has developed from being an avant-garde subcultural activity to a widespread—although not an entirely legitimate—leisure pursuit (Ben-Dov 2000; Schmidt 2006). In contemporary Israel, trance parties come in all sizes and social configurations and can happen anywhere, at any time, but especially on weekends and holidays. Although mesibot attract a heterogeneous mix of participants from a variety of age, gender, social, economic, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, their core constituents are mainly secular Jewish Israeli youth with diverse attitudes towards tradition and institutionalised ritual. Estimates are that nearly every week as many as 100,000 Israelis come into contact with some form of electronic dance music culture (Leon 2002). The twenty-five or so weekly PEDMC mesibot likely make up twenty to thirty-five percent of this figure, with other kinds of electronic dance music events, such as commercialised raves, club and private parties, accounting for the rest. Most mesibot are organised by specific psytrance communities and attract a following of loosely affi liated transistim who periodically assemble at

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parties thrown by particular crews. These communities—many have been operating for over a decade and include several thousand members—normally stage their “invitation only” events in secluded outdoor settings (deserts, beaches, forests, private resorts). Characteristically underground and with an ostensible grassroots, not-for-profit orientation, local “psytribes” purposefully skirt mainstream commercial promotional avenues by advertising their parties via private e-mail lists and members-only web forums. Generally, transistim only hear about mesibot a week or two in advance and then, on the night of the event, receive an e-mail or phone text-message instructing them of its exact location. To further safeguard transistim privacy as well as ensure a convivial atmosphere, organisers often place bouncers, known in Hebrew as selectorim, at the party’s entrance with the task of deterring any “uninvited elements” (discussed below) from entering. These concealed environments allow for candid self-expression and some transistim arrive at mesibot in costume and contribute to the festive ambiance through performance art (e.g., fi re-juggling, stilt walking, body painting, interpretive dance). Furthermore, the fact that parties are staged in tandem with Jewish/State holidays infuses them with a quasi-religious atmosphere which, for instance, emerges in their décor—a combination of Jewish/Zionist holiday motifs and neo-pagan/Eastern iconography. At the same time, the “mind manifesting” properties inherent in the so-called “psychedelic experience” infuse transistim consciousness and motivate their activities, imparting mesibot with an air of bizarre sanctimony (Smith 2000: xvi). Moreover, the totality of the drug effects, combined with the music’s all-encompassing sonic rhythms, works to thrust attendees into spaces of shared spiritual ascendance (St John 2004; 2006). This alternative style of “worship” appends the conventional religious practices of participants and, paradoxically, mesibot have become both an antithesis and a partner to more customary modes of holiday/weekend celebration. Inspired by their forbearers, the beats and hippies of the 1950s and 1960s, the most consistent philosophy among many global psytrancers is condensed into the acronym PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity and Respect), an outlook which serves as the (un)official guide for customary PEDMC conduct. In Israel and abroad, there seems to be an implicit endorsement of this standard as transistim generally recognise that acceptable conduct at mesibot entails a culturally liberal and socially tolerant attitude towards others. Although it seems inaccurate to claim that all participants at mesibot adhere to the PLUR principles on either an idealistic or spiritual level, many are aware of this acronym and, when questioned, support the notion that these gatherings aim to create a non-threatening pluralistic environment. With that said, closer scrutiny of Israeli psytrance culture reveals disparity between its egalitarian self-image and the actual behaviour of transistim. The following segment, therefore, discusses inconsistencies in their conduct by suggesting how dichotomic idiosyncrasies may be grouped into a series of contradictory paradoxes.

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EXPRESSING DICHOTOMY: INTERPRETING THE PARADOXICAL BEHAVIOUR OF TRANSISTIM Critics debating EDMC via the lenses of contemporary popular music/culture, identity/gender politics and patterns of globalisation have continually emphasised the contradictions within this subculture (Bennett 2000; D’Andrea 2007; Saldanha 2007). On target with this interpretation, transistim behaviour contains numerous paradoxes and contrasts which are located in a range of dichotomous pairs fused through conceptual opposition and present in their attitudes, conduct and language. From a close reading, it seems that many transistim behavioural and linguistic contradictions stem from issues, concerns and dilemmas facing post-millennial Israel. In other words, the contrasts positioned at the base of Israeli PEDMC are actually expressions of certain confl icting attitudes and contradictory value systems located within the broader Israeli socio-cultural context. This ironic pattern includes an additional degree of complexity since transistim tend to relate to their behaviour at mesibot as purposefully non-conventional and since, by and large, the Israeli public harbors a negative impression of PEDMC activities (Ben Dov 2000; Leon 2002; Schmidt 2006). Some of the key Israeli PEDMC dichotomies are insider/outsider, global/ local, individual/collective, secular/traditional and vocal/non-vocal. Since both the contrasts and the behaviour which motivates them are multilayered, interconnected and dynamic, these examples do not constitute an exhaustive list, but rather suggest some of the principal ways paradox presents itself within local psytrance culture. Thus, the remainder of this section outlines how these diametric pairs operate within transistim conduct and points to how they manifest within attitudes and practices.

Insider/Outsider The insider/outsider dichotomy is a fundamental paradox in Israeli PEDMC and surfaces in a number of ways. For instance, because attendance is by invitation only and mesibot are purposefully hard to locate, party organisers normally keep activities secret. Thus, a division exists between those who are informed where and when mesibot will happen and those who don’t, or can’t, know. Moreover, in their promotional e-mails, many psytribes instruct members to keep knowledge of the parties to themselves as a precaution against attracting “undesirable elements”. Although they never clearly state who these undesirable people are, and even though transistim generally don’t discuss this issue, there seems to be a shared recognition of their identity and collaborated acknowledgment of why these so-called “undesirables” are unwelcome. During conversations, transistim allude to the notion that these people are generally not connected to PEDMC on an ostensibly idealistic or spiritual level and instead utilise the mesibot for crass self-indulgence.

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Sometimes “undesirables” are referred to as Arsim (“punks”) or Shimonim, which makes them distinguishable from Anashim Yafi m (“nice/ beautiful people”). Arse is an Arabic word which literally means “pimp” and in Israeli slang implies “a jerk”, and “Shimon” is a name transistim stereotypically use to identify Eidot-Hamizrax, that is, Jews of North African or Middle Eastern descent. In contrast, Anashim Yafi m refers to a typical, well-behaved, middle-class transist of European/Ashkenazi descent. Within the psytrance context, the terms Shimonim and Arsim designate people whose conduct does not conform to PEDMC modes of behaviour and, for instance, make spectacles of themselves at parties by fighting, damaging property or talking rudely to women. Though not all those who misbehave at mesibot are from the EidotHamizrax, Shimonim are by defi nition are by defi nition Eidot-Hamizrax, and thus even if someone causing trouble is Ashkenazi they will be labeled as a Shimon or Arse, and hence affi liated with the Eidot-Hamizrax. Ironically, instead of using the term Yoramim, the slang equivalent of Shimonim for middle-class Ashkenazim, transistim prefer to call themselves Anashim Yafi m or Anashim Exuti’im (“quality people”). This would seem to imply that Ashkenazim are the group responsible for ranking Israeli PEDMC’s sub-categories and that the pejorative classifications, cultural prejudices and social elitism which exists within mainstream Israel are actually reconstructed within this context (Almog 2000; Kimmerling 2001b). It is not surprising, therefore, that the Ish Yafe/Yoram/Ashkenazi/transist paradigm stands counter to the Arse/Shimon/Eidot-Hamizrax prototype, or that transistim often claim that part of what contributes to the success of a party is the predominance of Anashim Exuti’im and the noted absence of Shimonim. Consequently, despite transistim rhetoric of PLUR-driven egalitarianism, it appears that the social framework at mesibot paradoxically duplicates, rather than challenges, many of the deep-seated divisions found in the everyday lives of transistim.

Global/Local A number of the features from the insider/outsider paradox blend with the global/local dichotomy. For example, although Hebrew is the native language of Jewish Israel, the majority of transistim digital communication, most of the samples in Israeli trance music and much of the slang used in their verbal discourse is English. In general, foreign language use among transistim, along with the fact that mesibot are held secretly in secluded locations, leads to a purposeful separation between PEDMC and conventional society. More specifically, the use of a foreign language, especially English—a language or lingua franca associated with academic and international fi nancial and commercial institutions—appears to be a way for transistim to distinguish themselves from both non-transistim and Shimonim and therefore is in opposition, as well as contradictory,

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to the tenet of “Unity” allegedly aspired for at PEDMC gatherings (Ram 2000: 225–226). Since English represents global capitalist culture, transistim use of this language also clashes with PLUR-derived non-commodified, not-for-profit, non-commercial sensibilities. Moreover, the use of English, which is also the language of translational capitalism, acts as an indicator for those who attend mesibot that they are “globalized Israelis” (Regev 2004: 19). In other words, the exclusivity entailed in the use of English identifies transistim as Israelis who construct their identities “as a local extension of contemporary world culture” (ibid). Additionally, the specific use of English enables a form of escapism by helping transistim legitimise their multiple identities (i.e., as local Israelis and as global PEDMC affi liates). It is interesting to note that, not only do psytrance gatherings separate transistim both physically and mentally from their conventional social settings, but mesibot in general, and the intense energy stemming from the collective hallucinatory experience in particular, offer participants the illusion that what takes place inside these “other-worlds” is qualitatively different from the events taking place within their ordinary social domains. Thus, even if the parties ironically replicate rather than alleviate societal discord, they nonetheless, at least on the surface, appear to present opportunities wherein change can occur. Accordingly, an Israeli PEDMC adage advises transistim to “trust in trance”2 as a means of countering their assumed disenchantment with living in tension-fi lled Israel. In this instance, a global subculture provides remedial support within a local setting (mesibot) and so contributes to the reputed notion among transistim that “out there” (overseas/the global) is qualitatively better than “in here” (Israel/the local). As a result, many transistim associate mesibot with a foreign cultural construct. That is, an imagined global arena wherein infi nite possibilities exist, music and drugs are chief concerns and, to paraphrase the dictum of the “Global Trance Community” on the popular web site “isratrance. com”, “no politics, no violence, and no disrespect” are permitted. Yet, ultimately, even as transistim escape from their daily lives into presumably more agreeable circumstances, their attitudes and general demeanor paradoxically reproduce, rather than improve, the reality which they are attempting to evade.

Individual/Collective The individual/collective binary is another example of an Israeli PEDMC paradox and one which combines features from several of the other contrastive pairs. According to David Muggleton’s research on “the post-modern meaning of style”, subcultures are “amongst other things a quest for individual freedom in opposition to structures” (2000: 158). Transistim demonstrate this pattern since even while their actions take place simultaneously, they consume various substances, dance their dances and absorb

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the energy of psytrance gatherings on an individual basis. Although transistim dance together, on the same dance floor at the same time, their dancing does not generally involve physical contact. This manner of dancing is in direct contrast to more traditional types of communal dance—such as a wedding Hora or Hasidic dancing—wherein the bodies of participants actually touch one another or face each other or dance together as a couple or a group in a ritualised manner. Transistim dance in a group, but their ritual is an anti-ritual and consequently they appear as autonomous individuals. This example illustrates how participants at mesibot display both individual and collective behaviour at the same moment; transistim place themselves in public settings in order to express their individualism, yet even as these two entities—the individual and the collective—are interwoven, they, paradoxically, remain apart. A party’s success is often judged on its ability to create a “vibe” among participants—a distinctive yet transitory form of harmony experienced by participants at mesibot. Although fashioned out of many factors, a “good vibe” is initially dependent on transistim reception of the party’s particular fusion of music, crowd and psychedelics. Following Victor Turner’s delineation of the “transitionary phase of public performance”, I have termed the successful achievement of this stage of PEDMC activity “hallucinatory communitas”, alluding to the magical sense of temporary communion experienced at psytrance gatherings (Turner 1967; Schmidt 2005; see also Rill 2006; St John 2008; Tramacchi 2000). Together with the remote locations of parties, the blend of music and drug consumption at mesibot enables an extraordinary, almost mystical bond to be formed between transistim. This union may be understood as an imaginative form of dance therapy and one which provides transistim with a unique remedy for coping with “‘the pressure cooker’ of Israeli society and politics” (Aviv 2004: 56; Ben-Dov 2000; Rosenthal 2003; Sagiv 2000). The remedial/escapist aspects of electronic dance music gatherings are not exclusive to Israeli PEDMC and, for instance, performance studies scholar Sally Somer explains in reference to dancers at Underground House clubs that: because rhythm coheres the whole, the vibe is mutable, in flux, controlling the ebb and flow of the night. The beat means safety. It pulses through bodies, causes the floor to bound and rebound; because everyone is moving in synchrony, it avoids disharmony, eschews collisions and fights (ibid). As such, the therapeutic respite created at mesibot is a prime motivator for participation. Yet, the unique exchange resulting from this collective moment seems to be music-dependent and, therefore, is short-lived as it terminates when transistim leave the party zone. Moreover, though the music facilitates union, its reception remains nonlinear because even if transistim

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hear the same music at the same moment, they appreciate it on a myriad of levels. Oddly enough, this uneven reception—compounded by assorted drug use and a composite range of subsequent “highs”—surfaces in the midst of a collective moment (the act of hearing/dancing to music). The interplay between the collective and individual behavioural spheres at Israeli psytrance parties seems to synchronise with Turner’s thoughts on the “multivocality of symbols”, an idea which suggests that the meaning of certain symbols used in rituals are not necessarily determined by the mass, but rather are open to individual interpretations as they are played out according to one’s specific experience (1967: 51). In this case, the hyperpersonal aspects of individual drug consumption ensures that the music is experienced at mesibot in a diverse number of ways and intensities. Paradoxically, it is the same set of hallucinatory dynamics which both hampers participants’ sense of communitas—what might also be called the party’s “vibe”—even as it fosters the potentially transcendental form of these events.

Secular/Traditional Another dichotomy, a tension between secular and traditional values, emerges in the way transistim combine their secular (leisure) and traditional (family) cultural spheres. In Israel, both for secular and traditionally observant Jewish families, Friday night, or Shabbat, and holiday dinners are an important ritual. Since mesibot often take place on the heels of these meals, they typically trigger confrontation with what is sometimes seen as the last bastion of traditional Jewish mainstream sociality (Rosenthal 2003). Taking this conflict into account, party organisers normally schedule mesibot from midnight to midday and thereby accommodate the prior involvement of participants with these sanctioned celebrations. The secular/traditional dichotomy is paradoxical since as transistim are replacing conventionally sanctioned family dinners with alternative countercultural mesibot, they ironically continue employing mainstream constructs within their unorthodox “religious” practices. Moreover, the fact that psytrance gatherings are held outside the confines of conventional society allows them to be both a challenge to established rituals and an apparently tolerated alternative to fading traditions. In Israel this tension is further complicated since these seemingly contradictory behavioural patterns—traditional institutionalised religious observance and unorthodox hedonistic celebration—are actually directed towards apparently similar aims: both Shabbat/holidays and mesibot afford their practitioners unique realms of relaxation, rejuvenation and communion. Accordingly, this pattern appears analogous to popular culture and music critic Simon Reynolds observation that youth are turning “to rave culture for the meaning and sense of belonging they once derived from religion” (1998: 288). Likewise, it supports recent claims made by Heelas and Woodhead that “outer

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directed religion” is being replaced by “inner directed spirituality” which has led to a “dual process of secularization with regard to religious observance and sacralization with regard to everyday life” (2005: 18). The secular/traditional dialectic assumes an additional level of intricacy since one of the by-products of the move from collectivity to individuality in post-Zionist Israel is a growing detraditionalisation of religious values (Rosenthal 2003). For this reason, many secular Israelis—including most transistim—have an ambiguous relationship with the establishment’s control of religion. This is so since they defi ne religious practice and relate to it as part of Israeli culture and because Jewish tradition and Jewish religious customs are intertwined with State politics and policy (Kimmerling 2001a; Meadan 2006). To be sure, the clash between secular and traditional value systems is not an exclusively PEDMC phenomenon. For instance, Aphek and Tobin note in their study of fortune-telling in Israel that many clients of fortunetellers seek them out in addition to, or as a replacement for, traditional spiritual and religious organisations (1989). This pattern appears indicative of a broader cultural transformation occurring within general Israel which is “today the site of an ongoing and at times violent competition over ‘tradition,’ that is, a set of meaningful and worthwhile guidelines for people’s lives” (Paine, in Tonkin et al., 1989: 123).

Vocal/Non-Vocal Finally, while at mesibot, transistim normally keep their verbal discourse to a minimum. This, no doubt, is due to the physical exertion required for dancing all night. Two other factors—the somewhat numbing effects certain drugs might have on a person’s motor system and the high volume at which psytribes amplify their music—also contribute to the non-verbal nature of the PEDMC environment. Thus, it appears that one of the main means of communication at mesibot is through music/dance and drugs; rhythms dominate the typically lyric-less music and drugs enhance the senses and allow transistim to feel rather than speak. Over all, the “linguistic economy” characteristic of PEDMC communication may be explained by the sign-oriented linguistic theory Phonology as Human Behavior (PHB), the underlying premise of which is that human language is motivated by the desire to achieve maximum communication with minimal effort (Tobin 1997: 12). For this reason, when transistim fi nd themselves in altered states of consciousness, or fatigued after dancing or staying up all night or from shouting over a loud sound-system, they prefer not to talk. However, because they are in a familiar environment, transistim make use of common codes and signals to maximise their minimal speech. Furthermore, the economic use of language at mesibot is sustained throughout general PEDMC practice and thus album titles and names of tracks, DJ acts, party flyers and psy-Internet forums are all typified by their employment of innovative acronyms, playful neologisms and

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humorous word combinations. This distinctive use of language, therefore, allows communication to be sparse and is thus conveyed as a vocal/nonvocal dichotomy. The common yet distinctive language within this subculture seems also to contribute to the exclusiveness of mesibot. As mentioned earlier, this pattern of exclusivity occurs both among cliques of transistim and between transistim and general society. Sociologist Eileen Barker notes with regard to the language of New Religious Movements, “sometimes the use of special concepts and terminology . . . can contribute, consciously or unconsciously, to cutting members off from non-members and providing the means whereby the members are reinforced in their distinctiveness and, perhaps, separateness from non-members” (1989: 75). The “wordless discourse” of participants also seems analogous to Andy Bennett’s observation that the verbal behaviour common in (British) EDMC conveys a “rhetoric of ‘otherness’ around which the scene has come to be organized” (2000: 94). As Israeli PEDMC appears steeped in dichotomy, the following section attempts to clarify some of the reasons for this by explaining how contemporary Israeli social and cultural circumstances are inter-related with the paradoxical attitudes and behaviour of transistim.

PEDMC and the Duplication of Israeli Society and Culture The rise of PEDMC in Israel in the early 1990s coincided with a number of fundamental changes which occurred during that period within Israeli society. Perhaps most significant was the idea that Israel’s founding Jewish-nationalist ethos, Zionism, had eroded to the point where it seems to have lost much of its “relevance and appropriateness to the contemporary Israeli situation” (Cohen [1989]1995: 210). Israeli sociologist Uri Ram (2000) believes these changes are partly due to the country’s exposure to the forces of globalisation which stressed ideas like social pluralisation and hyper commercialisation. The blend of external forces (globalisation) as well as internal influences (the erosion of the Zionist ideal) altered political and economic spheres and brought about a “fundamental transformation” within Israeli society (ibid: 235). These changes led to a reduction of the essential emphasis Zionism places on collectivism/self-sacrifice and allowed for a more individualist/hedonistic based society to emerge in Israel. In other words, Israel shifted from being a “nationalist and collectivist society” (inspired by Zionism) to one driven by liberalised secular materialism (inspired by neoliberal economics) (ibid, 226). Thus, it seems that whereas once individuals served the needs of the collective, today individuality and the push for self-advancement have become indicative of the joint Israeli cultural imperative. Interestingly, although this shift caused a revision of certain values it also preserved many existing discriminatory power structures and hierarchies and hence allowed for a mostly Ashkenazi elite to maintain much of its cultural dominance over Israeli society (Kimmerling 2001b; Shafir and Peled 2000).

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Ram is not alone in his observations of post-Zionism or in the way he locates oppositional and seemingly contradictory elements within the Israeli psyche and the predominant opinion among many local researchers is that the Israeli cultural consensus is moving from its former emphasis on collectivist idealism to its present-day focus on market driven individualism (Shafi r and Peled 2000). For instance, as Jewish Studies scholar Laurence Silberstein notes: processes that were occurring globally also played a major role in subverting the truths generated by zionist [sic] discourse and opening space for the emerging postzionist discourse. Like so many other countries in Asia and Africa, Israel, in recent decades, has experienced far-reaching demographic, economic, and cultural changes . . . These include a large influx of new populations, the rapid expansion of the media and technology, rabid financial growth, and the infusion of new ideas (1999: 94). Specific examples of these phenomena are the considerable inflow of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, the privatisation of kibbutzim and national companies and organisations, the almost-compulsory post-army trips overseas and the rapid pace of “Americanization” taking place in Israel (Zakim 1998). In a similar vein, the late Israeli political sociologist Baruch Kimmerling argued that, over the past few decades, “the most dramatic changes that occurred in Israel are the evaporation of the image of a single, unified Israeli society, the decline of a unique Israeli identity (notwithstanding excluded and marginal groups such as the Arabs and Orthodox Jews), and the diminishment of the hegemonic secular Hebrew culture. Within the Israeli state, a system of cultural and social plurality is emerging . . . ” (2001a: 1–2). Also commenting on this development, American/Israeli journalist Rochelle Furstenberg (1997) explains how the integration of global concepts and trends within Israeli culture has specifically altered the assertions of identity and personhood of the country’s younger generations. As Furstenberg observes, “in a broader sense, the breakdown of ideology throughout the world has also encouraged Israelis to become skeptical about their basic myths. The political establishment, the army, the founding fathers of the state, the early pioneers, have all been demythologized” (ibid: 2). This questioning of values among Israeli youth has recently been labelled by anthropologists Chaim Noy and Erik Cohen as a “deep crisis . . . a crisis that is on the surface, provoked by the unresolved dilemmas of the Israeli occupation of the territories and the Palestinian uprising, but which, on a deeper level, derives from an exhaustion of the hegemonic official Zionist ideology, which is, however, still clung to, at least rhetorically, by the older generation of Jewish Israelis” (2005: 252). Encapsulating this argument, Ram points to the ambivalence many youth have towards the dominant/ dominating Zionist value structure in Israel and suggests that the prevailing

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trend among local youth is their growing interest in “personal fulfi llment” over “societal contribution” (2000: 227). The oppositional categories discussed in these debates appear consistent with the contradictory behavioural patterns found among transistim in particular and with the overall paradoxes contained within the Israeli PEDMC setting in general. This diametric model also connects with other avenues of Israeli youth culture research and seems to signify a broader socio-cultural phenomenon. For instance, in her study of “Young Israeli Backpackers in India”, anthropologist Darya Maoz concludes that Israeli society “which is generally known as a mobilized, patriotic, and collective one”, enforces “a rigid timetable on the individual” (2005: 159). This rigidity results in a “tension . . . between the collectivism, which characterized the Zionist Israeli society in its beginnings, and individualism, a growing trend in contemporary post-Zionist society” (183). Relating the various ways that these two generations’ viewpoints overlap via backpackers’ behaviour, Maoz concludes that their relationship is “complex, since each incorporates the other” (ibid.) The behaviour of both transistim and Israeli backpackers illustrates the cultural transformations taking place within Israeli society since these communities alternate between progressive outlooks (for instance, the high regard for global culture) and more narrow-minded ethno-traditional conventions (such as the collectivism of the earlier Zionist society) and thereby embody the paradoxical oppositionality inherent in the generational tensions mentioned earlier. Thus, in her essay on the connection between “backpacking journeys” and “the formation of a new Israeli identity” anthropologist Ayana Shira Haviv writes: “in its symbolization of both individuality and a new youth-based collectivity, its association both with the ‘spirituality’ and with a culture of leisure and consumption, psychedelic trance music shares many ideological associations with Israeli backpacker culture as a whole” (2005: 75). Regardless of whether they are on ordinary/conventional or drug-induced “trips”, members of these communities mix and match both real and imagined identities and social roles to the extent that what emerges is a modified replica of their source culture—the Israeli mainstream. Furthermore, not only do these groups construct their identities by reduplicating and reinventing various traditional and established cultural modes and beliefs, but they also incorporate unfamiliar philosophies and practices encountered while on their “travels” (both literal and metaphoric) into their daily contexts (Haviv 2005; Maoz 2005). These cultural flows, however, are bi-directional and as transistim merge conventional cultural norms with their unconventional subcultural behaviour, they influence day-to-day Israeli society. In other words, their idiosyncratic style of cultural appropriation—of both local and global sources—filters back into the mainstream and impacts society by stretching its norms to include exceptional approaches for addressing its current state of cultural ambivalence.

144 Joshua I. Schmidt In his essay “Dionysus in Zion”, cultural philosopher and critic Assaf Sagiv connects transistim attraction to PEDMC with Israel’s socio-cultural transformations by suggesting that: The political, social and economic realities that surround the young Israeli have made him particularly vulnerable to the charms of the god of wine and fertility. However, the response to his call would not have been so overwhelming had Israeli society not failed to provide its young with a viable alternative ethos. The neo-pagan ecstatic revival has fi lled the vacuum left by the demise of the old Zionism, and has been fueled by a mistrust felt by many youth towards anything reminiscent of the grandiose slogans and utopian promises of an earlier day (2000: 174). Accordingly, we could interpret the prodigious rise of psytrance culture in Israel, not as the rejection by transistim of Zionist ideologies, but rather as part of their ardent search for a viable supplement to a cultural ethos with which they no longer overtly identify.

CONCLUSIONS: (EN)COUNTERING THE BEAT The paradoxical behaviour of transistim relates to the current Israeli sociocultural dynamic both by mimicking conventional society and by serving as

Figure 7.2

3rd Empire desert party, Israel, 2007. Photo by Joshua I. Schmidt.

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a radical reaction to it. The widespread popularity of mesibot as well as the multifaceted interactions occurring between PEDMC and the Israeli mainstream, allude to how these gatherings in particular, and electronic music culture in general, have become an integral component of Israeli youth/ leisure culture. What is more, psytrance music and culture have permeated contemporary Israeli society such that PEDMC residuals have affected, effected and otherwise “infected” a variety of non-immediately associated social contexts (e.g., advertising campaigns, exercise classes, political rallies, weddings, children’s birthday parties, religious celebrations). Yet, ironically, this subculture continues to be viewed as an anomaly by both the general public and the media, who make chronic references to trance music as “acid music” and to mesibot as “drug parties”. Furthermore, this ironic cycle of paradox is further complicated since, as previous research indicates, the Israeli PEDMC alternative to the mainstream derives from the mainstream itself (Schmidt 2006). This conclusion parallels and complements other recent ethnographic research on the socio-cultural implications of the New Age culture “boom” currently taking place in Israel and may indicate a more comprehensive system of metaparadoxes embedded within Israeli culture (see Tavory’s 2007 anthology). Dichotomic behaviour and attitudes, however, are not new to this “full-on” nation and as Israeli musicologist Edwin Seroussi contends “from its inception, Zionism was plagued by internal contradictions” (2002). To be sure, the paradoxical dichotomies characteristic of local psytrance culture are intertwined with broader socio-cultural adjustments occurring in Israel. In his 1996 essay on the nature of cultural change as perceived via the study of music, ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl reflects on the connection between music and cultural change and suggests that: [O]ne of the principal ways of associating past to present has been through the concepts of culture change and musical change, the idea that something that a society maintains and shares can change in character or in detail and yet remain essentially the same. . . . It is clear that music may have a particular, unique role in associating a society’s present with its past. . . . music can stand outside the rest of culture, its function being to comment and also to build bridges between a society and the outside world—connecting insider and outsider, humans and spirits, culture and nature, present to past. This insight aptly describes the relationship between PEDMC and Israeli society as well as underscores the function electronic dance music and culture fulfi ls for many Israeli youth. Additional analyses of Israeli PEDMC’s paradoxical pattern of apparent contradictions can provide greater understanding of the contrastive bipolarity of transistim while also shedding light on the dynamics of this model within other local music/youth culture frameworks. Further research into how other global-based “alternative” communities are interacting with

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established Israeli cultural tropes may assist in explaining how the paradoxical character of this country is implicated in its current state of cultural flux. Hence this research represents a tentative and modest beginning to further studies addressing how various global constructs are impacting—and being impacted by—the shifting paradigm of present-day Israeli cultural forms. NOTES 1. Overall, a number of the ideas presented in this chapter are borrowed from my Master’s thesis (2006) and depicted in two short fi lms (2005; 2007) which examine aspects of Israeli PEDMC via a combination of anthropological and linguistic theories. 2. The phrase “Trust in Trance” fi rst emerged as the title of a groundbreaking 1994 Israeli trance compilation. The term was subsequently employed as the name of a local record label which released a number of key Israeli trance albums most notably of the group “Astral Projection”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Almog, O. 2000/1997. The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew. Trans. H. Watzman. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barker, E. 1989. New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office (HMSO). Ben-Dov, Y. 2000. “Why are they afraid of us?” NewZeek. July 2000 [in Hebrew]. Bennett, A. 2000. Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music Identity and Place. London: MacMillan Press. Bloch-Tzemach, D. 2005. “Young Israelis’ Long Trip Abroad, Backpacking in Asia and ‘Dwelling-Tourism’ in Japan”. In C. Noy and E. Cohen, eds. Israeli Backpackers: From Tourism to Rite of Passage, 189–213. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cohen, E. 1995, 1989. “Israel as a Post-Zionist Society”. Israel Affairs. Vol. 1(3): 203–14. D’Andrea, A. 2007. Global Nomads Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures. London and New York: Routledge. Haviv, A. S. 2005. “Next Year in Kathmandu: Israeli Backpackers and the Formation of New Israeli Society”. In C. Noy and E. Cohen, eds. Israeli Backpackers: From Tourism to Rite of Passage, 45–86. Albany: State University of New York. Heelas, P., and L. Woodhead, et al. 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Kimmerling, B. 2001a. The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press. . 2001b. The End of Ashkenazi Hegemony. Jerusalem: Keter [in Hebrew]. Leon, T. 2002. “Pilgrimage, Political Power and Culture of the Young—Raves in Israel”. Master’s Thesis. Submitted to the Department of Behavioral Sciences. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev [in Hebrew]. Maoz, D. 2005. “Young Adult Israeli Backpackers in India”. In C. Noy and E. Cohen, eds. Israeli Backpackers: From Tourism to Rite of Passage, 159–184. Albany: State University of New York Press. Meadan, B. 2006. TRANCEnation ALIENation: Moral Panics, Trance Music Culture and Trance National Identity in Israel. Lulu Press.com.

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Muggleton, D. 2000. Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. Oxford, UK: Berg. Nettl, B. 1995. “Relating the Present to the Past: Thoughts on the Study of Musical Change and Culture Change in Ethnomusicology”. Journal of Music and Anthropology of the Mediterranean, Vol. 1. Noy, C., and E. Cohen, eds. 2005. “Conclusion: The Backpackers and Israeli Society”. In Israeli Backpackers: From Tourism to Rite of Passage, 251–261. Albany: State University of New York Press. Paine, R. 1989. “Israel: Jewish Identity and Competition over ‘Tradition”. In E. Tonkin, M. McDonald and M. Chapman, eds. History and Ethnicity. ASA Monographs 27, 121–136. London: Routledge. Ram, U. 2000. “The Promised Land of Business Opportunities: Liberal Post-Zionism and the Glocal Age”. In G. Shafi r and Y. Peled, eds. The New Israel: Peacemaking and Liberalization, 217–242. Boulder: Westview Press. . 2008. The Globalization of Israel: McWorld in Tel-Aviv, Jihad in Jerusalem. New York: Routledge. Regev, M., and E. Seroussi. 2004. Popular Music and National Culture in Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reynolds, S. 1998. Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. Boston: Little Brown. Rill, B. 2006. “Rave, Communitas, and Embodied Idealism”. Music Therapy Today 8(3): 648–661. Rosenthal, D. 2003. The Israelis: Ordinary People in an Extraordinary Land. New York: Free Press. Sagiv, A. 2000. “Dionysus in Zion”. Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation, No. 9 (Spring/5760), 155–178. St John, G. 2004. “Introduction”. In G. St John, ed. Rave Culture and Religion, 1–16. London and New York: Routledge. . 2006. “Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion: An Overview”. Culture and Religion, 7:1, 1–25. . 2008. “Trance Tribes and Dance Vibes: Victor Turner and Trance Dance Culture”. In G. St John, ed. Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, 149–173. New York: Berghahn. . 2009. Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. London: Equinox. Saldanha, A. 2007. Psychedelic White: Goa trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schmidt, J. I. 2005. Hallucinatory Communitas: Wordless Communication Among Israeli New Edge Psytrance Neotribes. Film presented at “Making Music, Making Meaning”, 13th Biannual International Society for the Study of Popular Music Conference. July, 2005. . 2006. “Fused by Paradox: The Challenge of Being an Israeli Psy-Trancer”. Master’s Thesis. Submitted to The Department of Behavioral Sciences. BenGurion University of the Negev. . 2007. “Fused by Paradox”. Film presented at “¡Que Viva La Música Popular!” 14th Biannual International Society for the Study of Popular Music Conference. July, 2007. Available at . Seroussi, E. 2002. “‘Mediterraneanism’ in Israeli Music: An Idea and its Permutations”. Journal of Music and Anthropology of the Mediterranean, Vol. 7. Shafi r, G., and Y. Peled, eds. 2000. The New Israel: Peacemaking and Liberalization. Boulder: Westview Press. Silberstein, L. 1999. The Postzionism Debates: Knowledge and Power in Israeli Culture. London: Routledge.

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Smith, H. 2000. Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Signifi cance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc. Somer, S. 2001. “C’mon to My House: Underground-House Dancing”. Dance Research Journal. 33:2, 72–86. Tavory, I., ed. 2007. Dancing in a Thorn Field: The New Age in Israel. Tel-Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad [in Hebrew]. Tobin, Y. 1990. Semiotics and Linguistics. London and New York: Longman. . 1994/1995. Invariance, Markedness and Distinctive Feature Analysi–A Contrastive Study of Sign Systems in English and Hebrew. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. . 1997. Phonology as Human Behavior: Theoretical Implications and Clinical Applications. Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press. Tobin, Y., and J. I. Schmidt. 2008. “The Language of Paradox: Interpreting Israeli Psytrancer’s Unspoken Discourse”. Israel Studies in Language and Society. 1:1, 97–116. Tramacchi, D. 2000. “Field Tripping: Psychedelic Communitas and Ritual in the Australian Bush”. Journal of Contemporary Religion 15(2): 201–213. Turner, V. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zakim, E. 1998. “Palimpsests of National Identity: Israeli Culture at the End of the American Century”. Shofar 16(2): 48–69.

Part III

Liminal Culture

8

DemenCZe Psychedelic Madhouse in the Czech Republic Botond Vitos in memory of dhaa

INTRODUCTION This chapter, based primarily on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2003/2004 and on follow-up research in 2007, focuses on the peculiarities of the Czech psytrance scene: a small community of a few hundred regular partygoers.1 In my experience the Czech scene offers scarce material for more popular trends in international psytrance-related studies focusing on topics such as spirituality and activism (e.g., Greener and Hollands 2006; St John 2004; Taylor 2001). Rather, the parties in my research provided in the fi rst place carnivalesque breeding grounds for a specific kind of psychedelic humour, which was self-consciously associated with a metaphorical state of madness. Demence was the widely used expression for the designation of specific drug-induced experiences and outward behaviour patterns of the participants. This ritualised dementia accomplished the temporary demolition and perversion of cultural systems, carried out through cognitive acts, and powered by sensory hallucinations. Most noticeably articulated through verbal communication, the demented vibe was characterised by eclectic playfulness and humorous ambiguity. The fi rst four sections of this chapter offer a comprehensive symbolic analysis. The nonsensical logic inherent in the linguistic projection of demence is explored with references to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. After discussing the relations between demence and the cultural systems of the everyday, the psychedelic-demented experience is further examined within the framework of the party as ritual. This ritual constructs an indeterminate hyperillusion of the world through an excess of simulacra. The fi fth section, borrowing its key concept of grotesque realism from literary theory and re-evaluating the connection with literary nonsense, provides a brief overview of the aesthetic sensibilities triggered by the demented party. Psytrance is a relatively new phenomenon in the Czech Republic. The fi rst significant party in the history of the Czech psytrance community was the Shakti open air, held in the summer of 2000 in Prague. For the fi rst time, this event offered a gathering point for the core of the community, consisting mainly of university students and young professionals (in many

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Figure 8.1 Partygoers Sharing a Bottle. Come Together Festival 2007, The Czech Republic. Photo by Botond Vitos.

cases designers, theoreticians or IT specialists). The scene underwent a proliferation in 2001 with a growth in the number of annual parties and the emergence of new crews, and by 2007 it obtained recognition within the Czech electronic dance music underground, while managing to avoid the mainstream. At that time, some of my interlocutors believed that the “golden age” of the scene had already passed, and felt quite nostalgic about the more intense atmosphere of the early parties, where the community bonds were perhaps more intimate and the consumption of psychedelics among partygoers was certainly more regular, leading to stronger articulations of the demented vibe (Sarah, interview). I was fortunate enough

DemenCZe 153 to be able to visit and experience one of the “legendary” outdoor parties held back in 2003 near the village of Protivin. The party-experience characteristic to such festivals involved the communal consumption of psychedelic drugs, with DJs generally playing harder psytrance styles (such as, but not necessarily, dark psytrance) during the night and euphoric morning psytrance from dawn. The night often proved to be the psychically and emotionally demanding phase of these parties, where, after the dawn, partygoers usually supplemented the psychedelics with alcohol to collectively “splash the evil of the night away” (Chris, interview). This informal “afterparty”, which sometimes took place outside the festival area, could last into the afternoon.

PSYCHEDELICS AND VERBAL DEMENCE The 2003 edition of the Protivin festival was the last in an annual series of parties held near the village of Protivin. It was the fi rst psytrance festival I attended in the Czech Republic, after taking part in several psytrance events in Hungary. Consumption of psychedelic drugs—predominantly LSD, but also “magic mushrooms”—was widespread in Protivin. This, as I was later informed, contributed to the “madhouse” atmosphere characteristic of such parties. While the expression was used metaphorically by Czech partygoers, psychedelic “madness” had in fact been a controversial issue in psychological research concerning LSD during the 1950s (Novak 1997: 90–92). Although early researchers had concluded that their subjects endured a temporary psychosis, the psychedelic state should not be confused with a psychopathological condition (Noll 1983: 454). Later LSD experiments gave diverging results. An alternative approach, which had significant influence on the 1960s (hippie) counterculture as well, was rooted in the experiences of Aldous Huxley, who, in the mid-1950s, redefi ned taking LSD (and mescaline) as a mystical/religious experience (Novak 1997: 93–95). While LSD is still treated as a spiritual technology in numerous contemporary popular discourses, 2 researchers had challenged this view in the 1960s, arguing that the results of the drug experiments were influenced by the different circumstances and preconceptions of the subjects. According to the contemporary academic view, the nature of each trip (LSD experience) is highly dependent on the dosage, the personal predisposition or expectation (set) and the environment (setting) (Pechnick and Ungerleider 2004). Therefore, LSD is not a spiritual technology in itself, and the narratives embracing its use may vary according to the local contexts. In this chapter I will argue that the psychedelic state of consciousness triggers the detachment of the subject from the cultural systems of the everyday: this very act can be situated for example within a quasi-religious (experiencing a divine entity), quasi-metaphysical (experiencing the universe) or quasi-psychological (experiencing the unconscious) framework. Moreover,

154 Botond Vitos the subversive potential of the psychedelic experience and the illegal status of drug use may connect LSD to a narrative of resistance, and its emancipatory effect (a common experience of Otherness) may be experienced under the aegis of the rave culture’s “Peace, Love, Unity and Respect”. Although these narratives are evident in the discourses of psytrance scenes that cherish or promote a hippie-heritage (Greener and Hollands 2006; Tramacchi 2001), their explicit propagation was not apparent in the Czech field. Generally, belief was regarded as everyone’s own “personal question”, and most participants were primarily preoccupied with aesthetic hedonism and/ or a process of learning by “exploring the depths of consciousness” (Jason, interview). Academic psychology discusses the psychedelic state as a profound “altered state of consciousness” (ASC). The latter is a prevalent and popular notion introduced by Arnold M. Ludwig (1969) to describe states of consciousness that are considered unusual, but not abnormal (Kokoszka 2006: 5). The pharmacological list of the commonly perceived effects of ASCs would include: alterations in thinking, distorted sense of time, (temporary) loss of control, change in emotional expression and body image, perceptual distortions and illusions, change in meaning or significance, a sense of the ineffable, feelings of rejuvenation and hypersuggestibility (Ludwig 1969: 14–17). In the following I show how some of these effects are structured in the demented psychedelic experience of the field. A core realisation in demence is that during the psychedelic “trip” the perceived cultural meanings of concepts and surrounding objects may abruptly change according to the provisional (inner/psychological and outer/environmental) conditions of the participants. This cognitive turnover is generally based on visual resemblances, linguistic associations or semantic relationships, and it is accompanied by the perceptual distortions of the surrounding environment. By means of communication one participant can transfer her/his experience to another, which leads to collective transformations of the cultural systems of “everyday” reality (i.e., the reality defi ned by the cultural consensus). In this sense, (verbal) demence is a communal, drug-enhanced association game. For example, during the morning at the 2004 “Witches Island” festival, a few participants were sitting, still affected by LSD, on the grass of a riverside meadow which, in that moment, appeared completely different than the place at which they had arrived on the fi rst night of the festival. The merry group tried to figure out where on Earth they were. Suddenly, one of the group imagined that their strange surroundings were part of a giant golf-course. The statement seemed accurate, as somebody caught sight of one of the “golf players”, who, not on a cabbie, but riding a bicycle, rushed past. They even observed golf-clubs peeping out of his backpack. Finally, one of them spotted a golf-hole with a diameter of about five meters, somewhat resembling a pool from the previous day. Had they actually found a golf-ball big enough, they would have undoubtedly burst out in laughter and begun the game.

DemenCZe 155 The most significant difference between common humour and psychedelic demence is that, in the case of the latter, cognitive acts are associated with intensive sensory hallucinations. Put simply, this makes the experience “real”. The psychedelic “trip” may also be accompanied by inner sensations which are difficult to express (the “sense of the ineffable” in Ludwig’s classification). What can be adequately discussed however is the logic of demence, reflected through its linguistic projection and articulated in a ritualised form during the festivals. According to most participants, the ideal time for verbal demence was in the morning of the psytrance party, which coincided with a shift in the drug-repertoire: around that time, psychedelic usage (the effects of which were wearing off) was supplemented with alcohol. The mixture of LSD and alcohol triggered this demented experience, placing the participants in a world of nonsense—a world similar to the Wonderland of Lewis Carroll. Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass occupy a distinguished position in psychedelic culture. Numerous references can be found to these works in 1960s psychedelic music, novels, fi lms and more recently in psytrance visuals and textual elements. The workings of the inner logic of Wonderland have been dealt with in detail in literary theory, and in the following I try to demonstrate how a very similar logic is to be found at work in instances of verbal demence. Balotă (1979) argues that, in Wonderland, the order of the everyday is undermined through language games which apply arbitrary rules to reality. Language in Wonderland is transformed into a parlour game, and the meaning of each word depends on the whim of the speaker; universal concepts have no objective existence. There, language becomes material (e.g., puns and statements come to life), but these wonders, by comparison with religious miracles, are characterised by the absence of purpose. In his linguistic analysis, Flescher (1969) investigates “the consciously regulated pattern of the backbone of nonsense” in Wonderland. He identifies a number of underlying principles of organisation, such as rhythm, alliteration or leaps from the figurative to the literal meaning of words. The conversations in Wonderland develop through deflections, with the arbitrary misinterpretation of words and interjected puns constantly leading dialogue in new directions, where arguments are undermined before they can reach any fi xed conclusion. Meaning remains on the surface and can develop neither in depth nor in sequence. Staying within the rules of the game, vocabulary can be employed with total freedom. Flescher (1969: 141–142) states that “an organic unity is created with an imaginative interplay of vocabulary which refers back to a concrete area of experience”. Reality in Wonderland is thus constantly undermined and reshaped by means of such language games. Similarly, demented conversations not only “destroy the world as you know it” (Chris, interview), but also rebuild it by reconfiguring its rules through the adaptation of nonsensical logic.

156 Botond Vitos Considering these arguments, I will now demonstrate by means of a simple example the presence of Wonderlandesque nonsensical logic at work in verbal demence. At the 2007 “Circle” festival, a ravenous dog destroyed someone’s tent to get at some sausages. The next morning, a few LSD-affected partygoers, who were engaged in a conversation about artificial flavours and drugs, were made aware of this unfortunate incident. A short language game then developed with the outcome involving dogs fed with Ecstasy pills—with a sausage flavour. Sausages are the chief ingredient in hotdogs, a word which contains “dogs”. And since the whole imagined scenario began with dogs eating Ecstasy pills, an infinite recursive chain of associations had quickly been established in this manner. The starting point of this game is formed by assumptions which correspond to commonsense logics: “dogs like sausages”, “artificial flavours add tastes to synthetic materials like pills” and “hotdogs contain sausages”. Through the application of the arbitrary rules of nonsense (such as misinterpretations, puns or the changing of the contexts) the statements are decomposed and rearranged, and in this case also fashioned into an infinite recursive loop. The (demented) psychedelic state of consciousness does not treat the arbitrary leaps of logic as breaks in the narrative, but rather blurs together the artificial rules with those of commonsense logic, and grasps the whole process as one continuously fluid construct. During these association games the participants creating them are also aware of their deviation from common sense and appreciate the humour deriving from the incongruities. Such games are spontaneous and unwitting developments, accompanied by a sense of the physical embodiment of language. The inner experience itself is characterised by eclecticism, freedom and playfulness: imagine ten people on acid drops3 lying all day in a chillout psycottage, making their brains to fly free on the waves of their own languages. [ . . . ] this is not speaking anymore, but more or less playing around with words. [ . . . ] your language is a toy! not just a tool. [ . . . ] the main thing is nonsense humor with many other meanings (William, e-mail).

DEMENCE AND CULTURAL SYSTEMS While the above example provides basic insight to the inner logic of verbal demence, in the following I situate the phenomenon of demence within a broader cultural and ritual context. I would like to emphasise that the linguistic projection is but a symptom of the overall phenomenon which can be regarded as the demented vibe: it is about feelings of freedom, destroying walls of conformity, playing and lots and lots of fun. language is only one, most visible part of the whole demented vibe (Richard, questionnaire).

DemenCZe 157 In this case the vibe is not only “a successful or optimum social dance experience” (St John 2006: 10), but applies to the whole range of LSDinfluenced, nonsensical activities at a festival. The fi rst step in this discussion is to demonstrate how demence undermines “everyday reality”. I use this latter term to refer to the complex of cultural/symbolic systems which interweave the daily lives of participants. The most pervasive cultural system of the everyday is the core system of “common sense”, described by Geertz (1983) as “natural, practical, thin, immethodical4, proverbial, accessible”. Demented cognitive acts may also exploit concepts borrowed from other cultural/symbolic systems, for example those of religion or art. Generally, a cultural system gains stability by applying certain rules to the world. In this sense, the system of common sense reflects the desire to render the world distinct. With its arbitrary approach and with no clear purpose, verbal demence overemphasises certain rules of the system and neglects others. This eclectic overdrive of rules/ logics ultimately dissolves the symbolic system responsible for fi xing cultural meaning, and in this way meaning is set free, or undergoes constant metamorphosis. Ultimately, emphasis is on the constant redefi nition of rules, ambiguity and humour. LSD, as a powerful catalyst, ensures that the cognitive acts occur in simultaneity with perceptional distortions. Thought and hallucination are bound together, and reality is continuously deconstructed (it becomes the raw material of the demented game). Psytrance parties are generally oversaturated with unusual, fantastic or bizarre decor and visual art, and the use of symbols, such as sci-fi motifs or aliens, adds another level of detachment from the everyday. Nevertheless, demence can also be fuelled by the most mundane objects. In the following I use the concept of “symbolic pollution” (Douglas 1966) as an analytical tool in the discussion of the socio-cultural meaning and the ritual significance of demence. In accordance with Geertz, Douglas states that ordered symbolic systems express the desire to eliminate ambiguities and irregularities. She defi nes symbolic pollution as “matter out of place”: a residual category rejected from our normal scheme of classifications or symbolic systems. Confronting anomalies is often an unpleasant experience, except in certain domains where anomalies are exploited, such as in humour and art. Anomalies can be treated negatively or positively, one can either ignore or condemn them, or deliberately confront them, with the latter transpiring in some traditional rituals (Douglas 1966: 48–50). Demence can be clearly labelled “symbolic pollution”. The nonsensical humour of verbal demence generates and embraces cultural anomalies through the continuous undermining of cultural categories and the perversion of cultural systems. The ambiguous and anomalous character of the demented party-vibe derives from the inner psychedelic state of consciousness and the outer, ritual context of the party-setting. The ever-changing inner structure of the demented psychedelic experience will be explored in the fourth section of this chapter. As for the ritual

158 Botond Vitos environment, the detachment of the Czech parties from the everyday was apparent in their typically natural contexts (i.e., a valley or glade in the woods remote from the city). Moreover, in the ideal case, amplified music and projected visuals possessed a mysterious or absurd design facilitating the abandonment of the mundane. Occasionally, the interacting public took advantage of the ambiguous decorations and backdrops. For example, at the 2007 “Bios” festival a number of unusual installations were staked into the ground. Some of them were 50-centimetre-high microchips, on which different vegetables were placed, including cabbages resembling human brains. At a strategic moment, a regular partygoer, dressed in a clown costume and under the influence of psychedelic drugs, placed a seat next to an installation and started to sell the vegetables in his newly built grocery store, much to the amusement of other participants. While a brain-like object on a giant microchip would have referred to an abstract relationship, which was not unusual for most partygoers (i.e., the relationship between biological and artificial intelligence), the unconcealed presence of vegetables rendered the whole situation anomalous and absurd. The humorous anomaly was further emphasised by the performance of a highly mundane act (i.e., acting as a greengrocer), which highlighted the everyday role of these vegetables. Douglas’ analysis (1966: 117–122) attributes a particular power to pollution. Disorder delineates and defi nes the symbolic system itself, and it also threatens existing patterns with a destructive potential: pollution is both a source of power and a constant threat. In the field, the psychedelic experience was commonly regarded as a powerful process, which involved, for example, “exploring your consciousness”, which is “sometimes very cruel and hard” (William, questionnaire). While this statement references psychedelic “trips” in general, the practice of collective demence at the parties clearly revealed for partygoers the vulnerability and relativity of symbolic systems. During the peak (night) period of the psychedelic experience, the darkness (usually in the woods), the mysteriousness of the fluorescent decorations, and especially the otherworldly music, were all designed to lead participants into a territory of maximum detachment from the everyday. This detachment was carried out through the continuous dissolution of the cultural systems, often generating a sense of danger, with one interviewee reporting that the combination of this night-time environment with LSD could lead to “everybody’s personal hell” (Edgar, interview). After attending two consecutive parties, another participant explained that spending his next weekend at home “was sort of a nonviolent rehabilitation to the ‘common sense’ after two very tough weekends” (Arthur, e-mail). As mentioned, the ritualised confrontation of anomalies has been observed among traditional cultures, with, for example, the African Lele’s powerful cult of the pangolin (scaly anteater) culminating in the digesting of the culturally anomalous animal. In other examples pollution symbols

DemenCZe 159 are accepted as integral parts of human nature (Douglas 1966: 209–220). These rites are organically connected to tribal metaphysics and are thus integral to accessing the realm of the sacred and the transcendental. At the symbolic level, traditional rituals provide access to “a world beyond process”: by leaving the mundane world behind, the participant can be part of a permanent, life-transcending entity (Bloch 1992: 3–4). A similar discussion of partygoers’ psychedelic experiences is often present in the literature. One such approach is provided by Tramacchi, in the context of Australian psychedelic parties. Tramacchi (2001: 179–180) argues that many contemporary spiritual seekers regard the “reality” of everyday sense perception as an illusory construct obscuring the life-transcending frameworks of existence, and interpret the psychedelic state of consciousness as a configuration of a more “transparent” reality affording glimpses into an “ultimate reality” or “ground state”. “Psychedelics”, Tramacchi concludes, “are said to ‘affect’ or ‘distort’ the perception of reality; reality is said to be illusory: ergo, psychedelics might provide a portal to a nonillusory condition”. However, another possible interpretation of this psychedelic state of consciousness should be considered. This second line of thought leads to a different understanding of the psychedelic experience, one which seems better suited to the discussion of the demence phenomenon. It does not rely on the platonic principle of a universal, ideal or transcendental order of reality, but on the contrary, it denies the existence of any such fi nal system. If one considers the illusory nature of reality, not in the sense that it conceals an “ultimate” or “supreme” reality, but in the sense of its “openness” or the amorphous potential of its categories, the demented psychedelic experience can be understood as one that leads to a state of consciousness in which this illusory nature of reality is sent into overdrive. Beyond the illusion of reality another illusion resides which in turn dissolves the illusory reality, and it can be instantaneously dissolved by a further illusion: that is, a chain of hyperillusions is generated. This overdrive is powered by the primary attributes of demence: ambiguity, eclecticism and the absence of purpose, which unchain the participants from the symbolic systems in which they are embedded. In spite of the obvious differences, that is, the intensive propagation of aesthetic hedonism and the absence of a transcendental framework or scope, the demented party has much in common with many traditional rituals. Scheduled interactive performances, both on and outside the dance floor, lead to an experiential realm which disintegrates reality, and, moreover, participants are therein confronted with symbolic pollution. Furthermore, it is significant enough to occupy a central place in the regular partygoers’ life—in the words of Edgar: “if it does not change your life, it’s not worth it”. Therefore, the demented party can be regarded as a powerful non-transcendental ritual, accomplishing the reconfiguration of “reality” according to its own pre-defi ned (nonsensical) principles.

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DEATH ON THE DANCE FLOOR While the previous section situated demence within a broader cultural context, my symbolic analysis aims to reveal the inner structure of the demented party-experience. For this purpose, however, I must fi rst provide insight on the central ritual of the party. Dance music scenes are organised around music styles, and, in this regard, dance music constitutes an essential dimension of psytrance parties. The dance floor, as the heart of the party, provides a fertile breeding ground for the demented experience. It has already been said that the demented party-ritual facilitates immersion in anomalies and irregularities. This is achieved by formulating correspondences not articulated in the everyday cultural systems. This process is most apparent on the dance floor, where the strange sound patterns of apparently freely wriggling music are in fact carefully directed and manipulated by the DJ. The systematisation of the absence of rules is deeply connected to the essential paradox of psytrance, which is discussed in the following semantic analysis of the dance ritual. The demented dance floors of Czech parties were constituted by the following organic assemblage: the “twisted”5 music conducted by the DJ, the visual projections of the VJ, the uncanny backdrops within the surrounding environment, and the bizarre and frequently unpredictable choreography of the drug-affected participants. Among the latter, recurring motifs occasionally appeared. For example, every morning a regular visitor would

Figure 8.2 DJ Playing Night Trance. Bios Festival 2007, The Czech Republic. Photo by Botond Vitos.

DemenCZe 161 drag down a huge stump from the forest, and in the course of a private performance, plant it on the dance floor and perform a kind of dance with it. At the 2007 “Come Together” festival four wooden frames were placed in the corners of the dance area through which multicoloured string was threaded, and into which four vividly painted human torsos were placed. In the morning, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, the same visitor took the occasion to lift one of the torsos out of the frame, kindly inviting it to dance. Generally, the mornings provided good opportunities for demented acts both on and outside the dance floor. During the night, however, the effects of psychedelics were still at their peak, often impeding both performances and verbal communication, and encouraging the immersion into the music. My following analysis focuses on the night-time dance floor, which in the ideal case consisted of LSD-affected partygoers “wriggling with twisted, otherworldly movements on the completely spaced out music” (Arthur, interview). Through the course of my research, I came to the conclusion that the impossible task of the night-time dance ritual is to offer a profound and comprehensive explanation of the inconceivable: its enunciations are formulated in an undecipherable foreign language. The precise meaning of the ritual is always shrouded or cocooned, dwelling in the blind spot of comprehension, hence inconceivable and inaccessible for interpretation; nevertheless, its profound explanation is offered on the dance floor. The camouflaged psychedelic meaning is an irresolvable enigma, which resists deciphering or unveiling.6 If it could be deciphered, it might cease to be psychedelic. The demented dance ritual accomplishes the essential disintegration of meaning at the psytrance party, a ritual sacrifice involving two victims. Within the discourses of everyday reality, the psychedelic meaning remains unborn: it is locked into its own cocoon by the ritual, and therefore victimised by being separated from the world. The demented experience in turn implies the ritual collapse of the cultural systems and their inherent layers of meaning, hence the second victim of the ritual. In short, in the ritual zone both the everyday and the psychedelic are devoid of meaning. However, the dance floor is not just the grave but also the womb, an archetypal centre from which the simulated layers of dementia arise, giving birth to infi nite provisional meanings, most spectacularly expressed in verbal demence. I will illustrate this mechanism with the brief analysis of a psytrance track composed by Hungarian DJ, Para Halu. The track is entitled “Karcos Harcos”, and employs two distorted speech patterns with humorous effects. The fi rst pattern is looped, repeating two mysterious words, something like “carcass harcass”. The second pattern is a bubbly sounding phrase: “you know what I’m talking about”. Both are situated in a disturbing musical atmosphere characteristic of most Para Halu tracks. This second pattern clarifies that the track explicitly deals with the problems of meaning and comprehension. It also suggests that the original meaning of the fi rst

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nonsensical idiom is decipherable. However, at this point it fools the listener: “carcass harcass” is in fact the English pronunciation of the Hungarian phrase “karcos harcos” (“scratchy warrior”), the meaning of which is inevitably hidden for the non-Hungarian speaking audience (or due to the English pronunciation even to some of the Hungarian speaking audience). After this irreversible loss of primary meaning, infinite linguistic associations or free mistranslations of carcass harcass may arise, driven by the nonsensical logic of psychedelic demence.

THE INFINITE MAZE OF MIRRORS Drawing on the previous discussions and the Baudrillardian theory of simulation (Baudrillard 1988), in the following I attempt to uncover the structure of the demented psychedelic “trip” by deploying the metaphor of a mirror maze to help grasp and textualise the multi-faceted and diffuse nature of the experience. My fi rst analysis in this matter concerns the cognitive acts during individual and collective LSD-tripping—these “trips”, together with the dance ritual, constitute the demented vibe of the festivals. As a result of the loss of original meaning and the disintegration of any universal “reality”, the demented associations and mistranslations can be thought of as Baudrillardian simulacra. However, the simulation logic of the party inverts the working mechanism of the Baudrillardian simulation: instead of simulating the real (Disneyland), it provides the simulation of the unreal (hyperillusion). The freely floating, eclectic and demented reconfigurations of the world are driven by nonsensical logic, and the efficiency of the simulation is assured by the powerful consciousness-altering drug. I have already pointed out how demence collapses both the everyday cultural systems and its own generated systems. Ultimately, the simulacrum becomes hyperillusory by concealing itself: the mutability and the constant rearrangement of the rules reveals that infi nite configurations are possible; each configuration is operational in its own simulated environment, but leads to anomalies in every other environment. None of the generated systems is primary, therefore each is legitimate (from the insider’s perspective) and illegitimate (from the outsider’s perspective) at the same time. This proliferation of simulated systems can be understood through the image of an infi nite maze of mirrors, in which each mirror reflects a distorted image of its surroundings, and it appears as a distorted reflection in the other mirrors. The mirror maze is indefi nable as a coherent narrative, because the narrative itself is a part of the maze, and therefore it is refracted in its endlessly distorted re-presentations. The following fragment, in which the party itself spontaneously transforms into its very own distorted simulation (comprehended at fi rst as an enchanted territory, then as a visual advertisement, and fi nally as a shelter),

DemenCZe 163 illustrates a brief walk through this maze. The events took place at the “Circle” festival in 2007, situated in a valley and surrounded by woods. [ . . . ] after midnight the three of us decided to climb one of the nearby hills to get a general view on the valley. we arrived to the top, and looked down at the party. the full moon covered the panorama with purplish shades, and thanks to the LSD, this very image was constantly changing its hue. as we felt the carnivalesque tents, the colorful visuals, and all the party-freaks whirling right under our feet, we instantly recognized the significance of this enchanted festival. however, the view was so picturesque, that one of us became suspicious. it was too perfect and artificial, like a souvenir postcard, or some sort of visual advertisement. the scenery has abruptly changed: what we saw in the next moment was its very own overcoloured and frozen image, some cheap and kitschy imitation of the festival. we started to laugh. apparently, this underground party transformed into its very own cheesy commercial . . . such panorama was no longer attracting us, and we decided to leave the spot. as we entered the woods, the whole scenery has changed once again: anxious and paranoid, we felt the presence of some evil power from a fairy tale gone wild. we were longing for the party, imagining it as an intimate and friendly shelter . . . (Edward, e-mail). Each simulated distortion or re-configuration of the system triggers two simultaneous mechanisms (or perspectives): alienation from the actual system itself and entrance into the next one. Generally, the participant is aware of both perspectives, and the perception of this incongruence enables her/him to appreciate the humour triggered by this state of demence. The fi rst mechanism is very similar to that which Baudrillard (1990) calls the “enchanted simulation” characteristic of the trompe-l’oeil illusionist paintings. According to Baudrillard, the ironical excess of appearances in the Renaissance trompe-l’oeil involves pure signs, objects isolated from their referential context and denuded of the aura of meaning. The primary concern of the trompe-l’oeil is not aesthetic, but metaphysical. By attacking our sense of reality, and therefore our sense of consciousness, its metaphysical seduction derives from the nullification of the real: it radically questions the principle of reality by surpassing its effects. Ultimately, reality is transformed into a simulation (Baudrillard 1990: 60–66). For the demented partygoer, the psychedelic “trip” creates a ritualised realm which surpasses reality and dissolves cultural systems together with their inherent principles and meanings. Through this process, the psychedelic simulation acquires metaphysical significance paralleling the enchanted simulation. However, in this case the dissolving mechanism is sent into overdrive: one takes the “trip” to the simulated space of Wonderland, where one may leap to a subsequent Wonderland, and so on. This process generates a sequence

164 Botond Vitos of successively embedded trompe-l’oeils or a chain of configurations in the infi nite maze of mirrors. Unlike the enchanted simulation, demence not only dissolves the aura of meaning, but also reconstructs it: meaning vanishes from one system and temporarily materialises in another, where the rules are again perverted and re-configured. By this second mechanism, the semantic dimension of the demented experience expands beyond the Baudrillardian model. The simulacrum here acquires a momentary depth of meaning which is repeatedly dissolved by the seductive power of demence. The narrative of collective “tripping” is constructed by a game in which each move may involve a change in the rules. In the course of the game, the players’ cards unfold; the process ultimately leads to the juxtaposition of incongruent memory patterns, which may occasionally organise around recurring motifs. While collective demented acts spawn a multitude of provisional meanings around which a consensus exists among the players, the night-time dance ritual apparently contradicts this working mechanism. The collective meaning of the dance ritual is inaccessible, locked into its amorphous embryonic state. The ideal dance floor sustains a collective experience for which “a madhouse would be an understatement” (Julia, interview). The working mechanism of the psychedelic drug assures that each participant acquires a different (alien) perspective on the performance, the only unifying point being the common sense of uncertainty. The dancer is seduced by a system which seals up and devours meaning; its rules describe the absence of rules. The dance floor generates an inverted simulation, accomplishing the non-presentation of the cultural systems. In this regard the dance ritual may reflect a state of proto-cultural singularity where the mirror surfaces of the maze, saturated with local meanings, slip together into one undecipherable layer of infi nite density. In other words, in this zone the cultural categories, the components of the ritual environment and the attitudes of the dancers are impregnated with a multitude of potential, but unarticulated meanings. This ritual condition may be very similar to that which characterises, on the individual level, the cognitive core or—in other words—the underlying structure of demence. If one conceives of verbal demence both as a symptom and as a “malfunction” of everyday communication processes, the cause of this symptom may be the cognitive oversaturation of concepts with a multitude of meanings during the psychedelic experience. As suggested in the following fragment: [the core of the experience is] the capability to view things from more than one perspective at once, or to think in parallel layers. when playing the demented game, you only choose one of these possible perspectives, which best suits the absurd logic of the dialogue, or which brings out the most unusual association. but in fact at the same time you surpass all the other points of view. and that’s only because language can only be used to tell one thing at once. in fact, it’s incompatible with the

DemenCZe 165 way you think on lsd. it’s as if the software was too powerful for the output hardware (Arthur, e-mail). As soon as this verbal “output” is articulated, the nonsensical statement “comes to life” and temporarily (re)shapes reality, making the next move in the demented game. I would like to emphasise that contrary to everyday language games, here LSD provides the powerful technology of the simulation, certified by the perceived “reality” of the sensory hallucinations. I have so far provided a symbolic analysis of the demented party-experience. The party involves a ritualised confrontation with cultural anomalies or symbolic pollution, but in contrast with traditional rituals, it does not evoke a transcendental level of existence, but rather emphasises the hyperillusory nature of a realm beyond “reality”. According to the semantic analysis, while the core area of the night-time dance ritual enables the double disintegration of meaning, the multitude of provisional meanings separated from the dance floor undergo polymorphic multiplication in an infi nite maze of mirrors. This excess of simulacra provides the ontological background of the demented “trip”. Finally, it has been argued that the inverted simulation of the collective dance floor parallels the core structure of the individual demented experience. Consequently, the psytrance party itself offers a ritualised projection of the individual drug experience.

THE AESTHETICS OF DEMENTIA Outdoor electronic dance music festivals are frequently associated with carnivals or are attributed a carnivalesque character. This relationship has been widely acknowledged within the Czech field. For example, the artwork on the posters and flyers of “Circle” festival, the largest Czech psytrance event in 2007, incorporated carnivalesque elements (such as circus tents, masked figures, acrobats and clowns) into a psychedelic collage-background. A regular partygoer described demence as “circus fun”; another participant referred to the annual large-scale free-techno festival CzechTek as “a metropolis of carnivals”. In scholarly discourse this carnivalesque character is frequently discussed in accordance with Bakhtin’s analysis of the grotesque realism manifested in carnivals (St John 2006). In the following, drawing on the previous parts of this chapter, I argue that attributes of demented psytrance parties may indeed be apprehended via the Bakhtinian concept of grotesque realism. At the same time, these parties also reflect an inclination towards the realm of literary nonsense. This analysis aims to reveal some of the aesthetic connotations of the demented experience. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin (1968) presents the medieval and Renaissance carnival as an unofficial “second life of the people”, which uncrowns the official, ecclesiastic doctrine of faith and dissolves it in laughter. This process is characterised by the aesthetics of grotesque realism, which

166 Botond Vitos degrades the medieval eschatology and renews it in the victorious earthly bodily. The bodily grotesque is characterised by ambiguity, incompleteness and transgression, attributes which alienate it from, and render it repulsive to, the modern bodily canon. The latter eliminates the unfinished and the ambiguous by removing all elements which transgress the bodily limits, and presents an entirely completed and strictly limited body in a finished outside world. I have argued that the party-ritual creates an accumulation of symbolic pollution, which accomplishes the ritualised confrontation with the ambiguities and anomalies excluded by the canon of our ordered and finished schemes of classification. Moreover, the amorphous operational logic of demence (characterised by ambiguity, humor and the evasion of finished systems) is also consistent with that of the bodily grotesque. Furthermore, the psychedelic experience, especially at its peak, blurs the altered inner condition of the participant with the environmental circumstances of the party, and therefore the subject transgresses her/his own bodily limits. Finally, the aforementioned grotesque traits are obviously articulated during the psychedelic dance experience: on the over-night dance floor the intensity of both music and visuals easily captivates the LSD-affected participant and triggers a series of ever-changing, “liquid” hallucinations. it was one of the strongest psychedelic experiences i’ve ever had. i spent some four hours bathing in the waves of sounds and visuals, being unable to escape from it. the outer world merged with my thoughts, perceptions and inner feelings into a colorful goulash [a typical Czech food], which later got the shape of a global web page, and i was the web designer. you know how hard it is to describe such things . . . (Arthur, e-mail). A spectacular visual attribute of grotesque realism is its excessiveness, manifested in its violation of natural forms and proportions by exaggeration and hyperbolism. A similar freakishness is perceivable during the psychedelic “trip”: the subject experiences visual distortions, surroundings are exaggerated, and colours become vivid. During the nights at psytrance parties, fantastic, fluorescent psychedelic decorations strengthen these effects. As for language, Bakhtin points out that the familiar conversations at carnivals involve comic folk elements, puns, allusions and verbal travesties. The language of carnivals is merry and free, situated beyond verbal prohibitions and linguistic conventions. Reflecting the principal of regeneration, the carnival is also a joyous celebration of sunrise, of “the very moment when light replaces darkness” (Bakhtin 1968: 40). Such carnivalesque conversations and moments were highly valued at Czech parties. While the night provided the best context for the “madhouse” dance floor (or for other, often psychically and emotionally demanding, non-verbal psychedelic experiences), the ideal time for the verbalisation of the demented vibe was during the morning euphoria:

DemenCZe 167 in the morning, happy that you survived the night, you get yourself a bottle of champagne or something similar, perhaps another lsd as well, and start to drink . . . and then comes the real [verbal] demence. you are happy, absolutely happy, you don’t know exactly what you are talking about . . . you are speaking nonsense, speaking in demence with your friends, and it’s great (Chris, interview). The last sentence of the fragment is consonant with the argument of the fi rst part of this chapter, that is, that demented conversations are driven by nonsensical logics. The genres of literary nonsense and grotesque are in fact related, both conveying abnormality and ambiguity. In his attempt to provide a working defi nition of nonsense, Tigges (1987) mentions this relationship; however, he also notes a difference. He defines grotesque as a “clash of codes” (a clash with conventional norms), leading to a distortion or fantastic combination of physical forms which are presented to illustrate the “lowest” aspects of reality. Similarly, Bakhtin (1968: 21) discusses the grotesque “degradation and debasement of the higher”, though also emphasising that this process is destructive and regenerative at the same time: grotesque realism hurls its “high” (spiritual, ideal or abstract) object to the reproductive and regenerative bodily “lower stratum”, the latter being related to acts of defecation, copulation, conception, pregnancy and birth.7 Tigges (1987) shows that in literary nonsense no such degradation is apparent and no canon is offended due to the absence of any reference to a normal state. While the discourse of common sense refers to the “real word”, in “nonsense” the discourse refers to “nothing”, because a multiplicity of meanings are created and then reduced to no meaning at all. In this regard, literary nonsense questions and dissolves reality (Tigges 1987: 25). I have already pointed out that an analogous process is accomplished by the transformation of the surrounding reality into multiple layers of simulacra during the psytrance party. The semantic analysis of the party revealed that this multiplicity of provisional meanings slips together into one undecipherable layer of infi nite density during the core ritual on the dance floor. Meaning is devoured or remains unarticulated there, or is again reduced to “nothing”. Moreover, literary nonsense is most obviously manifest in verbal demence itself: I have already discussed how the working mechanisms of the demented association games correspond to the nonsensical logic of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The aesthetic sensibilities triggered by both the demented “trip” and the party-environment share much common ground with those of grotesque realism. The collective practice of morning demence at the psytrance party evinces its carnivalesque character. At the same time, both the operational logic of demence and the dissolution of everyday narratives defi ne the demented vibe as literary nonsense. Consequently, the demented party can be regarded as a carnivalesque festal form which reconfigures grotesque realism within a free void of nonsense.

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CONCLUSION This chapter has focused on a significant, yet rarely discussed aspect of outdoor psytrance festivals: the “demented” psychedelic experience, which should be regarded as an integral component of certain parties built around the sufficiently “twisted” styles of the genre (such as the dark psytrance style). While early LSD researchers stigmatised the psychedelic state of consciousness as temporary schizophrenia or paranoia (Novak 1997: 90–92), the psychedelic “madness” discussed here is far from a pathological condition. Rather, the expression is used metaphorically, and it refers to the peculiar vibe of Czech psytrance parties. The chapter provided a comprehensive symbolic analysis of the ritualised experience and also revealed that the demented ritual is organically connected to Western aesthetic sensibilities. While my research was greatly facilitated by the significant and characteristic articulation of the demented vibe within the Czech scene, such psychedelic experiences are probably not limited to the Czech Republic. According to my own experience, one can enter the “madhouse” dance floor through the nights of Greek and Hungarian dark psytrance parties, or have typically demented conversations with LSD-affected Portuguese partygoers. While this means that the combination of the right music with psychedelic drugs may stimulate “demence” at any psytrance party, further efforts are needed to specify the regional availability of such experiences.

NOTES 1. I conducted ethnographic research at eight parties: seven summer festi-

2. 3. 4. 5.

vals held at various outdoor locations within the Czech Republic (generally at fields and in forests near Czech villages) and one indoor party held in the capital city of Prague. I focused on outdoor parties, which most of my interlocutors regarded superior to indoor events. The research was carried out in English (which was not the native language of the partygoers), and included participant observation, interviews with twenty interviewees (including regular partygoers, DJs, VJs and party promoters), several e-mails and two questionnaires. Throughout the fieldwork I continuously discussed my results with my key informant, whose help in this project proved to be indispensable. See, for instance, the program of the 2006 LSD Symposium in Basel at (accessed March 12, 2009). “Acid” refers to the chemical classification of LSD, and the drug is sometimes consumed in liquid form. Geertz (1983: 90) defi nes immethodical as “shamelessly and unapologetically ad hoc”. “Twisted” is a commonly used term among international psytrance partygoers to characterise the simultaneously mysterious, otherworldly, nonsensical and absurd sound of certain psytrance tracks. A significant psytrance label also bears the name “Twisted Records”.

DemenCZe 169 6. Similar to the discussion of nonsensical logics, the interpretation is aimed not at the phenomenon, but at the rules governing it: the question is not what it means but how it functions. 7. Grotesque realism, Bakhtin (1968: 21) concludes, knows no other lower level than that of the “fruitful earth and the womb”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Balotă, Nicolae. 1979. Abszurd irodalom. Budapest: Gondolat. Baudrillard, Jean. 1988. “Simulacra and Simulation”. In Mark Poster, ed. Selected Writings, 166–184. Stanford University Press. . 1990. Seduction. Montréal: New World Perspectives Press. Bloch, Maurice. 1992. Prey Into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience. Cambridge University Press. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Flescher, Jacqueline. 1969. “The Language of Nonsense in Alice”. In Yale French Studies 43, (The Child’s Part): 128–144. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. “Common Sense as a Cultural System”. In Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology, 73–93. New York: Basic Books. Greener, Tracey, and Robert Hollands. 2006. “Beyond Subculture and Postsubculture? The Case of Virtual Psytrance”. In Journal of Youth Studies 9(4): 393–418. Kokoszka, Andrzej. 2006. States of Consciousness: Models for Psychology and Psychotherapy. Berlin: Springer. Ludwig, Arnold M. 1969. “Altered States of Consciousness”. In Charles T. Tart, ed. Altered States of Consciousness, 9–22. New York: Wiley. Noll, Richard. 1983. “Shamanism and Schizophrenia: A State-Specific Approach to the ‘Schizophrenia Metaphor’ of Shamanic States”. In American Ethnologist, 10(3): 443–459. Novak, Steven J. 1997. “LSD before Leary: Sidney Cohen’s Critique of 1950s Psychedelic Drug Research”. In Isis, 88(1): 87–110. Pechnick, Robert N., and J. Thomas Ungerleider. 2004. “Hallucinogens”. In Marc Galanter and Herbert D. Kleber, eds. The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Substance Abuse Treatment, 199–210. Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Press. St John, Graham. 2004. “Techno Millennium: Dance, Ecology and Future Primitives”. In Graham St John, ed. Rave Culture and Religion, 213–235. New York: Routledge. . 2006. “Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion: An Overview”. In Culture and Religion 7(1): 1–25. Taylor, Timothy Dean. 2001. Strange Sounds: Music, Technology & Culture. London: Routledge. Tigges, Wim. 1987. “An Anatomy of Nonsense”. In Wim Tigges, ed. Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, 23–46. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Tramacchi, Des. 2001. “Chaos Engines: Doofs, Psychedelics, and Religious Experience”. In St John, ed. FreeNRg: Notes From The Edge of The Dance Floor, 171–187. Australia: Common Ground Publishing.

9

Dionysus Returns Contemporary Tuscan Trancers and Euripides’ The Bacchae Chiara Baldini

It is not a question here of how we must turn, twist, limit or curtail a phenomenon so that it can still be explained, if need be, by principles which we once agreed not to exceed; but it is a question rather of the direction in which we must expand our ideas to come to terms with the phenomenon. Schelling (in Otto 2002: 46)

On a bright day in December 2007 I received a call: “Ciao Chiara, it’s Mario, do you want to make a trance party with me?” Mario had spent a few years in Amsterdam where he participated in the organisation of many trance events and now he wished to organise a party in Italy where his DJ friends could perform. I had been an enthusiast of psytrance for ten years, mainly attending big international gatherings abroad, which had intrigued and seduced me, prompting my research into the historical and mythological roots of such events. Mario was not only offering me the chance to organise a trance party, but provided me with the opportunity to enable the youth of my hometown on the Chianti hills of Tuscany to experience psytrance culture. With little understanding of what I would face in the following months, I gave Mario an enthusiastic response. One of the most suggestive interpretations of the phenomenon of psytrance is the understanding that it constitutes a contemporary re-enactment of ancient shamanic practices, such as ritual trance dance induced by repetitive music and ingestion of mind-altering substances, aimed at the achievement of an “ecstatic state”; a modern day mystical experience, in the form of an altered state of consciousness capable of producing spiritual healing, rejuvenation and enabling community. Goa Gil, the legendary DJ generally considered as one of the “fathers” of Goa trance, is often quoted in support of this perspective for having interpreted the experience of the party as an initiation into trance dancing, constituting a “redefi nition of the ancient tribal ritual for the 21st Century” (Goa Gil in McAteer 2002). This redefinition is realised through the hybridisation of modern technology and traditional techniques of achieving

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transcendental states, as a way for re-creating a context for mystical experiences accessible to the “children of Babylon”, to use an expression coined by Goa Gil to describe the youth of the de-sacralised third millennium. For these reasons Goa Gil is often referred to as a sort of techno-shaman (McAteer 2002). This perspective resonates with the loose mantra of “archaic revival” celebrated by Terence McKenna, considered, despite his death in 2000, “the main spokesperson for the psychedelic culture of today” (Larkin 2003: 9). According to McKenna, the contemporary mind is characterised by a “nostalgia for the archaic” manifest in the revival of ancient shamanic techniques of ecstasy, as the chief means to experience the dissolution of the ego and escape from the “blind alley” into which it has been guided by the ego-based dominator/patriarchal society (McKenna 1993). Therefore the “shamanic resurgence” evidenced by the mushrooming of Goa/psytrance parties all across the world in the past fifteen years, has been interpreted as a manifestation of this “nostalgia” and, at the same time, its cure (Larkin 2003; McAteer 2002). As a consequence, what is now considered “psytrance culture” has been characterised since its very beginning by a distinct neo-pagan spirituality, expressed in the revival and redefinition of pagan practices and mythologies permeating the Eastern and Western traditions, whose common denominator is the primacy granted to the ecstatic experience. The fi rst example of “ecstatic cult” to function as inspiration and reference point for psytrance was the cult of Shiva, “the cosmic dancer”, one of the most ancient, yet better preserved, cults of modern day India. When the hippies went to India in the late-1960s and 1970s, in search of spiritual experiences that would liberate them from the constraints of Western materialism, they came in touch with and were deeply influenced by sadhus, wandering sages of Shiva, “ascetic and lascivious, free from the tyrannies of society” (Danielou 1992: 19). Goa Gil had become one of them, and it was probably when he was initiated in the Juna Akhara order of sadhus, that he became aware of the ritual use of mind-altering substances and the religious value of collective dancing, where “rhythm gives rise to a state of trance, which bring the human being nearer to Shiva” (Danielou 1992: 151). His initiation is considered to have validated the genuine spiritual roots of the Goa trance ritual (McAteer 2002). Concerning the Western religious tradition, it is the Mystery Religions of Hellenistic Greece (including Dionysian rituals, the Mysteries of Eleusis, the cult of Isis and Osiris, that of Cybele and Attis) which “play a very important role in the contemporary psychedelic story” (Davis 2001). It was Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD and the “grandfather” of the psytrance movement, who fi rst dared to suppose the use of psychoactive substances during the mysteries. In the groundbreaking work he wrote with Carl Ruck and Gordon Wasson, Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (1979), the “extraordinary vision” experienced by initiates of the Mysteries of Eleusis—the cause of which scholars have long

172 Chiara Baldini wondered—was speculated to have resulted from use of a lysergic compound in the kykeon, the fermented barley mixture drunk before the fi nal stage of initiation. The Mystery Religions attracted my attention in particular, for I wished to investigate the patterns of resonance between psytrance parties and Western religious traditions, thus I began reading all the available Greek texts concerning the practice of the Mysteries, looking for metaphors and answers. By chance, at the time I became involved in the organisation of Chianti Summer Solstice (the party I organised with Mario), I happened to be reading The Bacchae by Euripides, a V century BCE re-elaboration of the myth of the arrival of Dionysus in Greece, and I found myself startled at noticing how the events I experienced organising the party matched mythological narratives in the play. Was it possible that a play written 2500 years ago could “speak for” the social dynamics in a contemporary community facing the insurgence of the “ecstatic experience”? And if so, what were the implications?

THE PARTY To the mountain! To the mountain! (v. 115) All indented quotations from The Bacchae are from Euripides 1994 and are italicized. The Italian psytrance scene has grown slowly but steadily since the end of the 1990s, thanks to the efforts of many “trance tribes” operating at a local level, especially in the northern and central regions. The result is

Figure 9.1

Chianti Summer Solstice, Italy 2008. Designed by Chiara Baldini.

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now a fragmented scene, with many small parties featuring local DJs held in different areas almost every weekend, a few medium-size events featuring foreign DJs, and only one event, Sonica Festival, which began in 2005, attracting both international artists and followers. In this context, thanks to the quality of the foreign artists involved, our “little party” had all the requisites to be quite a special event—small but with an international “vibe”. Mario and I put together a group of collaborators (mainly consisting of people who had never been to a trance party!) and decided to call ourselves The Fufluns, from the name given by the Etruscans, the ancient inhabitants of Tuscany, to the god of wine, rebirth, spring and wild nature: the local version of Dionysus. Then we proceeded by choosing a date and a location. It was by chance that all the artists were available on Saturday, June 21, the summer solstice (of 2008), which was defi nitely auspicious. In fact, it is a common trend for psytrance parties to be held on such astronomically meaningful dates, another sign of their connection with pagan traditions, devoted to the celebration of the cycles of nature. To fi nd the location we contacted the spokesman for The Arts in the local township (the politician), with whom we wanted to co-ordinate the event in order to underline its cultural aspects. The politician was immediately intrigued by the project, which we promoted as a precious opportunity to introduce the local youth to an avant-garde electronic music scene and a world-wide countercultural movement. Furthermore, we underlined that setting the event in a beautiful open-air space could prompt young people to adopt a respect for nature. We also added that since we were aware of the use of drugs by people attending this type of event, we wanted to provide a harm-minimisation service by inviting an “expert” who would look after the “difficult cases”. The politician showed enthusiastic support for the project and said that the only problem would be fi nding a suitable location for the party, which needed high-volume music for the entire night. The only possible location, he suggested, would be Chianti’s highest mountain, Mount San Michele, a nature reserve ten kilometres from town. To gain the township’s approval, we wrote a formal application for the project, for which task we received the enthusiastic assistance of the town’s librarian. We then went to talk to the manager of the nature reserve who lived there with his wife and children and managed the whole area, consisting of many acres of woodland, a hostel, a restaurant and a bar. By the time we arrived, he had already heard rumours about the party and he greeted us, exclaiming “You guys are crazy! There is absolutely no way I will let hordes of drug addicts come and destroy my park! So, as far as I am concerned, you will have to look for another place to do your rave”. This was the root of the problem. As soon as rumours circulated around town that there would be an all-night party on the mountain, featuring electronic music, the event became generally identified as a “rave”. Unfortunately, only a few weeks before this, two kids under twenty years of age had died

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from ketamine overdoses in two separate electronic music events in northern Italy (both illegal techno-parties), which the media labelled as “raves”. To the manager we insisted that our party was not a “rave”, but a cultural event featuring international artists and supported by the township. And, of course, we would make sure that everything would be left cleaner than before. “You know”, he interrupted us, “the minimum that can happen is that someone is going to die”. We insisted, but he stared at us with contempt, shaking his head in blind prejudice. When our meeting concluded, he sent us away with a vague promise that he would think about it and call us back. We left feeling very despondent. A month passed and we searched desperately for another location, without success. Then, one day, after all hope had been lost, the manager called and informed me that the venue was available. Having introduced Chianti Summer Solstice and the characters involved, I turn to The Bacchae to begin mapping the commonalities between the two narratives.

THE MYTH Like it or not this city has to learn its lesson: it lacks initiation in my mysteries. (v. 39) The Bacchae was written by Euripides in the 5th Century BCE, just one year before the author’s death. The play, staged by Euripides the Younger, premiered posthumously in 406 BCE at Athens Dionysia Festival and won the fi rst prize. This granted the author the fame and glory denied him in life for being an uncomfortable figure because of his refusal of any imposed religion. The play is the only known tragedy to feature Dionysus himself as the main character and is the largest extant work of Greek literature dealing with the “bad boy” of the Greek Pantheon. The plot deals with the myth of the arrival of Dionysus in Greece and therefore it is “an invaluable testimony of the encounter of the Greek genius and the Dionysian orgies” (Eliade 1978: 393)1. In fact, it stands out as an “anthropological passion play” (Arrowsmith 1994: 143), confronting the question about how one should deal with a radical religious experience involving ecstatic dance and altered states of divine possession. The title of the play refers to the followers of Dionysus, also known as Bacchus, a name deriving from the Greek baccheuein, “to revel”. The play opens with Dionysus’ arrival in Thebes, the hometown of his mother Semele. He is offended because his cult is still ignored in Greece and angry with his mortal family for denying his divine origins. As the god himself explains, his mother Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, King of Thebes, had conceived him from Zeus, but her sisters, jealous of such an honour, had refused to believe the divine origin of her illicit pregnancy. The woman’s pride had also offended Hera, wife of Zeus, who convinced

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Semele to ask him to appear to her in his true form, a lightning bolt, which had killed Semele instantly. Baby Dionysus was then raised by the nymphs of Mount Nysa, only to return to Thebes now, determined to vindicate his mother’s death and start his cult. Euripides imagines Dionysus as a young, beautiful and smiling god, “with long, yellow curls smelling of perfumes” (v. 235), “a god incognito” (v. 4), disguised as a Bacchic priest who arrives in Thebes from Lydia and Phrygia, after having converted the whole of Asia to his cult. He is accompanied by throngs of devout Bacchae (constituting the Chorus of the play), the female worshippers he has brought with him from the East. He and his “exotic” followers, by means of playing his sacred music, have managed to “sting” (v. 32) with Dionysian frenzy all Theban women, including Semele’s sisters, compelling them to leave their homes and celebrate wildly on Mount Cithaeron, thus instigating various reactions among Thebes’ men. The former king Cadmus and the blind seer Teiresias manifest their willingness to do honour to Dionysus and toss their “white heads to the dances of the god” (v. 180). Whereupon, all “dressed in the costume of the god” (v. 180), they decide to climb up the mountain. On the other hand, the new king Pentheus, grandson of Cadmus and cousin of Dionysus, is fi rmly against the “obscene disorder” (v. 232) that “this latest divinity” (v. 219) has brought to Thebes. When he sees Cadmus and Teiresias “playing at the bacchant” (v. 250), he becomes infuriated with them, even though they argue with him, defending the pragmatic wisdom to embrace the new religion. But he refuses to listen ordering his soldiers to arrest the priest “who infects our women with this strange disease” (v. 352). The guards return with Dionysus, still disguised as a priest. Pentheus questions him about his cult, but the god humiliates the arrogant king with carefully crafted rhetorical tricks. This angers Pentheus greatly, and, as a result, Dionysus is locked in prison. The god quickly frees himself and further humiliates Pentheus by using the king’s irresistible desire to see the ecstatic women to convince him to dress as a bacchant and climb up the Cithaeron. Once Pentheus approaches the secret rites, Dionysus reveals him to the bacchants. The women, possessed by divine frenzy, mistake him for a wild animal and hunt him down, ripping his body to pieces with their bare hands. The fi rst to attack him is his own mother Agave, Semele’s sister. After the murder, she brings his head back to the palace, believing that it belongs to a mountain lion. Once there, she displays it, all “proud and happy” (v. 1998), to her father Cadmus, but as the ecstatic state begins to wear off, she becomes aware of “the greatest grief there is” (v. 1281), and is sent to exile with her whole family. Come dance the dance of god! (v. 110) If we consider Chianti Summer Solstice as a testimony of the introduction to Italy of a contemporary version of the “revellers” cult, of which

176 Chiara Baldini Dionysian practice is exemplary, we can begin to comprehend why the events narrated in Euripides’ play, and those involved in the organisation of the party, demonstrated similar dynamics and confl icts. In fact both narratives unfold in the context of a small community and deal with the impact of the insurgence of the ecstatic experience within that community. Dionysus, as I have already mentioned, appears in The Bacchae for the fi rst and only time as the protagonist of a Greek tragedy. His arrival in town marks the beginning of the initiation of Thebes into his mysteries, where “his new rites, his origins and his group of foreign followers are all unfamiliar” (Johnston 2001). In the case of Chianti Summer Solstice, the character of Dionysus can be substituted with the group of foreign DJs who led all-night dances on the mountain-top, as the representatives of a dance movement which is just starting to spread in rural Tuscany. If we were to follow this logic, the DJs manifest as those who come to celebrate the ritual, the “god incognito disguised as a hippy” and are therefore perfect representatives of the foreign god, the god who arrives, the god of dancing, clamour, nocturnal feasts, some of the most common epithets of Dionysus. According to Vidal-Naquet (Vernant et al. 1991: 231), “Dionysus reveals himself by hiding. His epiphany is that of a masked god. The foreigner is the mask of the god, meaning that even if he hides behind a mask . . . , this becomes the means of his revelation”. Even our group, The Fufluns, as the organisers of the party, might be considered a mask of the god, another manifestation of his presence in the community. The god’s rites, as described in the play, consist of a mountain dance, which is an ancient and wild form of the cult, where only women were allowed, likely due to ecstatic practices originating in prehistoric “fertility rituals” involving the worship of a Great Mother, identified as a female deity with female worshippers (Baring et al. 1991). 2 This ancient ritual, besides climbing up the mountains and dancing wildly with the aid of various psychoactive plants, later substituted by wine (Kerényi 1992), also involved the tearing to pieces (sparagmos) and eating of the raw meat (omophagia) of a wild animal as a means by which the ecstatic maenads (from mainesthai “to be mad”, but also “to pray upon”) may overcome their human condition and experience communion with the god. By the time of Euripides, the cult no longer involved such primitive practices and included also men in the worship. Of course, today participants in psytrance parties do not hunt and eat wild animals, but the essence of the ritual as “a rapturous group experience featuring dancing, costumes, music, wine and ecstatic release out in nature” (Johnston 2001), remains practically intact, as apparently do the responses to such a radical experience. Thus, there are those who fi rmly deny it, reject it and persecute it, and those who accept it, support it and enjoy it. In other words, the Pentheus types and the Cadmus and Teiresias types emerge with behaviours consistent with archetypal patterns.

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THE OPPONENT Dionysus is within, adore him! (v. 590) As the main opponent of Dionysus, Pentheus resists and persecutes his “filthy mysteries” (v. 260), his “shameless orgies” (v. 1061). In our modern version of the story Pentheus materialises as the manager of the nature reserve, the borders of which were subject to invasion by our “obscene disorder” (v. 232). I had wondered at length as to what had convinced the manager to agree to host “il rave”, since the money he was offered proved little when weighed against the supposed consequences of the threat posed to his “kingdom”. The answer came from Pentheus himself during one of his most intriguing exchanges with Dionysus: D: Would you like to see their revels on the mountain? P: I would pay a great sum to see that sight. D: Why are you so passionately curious? P: Of course I’d be sorry to see them drunk. D: But for all your sorrow, you’d like very much to see them? P: Yes, very much. (vv. 811–815) Sheer curiosity, then, appears to be the main reason for the manager’s decision to host the party. Additionally, Pentheus’ statement that he would be “sorry to see them drunk”, matched the manager’s contempt towards the “drug addicts”. “Once you see the glint of wine . . . you may be sure the festival is rotten” (v. 260), says Pentheus, demonstrating how devaluation of the “manìa”, the altered state of consciousness, is one of the main motives of those opposed to ecstatic practices. In fact, even today, the use of mind-altering substances is still the main justification for the criminalisation and repression of open-air electronic music events, generally labelled “raves”. During a press briefi ng in 2005, Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, defi ned such events “international drug festivals”, stating that “the psychoactive drugs that makes these raves, or ritualized drug parties, so dangerous fall under our purview. Member States have a special obligation to reduce the harm these events hold for young people” (Millar 2005). Only that, instead of educating the youth to a conscious and informed approach, this “special obligation” has mainly translated into repressive measures. If we are to take psytrance as a modern version of Dionysian rituals, we might fi nd Mircea Eliade providing an explanation: Dionysus has to meet with resistance and persecutions because the religious experience he provides threatens a whole lifestyle and a value system. This is embodied by the Olympian religion and its institutions,

178 Chiara Baldini but also, we can look at it from a more intimate point of view, betraying an underlying drama which is well documented in the history of religions: the resistance against all forms of an absolute religious experience, which can be obtained only after having denied everything else (i.e. personality, equilibrium, conscience, reason . . . ) (Eliade 1979: 389). Further parallels are manifest in the actions of Pentheus and the manager. While, in reference to the cult, the former held the fi rm intention to eventually “silence their drums” (v. 514), one of the manager’s strict rulings was that the music was to be switched off at 7:00 a.m. (i.e., around the time most psytrance parties are “peaking”). Also Pentheus’ derision of Dionysus’ appearance, whom he calls an “effeminate stranger” (v. 350), with “girlish curls” (v. 492) was repeated by the manager. When the DJs, a group of space-age smiling hippies, skinny, some with long dreadlocks and colourful tattoos, fi nally arrived, the manager could not restrain himself from scorn: “Mamma mia . . . I don’t even fi nd the words to describe these people! It is better if I don’t say anything, you already know what I think . . . ” In fact the hippie DJs and Dionysus share an androgynous appearance—“smiling, soft-spoken, feline effortlessness” (Arrowsmith 1994: 146)—which presents a strong contrast to the impetuous, heavy-handed and tyrannical characteristics of both king and manager. As Ian Kott notes: “Pentheus looks at the stranger like a sheriff from Arizona would look at a bearded guru and his dishevelled followers” (Kott 1988: 74). It is useful, at this point, to refer to Johnston’s analysis of Pentheus to understand the manager’s behaviour and the nature of his confl ict with the “revellers”: “He has complex inner problems . . . , so that his responses to the crisis (all that talk of prisons, soldiers, massacres, and . . . his fascination with Dionysus’s appearance, especially his obsession with his hair) come across more as a psychological response to certain personal inadequacies or inner pressures” (Johnston 2001). In this context, even the manager’s curiosity stands out as ambiguous: “He wants to see something illegal, sexual, naughty . . . He doesn’t want to accommodate himself to it but to enjoy it all the more because it offends him” (Johnston 2001). But, as many have noticed, The Bacchae is a skilfully constructed play of mirrors, where every element has its contrary, and where, at a deeper analysis, we can observe that the two contrasting viewpoints hold equal validity. For example, as Maria Ciani has successfully pointed out, the critics’ views of Pentheus are disparate. Next to those who picture him as a repressed despot, there are those describing him as “not the typical tyrant of tragedies. He is a simple, down-to-earth man who can’t tolerate the intrusion of a foreign cult into his territory” (Diller in Ciani 1979: 70). Or “Pentheus is the King of Thebes, he defends his city from an impostor, it is his right to do so” (Carrière in Ciani 1979: 70). This, once again, corresponds with my experience, as conveyed in the comment of a friend, who, upon returning

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from a meeting with the manager where he reiterated the nature of our looming disaster, exclaimed: “But he is right! You always picture him like a horrible man but he is just very concerned about real problems! And he has the right to be worried about his beautiful park!” Such ambivalence is also one of the main characteristics of Dionysus: “under the apparently innocuous request of freedom of action and survival space, he hides an equally implacable will of affi rmation” (Ciani 1979: 37), which manifests itself with the ferocious violence infl icted on his opponent who becomes butchered at the hands of his own mother. Such divine ferocity directs an unexpected and disorienting shift of readers’ sympathies from one character to the other. Euripides statement, in this case, is to “represent Dionysian religion in its totality, which is constituted by the union of opposites: a singularity which is a sum of diverging aspects. The confl ict arises in the contradictory nature of the god, and the tragedy resides in the exposure of man to this contradiction” (Ingram in Ciani 1979: 65). In our case, as the organisers: under the “apparently innocuous request to organise a party” we also manifested an “implacable will of affi rmation”, with a strenuous persistence in our intentions to make the party happen at all costs. These costs included our constant “battles” with the manager, but also very bitter internal conflicts during our meetings, revealing “tyrannical tendencies” even among the “love and peace” Dionysians. Furthermore, the accomplishment of “our mission” required such an absolute devotion to the project that it resulted in the total abandonment of anything not strictly pertaining to the party (including work, friends and families), which stirred a “shift of sympathy” often manifesting as open resentment in many of those who felt ignored and abandoned.

THE SUSTAINERS But dance we must. (v. 322) Returning to The Bacchae, we notice that among the sustainers of the “latest divinity” we have the blind seer Teiresias and the former king Cadmus. Even if they are both ageing, they do not hesitate to “wear the costume of the god” (v. 180) and “toss their white heads in the sacred dances” (v. 183), each feeling “young, young enough to dance” (v. 190), “night and day, untiringly” (v. 186). These figures, cast as holding “major symbolic importance in traditional Greek literature and myth” (Johnston 2001), represent tradition, and when Euripides has them worship the new god, he suggests that Dionysian religion “represents archaic traditions and customs coming from the beginning of time, which therefore originate from nature itself” (Vernant et al. 1991: 240). That is why Teiresias warns Pentheus that: “Your home is here, with us, with our customs and traditions, not

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outside alone” (v. 330). And, moreover: “This new god whom you ridicule shall someday have enormous power and prestige throughout Hellas” (v. 272–274), because it is divinely destined to prevail, since, as the Chorus say: “whatever long time has sanctioned, that is a law forever: the law tradition makes, is the law of nature” (v. 895). In our scenario, the performances of these two characters might be identifiable in the roles of the politician and the librarian, both representing institutional and cultured figures and manifesting a “surprising” faith in the “new cult”. Even if they knew little about psytrance culture, they were able to relate to the “customs and traditions” it represented. This was especially the case with the librarian, who is extensively learned in Classical Studies and was well aware of the cultural and social implications of the “mountain dance”. If you had been there and seen these wonders for yourself, you would have gone down on your knees and prayed to the god you now deny. (vv. 711–713) Finally the day arrived and, like any respectable Dionysian worship, following resistance and persecution, we achieved triumph! The sun was shining and more than 500 trancers arrived from all over Italy, and also from abroad. When the music began, following last-minute technical problems, the whole forest became alive with pounding beats and cries of joy, which resonated for the whole night, as the “revellers” surrendered to the “divine ecstasy of union with the Cosmic Spirit”, as Goa Gil would have put it (McAteer 2002: 75). The “harm minimisation expert” who had arrived to monitor the use of psychoactives took care of the few “difficult cases” and, in general, we had no problems at all. Moreover, our effort to raise awareness among participants to keep the reserve clean was fully rewarded. Both “excited and disturbed” (v. 214), the manager made sure it was all in order and monitored everything like “the madman who spies on the maenads, who peers from behind the rocks, who spies from a vantage” (v. 981). At the scheduled music cut-off time, the dance floor was in delirium and we tried to push the deadline by an hour, an effort which had the manager shouting and gesturing (the hand movement across the neck) in response. Once again Pentheus sounded out: “I’ll stop his pounding with his wand and tossing of his head, by god I’ll have his head cut off!” (v. 240). When the party was over and he had satisfied his curiosity, he informed us that, in future, we should fi nd another location. Both the politician and the librarian came up the mountain during the second day of celebrations. The first wandered around with eyes wide-open, complimenting us for the organisation and said that it was a pity that politicians ignored such a widespread youth movement. Still to this day, if we meet in the street, he asks when we will organise our next party. The librarian

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cooked dinner for the DJs the day they arrived and came to dance on the Sunday afternoon, declaring that she experienced a moment of “pure catharsis, while the sun was shining, the wind was blowing, the beautiful music was playing, and all around there was an atmosphere of incredible harmony”. Blessed are those who know the mysteries of god. Blessed is he who hallows his life in the worship of god, he whom the spirit of the god possesseth, who is one with those who belong to the holy body of god. Blessed are the dancers and those who are purified who dance on the hill in the holy dance of god. (vv. 75–80) Amid this pattern of correlations, the Chorus of the play, the bacchantes themselves, the foreign worshippers gathered by Dionysus in his roaming across Asia, fi nd parallel in the goani (as the Italian Goa-inspired trancers refer to themselves) and the foreign trancers who were led to this Tuscan forest by a “dance-cult” similarly arriving from the East. The local volunteers helping us to park cars were completely bewildered by the sight of so many different licence plates, so many “exotic followers”. Reports left by the goani on the web site3 where we posted our event, give us occasion to gauge the thoughts of the “bacchantes” themselves: I arrived all charged up, electrified and excited to get to the location . . . When I saw the dancefloor my enthusiasm dropped a bit . . . for I saw lots of local disco-types, who are not the kind of people I normally like to be surrounded with . . . after having refused for the sixth time a shot of vodka by a guy who could hardly stand (the usual super-wasted one, who reduces himself to a piece of garbage, there is one in every party!) I went to the dancefloor and fi nally started meeting some friends … so I calmed down and started dancing . . . but I was waiting for . . . AJJA! . . . when the big haired guy started playing, all smiling, I immediately forgot everything and started enjoying the situation very much, thanks to his massaging bass which really shook me from within! Afterwards he came to dance among the people (which is rare for a DJ, especially if the ambient is not strictly “goan”) . . . And then magic happened: when they disco-types found themselves surrounded by people dancing in a strange way, they all left, except those who integrated themselves and will soon be attracted to Trance again (welcome!) When the sun came out I only saw beautiful faces, all happy and smiling, all leaping in the air, a truly wonderful vibe! . . . I saw all the characters animating the dancefloor and it was such a joy! I heard great music and danced all coordinated without even thinking about moving, the body so caught up into the music that it goes by itself . . . my mind in empathy with everything around . . . It was such a shame that it had to fi nish so soon

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Chiara Baldini after having reached such a climax . . . but I noticed that the hypocrite owner . . . really hated us and could not stand us anymore . . . what to say? A truly enchanting location, really wonderful people, in the end I had a really great time! (Spiralgalaxy)

From this report, we can notice the differences between local “disco-types” and the “goans”, mirroring “the difference between Bacchantes and Thebans, emphatically brought out by the clothing and movements of the chorus in contrast with the clothing and movements of the citizens of Thebes” (Johnston 2001). The “disco-types” are described as those who dance indoors and leave in the middle of the night, while the goani are those who dance outdoors “in a strange way”, all night and into the morning. The “strange way” of dancing, with “the body that goes by itself” and “the mind in empathy with everything around” is a typical feature of trance-dancing as explained by Vidal-Naquet: “When the group of maenads let themselves go to the orgiastic frenzy, every participant is possessed on his own, without caring for a general choreography, indifferent to what the other do. As soon as the worshipper starts dancing, he fi nds himself alone, like the elected one, face to face with the god, entirely submitted from within to the power possessing him and moving him” (Vernant et al. 1991: 232). The reporter also notes that some “disco-types” will certainly “come back to Trance again”, and he kindly welcomes them into the family. Identification with other “initiates” is also characteristic of the Mystery Religions and is manifest in the expression “syngenia psychon kai somaton” (Burkert 1989: 124), the companionship of bodies and souls experienced by those attending the Mysteries. This feeling of companionship is also found in the reports of other goans: “Viva the goan family!” (Kesmo); “Friendship means sharing the same soul among many different bodies! Thank you guys, every time I am with you I feel enveloped in a mystical warmth that makes me feel great!” (PsyloCibe). “The group of worshippers”, Vidal-Naquet again explains, “is composed by those who conform to the ritual practices which have been revealed to them by the god . . . In fact they share with him a privileged relationship, a direct connection which goes beyond the ties of civic communities” (Vernant et al. 1991: 209). The latter is summarised in the expression: “Dionysus, not Thebes, has power over me” (v. 1037). In a further observation, it should not be ignored how participants, like their equivalents among cultic initiates, shared different kinds of manía. The ecstatic state of possession, as already mentioned above, is one of the most central, yet most ambivalent, aspects of both psytrance and Dionysian rituals: in both cases it can carry either supreme bliss or extreme delirium: “There is a difference between the manía of the Chorus, which brings the joy of frenzied running and dancing, and the delirium of the Theban women, which leads to Agave’s murder” (Vernant et al. 1991: 246). This “delirium” is a manifestation of the false happiness of those who showed disrespect towards the power and divinity of Dionysus. “In the tragedy

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there are the true maenads and the false bacchantes. They perform the same gestures and the same rituals and therefore the viewer can easily mistake them. This is a risk of every religion, to easily mistake its authentic form from its monstrous deviation” (Defradas in Ciani 1979: 72). In our case, Spiralgalaxy proves to be a “true maenad” (and a “true trancer”), by kindly keeping his distance from the “super wasted one” who illustrates the “monstrous deviation” resulting from the abuse of alcohol and other substances, described by Maffesoli as a “banalization of pleasure” (Maffesoli 1990: 47), and by Erik Davis as “wacky hedonism” (Davis 2001). Besides the joy that comes from celebrating with “fellow-initiates”, the happiness shared by “true” maenads and trancers alike could be described as a combination of a respectful attitude towards “divine possession”, resulting in a responsible approach to mind-altering substances and the appreciation of the simple joys of everyday life: “What the common people do, the things that simple men believe, I too believe and do” (v. 426) and “he who garners day by day the good of life, he is happiest”, (v. 910) speaks the Chorus. Finally, these words are echoed in Sara’s report, where she states that “the smell of the brooms . . . the singing of nightingales . . . healthy home made food . . . good Chianti wine . . . sun, flute, guitar, percussions”, and “the company of many lively sparks”, all contributed to put her “in such a good mood” that anything could have happened and she would still feel “absolutely amazing!”

CONCLUSION Foreigners everywhere now dance for Dionysus. (v. 480) The synchronicities arising across the two narratives, ancient and modern, offer evidence that psytrance culture could be rendered a space-age technoepiphany or a post-modern mask behind which the god of ecstasy is returning. Moreover, the possibility of finding a series of parallels in the social dynamics and behavioural patterns of the organisation of a psytrance party in Italy in 2008 and the myth of the arrival of Dionysus in Hellenistic Greece, creates a strong connection between the two “ecstatic cults”, which goes well beyond the sharing of the ecstatic experience. In fact, it suggests that the compatibilities between these phenomena can be extended to the entire socio-political context in which they arise. Besides fi nding a perfect allocation within McKenna’s “archaic revival”, the recurrence of the ecstatic experience could be more significantly identified with a “mystic revival” taking place within a precise socio-political context which presents what David Ulansey calls a “startling resemblance” with that of Hellenistic Greece, and creating what Peter Green describes as an “overpowering sense of déjà vu” (in Ulansey 2000). As Ulansey explains,

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both periods are characterised by a massive convergence of ethnicities and cultures mainly due to an unprecedented political and cultural expansion of borders together with a dramatic improvement in transportation and communication. At a religious level, these conditions lead to the crumbling of previous belief-systems and create a growing feeling of disconnection from the old “institutional” gods, which are perceived as distant and difficult to contact. As stated by Erik Davis, Mystery Religions provided the context where “people fed their evident religious hunger and sense of spiritual dislocation by turning towards these exotic sects that promised, at the heart of the whole operation, an otherworldly experience. There was a desire for an experience of the self that went beyond the body, beyond the visible world, that seems very similar to today’s embrace of meditation, yoga and psychedelics” (Davis 2001). The ecstatic practice not only appears to be at the core of both Mystery Religions and psytrance parties, but it also provides the possibility to experiment with transcendence required in two distant yet resonant socio-historical contexts. As a result, the social dynamics connected to the resurfacing of such a radical practice generate equally resonant narratives, constituting the cultural matrix within which the ecstatic experience is codified and integrated into ordinary life. So, even if, as Davis writes, “we no longer have a specific cultural story that can be performed in that mythological sense” (Davis 2001), Hellenistic mythology nevertheless helps us understand why a group of people would want to organise an all-night dance party on top of a mountain in Tuscany. When shall I dance once more with bare feet the all-night dances, tossing my head for joy in the damp air, in the dew, as a running fawn might frisk for the green joy of the wide fi elds . . . leaping to frisk, leaping for joy, gay with the green of the leaves, to dance for joy in the forest, to dance where the darkness is deepest, where no man is. (vv. 860–875) NOTES 1. The translations from Italian sources are my own. 2. While the implications of such origins are of great interest, they are too vast to address here with anything more than a passing reference. 3. .

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baring, Anne and Jules Cashford. 1991. The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. London: Arkana.

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Burkert, Walter. 1989. Antichi Culti Misterici (Ancient Mystery Cults). Milan: Laterza. Ciani, Maria Grazia. 1979. Dionysos: Variazioni sul Mito. Padua: Antenore. Danielou, Alain. 1992 [1979]. Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus. Rochester Vermont: Inner Traditions. Davis, Erik. 2001. Psychedelic Culture: One or Many? (Originally published in Trip Magazine). On line at: (accessed March 15th, 2009). Dodds, E. R. 1960. “Introduction”. In Euripides, The Bacchae, pp. xi–lvi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eliade, Mircea. 1979 [1978]. “Dioniso e le Beatitudini Ritrovate”. In Storia delle Credenze e delle Idee Religiose, vol. 1 (A History of Religious Ideas), pp. 387– 403. Florence: Santoni. Euripides. 1994. The Bacchae. Translated and with an Introduction by William Arrowsmith. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Jeanmaire, Henri. 1972 [1951]. Dioniso: Religione e Cultura in Grecia (Dionysos: History of the Cult of Bacchus). Turin: Einaudi. Johnston, Ian. 2001. An Introductory Note to Euripides’ Bacchae. On line at: (accessed March 15th, 2009). Kerényi, Károly. 1992 [1976]. Dioniso: Archetipo della Vita Indistruttibile (Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life). Milan: Adelphi. Kott, Ian. 1988. “Mangiare Dio o Le Baccanti” (The Eating of Gods). In Euripides, Le Baccanti, pp. 70–113. Milan: ES. Larkin, Christopher. 2003. “Turn on, Tune in, Trance out: the Exploration of Entheogens and the Emergence of a Global Techno-shamanic Ritual”. Thesis in Sociology/Anthropology, Lewis and Clark College. On line at: (accessed March 15th, 2009). Maffesoli, Michel. 1990 [1988]. L’Ombra di Dioniso: Una Sociologia delle Passioni (The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy). Turin: Garzanti. McAteer, Michael. 2002. “Redefi ning the Ancient Tribal Ritual for the 21st Century: Goa Gil and the Trance Dance Experience”. B.A. Thesis, Division of Philosophy, Religion, and Psychology, Reed College. On line at: (accessed March 15th, 2009). McKenna, Terence. 1993. Archaic Revival, Alien Love, Speaking in Tongues, Timewave Zero. Transcript from audio. On line at: (accessed March 15th, 2009). McKenna, Terence. Re-Evolution. On line at: (accessed March 15th, 2009). Millar, Katherine. 2005. “UN Drug Officials Discuss Issues and Challenges at 48th Session of Commission on Narcotic Drugs”. On line at: (accessed March 15th, 2009). Otto, Walter. 2002 [1933]. Dioniso: Mito e Culto (Dionysos: Myth and Cult). Genoa: Il Melangolo. Ulansey, David. 2000. “Cultural Transition and Spiritual Transformation: from Alexander the Great to Cyberspace”. In Thomas Singer (ed.) The Vision Thing: Myth, Politics and Psyche in the World, pp. 213–231. London and New York: Routledge. Vernant, Jean-Pierre and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. 1991 [1986]. “Il Dioniso mascherato nelle Baccanti di Euripide”. In Mito e Tragedia (Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece), pp. 221–254. Turin: Einaudi. Wasson, R. Gordon, Hofmann, Albert and Ruck, Carl A. 2008. [1978]. The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

10 Weaving the Underground Web Neo-Tribalism and Psytrance on Tribe.net Jenny Ryan

Originating with the countercultural movement of the 1960s, the growth of the psychedelic trance phenomenon is concurrent with that of the Internet. This shared history is rooted in utopian visions of a vast, interconnected global community free of the iniquities of neoliberalism, defined instead by a return to communality and the gift economy. Yet, equally common are ominous, even apocalyptic, depictions of a world governed by Big Brother, divided by war and poverty, or destroyed entirely by human ignorance. In line with Michel Maffesoli’s (1996) analysis of contemporary neo-tribalism, the international psychedelic trance underground may be viewed as a network of interconnected nodes. Yet, with more intentional commitment than Maffesoli allows, members connect through their shared experience of what Hakim Bey (1991) calls the “temporary autonomous zone”—the space outside societal hierarchies, marked by liminal states that Victor Turner characterises as “necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space” (1986: 95). These relationships are frequently solidified and extended through the new forms of communication made possible by online social networking sites such as Tribe.net, which functions as a communications medium for a variety of “neo-tribes”. The playfully subversive communities on Tribe.net comprise a virtual tent city, like those found at outdoor psytrance festivals. In this liminal space, both a sense of communal belonging and reformulations of self-identity are made possible. Psytrance culture in America is marked by an opposition to mainstream society and a desire to cultivate alternative ways of life within a global “underground”. In their ideal form, these parties are intended to be anarchical in nature—no gods, no masters, anything goes, do what thou wilt. Attendees are active participants in a performative space where electronic music, psychedelic art and ecstatic dance coalesce. Modern technologies are utilised in conjunction with tribal sensibilities to create collectively imagined worlds, where animal spirits of the ancient primordial forest dance with space aliens of the distant stars. In this nebulous liminal space, culture and nature are interwoven in a timeless ritual that evokes re-enchantment with the world and a sense of collective connectivity.

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Despite the utopian discourses of egalitarianism and communality that drive both psytrance culture and cyber culture, Sarah Thornton’s (1996) much-contested theory of subcultural capital and status-based hierarchies remains pertinent to current trends within these milieus. For instance, members of the psytrance community acquire “hipness capital” by adopting certain styles and acquiring certain knowledge (discerning music taste is particularly valuable, exemplified by the enormous popularity of some DJs). Social and cultural capital is explicitly displayed online, frequently equating to the quantitative value of one’s social network and the extent to which one acquires fluency in and is granted access to computers and the Internet. How members of these neo-tribes construct subcultural hierarchies and display markers of subcultural capital is a secondary focus of this chapter.

THE SHARED HISTORY OF PSYTRANCE AND THE INTERNET In 1962, Marshall McLuhan published his landmark novel, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, which describes the changes that have occurred since the invention of the Gutenberg press. He noted in particular the accelerating collapse of spatial and temporal barriers, enabling global communications. His prescient notion of the “global village” has since become a popular metaphor to describe the Internet and the World Wide Web. Like radio, computer networks were originally invented for military use. However, the development of computer technology as a medium for civilian communication finds its beginnings in the intellectual sphere: just as print media had been largely produced by the Church and the university between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, so too was computer-mediated communication initially confi ned to powerful institutions—namely government, academic and scientific research communities. The subsequent adaptation of this technology for personal use by a small group of hobbyists also had a precursor in the history of the radio. At the turn of the twentieth century, amateur ham radio enthusiasts were the driving force behind the rapid technological advancement of the medium (Briggs and Burke 1995: 155). Likewise, it was a community of computer hackers who have been principally responsible for the cultivation of “playful, emotionally and intellectually satisfying forms of collaboration” online, enabling the computer to become a “tool for the establishment of a better social world” (F. Turner 2006: 117). The hacker movement embodied many of the ideals of the international Situationist movement of the 1960s. According to Situationists, social domination worked through centrally produced, controlled and allegedly manipulative mass media. This was what French Situationist leader Guy Debord called “the society of the spectacle”, wherein interpersonal

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relationships are mediated and saturated by icons and images in an accelerated consumerist society. The Situationists advocated détournement, the tactic of appropriating and “turning” the instruments and products of spectacle society to other, libratory, ends. While Situationist-inspired activists altered prominent billboard ads, hackers concentrated their energies on manipulating computer networks. Inspired in large part by the radio jamming of previous eras, Situationist theory contributed to the emergence of what is today called “culture jamming”. Despite the democratising potential of the web, control and surveillance from government and corporate institutions threaten what is often considered the fi nal frontier for individual freedom of expression. One of the founders of cyberpunk science fiction, William Gibson, coined the term “cyberspace” in 1982, which he described in Neuromancer as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation” (51). With the increasing ubiquity of Internet access in the face of deteriorating economies, unstable international relations and environmental collapse, new media simultaneously enables the growth of social movements and provides new viral weapons of propaganda in this age of information warfare. Notably, the Situationists had warned of the common reactionary process of recuperation, in which threats to the dominant political order are appropriated or reappropriated by “the spectacle”, absorbed and made safe for mass consumption. This was certainly the case with prior broadcasting media, which by the mid-twentieth century had become controlled and packaged for mass consumption by large media conglomerates like CBS and NBC. There was, nevertheless, a striking difference between the national mood that had shaped the reception of earlier culture industries and the mood that shaped computer-mediated communication. While radio, fi lm and television emerged in eras characterised by a popular desire for national unity and material wealth, computer networks were developed in large part by those who rejected institutional authority and sought to preserve civil liberties. Thus, the primary historical precedent for the grassroots development of computer-mediated communication was the US countercultural movement of the 1960s (F. Turner 2006: 4). Just as the mass circulation of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses played a pivotal role in the fragmentation of religious authority in sixteenth century Europe, 1960s underground publications—such as radical newspapers, political pamphlets and “zines”— helped foster collective resistance to political authority in the US. Principal among these publications was the Whole Earth Catalog, whose readership connected disparate academic, technological and countercultural communities. The Whole Earth Catalog, created by Stewart Brand in 1968, was inspired by Brand’s involvement with systems theory and New Communalist politics, which were based on the democratised spread of information and collective consciousness.1 The Catalog’s focus on reader contributions and its practice of transparently publishing fi nancial accounts mirrored

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the interactive and open-source nature of modern Internet technologies. The fi rst issue, the cover of which depicted for the fi rst time the view of Earth from space, begins with a poem by Buckminster Fuller entitled “God is a Verb”. Brand’s quest to create collaborative communities led to the creation, in 1985, of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (more commonly known as “the WELL”), a collective of online message board forums. The intimate social dynamics of the WELL constituted the central theme of The Virtual Community, published in 1993 by Howard Rheingold, who’d been an active member since its inception. Made up of technologists, academics and counterculturalists (particularly fans of the Grateful Dead), the WELL reflected the dispersed networks previously established by the Whole Earth Catalog. As a prominently represented subset of the WELL, hackers introduced a return to the ideals that defi ned the New Communalists; namely, that “information wants to be free” (Brand 1985: 49). From the 1960s convergence of countercultural, technological and intellectual spheres epitomised by Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog to the 1990s dot-com frenzy originating in Silicon Valley, the evolution of the Internet has been fuelled by a utopian discourse of openness at odds with the imagined “corrupting” force of governance. This vision was famously articulated in a treatise entitled A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow. 2 Barlow’s eloquent manifesto, a pointed attack of the legal system on behalf of the civilians of cyberspace, echoes the principles on which America itself was founded: Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions (Barlow 1996, emphasis added). Barlow’s manifesto paints a telling portrait of the contention between the state and the “networked publics” of cyberspace (boyd 2008: 2). The topdown gazes of authority make up a vertical net that, more often than not, fails to ensnare the rhizomatic web of horizontal connections. Attempts to do so, epitomised by the massive US government-initiated “hacker crackdown” of 1990, have triggered a political movement dedicated to the preservation of civil liberties online (Sterling, “The Hacker Crackdown”, par. 13). If the Internet is an ideological battleground, Barlow is a rebel warrior/reality hacker par excellence, a fitting example of the democratised shamanism characteristic of both cyber culture and the psytrance movement. Both are emblematic of new frontiers, sites where “technotribes” envision themselves as actively engaged in “reworking the future” (St John 2003: 78).

190 Jenny Ryan These revolutionary sentiments propelled the cyber- and countercultural forces that gave birth to Burning Man during the summer solstice of 1986. Central to this annual affair is the burning of a tall wooden effi gy, a ritual of destruction and rebirth evoking Fuller’s poem. The Burning Man Festival is widely viewed as a Mecca for neo-tribalists in the US, drawing freaks, trancers, ravers, hippies and techies to Nevada’s Black Rock City to create a utopian, if ephemeral, community based on artistic expression and gift culture (Harvey 2002: par. 20). Described as the “ultimate meta-rave” (Gosney 1998: par. 3) or “mega-vibe” (St John 2009: 55), the event has become a sonic landscape featuring a wide and diverse range of music genres. In its early years, however, Burning Man was rife with tension between those few endorsing electronic music and those opposed to the influx of “ravers”, the “techno” stylings of which “evolved into a kind of outlaw satellite of Black Rock City” (St John 2009: 158). Acutely aware of this longstanding stigma and the insulated nature of the event, many psytrancers believe Burning Man has “gone mainstream”, now comprised of increasingly homogenous sub-cliques and cults. Nevertheless, there was considerable overlap between the international Goa/psytrance culture and the more localised Burning Man festival, where many well-known trance DJs (such as Simon Posford and Goa Gil) played in the late-1990s. These formative “Community Dance” events organised by Michael Gosney and others between 1997 and 1999 were integral in establishing psytrance music and culture in the United States. As earlier chapters in this volume have explained, psytrance (initially “Goa trance”) was birthed in Goa, India, in the 1960s by hippie expatriates whose nomadic exile lifestyle was cultivated alongside a unique ritualised form of trance music—the fi rst popular genre to be electronically produced and distributed, shared, remixed and sampled freely across the globe. With the playability of vinyl records limited by the arid environment, Goa trance developed out of a fusion of electronic and acoustic DAT recordings imported from around the world. This fusion was fostered by the traveller culture of Goa, a scene “constantly in motion”, and “gone like smoke in a few years”, as “the brotherhood gave way to ego-thinkers, territorial disputes and ignorance” (Mathesdorf 2002: par. 11). Nevertheless, these dancing travellers carried the Goa virus with them around the world, where it spread and mutated into an array of sub-genres and culturally inflected permutations. In his continuing efforts, Goa Gil (2001) states his purpose as “redefi ning the ancient tribal ritual for the 21st century”, the lofty aim of which is igniting “a chain reaction in consciousness”.

TECHNOSHAMANISM AND NEO-TRIBALISM ON TRIBE.NET In a paper on techno-shamanism and related heuristics, Dave Green discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of rhizomatic versus hierarchical

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relationships, marked by horizontal expansion as opposed to vertical, arboreal development: “The rhizome like the nomad is sustained by constant movement—deterritorialization—only temporarily creating new symbolic homes and practices—reterritorialization—before moving on” (2001: 6). The web exemplifies this process in unique ways, mirroring and magnifying the artifacts of our collective memory, accelerating and multiplying the “lines of fl ight” available to comprehension of the whole. Mediated emotional connections to others remain proximate, certainly “real” albeit mirrored and magnified—hyperreal, perhaps (Baudrillard 1994). Despite the theory that postmodern sociality is characterised by depthless, fragmented identifications, research into “virtual psytrancers” demonstrates the feelings of kinship, commitment and close identification with a culture that sustains itself beyond the ritual of the dance floor, maintained in virtual spaces and sustained through shared beliefs in the spiritual power of psychedelic trance (Greener and Hollands 2006: 414). In his book, We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour hypothesised that modern civilisation has in fact never been actualised; rather, a false division between nature and society has been erected that obscures their true hybridisation (Latour 1993: 95). Tribe.net represents a burgeoning desire to return to premodern modes of thinking, reaching back into the hyperlinked web of tribal sociality as a means of reclaiming our faltering connection to the planet: A lot of visionary artists are reflecting states or planes that are certainly more primordial and edgier than the technicolor flower-powered sunshine of the 60’s. Goa/psy trance also reflects the aural elements of the shadow plane, and this is in response to the fact that we are dealing with heavy amounts of darkness. We could lose our planet in 50 years, for goodness’s sake! 2005 was the hottest year on record, and Africa is suffering from a massive AIDS epidemic (Posted to the Tribe “Techno Shamanism”). Underlying popular notions of neo-tribalism is the concept of a universal consciousness that has been lost and forgotten in the wake of civilisation, and that must be rediscovered if humanity is to survive. Techno-shamans seek to raise positive energy in order to effect the healing seen as imperative for creating a better world and reclaiming our forgotten roots. Both terms evoke a romantic notion of merging modern technologies with ancient tribal wisdom. For instance, certain kinds of electronic music are attributed the capacity to induce trancelike states that can be shared by a group of people through ecstatic dance, evoking images of shamanic tribal rituals in South America, India, Africa and elsewhere. Psychoactives such as LSD, MDMA and DMT are frequently ingested to aid in inducing these states, altering visual and auditory perceptions, and enhancing feelings of connectedness to others and the “divine within”. In the words of one Tribe.net member:

192 Jenny Ryan To me, [technoshamanism] is getting in touch with the past and uniting it with the present. Our species has danced the night away to a rhythm and beat for as long as we have had consciousness to do so. Whether it be an animal hide-based drum or a drum machine, the sound is the same. If music in general was compared to say, the English language, its beat and rhythm would be the vowel sounds that make up every word in existence. Understood by all who hear it regardless of ethnicity or creed. Like the Back-to-the-Land movement of the 1960s, members of the psytrance movement continue to seek a return to humanity’s ancestral roots through developing local, self-sustaining communities, with an emphasis on creating a global network of interconnected “tribes”. Chicago’s Chilluminati offer an example of this, their web-banner declaring their aim of “promoting psychedelic trance and Goa music and culture—Chicago and planetwide”.3 Like any savvy party network, the Chilluminati are highly active online— hosting their own forum, uploading current tracks and upcoming events on their MySpace profi le, and collecting a small gathering of members on the niche-based Tribe.net. Rooted in the Burning Man community4, Tribe.net is home to countless virtual psytrance communities across the globe. Information flow on the site occurs primarily by way of membership in particular “Tribes” of interest, the home pages of which display a group message board for conversational posts, photos, listings, events, reviews and requests. In a network of over 67,000 Tribes and over 256,000 members, a search for “psytrance” reveals nearly 400 Tribes. The fi rst psytrance Tribe, Psytrance/Goa, was created in 2003 and is currently approaching 3,000 members. While a great deal of posts to this Tribe reflect the site’s San Francisco roots, the most popular threads (such as “what got you into psytrance/goa?” with 115 posts, and “Psytrance—WEAK or NOT?” with 109 posts) encourage a diverse range of responses and ongoing dialogue from psytrance enthusiasts around the world. Given the nature of the site, based on integrating local classified ads with social networking, many Tribes are locality-based. For instance, PsyCircle is a San Diego psytrance collective that defi nes itself on its Tribe home page as “a group of aliens and artists that aim to raise the collective consciousness through our music, visual art, and communal style of underground PsyTrance-themed events”. At the time of this writing, the most recent posts to the main bulletin board include details on a spring psytrance festival in Ohio where several of the PsyCircle artists were to be playing sets; a forty-two-post thread on a gathering in the nearby Mojave desert beginning with a simple post stating “more details to come soon”, continuing with carpool arrangements and ending with enthusiastic replies thanking the event planners; and a series of photographs taken at the Mojave event. One of the larger psytrance Tribes with around 1200 members, Bay Area

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Trance continues to serve as a bulletin board of San Francisco Bay Area trance events dating back to the Tribe’s creation in 2003. This permanency enriches the cultural memory of the psytrance community, granting it a history in digitised form. Other Tribes are more focused on the music community than local scenes, and typically have a larger and more geographically diverse member population. ::Psy Dub::, for example, has nearly 800 members, and a substantial proportion of its message board is comprised of music reviews (denoted by the stars given next to the subject line). While most of the threads are single posts, one thread titled “psy-dub top 10?” received forty replies from fellow psy-dub enthusiasts. DarkPsy, a Tribe devoted to a popular sub-genre of psytrance, has over 1100 members. The most popular thread, “Where are all the darkpsy mixes?”, was fi rst posted in late 2005 and has continued well into 2009 with over seventy posts. Members promote their own darkpsy albums as well as the work of others, providing direct links to download sites as well as personal commentary. There are also dozens of Tribes devoted to specific artists and record labels, such as Kindzadza and Tantrumm Records—many of these kind of Tribes, however, are rife with self-promotional posts and reviews and little discussion of the artists and labels themselves, implying that the intentions of those who joined were either to simply mark themselves as fans or to gain access to a large population for promotional purposes. Tribe.net is principally a bulletin board in practice, made up of local underground scenes knit together in a virtual web, trance music production and DJ culture formed in a niche-village. As such, it is also an archive of human stories writ large. It is a tent city, with all the trappings of a festival: music, drugs and crafts marketed as consumer wares; insider knowledge as status markers; intimate “campfi res” peopled by storytellers and caregivers, nurturing camaraderie and communality. Threads pertaining to specific events (such as “Gaian Mind Festival 2008”) fuel the flames of community through nostalgic reminisces and collaboratively produced photo albums, enabling relationships formed in the course of ephemeral happenings to endure. The site’s members have long resisted censorship, and its relative obscurity has made it an ideal virtual turf in the battle against the increasingly watchful eye of authorities and the frenzy of popularised commodities. How this space was won is described in the story that follows.

TRIBE.NET AS CONTESTED TERRAIN Despite the rhetoric of egalitarianism described in the preceding section on psytrance and cyber culture, a closer analysis reveals that social and (sub) cultural capital play out online just as they do offl ine. In the high school cafeteria of “Web 2.0”, MySpace and Facebook are the popular kids, known by those with even the most rudimentary understanding of online

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social networking. Tribe.net, on the other hand, is a little-known site where the marginal become the mainstream, where the burnouts and freaks congregate just past the smoke-free school zone boundary. Members feel free to perform playfully and act transgressively because of the slim chance that they will be seen by the judging gazes of the masses and unhip authority figures. While the more popular MySpace and Facebook encourage selfcensorship to some degree, on Tribe.net it is common to come across public message board threads discussing nudity, bondage, drug use, mysticism and shamanism with the sort of frankness normally reserved for close friends. A novice drug user, posting a thread entitled “lsd versus mushrooms” in November of 2005 received 122 responses of advice from more experienced members over the course of three years. In a Tribe5 called “Au Naturel”, a post entitled “how many of you drive naked?” incited friendly camaraderie and support in the form of fifty-one responses. A Tribe called “3+ Male Relationships” describes itself as “A tribe for Gay men that are interested in LTR [long-term] relationships of 3 or more”, and has 121 members. Clearly, the site is an excellent vehicle for information and social support difficult to get via mainstream media or in everyday life. Tribe.net was introduced to the Internet community in July of 2003, as Friendster’s popularity was peaking.6 Its San Francisco origins are still evident today, as this particular regional network remains the most populated and active. The site, emphasising local networks organised by city, allows users to buy and sell items, rate restaurants and other establishments and rummage through job postings and housing ads. Members can establish trustworthy reputations by creating personal Profi les, joining and creating Tribes based on shared interests and connecting to friends. “The original thesis of Tribe”, co-founder Paul Martino wrote in an online chat, “was to marry Friendster and Craigslist—or as one of our focus group members said, ‘Craigslist with a face’”.7 As for the origins of Tribe.net’s demographic base, Martino said that “to some extent Tribe was ‘captured’ by the Burning demographic”. For this reason, Tribe.net never went mainstream in the way MySpace did, instead becoming a niche site for displaced Fakesters (a playful term for Friendster exiles), Burners and a collective of “New Age” spiritual seekers (including trancers). By virtue of even joining the site, members demonstrate insider knowledge of the “virtual underground”. In marked contrast to the dramatic growth in popularity of MySpace throughout 2004, Tribe.net was reporting little increase in traffic, prompting the site to become focused on marketing strategies. In April of 2005, Tribe.net CEO Mark Pincus was replaced as part of the company’s initiative to accelerate its stalled growth. Over the course of the next year, Tribe.net members vocalised their discontent with the new management’s alterations of the site, such as graphical and navigational changes. In July of 2005, rumours abounded that Tribe.net was soon to be bought out by NBC, inciting enormous protest and criticism that the site had “sold out”. These rumours proved to be false. Over the next six months, the site

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failed to produce significant revenue. Attempts to market Tribe.net to the mainstream were largely unsuccessful, for, in the words of one Tribe.net employee: . . . in trying to guide this site to the mainstream we were trying to be something that we weren’t. It remains to be seen whether an audience of geeks, kinks and burners can grow out from its largely San Francisco based roots and embrace other niches in other places (Tribe Company Blog, 24 July 2006). Shortly following this announcement, in August of 2006, Pincus bought back the faltering site. His return signified a shift back toward the original management structure, which promised to return the site “to the community and the content” (Tribe.net 2006: par. 7). The move was widely celebrated by the loyal community of Tribe.net members, who flocked to the newly formed “brainstorming” Tribe to suggest improvements and new ideas. Members overwhelmingly expressed their support of the features that made Tribe.net unique from other social networking sites, particularly its emphasis on local community and openness to “alternative” subject matter. In March of 2007, Tribe.net (described as “a mostly forgotten social networking site”) and FiveAcross (another social networking site) were officially acquired by Cisco Systems, a “Silicon Valley heavyweight” in the field of telecommunications equipment (Stone 2007: par. 1). In response to a blog post covering the news on the popular technology website TechCrunch, one reader commented: Seems the wild west has a new frontier tale to tell today, one about how the cisco kid gathered up the tribe and rode into the (silicon) valley, five across and lord knows how many deep, all manner of whoops and hollers piercing the pregnant air, gold in them thar hills, a whipping post and minions predisposed to bdsm and fi re dancing on the open flats by nightfall . . . and the age-old struggle to domesticate the tribes rises up at high noon as the cisco sherriff makes steps into the cantina . . . can the tribe be civilized? will they settle? is this a new home or a hollywood set rigged and ready for showtime? there’s talk in the tribes and the whipping post sweats and communal bondage, or is it bonding, waits to meet the law . . . switch on, switch off, or switch sides . . . Despite this reader’s amusingly ominous predictions, Tribe.net’s slick user interface was the primary reason for its acquisition by Cisco; it is among the most flexible and advanced of any social networking site, allowing members to drag and drop modules on their home pages as well as their profi les. Their user-centric approach continues to be grounded in communicating directly with members through forums dedicated to suggestions,

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criticisms and concerns. The tightly knit communities that make up Tribe. net’s demographic celebrate the site’s relative anonymity, unhindered by crowds and thus able to gather together more closely around the “virtual campfi re” (Ryan 2008: 9). In December of 2007, Tribe.net launched a “premium membership” program, proposing enhanced features such as instant messaging and file sharing—as well as relief from the now prominent ads plastered throughout the site threads and sidebars—in exchange for inexpensive paid subscription fees. The response was quite positive, as many members value their communities on the site and have been proud to show their support by purchasing the five-dollar monthly service (marked by the addition of a gold star next to their usernames). However, Tribe.net continued to be beleaguered by frequent sporadic downtimes, an inconvenience often noted in my faceto-face conversations about the site with fellow trancers, for whom the site is frequently associated with the New Age movement (defi ned broadly as “a diffuse collectivity of questing individuals” by Steven Sutcliffe [2003: 223]), marked by stereotypical symbols and ideologies of earth-based spiritualities. In following with the nomadic and fragmented nature of New Age travellers, many of the original members of Tribe.net have carved out new virtual territories despite continuing to associate themselves strongly with the site. Today, the site is an intricate virtual graveyard of abandoned Tribes and forum threads—in effect, an archive of stories interwoven with lifestyle-based niches and colourful personalities.

UTOPIA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES While the most popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are egocentric in nature, centred around the individual member’s profile and social network, Tribe.net is interest-based and information-centric. Discussion amongst members is encouraged by the centralisation of message board forums, publicly visible and open to anyone surfi ng through. However, this is not to say that Tribe.net is less hierarchical than MySpace or Facebook. On the contrary, being “in the know” is a key value in the formation of the “underground”, through which participants seek and obtain special knowledge (subcultural capital) that distinguishes them from the imagined “mainstream” (Thornton 1996: 11). In a similar vein, Maffesoli (1996: 141) notes that the cohesion nurtured by the tribe through proximate connections is also characterised by exclusivity: It must be noted . . . that at the same time that it encourages attraction, even if plural, the feeling of belonging proceeds if not by exclusion then at least by exclusiveness. Indeed, the characteristic of the tribe is that by highlighting what is close (persons and places), it has a tendency to be closed in on itself.

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The often extreme libertarian sentiments embraced by US trancers echo the New Communalist rhetoric of the 1960s hippie countercultural movement, the “fuck the system” anthems of 1970s DiY punk, the “right to party” British acid-house-scene-gone-international- phenomenon of the 1980s, and the free-spirited underground ethos of the 1990s San Francisco warehouse raves. As a post-rave movement, psytrance is infused with both nostalgia for its genealogical parent cultures and a cautious, critical awareness of their consequent recuperation in the form of mainstream popular culture. This commonly held paranoia was eloquently described in Hakim Bey’s discussion of “permanent TAZs”: The Media experience a vampiric thirst for the shadow-Passion play of “Terrorism”, Babylon’s public ritual of expiation, scapegoating, and bloodsacrifice. Once any autonomous group allows this particular “gaze” to fall upon it, the shit hits the fan:-the Media will try to arrange a mini-armageddon to satisfy its junk-sickness for spectacle and death (Bey 1991). The public nature of Tribe.net grants transparency to a subculture that might have otherwise insulated itself from becoming faddish or trendy. In one blatant example of the commercialisation of the underground, Boston’s long-running riverside psytrance events were overtaken in the summer of 2008 by two entrepreneurial DJs. As they said in an interview with Shebrew Magazine, “It does help that we go into everything from a business perspective. You gotta be able to take the underground culture and package it. We are the ‘cool factor’” (in Berezina 2007: par. 15). Commercially packaged, the event resonated painfully amongst members of the local psytrance scene. As described by one attendee: So i went to the SoulClap event last night. Damn I appreciate Psyforia so much! There was a $20 cover charge!!!!! and not the cheapest drink in town, they had an outside bar set up and it was SPONSORED by REDBULL! I should have known it was too well organized. The music was good, didn’t stay for the main act . . . couldn’t handle the product placement in the VJ’s work (which was otherwise really good). The crowd was pretty Euro (as in Eurotrash but I’m trying to stay positive here)—lots of tourists being like “wow, check out that girl, that’s what a hippie looks like . . . ” (Sonic Beating Tribe Member). It is commonly believed that once a “scene” has been infi ltrated by “scenesters” it has ripened into a commodified subculture. The term itself is derogatory and only used when describing others. In her analysis of subcultural discourses of the mainstream, Thornton aptly points out that “[r]ather than subverting dominant cultural patterns in the manner attributed to classic subcultures, these clubber and raver ideologies offer ‘alternatives’ in the strict sense of the word, namely other social and cultural hierarchies to put in their

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stead” (1996: 115). Currencies of value in the underground economy are directly tied to the forms of subcultural capital valued by trancers; namely, who you know (party promoters and organisers), music taste (DJs and producers) and style (vendors selling clothing, jewelry and art). Members of subcultural communities often perceive themselves as beyond the ethos of productivity and the confines of governance, an attitude reinforced by subsistence through an underground economy supported by the forms of subcultural capital mentioned above. There is an inherent irony in claiming authenticity within the psytrance scene: many of the styles and spiritual underpinnings of the movement are based in the appropriation of indigenous cultures and religions (such as Native American tribes and Indian Hinduism). Evidence of this conflict recently occurred in the spring of 2009, when a San Francisco Bay Area event for Burners dubbed “Go Native!” was cancelled in the face of virulent furor by Native Americans across the country (Downs 2009). Pitched as a fundraiser for “neurofeedback research” into medicinal usages of peyote and featuring four “theme rooms” aligning Indian tribal groupings to the four elements, attendees were encouraged to dress in “Native costume” for the dance event scheduled to take place at an ancient Ohlone site (the indigenous people of the San Francisco Bay Area). The Visionary Village leaders quickly complied with the American Indian Movement’s demand for cancellation and request for dialogue. It was to be a lesson in effective confl ict resolution, though certainly tensions remain: On the night of the event, a handful of Burners were lectured to by the Ohlone community (including children) for four hours on the importance of cultural sensitivity. The Burners were apologetic and conciliatory and willing to bridge the rifts between their cultures: “I think that this is also a wake up time for this community to WALK OUR TALK and start giving back. Instead of LEAVE NO TRACE (creating temporary communities and tearing or burning them down), it’s time for us to make a mark and LEAVE A TRACE—by creating lasting and positive change” (Burning Man Tribe Member). This collective desire for long-lasting positive change represents an awareness of and transcendence from the constraints of Thornton’s subcultural capital theory, reflected in the multitude of Tribes dedicated to discussion of global crises, sustainable practices, earth-based spiritualities and the cultivation of intentional communities and co-ops. What do these interests and lifestyle groupings mean in the context of the cyber and countercultural networks under discussion?

CONCLUSION In a postmodern era characterised by an emphasis on and fluidity between multiple identities and sites of belonging, the psytrance movement is representative of neo-tribal sensibilities (Bennett 1999: 614). These shifting nodes of identification make up a network of neo-tribes marked by empathetic and

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sensual proximate relations (Maffesoli 1996: 139). Forged through mutual aid within the shared experience of the festal—which Maffesoli (ibid: 92), defines as “those moments of pure consumption occasioning transgressions of imposed morality”—emotional bonds are formed on the basis of reciprocity and trust. This sense of trust is largely informed by the degree to which one’s online network aligns with one’s personal values, such as family and local community or musical preference and party style. The shared values of communality, openness and creativity that undergird both cyberculture and psytrance culture coalesce on Tribe.net, creating a safe space for the cultivation of trust. It is one thing to embrace the now, to achieve spontaneous communitas in the interstices of everyday life—it is quite another turn when new media practices enter the picture, allowing users to create and retrieve artifacts of group memories in ways previously impossible, as well as granting new possibilities for collectively (re)envisioning the future. Despite the substantial decrease in activity over the past few years, Tribe. net continues to serve as a massive archive of human stories and conversations and as a useful bulletin board of information pertinent to New Age travellers and techno-mads. Characteristic of the earliest online communities (such as the WELL), the site brings individuals together on the basis of shared interests, taste preferences, beliefs and lifestyles rather than institutionalised or familial connections, enabling the creation of more playful performances and personas in a manner akin to the “temporary autonomous zone” or TAZ frequently created at psytrance gatherings: Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a republic of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those of, say, the entire US Government? Some of the “parties” we’ve mentioned lasted for two or three years. Is this something worth imagining, worth fighting for? Let us study invisibility, webworking, psychic nomadism— and who knows what we might attain (Hakim Bey 1991)? Victor Turner suggests that “liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon” (1986: 95). In such states, “threshold people” may fi nd themselves attuned to the orgiastic whole described by Maffesoli. In these moments, communitas—the very stuff of community, the being-together—unites us in collective reverence. In the imagination we transport ourselves into alternate universes of possibility with the comforting knowledge that the real world will be waiting for us when we return. The greatest mysteries lie at the nexus between individual imagination and collective hallucination; that is to say, we may become the people we wish ourselves to be in the spaces “betwixt and between” the roles we presently perform in everyday life (V. Turner 1986: 97). It is this potential future democratic utopia, realised and enacted momentarily in

200 Jenny Ryan the TAZ, that is desired and variably actualised by the neo-tribes described in this chapter on a more permanent basis: Although the TAZ remains a Wonderland—often identifying as tribes— tekno, doof, and trance outfits seek to pursue the “second world” on a permanent, or perhaps semi-permanent, basis. Here the dance party becomes a conscious effort to infect the world with the ambiance of the “second world”, to literally vibrate its aesthetic, to breach the ramparts of the world of sobriety and toil, with the love, conviviality, and hope known in the zone (St John 2009: 122). In describing these autonomous spaces as they are formed in cyberspace and psytrance gatherings, this chapter has hopefully illuminated both the dangers of exclusivity and alternative hierarchies as well as the possibilities for re-imagining the world and effecting positive (even permanent) change.

NOTES 1. New Communalists rejected private property values, which they argued alienated individuals from society, and sought the restructuration of community in the form of a Back-to-the-Land movement. This American movement is characterised by a demographically prominent migration from urban to rural areas throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with the creation of somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 communes (F. Turner 487). 2. Barlow, who was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), dedicated to the fight for freedom of speech on the Internet. 3. The name “Chilluminati” contains two linguistic derivatives: “chillum” refers to a smoking pipe historically used in India; and the “Illuminati” is the name of the secret society founded on May 1, 1776, which is today associated with Aleister Crowley, Freemasonry, the Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, a variety of popular video games, and conspiratorial rumours of a New World Order. According to a crew member, the “Chi” in “Chilluminati” was intended to refer to “Chicago”. 4. The Burning Man Tribe is by far the most populated on the site, with nearly 20,400 members as of May 2009. 5. Throughout this chapter, the ordinary language terms used to describe official features of these sites will be capitalised as proper nouns. 6. Friendster was the top social networking site until it was overtaken by MySpace in 2004, at which point membership underwent a dramatic decline. 7. Craigslist, a free, text-only site made up of classified ads organised by city, was founded in 1996 and has remained one of the most popular sites on the Internet today.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barlow, John. 1996. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”. Davos, Switzerland. . Accessed 10 November 2007.

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Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Bennett, Andy. 1999. “Subcultures or Neo-Tribes? Rethinking the Relationship Between Youth, Style, and Musical Taste.” Sociology 33(3): 599–617. Berezina, Anna. “Breathe it, Live it, Work it: Soulclap”. Shebrew Magazine. (October 2007). . Accessed 12 December 2008 Bey, Hakim. 1991. TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, and Poetic Terrorism. Autonomedia. . Accessed 8 June 2008. boyd, danah. 2008. “Why Youth <3 Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life”. In David Buckingham (ed) Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, pp. 119–142. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Brand, Stewart. The Whole Earth Review. May 1985. Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke. 2005. [2002]. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity. Debord, Guy. 1967. La Société du Spectacle [The Society of the Spectacle]. Paris: Editions Buchet-Chastel. Downs, David. “Burners Torched Over Native Party”. East Bay Express. 1 April 2009. . Accessed 5 April 2009. Fuller, Buckminster. “God is a Verb”. Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968. . Accessed 10 January 2009. Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books. Goa Gil. Interview. Freeze Magazine. August 2001. . Accessed 3 March 2009. Gosney, Michael. “Genesis of the Community Dance”. Radio-V, 1998. . Accessed 20 May 2009. Green, Dave. “Technoshamanism: Cyber-sorcery and Schizophrenia.” Paper presented at the International Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR) Conference, London, 2001. . Greener, Tracey, and Robert Hollands. 2006. “Beyond Subculture and Postsubculture? The Case of Virtual Psytrance”. Journal of Youth Studies 9(4): 393–418. Harvey, Larry. Interview. “An Economy of Gifts.” Burning Man Newsletter, Summer 2002. . Accessed 10 March 2009. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maffesoli, Michel. 1996. The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Martino, Paul. Personal interview. 8 October 2007. Mathesdorf, Kai. “A History of Psychedelic Trance (Part 2)”. Mushroom Magazine, 1 January 2002. . Accessed 4 March 2008. McKenna, Terence. Alien Dreamtime [video]. 1993. . Accessed 18 February 2009. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rheingold, Howard. 1993. The Virtual Community. Electronic Version. . . 2000. The Virtual Community, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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Ryan, Jennifer. 2008. “The Virtual Campfire: An Ethnography of Online Social Networking”. Unpublished Master’s Dissertation. Wesleyan University. Available online at: . St John, Graham. 2003. “Post-Rave Technotribalism and the Carnival of Protest”. In . David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl (eds) The Post-Subcultures Reader, pp. 65–82. London: Berg. . 2009. Technomad: Global Raving Counterculture. London: Equinox. Sterling, Bruce. 1992. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. The Cyberpunk Project. . Accessed 10 March 2009. Stone, Brad. “Social Networking’s Next Phase”. The New York Times. 3 March 2007. Sutcliffe, Steven J. 2003. Children of the New Age: A History of Spiritual Practices. London and New York: Routledge. Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Hanover: University Press of New England. Tribe.net. Tribe Company Blog. 10 December 2007. . Accessed 10 March 2009. . “We Take it Back: A Letter to the Community From the Employees of Tribe.net”. September 2006. . Accessed 10 March 2009. Turner, Fred. 2009. “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production”. New Media & Society 11(1–2): 73–94. . 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Victor. 1986. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites De Passage”. In Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

11 Narratives in Noise Reflexivity, Migration and Liminality in the Australian Psytrance Scene Alex Lambert

The Australian psytrance scene shifts between two primary social “places”, bush parties known as “doofs” and online discussion forums. Online forums are used to sustain doof culture between doofs, which are by nature transitory and fleeting events. In this chapter I discuss an online psytrance community called Oztrance1, which is concerned primarily with doofs in the state of Victoria. I discuss how online sociality articulates the cultural significance of “doofi ng”. Here psytrancers, through processes of collective memory, form a localised narrative about doof culture. The forum connects psytrancers in novel ways and affords lengthy, critical and reflexive discussions. These discussions carry the trace of the doof, but also include reflections on the broader psytrance scene, its music, rituals, politics and aesthetics. The forum is thus a threshold where localised narrative can enter a broader psytrance narrative. “Narrative” is a powerful way of understanding the scene; psytrancers tell stories and they engage with themes. The migration from the virtual world of discussion forums to the liminal world of doofs is like a formula or plot. However, the way in which actors communicate online has been characterised by contemporary scholarship, not so much as narrative, but as noise. “Noise” has been expressed in relation to individualism and the breakdown of social relations, the loss of a sense of communal belonging and the rupture of shared meaning systems and rituals. These themes arise, in general, as a critique of our contemporary information society and they crystallise around the Internet and new modes of social networking. Yet, I argue that the Australian psytrance scene uses the tools and techniques of our information society to create and sustain shared meaning systems as well as sense of community. The way in which it does this, however, changes the nature of the scene, making it in a very specific sense refl exive.

DOOF AND THE INFORMATION AGE Doofs fuse psytrance music, culture and the Australian landscape. They are ecologies where humans respectfully interact with nature. The tropes

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of the Australian wilderness, its ancient energy, beauty and atmosphere, give the doof its cardinal quality—”going bush”. The cultural significance of the bush engenders performances where natural rhythms and elements are taken up by doofers in dancing—a sideward, back-and-forth oscillation also known as “stomping”. Doofers stomp the earth while twirling fi re, wielding phantasmic orbs in their hands, gracefully coiling or frenetically convulsing. Doofi ng usually involves psychedelic drugs; the psychedelic experience heightens the ethereal juxtaposition of Australian bush and psytrance music. Doofs are an example of “post-rave” culture, a backlash against the hyper-commodification of rave of the 1990s, against the colonisation of clandestine pleasures by capital, the cliqued branding of the alternative (St John 2001). In DIY autonomous zones doofers experiment with new meanings that go beyond these branded experiences, the doof itself becomes an artistic process where doofers creatively interact with bush, light, sound and décor, imbuing them with a living aura. Doofs are liminal moments, potent anti-structural islands where liberation, transgression and transcendence occurs. They are an example of “communitas” (Turner 1969), a spontaneous sociality between equipotent fellows. In this sense doofs resemble tribal ritual and doofers refer to themselves as “tribes”. The doof culture discussed in this chapter is centred around Victorian parties. These range from smaller, intimate gatherings put on by production crews like Psychotic Episode, Silent Partner, Mutagen Community and Unconscious Collective, to larger “lifestyle gatherings” that involve markets, meditation areas and chai tents hosted by the likes of Somatica, Tribeadelic and Royal Doof. Victorian doofs tend to be “darker”, to play “dark psytrance”, a more furious style, with fast BPM and chaotic, a-melodic sound. In contrast to the “tribal” paradigm of the doof, the contemporary world has been described as a “post traditional” society (Giddens 1994), where actors are forced to take up new modes of life in a dynamic, heterogeneous, global economy. To satisfy the ever-broadening scope of social ties needed to operate in this world, the Internet is a medium permitting social networks to span vast distances of time and space. Thus new interfaces are becoming day-to-day tools in our social lives: the blog, the forum, e-mails, instant relay chat and the social networking site. These systems become increasingly harder to manage. Far from being concrete social worlds, they are liquid and diverse, complex and difficult to map. This poses a crisis of representation, “the limit [of which] corresponds with its incapacity to account for complexity, entropy, indeterminacy and non-linearity that characterizes immersive informational environments organized about the logic of relations” (Rossiter 2006: 39). Put another way, the social world of the information age lacks harmony, is dissonant, “noisy”. Anthony Giddens (1991) argues that, in the face of this indeterminacy and non-linearity, actors must become more self-reflexive. With the burdensome removal of traditional social roles actors must take it on themselves to compose their identities, their individuality. This involves careful

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considerations of one’s past and one’s place in the world in order to plot a course for the future. It involves continuously taking on new knowledge and integrating this into the “reflexive project of the self”, which involves “coherent, continuously revised biographical narratives” (ibid: 5). Giddens considers the self-narrative to be discreet, unique and self-determining, a form of empowerment necessitated by the chaotic modern moment. The online world enables this empowerment, providing tools like blogs which allow users to perform their subjectivities, circulate them and archive them. Knowledge can be accessed, reconsidered and reworked over time—this is the reflexive process. Scott Lash (1994), however, critiques the self-reflexive actor as an unhealthy specimen of individualism. He compares Giddens’ reflexive self with Heidegger’s pre-ontological human. The latter enacts a social role as the very essence of his/her being. The meaning of the role is given through habitual interactions within a tight knit social group. Habitual interaction is pre-reflexive; it is the day-to-day, unproblematic enacting of social routines within a stable social world. The reflexive self, however, is especially conscious of the role he or she plays in society, having to constantly modify it to adapt to the changing world. Thus Lash implies that the reflexive self is unhinged from meaningful, habitual social life, that reflexivity is a notion of the “I”, not the “we”. Geert Lovink (2008) explores this in regards to online life, arguing that most blogs are interesting only to their writers, garnering zero comments from other bloggers and acting more as a personal online diary. Bloggers nihilistically refuse the audience; instead they focus on personal experiences, delving within the “I”, apparently apathetic to the “we”. Oztrance, however, uses forum software, not blogs, and the distinction is important. Forums, as a means of connecting a social network, especially of the subcultural variety, are in some ways yesterday’s news. The Web 2.0 era has seen the rise to dominance of the blogosphere and personal-pagebased social networking software. Meanwhile forums are used increasingly as peripheral tools attached to broader sites, as places to post queries and work through functional dilemmas. Interestingly, one country where forum software is still highly popular is Germany. This may be because the notion of “forum” reflects aspects of German culture, particularly its history of public intellectualism and institutional communitarianism. Forums promote complex and prolonged conversations; they are associated with debate and disagreement. It is not uncommon to see committed interlocutors loyally cluster around a topic for months, sometimes years. A forum is thus an apt online corollary to the doof, both are places committed to providing a sense of community. But how does this relate to narrative? Are forums the type of online communities which afford coherent social narratives, avoiding a crisis of representation? Importantly, online communities are different to “traditional communities”. Barry Wellman (et al 2003) considers them to be

206 Alex Lambert “communities of interest”, places where “networked individuals” share cultural capital. This seems to be a rather weak notion of community, where networked individuals—reflexive agents with discreet, self-directed lives— come to swap ideas, but not to share collective emotions and memories. This is crucial as the “doof narrative”, I argue, is one of collective emotion and memory. Yet, simultaneously, Oztrance is a network of reflexive individuals, a site of individual opinions and plural discourses. And it is also a network routed in the doof moment, in face-to-face liminality and communitas. The doof’s liminal characteristics leave their trace in the online sociality of psytrancers, affecting the narratives they create. That is, the aggregate textual efforts of psytrancers online forms a collective narrative. Processes of collective memory and habitual storytelling connect this narrative to the liminal power of the doof. From the doof this collective narrative draws some of its most canonical themes: pagan magic, shamanism, tribalism and myths of place. These themes are articulated online, imagining the doof and its tribal potency to create a sort of virtual ontology. These themes also suture the scene together, saving it from the crisis of representation which “noise” signifies, acting as an ambience, a totem of recognition and an umbrella under which a heterogeneous array of positions are taken on the nuances of psytrance culture. In this sense, the scene in question marries the notion of pre-reflexive community with that of the reflexive individual, the narrative with the noise. In this chapter, I explore how narrative emerges from the scene on two levels. First I focus on the micro-level, the level of language. Here the narrative is like a “language game” and contains the fusion of place and collective memory deployed in emotionally loaded signifiers. Later, I discuss the macro-level, in which canonical themes take shape.

AFFECTUAL SIGNS: DOOF LANGUAGE From the outset, let us form a picture of how a forum works. A forum contains two primary logistical components: the topic or “thread”, and a subsequent discussion that consists of usually short, chronologically arranged text replies or “posts”. Thus the structure of a forum reifies, logically and visually, an ordered conversation between multiple interlocutors in which everyone is permitted to speak without being spoken over. Here we see the ethics of communicative rationality, an effort to trade cultural capital, provide humour and opinion and make meanings. This rationality is expressed in many ways, from admiration: “If you want to hear some excellent heavy dark psytrance come to Freakreation . . . ” (Lord Shekinah), to personal accounts: “I pretty much all but gave up on playing dark psy at parties—after numerous times been booked to play—only to get half way thru my set—and asked to lighten up abit” (volt), philosophical reflections: “There’s no good dark psy and no shit dark psy really—what’s good and

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what’s shit?? It’s like saying, what’s normal and what’s not? It all depends on the individual” (StarryEyed), and conceptual contestations: “with the ‘good dark vs shit dark’ comment i can empathise to an extent, but i dont think it’s really good vs bad as much as it’s hectic vs smooth, and the best dark sets would probably move between both” (CosmicInferno). 2 These “posters” are connected in their efforts to be meaningfully and reflexively positioned within a discourse on psytrance culture. Discussions like these provide a scaffold for the deployment of emotionally loaded signifiers that enable the formation of a collective narrative. For example, the above cited oscillation between “hectic and smooth” is not just a simple interpretation of dark psytrance, it reflects a commonly held experience reiterated in a range of similar narrative tropes. “Hectic and smooth” also evokes the differences between frenetic dancing and “chilling out”, “buzzing” and “coming down”, dusk and dawn, night and day, winter and summer. The term “collective narrative” must be properly defi ned because it describes an aesthetic process quite different to that involving linearity, teleology or authorship. A collective narrative emerges innocently from a conversation, or a collection of descriptions or a picture. It is thus intertextual, materialising online out of the multiplicity. In a Deleuzean style, this “continuous multiplicity”, although made up of internally different entities, gives the narrative as a whole a virtual ontology. It also carries with it a notion of collective creativity, although not in the sense that every user is aware of it and collectively motivated toward the fi nal aesthetic product. Such is the case of the Flickr blog entitled “Collective Narrative”, an experimental community engaged in unstructured contributions to a textual process. Here a user may add their own text to someone else’s, thereby plugging their subjectivity into the meaning-making process. It is “an experimental group based on the intriguing idea that Flickr is potentially a ‘network of minds’ where we can interact using text and image, within creative projects”.3 However, the collective narrative of the psytrance scene cannot be seen as a “project”, which, fragmented and distributed, still possesses authors—indeed, reflexive authors who are aware of their own acts of authorship and their place within an abstract totality. We must conceive of this as a narrative without an author. It is important to clarify that I am not arguing for something approximating the post-structural “death of the author”. Such a “death” always implies what was once alive (the author) in negation, and is thus incomplete. As Derrida’s thought clarifies, the author is always present in his or her absence, haunting the sign. But what of a narrative that, as a whole, cannot be conceived of as ever having a singular author? Does this confound the supposed individualism associated with reflexivity? I argue that one place such a narrative can be experienced is in the immediate domain of language and emotion. Michel Maffesoli (1996) has re-popularised the anthropological notion of “collective emotion” in the study of contemporary collectivities. What follows is an attempt to illustrate how an emotion

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can be collective in an arena like the online discussion forum. I discuss how this affectual timbre is deployed within a language game unique to the psytrance scene, and ask how language makes reference to collective emotion. It does so, I argue, through processes grounded in both place and memory. These processes of memory collectively imagine the doof, which in turn acts as a “place” for the narrative. To begin, take this thread inquiring “Do you prefer being at doofs in the night or the day”. Responses included: I love both [night and day]; nothing like managing to have the full experience from evening through night to psychedelic morning invigoration and fi nally sunburnt afternoon looseness (Adam). [I] still think the most psychedelic approach is getting really psychedelic and twisted at night-time, then when the [sun] comes up getting that fresh wave of morning energy, eating some fruit, get a change of clothes to something warmer, and rock on all day (Rhythmik).4 Two important elements can be taken from this conversation. It is imbued with affect, projecting a tone of positive emotion and it is structured around memory, around the affectual remembrance of the doof. The topic thread calls out for memories and posters oblige with stories everyone can relate to. That is, the content of these memories are familiar and so can be called “collective memories” (Halbwachs 1992). The doof acts as a place for memory. The link between place and collective memory has an important contextualising function (Lipsitz 1990; Huyssen 1995). Collective memory needs a social forum like Oztrance where experience can be (re)presented, as well as a place, or site of memory, where they originally occur. Place acts as a common ground and an interface between the individual storyteller and the collective narrative (Kenny 1999). Put simply, psytrancers are familiar with doofs; the elements common to these events form in the collective imagination the archetypal doof. The doof becomes the precedent and the paradigm for collective memory. As long as the doof, having the affectual potency of face-to-face liminality and communitas, acts as the scene’s mnemonic place, it will engender a narrative of collective emotion. So, the signifiers deployed by those who post on these forums are loaded with emotion, and yet they are deployed casually, by the by, and in a habitual fashion. Indeed, Maurice Halbwachs (1992) argues that collective memories can only perdure if the practice of remembering is habitual. Cultures remember through rituals. Just as tribal cultures interact through ritualised oral traditions, the ritualistic act of posting on a psytrance forum necessitates a common language game. For example, on a thread asking whether summer or winter doofs are superior, an entire affectual language was deployed where poster’s jocundly circulated commonly experienced

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and emotionally loaded signs, such as: “thermals”, “thermuses”, “longjohns”, “thick socks”, “fi res”, “sunrises” and “dancefloor”. tripping in the sun makes the colours so vivid. hot doofers wearing not much and chunky tunes easily takes the cake over a rugged up and cloudy dancefloor (HrPuffinStuff). ummm one of my fav memories at a doof was the below zero winter night, then the morning sunshine, the peeling of the layers, feeling the sun fi rst hit my skin (HelloMot). winter, because people seem to get waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more higher (elvis is back). winter = thermals, fi res, possum socks, fungi, long nights and crisp sounds at intimate parties summer = swimming, warm nights, cold beer and rainbow (sourcepan).5 The last of these posters makes reference to “rainbow”, a term which has entered the cultural vocabulary, meaning the Rainbow Serpent festival, a popular event held at the height of the summer doof season, synonymous with summer doofi ng. This affectionate, mnemonic language comes to form a prose style, a style that makes systemic reference to the doof. But although it can be said that this prose style unifies the scene’s narrative, on the more complex level of opinions, beliefs, values and tastes, the differing subjectivities of reflexive individuals makes the narrative plural. That is, while language is wedded to the concept of the doof, a heterogeneous choir of individual voices mediates the conceptual terrain of the “doof narrative”.

ONLINE FORUMS: PLURALITY ZONES What common story does a collective narrative tell? The question is, of course, problematic given that such a narrative emerges from a plurality of voices. This is why I use the more specific term narrative and not “aesthetics”. These days, we may be comfortable with the concept of pastiche or of “mashup culture” when imagining some aesthetic forms, but when referring to social groups we look for thematic unity, we look for a narrative, even if we must discover it lurking behind apparent anarchy. Doesn’t sociological theory dictate that narratives must account for the subjectivities of those in the groups they describe? So what are the presumed narratives about the psytrance scene? Research on rave and post-rave subcultures has attended

210 Alex Lambert to the astonishing acid-house craze of the early-1990s in England, linking these musical collectivities to a range of alternative lifestyles (Hutson 1999; Gibson 1999; Partridge 2006). These modes of life are considered “alternative” partly because they arise from 1960s hippie counterculture, and partly because they endorse non-mainstream, non-institutional forms of spirituality. It is likewise common to fi nd the ambiance of a bush doof laced with the rhetoric of peace and love, New Age idealism, eco-spirituality and shaman magic. The global psytrance scene performs a bricolage of many eastern and pagan mythologies, reifying what Hutson (1999) has termed “technoshamanism”, the spiritual act of raving. Some critics argue for the ideological significance of these spiritual narratives (St John 2004; Greener & Hollands 2006; Partridge 2006). Similarly, this ideological solidarity extends into the political sphere, where scene-participants become committed to issues that range from quests for Aboriginal sovereignty to nuclear disarmament and clean energy activism (St John 2001). One may encounter all such themes on psytrance forums. For example, a rich thread on Oztrance discusses “Fossil fuel free doofi ng”, where multiple posters show a genuine interest in how to operate a doof on renewable energy. Also, on the psytrance web site Australiens.net an entire forum is dedicated to “Current World Events” where informal political discussions occur over a range of topics. Yet, these discourses are also continuously deconstructed on the forums. For example, on a thread entitled “Missionary Doofers” (Oztrance web site), the topic post contains a large extract from a document entitled: Youth Dance Cultures, Doofs & Alternative Spiritualities: Short Summary Notes as A Basis for Missional Refl ection and Action. The document, it turns out, originates from the Lausanne Movement, a Christian organisation also known as the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelisation. The document describes doof culture as an inherently spiritual experience, ripe for the activities of Christian missionaries. It details the historic potency of countercultural and spiritual movements in rave music, and makes reference to the acronym PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect), resistance to globalisation and the aesthetics of “temporary autonomous zones”. The following poster shares his chagrin about the missionary document and its typification of the scene through denouncing the “Prayer for Peace”, a track played by DJs all around the world simultaneously at a global synchronous event called Earthdance: An awful lot of people here were at a dance music event earlier this year and were forced to partake in an act of prayer together. Admittedly it was Earthdance and it was the “prayer for peace” [.] That weekend I was at Full Moon tribal gathering (which was a f’kn great wee party) and we had that act of organised religion imposed on us against our will. Just when I was surfin outer galaxies and dancing to crackin’ tunes someone tells me to stop dancing and pray! IMHO, If anybody truly believes in

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the power of prayer they should be in a church, not a dancefloor. Prayer for peace was a worldwide organisation trying to make everyone pray at the same time. That sounds like organised religion, which most people posting in this thread have denounced as innappropriate at a doof [ . . . ] Be careful folks, religion has already infiltrated our culture, before you know it there’ll be Priests and Rabbis and Imams at doofs. So to keep this threat at bay, next time someone plays a prayer for peace on a dancefloor, you should start a fight (space cowboy). Another poster writes: Religion is the root of all evil (Trolley).6 This thread is distinctly skeptical and non-ideological. Replies are scathing and ironical. If anything is considered sacred it is doofi ng, dancing and achieving psychedelic, altered states of consciousness. When prayer makes a rude incursion on “space cowboy” while he is doofi ng, he is abducted into a narrative that doesn’t speak for him, while momentarily removed from the one that does. There is also a significant element of reflexivity in the above posts with regard to the supposed ideological nature of the scene. Although doofs are potent liminal moments that give rise to feelings of sacredness and spirituality, psytrancers are wary of this being simplified into overarching meta-narratives. On a fast-paced thread entitled “using ideologies to sell parties”7, triggered by the cynical statement, “basically there’s a tendency in this scene to sell parties using religious propaganda” (sam I am), nearly two hundred replies were posted in fifteen days. At the heart of this discussion is the tension between the community and the individual, between a homogenous narrative and a plurality of voices. The thread has as a focal sub-theme the legitimacy of the belief in a global shift of consciousness and psychic awakening in the year 2012. It begins with annoyance expressed toward event crews adopting 2012 to promote their parties. This myth, or “prediction”, is drawn from the work of Terence McKenna (1992) and others, who believed the psychic evolution of humanity would intensify to a new state of being at the end of the current phase of the Mayan calendar. The thread posits that 2012 is more of a useful marketing tool than an ideology. Responding to this skepticism one poster, however, writes: [T]hese loose gatherings of half baked faith are an attempt to promote solidarity within a counterculture thats left itself nothing to believe in through critisism of establish belief systems. its natural that within the counterculture will be die hard cynics that will apply the same harsh skepticism to new or adapted faiths that spring up, just as they have to the established belief systems that led them to the counterculture in the fi rst place (sonicpulse).

212 Alex Lambert According to this poster, event promoters are doomed to fail in their efforts to unify a scene skeptical of unifying narratives. Offering further opinion, another poster echoes the communal theme of PLUR and cautions against disrespect: I know many people who share this belief of 2012, many whom I call really good friends. [ . . . ] from what I have read in what you and others have been posting [ . . . ] you[r] idea of selling a party through religious propaganda is really backwards. Many of my friends really believe in this with their heart and soul and with that I can’t ever EVER take pride, liberty or feel retribution for trying to stike anyone down, especially if they ARE NOT BEING OF HARM TO ANYONE ELSE (feedyourhead). This incites the following reply: I’d say it is causing harm to other people. Being led to believe in bullshit is a terrible mental disease. Basically everyone believes in bullshit, but some of it is mega-bullshit and needs to be pointed out. To not point this out is letting your fellow human down (Oxygene). This being said, the following poster implies that communities may unite under “ideological” banners not dubiously spiritual, but rather philanthropic and egalitarian: [A]re certain charity events included under the umbrella of using these dreaded ideologies? or events used to promote a cleaner earth or an end to logging or those that are promoted as carbon neutral or come and plant trees (kat)? A further conversation around this subject takes another position, exploring the constructed, reflexive and artistic nature of these “ideologies”: Most parties are self indulgent and someone has to pay for that (Dale). [I] agree Dale. But most art is self indulgent too (Rhythmik). I would argue that promotion is definitely a form of art (thus the starving hippies), and that as with other forms of art, compromising is not necessarily a good thing. Particularly in psychedelic trance, where it is actually supposed to be mind altering (new and different) (Dale).8 Thus a multivalency of opinion and a plurality of values and beliefs are clearly expressed on the forums, and these subjectivities are directed at the scene in a critical and deconstructive manner. This is the result of the

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integration of reflexive actors into a particular subcultural space. However, it is important that we do not assume that the development of online discussion forums has fashioned this plurality. Opinions, beliefs and values are tied up with the complex historical and social matrix of an individual’s life. Online forums give voice to and allow the coming together of individuals who both agree and disagree on a range of things in ways not previously possible. Online communication puts a novel and potent emphasis on the exchange of information. Significantly, it is a type of exchange that is different to face-to-face sociality. It is asynchronous and textual; interactions online can be thought out and carefully edited. Posters say what they want to say with more poise and reflection; they can look back over the archived history of a conversation and make reference to old comments they fi nd important. These communications are highly individualised; with more time and resources for reflection comes a heightened personalisation of the response. The exchange of knowledge is intensified, individuals become more self-reflexive, and this benefits the group as a whole, which, through the clash of opinion and the germ of new knowledge found in healthy debate, becomes more collectively refl exive.

AMBIENCE: SACRED AND UNITING Given the plurality which reflexivity engenders, how are we to give ontological foundation to the narratives of psytrance? How are we to link the subjectivities of psytrancers to the canonical themes of psytrance? I propose that a solution can be found in the work of Michel Maffesoli (1996). In the mode of Durkheim, Maffesoli explores the manifestation of moments of social effervescence in modern society, in what he calls “neo-tribes”. A particular neo-tribe’s aesthetic component is like a banner under which a heterogeneous amalgam of personae can group. It makes reference to the shared interest of a group and thus provides an “ambience” through which the group comes to be unified. Also, for Maffesoli the very concept of social unity, of coming and being together, has a necessary emotional component. As bodies meet, so too are affectual bonds created. Maffesoli calls this the “social divine”. Thus an aesthetic ambience carries an affectual significance, bound to moments of “shared warmth”. The aesthetics of a particular group are like beacons to which people gather; yet for Maffesoli they need not express the beliefs of those who gather, they signal no more then the affectual act of gathering. One poster helps clarify this point: [I]ndeed i think alot of the hindu and other religous devices and images we see at parties is more a left over from the goa/hippie era when people saw opening there minds to new ideas as not only a rebellion but simply umm opening there mind to new ideas[.] These days I think its more just that the imagery is associated with psy-trance (Nwalmaer).9

214 Alex Lambert I argue that techno-shamanism, eco-spirituality, neo-corroboree and related narratives can be read in this light, as costumes of belonging. They are narratives as ambience. Drawn from the practices of some, they have been adopted as signs for the many. We shall see that they are linked both symbolically and through collective memory to the doof. The potency of the liminal moment, the thrilling pleasure and feelings of transcendence found in the pre-reflexive “we”, inspire these canonical themes.

MIGRATION OF NARRATIVE As Victor Turner (1969) has explored, liminal moments cannot occur in a vacuum. There must be structure in order to create the potential for antistructure. Anti-structure may be stateless and transitional, but it necessarily implies a “before-state” and an “after-state” (ibid: 97). For the scene, the transition from the familiar to the liminal demands a conceptual continuity between these two worlds that is taken up by aesthetic processes online. In this way, the liminal is not so unfamiliar, its status as separate and beyond is structured by antecedent processes of signification. Thus the collection of murals, banners, profi le pictures, artwork, videos, photo albums, sounds and discussions which constitute a discussion forum all imagine or prefigure the doof. They are taken with doofers, inscribed on clothes, décor and in music—and, most importantly, in minds—on the migration out to the bush. This effects the aestheticisation of the liminal zone. But the power of the doof as the originator of these manifold aesthetic and mnemonic practices cannot be overstated. Doofs vividly capture Maffesoli’s notion of the social divine: a kinetic, Dionysiac gathering. The throbbing core looks like a battle in space with fractals carving through 3D projections of psychedelic art and psytrance pumping loud. This is the dance floor, an enclave of heightened sensation, potent experience. Sociality takes on a spontaneous, non-hierarchical nature, that is, what Turner terms communitas (ibid). These ritual moments gain their power from the existential joy of being-for-oneself, of free “becoming”, and of beingwith-others, of kinetic togetherness (Rill 2006). Such processes affront structured social norms and routines in their very performance, embodying a spirit of transgression. Transgression, Turner holds, is the cardinal quality of liminality and involves a “leveling or stripping” that fi lls the subject with affect (1969: 128). It is a stripping of individuality and, when on the dance floor, a stripping of language in favor of dance. A stripping which, I argue, occurs on the level of thought as well as social structure. When a group writhes as one in dance while in altered states of consciousness, cognition becomes involved in a collective presence, rather than a reflexive distance. Phenomena are experienced in flows and bursts—the best description may be “psychedelically”—and the subject envelops both object and “other”.

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This is in sharp contrast to the day-to-day world, where actors wrestle with various information sources, where sociality has become fragmented and overlapping, occurring through a variety of media simultaneously and at different speeds and paces, breaking up the unity of the socio-temporal experience (Cooper 2002; Weinberger 2003). Thus the day-to-day life of the city, one involving division and exclusion, can be contrasted to the doof. It is important to note that the doof itself has various zones that in a way “structure” it—an orbit of cars and campsites, markets and chai tents, treeplanting regions, meditation and fi re-twirling areas. Here, just as on forums, reflexive interactions occur. Unlike on forums, the company of face-to-face sociality, the absence of inhibitions, altered states of consciousness and the climactic energy of the dance floor means that liminality is more pervasive and potent. So much so that, at the doof, reflexive narrative is temporarily suspended—lost. Yet, through some form of collective creativity, doofers must be generating new meanings on their psychotropic, tribal dance floor. How else are we to explain the fusion of the thematic ambience of the bush and the collective mind of those dancing, so paramount in the narratives of psytrance? Turner, again, helps us here. When narrative collapses, when meaning becomes lived, so to speak, ambient signifiers take on a “multivocal character, having many meanings, and each [ . . . ] capable of moving people at many psycho-biological levels simultaneously” (Turner 1969: 129). Bush, for example, may come to evoke, through the liminal moment, a form of tribal inhabitance akin to that of the Australian Aborigines—a transformation of being, a new, pre-reflexive understanding of what was once “other” (Luckman 2003). Liminality thus uproots meaning, leaving it open for infi nite reinterpretation. Such new possibilities are imprinted prelinguistically, or “psycho-biologically”, in the cathartic act of dancing and, I argue, are preserved in collective memory. It follows, metaphorically, that in this moment, the doof takes on a collective body. The post below, remembering the now defunct popular festival Earthcore, echoes this biological schema: I started to view the festival as a living entity—each person was a red blood cell, the market stage was the beating heart, all the tracks and trails were the blood vessels and capilliaries branc[h]ing off—the more I thought about it the more real it became . . . (Ant Friend).10 The doofer metabolises narrative into the dancing body and back again onto the virtual network. And it is the ambience of the doof, and the power of liminality, which, at this embryonic moment, imagines the most canonical of the scene’s themes. Turner identified common tropes that arose out of liminal rituals. These include symbols of transition such as death, the womb, darkness and solar eclipse; a pagan emphasis on animism, femininity; and universal values of “spirit”, “soul” and “humankindness” (1969: 95, 116, 121, 128). Overall, this amounts to a perception

216 Alex Lambert of such moments as sacred and holy. Such sacred retellings are common on discussion forums. For example, the following posts reveal the germ of the sacred narrative through expressions of tribal empathy and the personification of nature. Psytrance & its accompanying nature parties are profound, beautiful, integrative, transcendent, and brilliant; it lifts me into exultation. If you really love the music, the lush, little psy-trance goddesses, the profound beauty & magic of nature, and are into consciously evolving & spiritually unfolding, then you can answer your own question (Paramashiva).11 An amazing night of detail, depth and revalations. Complete peace and all the feelings that come with that state. Such awareness. Such empathy. Total bliss. Nature . . . amazing. Life . . . everything (noi noi). [T]here’s a dozen or so ‘wind-spirits’ playing in the canopy of the surrounding rainforest[ . . . ] (Syzygium).12 These posts help illustrate the creativity of the doof—a place where the Australian psytrance scene’s core narrative themes are born. Themes, as with all narratives, help “tell” the bush doof story. Primal myths, they evoke that which is beyond language, they are arcane, vital and poetic. In this sense they have an archetypal power and thus are perfect to act as aesthetic vehicles that help transport the scene’s cultural narrative back from the bush, back to the online forum.

Figure 11.1

Bush Doof / Online Forum Chart. Alex Lambert.

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CONCLUSION In illustrating, then, how this migration comes full circle, how narrative ventures out to the bush, is lost, ruptured and rejuvenated, then returned via collective memory, the scene’s liminal and virtual poles can be conceived of as forming a cultural circuit (see Chart 11.1). I want to clarify, then, how the Australian psytrance scene is perhaps uniquely positioned within our information society because of this peculiar cultural circuitry. It is both a reflexive network of individuals, and a community of tradition and ritual. The ritual of remembering, of storytelling, of logging on and posting, complements the ritualism of migrating out to the bush, camping, dancing and making new friends. This is how the doof leaves its trace in the social activities of psytrancers once the music has stopped, the tent packed up and the journey taken home. Liminal and affectual, the trace references the shared warmth, oneness and transcendence of the doof, reproducing this online through memory and language. The trace is central. Narratives, on the other hand, are, as Maffesoli would put it, an ambience; they are ambient noise. Though, having said this, the scene’s reflexive element is just as important as its liminal counterpart. Reflexive communications provide the scaffold on which psytrance culture and its narratives can be fashioned and refashioned. These conversations in turn provide a scaffold through which the liminal trace is expressed. In a postmodern world, where “subculture” has been critically deconstructed, collectivities have earned various new denotations such as “community of interest”, “tribe” and “scene”, all of which posit the congregation of reflexive actors within relatively unbounded and heterogeneous networks. In such cases “narrative” has a plural, fragmented ontology, emerging from a hodge-podge of mobile subjectivities. However, when a scene’s narrative is embedded in something like a liminal trace, there forms an overarching unity that is deeper than, say, a shared interest. The scene in question should thus be celebrated. In its conjunction of reflexivity and collective emotion we see that narrative is “up for grabs”, at the whim of the “I”, and yet embedded in reality, born out of the “we”.

NOTES 1. <www.oztrance.net>. 2. “Intelligent, Beautiful Dark Psy”, Oztrance web site. 3. “Collective Narrative”, viewed 10/08, <www.fl ickr.com/groups/collectivenarrative>. 4. “Doofs: Day or night?”, Oztrance web site. 5. “Summer Or Winter???????????”, Oztrance web site. 6. “Missionary Doofers”, Oztrance web site. 7. “Using ideologies to sell parties”, Oztrance web site 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid.

218 Alex Lambert 10. “your fi nest psychedelic moment . . . ”, Oztrance web site. 11. “50 words or less”, Australiens web site: <www.australiens.net>. 12. “your fi nest psychedelic moment . . . ”, Oztrance web site

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cooper, G., N. Green, G. M. Murtagh, and R. Harper. 2002. “Mobile Society? Technology, Distance, and Presence”. In S. Woolgar, ed. Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, 286–301. New York: Oxford University Press. Gibson, C. 1999. “Subversive sites: rave culture, spatial politics and the internet in Sydney, Australia”. Area, Vol. 31, No. 1, 19–33. Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Oxford: Blackwell. . 1994. “Living in a Post Traditional Society”. In Refl exive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, 56–109. Cambridge: Polity Press/Blackwell. Green, N. 2002. “On the Move: Technology, Mobility, and the Mediation of Social Time and Space”. The Information Society, Vol. 18, 281–292. Greener, T. and R. Hollands. 2006. “Beyond Subculture and Post-Subculture? The Case of Virtual Psytrance”. Journal of Youth Studies, Vol. 9, No. 4: 393–418. Halbwachs, M. 1992. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hutson, S. R. 1999. “Technoshamanism: Spiritual Healing in the Rave Subculture”. Popular Music and Society, Vol. 23, No. 3, 53–78. Huyssen, A. 1995. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York: Routledge. Kenny, M. 1999. “A Place for Memory: The Interface between Individual and Collective History”. Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 41, No. 3, 420–437. Lash, S. 1994. “Reflexivity and its Doubles: Structure, Aesthetics, Community”. In Refl exive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, 110–173. Cambridge: Polity Press/Blackwell. Lipsitz, G. 1990. Time passages: collective memory and American popular culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lovink, G. 2008. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. New York: Routledge. Luckman, S. 2003. “Going Bush and Finding One’s ‘Tribe’: raving, escape and the bush doof”. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Vol. 17, No. 3: 315–30. Maffesoli, M. 1996. The time of the tribes: the decline of individualism in mass society. London: Sage. McKenna, T. 1992. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. New York: HarperCollins. Partridge, C. 2006. “The Spiritual and the Revolutionary: Alternative Spirituality, British Free Festivals, and the Emergence of Rave Culture”. Culture and Religion, Vol. 7, No. 1, 41–60. Rill, B. 2006. “Rave, Communitas, and Embodied Idealism”. Music Therapy Today, Vol. 7, No. 3, 648–661. Rossiter, N. 2006. Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (Paperback). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

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St John, G. 2001. “Doof! Australian Post-Rave Culture”. In G. St John, ed. Free NRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor. Altona: Common Ground. . 2004. Rave Culture and Religion. London: Routledge. Turner, V. 196. “Liminality and Communitas”. In The ritual process: structure and anti-structure, 94–130. London: Routledge & K. Paul. Weinberger, D. 2002. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unifi ed Theory of the Web. Cambridge, MA: Perseus. Wellman, B., A. Quan-Haase, J. Boase, W. Chen, K. Hampton, I. Díaz, and K. Miyata. 2003. “The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Vol. 8, No. 3.

12 Liminal Culture and Global Movement The Transitional World of Psytrance Graham St John

Festivals are the critical cultural hubs of the global psytrance movement, where on any day in 2010 major events attracting between 1,000 and 40,000 people are transpiring somewhere in the world. This chapter charts the complex transformational character of psytrance with particular attention to its festivals. While recent scholars seek to understand participation in electronic dance music cultures (including psytrance) as something of a rite of passage experience enabling transition from “preliminal” to “postliminal” conditions (in the schematic of Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner), and popular discourse credits an efficacy to dance events reckoned as sites for self-transcendence, social transformation and/or the transmission of values, psytrance possesses a liminality that is protracted and a transition that is complex. It is this kind of hyper-liminality that appears to fuel the cultural movement of psytrance, its super-abundant festal life enervating the lifestyles of its participants. The psytrance festival is a sophisticated realm. While a liminalised world with an unpredictable telos, a domain of excess and risk, the psytrance festival is also a context for conscious ritualising in response to perceived crises of self and world—an arena of ethical consumerism and disciplinary action. As the multitudinous hub of this liminal culture, then, the festival provides the performative staging ground for diverse sacrificial logics and ideas of the sacred around which such logics orbit. Through specific attention to my research experience at festivals in Italy (Sonica), Australia (Rainbow Serpent) and Portugal (Boom), beginning with a discussion of psychedelic ritualisation (or indeed entheogenic liminalisation), this chapter investigates the hyper characteristics of liminality in the present.

PSYCHEDELIC RITUALISATION The decline, attenuation or disappearance of rites of passage—especially those marking transition to adulthood—has been addressed by commentators concerned with the social impact of modernity, industrialisation and secularisation. Recognising opinion shaped by the likes of Herbert Spencer

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and Peter Burke, Catherine Bell (1997: 254) commented that, since the mid-nineteenth century, the “popular contention that ritual and religion decline in proportion to modernization” seems to have crystallised into a “sociological truism”. The truism seems to have been validated by Max Weber, who contrasted ritual and magic with the “disenchantment” in the everyday lives of rational moderns. But it would also be validated by those sympathetic of traditional ritual thought to have vanished or diminished in the contemporary world. Thus, theorist of ritual and performance, Victor Turner, lamented the loss of ritual’s transformative potential in proliferating leisure industries, media arts, sport, advertising—the “hall of magic mirrors” of modern life. Pursuing liminality’s tragic career (it also has an heroic career—see St John 2008), Turner argued that the “religious sphere” has contracted, and, as a consequence, he observed “deliminalization” (1982: 85), and the loss of ritual’s “cultural evolutionary resilience”, which ceases “to be an effective metalanguage or an agency of collective reflexology” (1985: 165). A host of aesthetic media, including song, dance and graphic and pictorial representation were said to have “broken loose from their ritual integument” (ibid. 166). This fl ight, this disintegration, this detraditionalisation, appears to have been inscribed in Turner’s concept of the “liminoid” (the “ritual-like”), which, while evincing the fragmentation of liminal sacra, evokes, at the same time, the possibility of its return— indeed the revitalisation of self and society through the now valorised ritual form. And it has indeed been the ideology of return that has inspired a great many practitioners of contemporary ritual, who adopt the raiment and gestures of world religions to ornamentalise their actions and effect their beliefs. This has been typical to critical commentary since the 1960s, evolving among countercultural cognoscenti, freak utopians and other traditionalists who have built a mythology of necessity and ethos of survival around the return of ritual. It is within this evolving tradition that commentators, media producers and promoters within trance, visionary arts and related scenes have emerged. A typical concern among such commentators is that plant-assisted consciousness alteration has gone the way of the lost rite, in which such alterations are believed to have been integral. Grievance has given rise to proliferating mythologies of disappearing heritage, of disconnection and disenchantment. Such discourse is apparent, for instance, in Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within (2006), a documentary popular at psytrance festivals.1 According to interviewee transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof, the lacuna forming in the absence of rites of passage is “responsible for much of the pathology in our culture”. Symptomatic of this tragedy, young people have stumbled into the void cobbling together rituals which he decides are often misguided and unconstructive. Grof’s concerns evoke Timothy Leary’s proselytising of LSD to American youth in the 1960s, resulting in, as Grof has elsewhere (2008: 96) indicated, a “naive and careless mass self-experimentation”, the administrative, legal

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and political response to which effectively terminated legitimate clinical research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. But the intention of this fi lm is not to admonish youth downstream from Leary’s enthusiastic interventions. At one point, California Institute of Integral Studies professor, David Ulansey, utters the key word: “reconnection”. Ulansey elaborates that “people in a drumming circle or in an ecstatic dance setting are connecting themselves with the continuous legacy of the incarnation of vitality in the form of homosapiens”. The message of continuity is reinforced with footage of ethnobotanical philosopher and psychonaut Terence McKenna, who, in the 1990s, had become the chief bard to the neo-psychedelic counterculture, becoming likely the most commonly sampled individual in psytrance productions. 2 McKenna, who made wild speculations about the role of entheogens in the origins of human consciousness, explains that the perennial function of consciousness alterants, as used in world initiation rituals, enable neophytes the opportunity to “step behind the cultural myth”—such is the chief revelatory function purported for entheogens like psilocybin mushrooms and DMT, 3 which would circulate within the trance movement subsequent to McKenna’s enthusiastic presentations at dance festivals and gatherings (see Tramacchi 2006). Entheogen offers a series of vignettes of the unyielding commitment to dance—in African tribal, sufi , tap dancing and in the subliminal flashing of what appears to be a contemporary psytrance party. The distinctive sound and sight of psytrance arrives in clear focus as the fi lm concludes, a resolution echoing that of an earlier documentary, Dances of Ecstasy (produced by Mahrer and Ma 2004). That fi lm juxtaposed exotic trance dancing—such as that associated with the Condomble Orisha possession ceremonies among the Mae Zelinha of Pelo Ife Axa, Brazil—with scenes from Australian psytrance events like the Rainbow Serpent Festival. While psytrancers are not entrained to enter and interpret their altered states of consciousness within consensual cultural frameworks in any fashion resembling possession cults, that they become engrossed by the moving images of, and seek to compare their experience with, “tribal” ritual and traditional states of entrancement, is symptomatic of a common desire to access the sacred, experience the transcendent numinous and to revitalise the present, repurposing an assemblage of new tools to these ends. The ritual significance of contemporary dance music cultures has become a subject of interest among popular music scholars. In his Trance Formation (2005: 97–127), for instance, Robin Sylvan details the temporal and spatial ordering forming the ritual dimension of San Francisco rave culture. Sylvan’s perspective, which is clearer in an earlier book (Sylvan 2002), is that West African possession religion has been transmuted into Western popular music forms. Despite offering a US and North American centred understanding of the history of popular music (and while offering little recognition of the global character of trance, or psytrance, culture), the

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work is representative of commitments among scholars of contemporary EDMCs, for whom the dance music experience is held to be efficacious, and where dance cultures are recognised as experimental, transcendent and transformative. But ritual, meaning and identity have not typically drawn the attentions of social and cultural researchers, even when youth and music cultures have been the subject of their investigations, and even where “ritual” has been a key trope (Hall and Jefferson 1976; St John 2006, forthcoming). But while “ritual” was employed metaphorically by researchers of “subcultures” at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary and Cultural Studies, more recent scholars of youth and music cultures would begin addressing the ontological significance of ritual and ritualisation (see Takahashi and Olaveson 2003; Gerard 2004; Takahashi 2005). With the intentional adoption of ritual practice by Goa/psytrance DJ/producers (and visual and décor artists) who appropriate heavily from traditional and popular cultures, these perspectives require extending and updating. Performative adaptation of spiritual, “tribal and “futurist” ritual miniature has long been the preoccupation of activists and esoterists in projects flourishing since at least the 1960s, a period from which psychedelics would motivate music and the development of media to enhance the alteration of self within the context of social dance. The “Acid Tests” organised by Ken Kesey and Stewart Brand in San Francisco are legendary (indeed celebrated in countless samples from fi lm and other dialogue used in psytrance tracks). In that decade, Timothy Leary and his colleagues adapted the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a psychedelic manual enabling disenchanted youth to “tune in” to the “eternal vibrations” (Leary et al. 1964) (and Leary is heavily sampled). In the 1960s and 1970s, seasonal gatherings and festivals such as the USderived then international Rainbow Gatherings, neo-pagan festivals (see Pike 2001), traveller free festivals in the UK (see McKay 2000) and ConFest in Australia (St John 2001a), began flourishing, becoming sites of intentional ritual and conscious performance. In the 1980s, psychedelic ritualisation was augmented with the repurposing of computers and digital media enabling effective mobilisation and performance, fi rst in Goa, and various other traveller enclaves like Koh Panghan, before exploding globally from the late-1990s as psychedelic trance. With his intention of “defi ning ancient ritual for the 21st Century” (McAteer 2002), veteran of 1960s San Francisco and eventual sadhu, Goa Gil, pioneered conscious ritualisation deploying the techno-chemical assemblage forming in Goa and then exported world-wide, with Gil becoming a seminar figure in the global trance mission. And from the late-1990s, in the wake of McKenna and the subsequent quest for “entheogenesis”, plant-assisted mind alteration and the desire for self-shamanising would become inscribed in the music, and in the culture, of psytrance. Continuing this introduction from a filmic point of view, there is possibly no clearer expression of this than another popular documentary Liquid Crystal Vision (Omananda and Tantric Demon 2002)—an effusive attempt to both reproduce and affect

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a psychedelic “trip”. In the fi lm’s opening commentary, Goa Gil’s ancient ritualising and McKenna’s DMT vaporising precipitates entry into the gnosis depicted through visual sequences of Hindu holy men, Eastern spiritual motifs and enlightened beings partaking in sacraments and devotional dancing. The fi lm culminates in an extraordinary sequence which, backed by Banco de Gaia’s uplifting “Harvey and the Old Ones” (from The Magical Sounds of Banco De Gaia, Disco Geko, 1999), indexes core tenets of what Linda Woodhead (2001) identified as “The New Spirituality” downloaded into the present: the recognition that multiple religious pathways are but an expression of one truth (that “all is one”); that this truth can only be acquired in the radical immanence of immediate bodily experience; and that humanity retains a critical role in planetary evolution. In the sequence, images of world sacred sites, rites and exotic dance fl icker by at a rapid pace as if one’s life memories are flashing in fractalised patterns across the back of one’s retina’s before death/rebirth. Immediately following this sequence, we hear commentary from none other than Raja Ram and Simon Posford, members of the leading act in the psychedelic diaspora, Shpongle. This outfit are heavily indebted to McKenna (and DMT), precedents to a virtual avalanche of producers and promoters so indebted. Indeed, by the early 2000s, the music and cultures of psytrance (from psybient to darkpsy) was becoming entheogenically liminalised, a popular state of affairs from Europe to Israel, America to Australia and Brazil to South Africa. To offer but one recent example of this development, take Portuguese Sérgio Ribeiro’s (aka Xamanist’s) appropriately titled album Initiation (2009). The album’s cover features the drawing Circuitous Complexion by Adam Scott Miller, which might offer a depiction of astounded upgazing neophytes exposed to profound truths. On “Machu Picchu”, the album opens with McKenna offering advice for the audio-trippers—that a mysterious substance should be taken “in darkness, and in silence, and in reverence, on an empty stomach, free from distraction, with attention to breath”. Xanamist fi lters classic McKenna brogue: “reality is a very thinly spun cultural fiction. And as long as you remain on main street it all holds together pretty well”. But with the beats having accelerated to a gallop, and breath work equalling the pace, the listener (and the dancer) is taken on a detour from “main street”, a phantom ride into an otherworld, the journey scripted by cryptic floating messages distorted by effect and overtaken by driving rhythms. With a further comment lifted from McKenna—“I have had extraordinary experiences in ayahuasca sessions”—“White Magik” reveals the real guide taking the “initiation” (a brew made from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and often DMT-producing plants). Ayahuasca— along with DMT, Salvia divinorum and other “teacher plants”—has been dropped in the trance mix since the mid- to late-1990s, fuelling a trance dance liminality no doubt authenticated by association with the indigenous ritual heritage these entheogens signal. A departure from the off-planetary trajectory championed by Leary and characteristic of Goa, this signalled a

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vegetal momentum gaining at the time psytrance became popular in regions proximate to the traditional therapeutic use of such plants (i.e., Mexico, Brazil) (see St John 2011). But while psytrance culture would become insonerated with entheogen-led initiatory praxis, and by association an indigenised trajectory, what might be considered the most advanced conscious ritualisation in psytrance appears manifest in the “Liminal Village”, the presentation/film/workshop space at the premiere event in the global trance calendar, the Boom Festival. I discuss Boom’s Liminal Village later in the chapter, but not before a discussion of the lifestyles of the liminal breaking out in the contemporary.

THE LIMINAL LIFE It has been common among researchers of clubbing, DJ/dancer interactions and raver practice more generally (e.g., Malbon 1999; Gerard 2004; Gauthier 2004a, 2005; Sylvan 2005: 101–102) to navigate the EDM experience using Van Gennep’s model of rites de passage (1960), itself adopted by Victor Turner to fashion his processual heuristic of “liminality”. As introduced in The Ritual Process (1969), From Ritual to Theatre (1982) and other works, liminality is a cornerstone of ritual analysis and a critical component of Turner’s model of ritual and performance (see St John 2008). It is either explicit and implied in much of this work, including research which addresses the social liminality of “spontaneous communitas” in EDMC (see Tramacchi 2000; Olaveson 2004; Rill 2006), that ritualised social interaction enables transit from “preliminal” to “postliminal” conditions. While interventions offer valued insights on the nature of performance and identity in EDMC, the tendency toward unmodified applications of Turnerian theory to apprehend “ritual” and “ritual-like” phenomena is troubling. What is the utility of non-renovated processual logic to the apprehension of EDMCs like psytrance? While studies illuminate the processual character of events, and suggest continuity with other transitional music/dance rites, analogical modelling appears to offer fewer insights on the actual telos of participants than promised. Researchers employing the terminology of “passage” and “rite” in their analyses invite scrutiny since evidence of transit is scant, unclear or simply not forthcoming. The reasons for this data vacuum become apparent when it is recognised that participant knowledge and experience holds primary value within the immediate dance cultural networks, and within the phenomenal locales of clubs and festivals themselves. While Gerard (2004) articulates an accelerated transition within a techno club in Toronto, the experience is significant beyond the club moment only in-so-far as participants are able to express their “competence” (bodily “knowledge”) at future events. Furthermore, he suggests that “[i]nstead of efficiently returning to the mundane world as adults or other elevated social categories, participants receive their incorporative

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recognition as valued initiates only by returning to the ritual community itself” (2004: 18). It appears that these dance “rituals” may be more efficacious in transporting participants into a liminal community than effecting transit to a well-defi ned externally recognised social condition. This, I feel, is true for psytrance. Not transitional rites or conduits to post-event life, the psytrance party and especially the festival, appears more like a liminal world, and psytrance consequentially a liminal culture. Conveyed by the name “psytrance” itself, this is a liminality that is quite literally fuelled by psychedelics (or “entheogens”), perhaps becoming “floating worlds” of the kind articulated by Turner (1969: vii). When Sally Sommer states that “Hard-core Househeads” have “recreated that liminal and almost ideal transitional world in which they experiment with multiple states of mind and shifting identities, through total body and athletic endeavour” (2001/02: 84, my emphasis), she is referring to a creative social orgiasm flourishing in the present. Such transitional worlds have arisen throughout EDMC, but the festal culture of psytrance is a dominant carrier. While the trance experience may effect revitalisation, or enable healing, as is often reported, this appears to be associated with a process of re-identification that can only be achieved and repeated by inhabitation. Belonging is dependent upon knowledge and experience which has primary value within the context of the dance event. That psytrancers are immersed in a social universe that is liminalised, in which spontaneity and indeterminacy are pursued and reanimated in consequential lifestyle and consumer practices, is more instructive than the idea that habitués have entered a ritual-like “phase” from which they will return to society “aggregated”, the fi nal condition of passage in Van Gennep’s model; or indeed “resolved” in Turner’s dramatic processualism. This liminal “state of mind” was of course established in Goa (and Haight–Ashbury—see Elliott, this volume), and would be transported globally. While this circumstance evinces the disposition of fan-cults within the global mediascape, psytrance appears to more resemble a liminal movement. As noted earlier, Turner himself offered a conceptual apparatus to assist understanding of the career of the liminal and liminal-like conditions in modern culture. But the “liminal/liminoid” framework was the product of an historical distinction which appears to beg more questions than answers. In any case, Turner did not offer sustained analyses of contemporary leisure genres, fan cults and the lifestyles of their participants, festivals or otherwise. Perhaps it is not so much the dearth of useful heuristics but the absence of sustained ethnographic application that is at issue, a problem apparently unresolved by additions to the theoretical lexicon, such as the “liminautical” which McKenzie entertains to explain how new digital technologies, “digital limen”, apparently erase work/play, labour/leisure, sacred/secular distinctions in the contemporary (2001: 94). Such iterations to the lexicon are not unwelcome, but McKenzie only brushes up against new media technologies

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(cybernetic and digital) and how they might continue to animate, mobilise or mutate the liminal. With the flourishing of alternative spirituality, and indeed a popular “occulture” (Partridge 2006), a spectrum of authorities in the form of causes mobilising subjects, it is certainly no longer useful, nor wise, to argue that the sacred (religion or ritual) has receded in modernity with the decline of institutional religion. It is, however, necessary to consider how the sacred is shaped by obligatory and elective determinants, how spirituality is “religious” and “secular”, ritual conservative and experimental, authorised and chosen. With inquiry shaped accordingly, it may be possible to determine if, as Turner’s claimed, “free liminoid experiences are the cultural debris of forgotten liminal ritual” (1982: 55). Attention to the micro, creative and countercultural industries emerging to augment and maximise liminal conditions assists our inquiry. When Portugal’s Good Mood Productions promote their biennial event (the Boom Festival) as “sustainable entertainment” a double meaning is apparent. On the surface, the phrase indexes the organisational efforts to implement ecologically sustainable event-systems. At another level, the phrase offers a covert signal of its intention to sustain the party, to invest in industries (including event-production, management and performance) which work to reproduce the super-liminality of party culture though the production and marketing of a range of commodities (e.g., event tickets, utility belts, shamanic herbs). In this second meaning, sustaining liminality involves dedication to supporting and investing in service industries that optimise and re-optimise the party, industries that serve the experience that remains the chief commitment within the Goa trance diaspora (see St John 2011). Whether event producers are said to provide or exploit consumer desires is open to opinion and interpretation, but the liminal economics of festal culture is reliant on an experience that is satisfying-yet-incomplete, the experience of permanent upgradability, of being “progressive”. On the dance floor, this can be observed, for example, in the practiced skills of “progressive psychedelic” DJs like James Munro or Silicon Sound’s Johannes Regnier who are experts in building the promise of climax—an intangible property that is sought through the subsequent acquisition of style, commodities and experience by freaks, converts or simply the curious, who make repeated visits to, or loiter in, the scene of the sublime. If an incompleteness is native to psytrance, and by extension, the lifestyles of its inhabitants, it defies the processual logic of the limen in a passage rite which potentiates resolution through temporal dissolution. As participants populate and modulate the “vibe” on a regular basis, refreshing its parameters, weighing anchor in a field of impermanence, they liminalise their lifeworlds, indefi nitely. For Turner, the liminal “realm of pure possibility” (1967) is invariably a threshold, a portal, a stage. The “realm” may be characterised by indeterminacy, but given the structure and function of the process—be it ritual, theatre, game, literature or otherwise—an outcome is implicit to the programme: a transit, a fi nale, a result, a conclusion. But within the immediate carnivalesque

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proliferating in psytrance, there may be no transit anticipated, no outcome desired—no conclusion, just a permanent state of impermanence. Becoming entranced, then, is more than just a night out—indeed, as was affi rmed by Melbourne’s now defunct digizine en-trance, or in the world’s foremost psytrance publication, Hamburg’s Mushroom Magazine, it connotes a “lifestyle”, a “community” and a “movement”. Attending parties, clubs and festivals often with greater frequency, partygoers, in a sense, dwell on the threshold. In a constant cycle of parties, after-parties and post after-party gatherings, in scenes the world over, participants are released from the abstractions of the everyday and become looped in a world of immediacy and pleasure. Commentators have suggested that such zones resemble “wombs” whose occupants possess infantile pre-Oedipal characteristics (Rietveld 1993: 54; Tramacchi 2004: 139). This “lost kingdom of the womb”, which Simon Reynolds (1998) saw characterising psychedelic rock fandom, constitutes “an end to our separateness and the recovery of our lost continuity”. Perhaps this explains the presence of psytrance in countries like Israel where transistim seek their obsessions in numbers greater per capita than anywhere else (see Schmidt, this volume), and where psytrance has obtained the status of a popular music, to the chagrin of moralists and other commentators worrying over the proliferation of the Dionysian in the Holy Land (Taub 1997; Sagiv 2000). To seek sovereignty over this “kingdom”, it might be stated, is to confound the temporality of the threshold over which one must cross, or indeed the organic logic of the womb, from which one must be born and grow independent. It competes with the teleological, or evolutionary, purpose of the limen which indexes transit to a whole, stable, mature, self. In the orgiastic world of a party-culture whose “rave-olutionary” impulse is to “stay up forever”, where one can be “on” longer with the assistance of chemical, cellular and cyber technologies, are we witness to a pathological obstruction of development as implied in theological discourse and sociologies of youth transition? While ravers might be suspended in a realm “between childhood and adulthood” (Tomlinson 1998: 201), psytrance has clearly engaged and retained enthusiasts over life stages. Many in their thirties, forties and fi fties, alongside those in their late teens and twenties, will attend psytrance festivals. Infants and children of varying ages are also common at these events, sometimes, as at Rainbow Serpent or Boom, catered for by zones or villages, which in the case of “Baby Boom”, function as crèches, enabling young parents freedom to be temporarily unburdened of their parental duties. Rather than rave’s suspension of adulthood, with psytrance, then, it is perhaps more accurate to speak of the extension of “youthful” sensibilities into adulthood. As psytrance challenges linear models of youth-adulthood transition, indeed prompting reconsideration of the category “youth” itself, studies of the explosion of the festal “unkingdom”, of the carnivalesque, in the present, provide useful insights. As Françios Gauthier reminds us, to re-enter the atmosphere of the festal is

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to desire an “eternal present”. While the rite possesses telos, the festival “implicitly seeks forgetfulness, selflessness and oblivion” (2004b: 69). The quest for the passional, which sees individuals oscillate between networked sites of belonging, extending the hours and places of “empathetic sociality”, is a Maffesolian (1993; 1996) sociology of the extended and multiple “orgiasm” (or indeed of ejaculatory control), an approach recognising a vibrant puissance re-enchanting social life. But what of the “neo-tribes” motivated by the carnival of intent, the permanent conditions sought beyond the threshold, and the liminars motivated to shift the temporality and consciousness of the carnival into everyday life? What of the career of the artivists, dilettantes and outlaws who inhabit the protracted carnivalesque? And, thus, what of the mobile carnival?

OF ECSTATICS AND ACTIVISTS The lifestyles of psytrancers worldwide appear to be shaped by an historic tension performed within the context of festivals. This tension speaks to variable sacra, or causes, within the counterculture to which psytrance is heir. The ecstatic/proactive or bohemian/militant dynamic at the heart of the counterculture—the dance of ludic creativity and instrumentalism that Frank Musgrove, in his Ecstasy and Holiness, articulated as “the dialectics of utopia” (1974: 16)—gives life to different, sometimes contradictory, other times complimentary, sacrificial dispositions. At one end of the dynamic, one encounters the impulse which breathes life into the Dionysian, the social orgiasm of the dance party whose intoxicated habitués hold concern for what is happening now, indeed deploying an assemblage of mind and body technologies to invest in making “now last longer”. They abandon themselves in the context of others, strangers in whose company they capitulate to rhythm and reverb. They are physically mobilised by bass, to which they may be said to willingly surrender. At the other, one is mobilised in struggle, perhaps coordinating with others in the service of a cause other than one’s self. Multiple movement causes are dramatised within events by activists who intend to raise awareness of crises, such that the festival becomes a staging ground, a recruitment centre, for the personal, social, cultural and political transitions desired. When motivated by the former attitude, habitués are primarily concerned with today or tonight (or tomorrow morning, for the morning session). In the latter, they’re responsive to crises of self and world, with festal occupants anxious about life “after the orgy”. While the former prolong the orgiastic present, the latter are bent on reclaiming the future. While psytrance festivals facilitate the means by which enthusiasts may experience an abandonment of the self, “spending” personal resources in the pursuit of self-transcendence, practising freedom from moral codes and disciplined embodiment, they also enable practices of (personal and

230 Graham St John environmental) resource conservation. Activists often express their ambivalence towards excessive and unproductive expenditure among other participants, downcast, according to the persistent complaint, by rampant commercialism, and, as Iboga label manager, DJ Emok, lamented in Mushroom Magazine,4 an “ever disappearing spirit” caused by “more and more people that orientate on the common norms and values of Western society”. In February 2008, contempt for rampant consumerism became a topic of debate” on Tribe.net’s “Psytrance” node, where a poster to the thread, “Psytrance—WEAK or NOT”, accused labels of dressing up their releases in “mostly brainless, preposterous hokum [that] usually sounds like a sleazy washing powder commercial”. It was further contended that “the majority of Goa fraggles are basically just big consumers. Consumers of new ‘killah releases’, heavy consumers of drugs, of course, consumers of laser shows, consumers of dancefloors and, most of all, consumers of an old and long vanished idea of a better life as a hippie”. Whether the “mindless consumer”, the raving “tourist”, working class “proles”, “bogans”, “chavs” or worse still, the quasi-“hippie”, these personas are widely admonished to serve as others against whom genuine and “real” psytrance communities continually seek defi nition.5 The lament is that, today, the “ordinary people with their ordinary interests and ordinary habits” are diluting psytrance, which has, with such massification, lost its purity, its Goa vibe (see D’Andrea this volume). While, in response to this, there arise calls to become secreted away from the tourist gaze, others seek to exemplify the future state, with quests, for instance, for resource conservation, renewable energy and minimising one’s “ecological footprint”. Take, for example, Lucy Legan, permaculture designer, and co-founder of Ecocentro IPEC (Instituto de Permacultura e Ecovilas do Cerrado) in Pirenopolis, Brazil. Contracted by organisers of the Boom Festival in 2006 to build experimental composting toilets recycling human feces and organic waste to initiate a reforestation process in the region of the festival, Lucy challenged the consumerist lifestyles of event-goers, noting in particular their “cosmic” pretentions, expressed via the space travel motifs and alien abduction narratives redolent in psytrance. Attention diverted from the Earth is a cause for alarm since “we need to live on this planet and improve its condition and our relationship with it”.6 While psytrance may be integrated, as Hillegonda Rietveld has indicated in this volume, within global neo-liberalism, this is not unmet with internal critique. Criticism such as that above, hails an underlying tensions in the psytrance movement: between commitments, on the one hand, to spend, and on the other, to conserve/recycle, resources and energy. Within the context of trance events, there unfolds a sometimes tense dialogue between those whose consumption/energy practices are opposed, their causes (and their valuations of the “sacred”) determining expectations and practice. The work of Georges Bataille offers a lead into this analysis. As Bataille announces in relation to sacrifice:

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The meaning of this profound freedom is given in destruction, whose essence is to consume profitlessly whatever might remain in the progression of useful works. Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates . . . This useless consumption is what suits me, once my concern for the morrow is removed. And if I thus consume immoderately, I reveal to my fellow beings that which I am intimately: Consumption is the way in which separate beings communicate. Everything shows through, everything is open and infi nite between those who consume intensely (Bataille 1988: 58–59, in Gauthier 2004a: 68–69, italics in text). Psytrance festivals are natural sites of excess, for the wild consumption of excess “energy”, for the burning up of that which had been translated as society’s “accursed share”. Habitués of the psytrance festival embody a radical otherness, a delirium born from exposure to powerful bass and extreme frequency ranges, from shared intoxication. Unravelling selves amid passionate gesticulations illuminated by turbulent fire staff, glow poi and an array of advanced lighting, ingesting a growing platter of psychoactive compounds, modifying bodies in simple or baroque tattoo designs evoking mystery, nature and gothic struggles, combating entropy with lobe scalpelling, staplings, dermal anchors and flesh pockets, becoming locked in nocturnal têt’à têtes with punishing darkpsy at 170+ BPM, driven to states of self-annihilation, they literally pass outside of their selves. These are contexts for epic derailments of the mind, and violent interventions upon the body, which might prove fatal,

Figure 12.1 Main Floor, Ozora Festival, Hungary 2009. Photo by Alex Canazei: www.alexcanazei.com

232 Graham St John as at Sonica 2007 when a local man died of an alleged overdose of atropine cut cocaine. The more common evidence of limit-transgressions, however, are the casualties resulting from combinations of extreme weather conditions, dehydration, disease, excessive alterant use and other factors. Even more regular, is the frequency of having been “trashed” from long periods of activity on the dance floor, broadsided by high-volume sound systems for consecutive days and nights where sleeping routines are disrupted and circadian rhythms broken. These transgressions, like those associated with other youth and dance cultures (see Ambrose 2001), do not go unnoticed within a Bataillian general economy of sacrifice, where becoming “wasted”, the nonproductive expenditure of one’s self through lavish limit-pushing ventures in the presence of strangers, is productive, even if only of equilibrium and revitalisation. This is neither the pathology of excess which led Durkheim to his study of “anomie” (1970), nor is it his romantic “collective effervescence”, but a theory of excess which recognises the value of waste, of transgression— the apocalypse of subjectivity. But the luxurious discharge of personal resources on the dance floor is a mode of ecstatic expenditure that shares a sometimes tense and other times amicable relationship with an already identified ecological ethos. In Australia, for instance, such an ethos became axiomatic to “doofs”, an event form that emerged in the 1990s in response to the commercialisation and regulation of raves considered to have grown unaccountable, irresponsible and maladaptive to ecology (St John 2001b, and see Lambert this volume). The DiY ethos of doofs competes with standard capitalist economic models, the tension especially dramatic within sites, events and regions where cooperativism (and an accompanying recognition of ecological crisis) and cowboy capitalism (and a corresponding environmental negligence) collide. For detractors, Melbourne’s Earthcore, an event organisation which began in 1993 with small gatherings and evolved into multi-staged eventspectaculars by the following decade, offers a deceptive impression of an eco-conscious sensibility. Claiming that Earthcore “damages the very landscape they use to market themselves”, the anonymous author of the blog, “Boycott Earthcore”, reported the organisation’s negligence to clean up the festival near Undera, Victoria, in 2006, an incident which left the local community and council outraged, and prompted a local newspaper story featuring the headline: “Trashed”.7 What is perceived as an irresponsible combination (i.e., getting one’s self “trashed” and “trashing” nature), is a circumstance that would inspire alternative dance practices and events, among which was the Melbourne based eco-dance collective Tranceplant who, for several years from the late-1990s, held weekend dance festivals proximate to unprotected waterways and other fragile areas, where mass native tree plantings took place. At their Resurrect the Bush festival over Easter 2001, for instance, thousands of trees were planted in a region which had suffered degradation from the colonial gold mining period. At these events—the inspiration for subsequent “environmental sounds

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parties” around the country—activists would regenerate native tree species on salinated river systems and other despoiled ecologies while in adjacent moments abandoning themselves to the secret aesthetic of the dance floor—an innovative mixing of politics with pleasure, and a cross-fading of concomitant modes of sacrifice. As psytrance parties in Australia and elsewhere have become stages for the expression of an ecological sensibility, they exemplify “cultural dramas” which Turner identified as cultural modes of “redress”, performative vehicles through which the sacra, the “ultimate concerns” of event-habitués, are enacted, displayed, performed and transmitted (Tillich in Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993; see St John 2009a). Efforts to redress ecological crisis are possibly best illustrated in the way psytrance has become a vehicle for the activities of a consciousness movement inscribed in the activities of the Planetary Art Network (PAN), and principally their Dreamspell Calendar. Also called the “13 Moon Calendar”, the Dreamspell is a tool for consciousness change developed by José and Lloydine Argüelles (who also founded PAN) and is based, in part, on their translation of the Mayan calendar. Having initiated the replacement of the Gregorian calendar on July 25, 2004, “Galactic Freedom Day”, PAN activists understand calendar change to be an eight-year process (2004–2012). Consisting of an annual cycle of thirteen moons each twenty-eight days long, and said to demonstrate harmony with the Earth and natural cycles, coded, for instance, in the human female biological cycle, the calendar is thus regarded as a core technology adopted in response to disharmonious consumer lifestyles and to redress global ecological crises. In the past decade, many dance and festival groups began aligning their gatherings with the new calendar (St John 2009a: 184–189), and PAN nodes hold presence at festivals and gatherings which have become sites for the pedagogical transmission of “the New Time”.8 By contrast with the headlong charge towards an orgiastic suspension of time characterising one’s approach to dance, the 13 Moon Calendar movement offers a profound teleological expression of the concern for life “after the orgy”, including, that is, the “orgy” of history, or more accurately, the history of ecological despoliation characterising Western modernity. An amalgamated collection of responsibilities regarding one’s attitudes towards the natural environment and one’s self evolving post-1960s has concreted in “the movement for a new time” embodied in the Dreamspell Calendar. Orgiastic and idealistic commitments are not necessarily discordant, with festivals becoming sites for the diverse experience of altered time symptomatic of the desires and wishes of participants in the PAN (see St John 2010). But festivals are not always venues for the happy marriage of differential causes, and the sacrificial logics performed in their name. This became noticeable in August 2007 at the third edition of the Italian psytrance festival Sonica. In response to complaints of environmentally unsound practice at previous events, Sonica organisers promoted the event as the “Celebrating Nature” edition. In support “of the environment and

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for the use of renewable energies”, the five-day festival held in mountain pine woodland in Liguria between La Spezia and Genoa 1000 metres above sea level, featured solar-powered showers and lighting, garbage separation, clean-up efforts by “eco-team” volunteers and reputed investment in a “carbon sink” re-forestation program in Costa Rica. Yet, with the presence of the Duracell Powerhouse, a large air-inflated tent shaped like a long-life Duracell battery pitched mid-festival (on its European “Power Up” tour), the tension between the promotional declaration of reducing one’s “ecological footprint” and the consumption of resources in delirious expenditure seemed to have acquired bizarre amplification. With a sound system, smoke machine and dance club atmosphere inside, the Powerhouse featured a full line-up of DJs whose set-times were listed in the Sonica booklet alongside the artists performing on the Main and Alternative stages. According to its web site, the Powerhouse was dedicated to “partying into the early hours, making the music last longer, much longer”. Enticing participants with the prospect of swapping their “tired batteries” for “shiny new Duracell Ultra M3s”, hustling brand loyalty and reinforcing a perma-cycle of disposability, Duracell offered festival participants a “free battery exchange”. But Duracell’s presence and sponsorship was disapproved of by a critical event-public.9 Incomprehension was especially felt by the residents and visitors of Sonica’s self-identified “neo-tribal” Duende Village, an area for presentations, workshops and films promoting an “eco-sustainable future” which was broadsided by the bloated icon of disposability. According to its

Figure 12.2

Sonica Festival 2007, Italy. Photo by Susanne Riemann.

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initiators, Duende is “a mysterious and indescribable force, a creative fi re similar to the vital lymph that courses through the roots of human sensibility, feeding the collective imagination with dreams of utopia and a better world”.10 One can only imagine the contempt felt by estranged villagers for whom the battery signified the rupturing of such dreams. Sonica’s appropriation of environmental virtue, while accepting sponsorship and on-site marketing from Duracell, seems hypocritical and duplicitous, indeed echoing behaviour now commonly practiced by corporations globally as “greenwashing”. A symbol of Dionysian capitalism, the Powerhouse contradicted the eco-conscious legacy and utopian sensibility to which psytrance is heir. But in its promotion to energise the night, to make now last longer, it is not dispossessed of the desire for bliss and luxury, the prevailing ecstatic-erotic impulse which cares little for tomorrow. While committed to modes of consumer opposition, psytrance enthusiasts, nonetheless, pursue an ecstasy reliant on technologies, industries and practices compromising an eco-sensibility. With differential causes and corresponding understandings of the sacred, the festival is thus a stage for the dramatisation of a defi ning ecstatic/activist paradox which fuels controversy, or what Turner might have labelled “social dramas” between adversaries committed to ecstatic and conscious extremes, and indeed feeds anxieties held by individual participants themselves. For it is at these events, that habitués are provided the opportunity, indeed the encouragement, to oscillate between causes. That is, exposing participants to the diversity of Dionysian and conscious sacra, festivals facilitate experimentation across the sacred divide, triggering ever-newer modes of redress and optimisation on the part of participants and promoters.

CONSCIOUS AND TRANSGRESSIVE RITUALS The presence of the Duracell Powerhouse highlights another tension in which the question of “energy” remains critical. An image is imprinted in my mind. As if squaring-off upon a karmic battlefield, a Javanese-style stone meditating Buddha’s head faced down the swollen copper-top for the duration of Sonica 2007. The statue belonged to the adjacent Healing area, which hosted practical workshops on, among other healing modalities, shiatsu, ayurvedic massage, crystal healing, reiki, aura imaging, along with a sweat lodge. While this provides a particularly sharp juxtaposition, it is a microcosmic representation of tensions evident within psytrance, which speak of discipline on the one hand and risk on the other. The Healing area at Sonica, not dissimilar to healing zones at other global psytrance events, signalled a crisis of the modern subject recognised by human potential and integralist movement practitioners who have evolved techniques adopted from Oriental, indigenous and Western esoteric traditions harnessed in the pursuit of self-actualisation and the “enlightenment of the body” (Kripal 2007). In these festal venues psytrance habitués are exposed to practices and

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philosophies (including yoga, meditation, body arts) by which they may discipline mind and body, cultivate inner and outer “energies” and evolve their “spirit”. It is common to fi nd practices and philosophies uniting East and West, spirituality and science, and adopting eclectic shamanisms in which therapeutic and transformational strategies are evoked and practiced. But the disciplined commitment to growth and a corresponding evolution of consciousness contrasts, sometimes clashes, with the commitment to which we know psytrance habitués demonstrate popular dedication: the party. In the former, individuals elect pathways of self-advancement through numerous techniques around which they build a personal repertoire characterised by holism, purity and progression. Here disciplined workers in service of the self seek a balanced relationship with body-mind-spirit. At the latter extreme, those who are “aven it” know the sacred in altered states of indulgence—they mount the curb of the normative, fi nd meaning in risk and inhabit a transgressive “edge”—the source of an identity, status and belonging often rendered “subcultural”. In the former, dietary regimes, breath work and somatic practices are taken up with intent to make transit into higher “consciousness”, personal “wellbeing” and “mindfulness”. Life is considered a “journey”, and with the appropriate discipline one may be rewarded with “wholeness”, “completion” and sanctity. While enthusiasts of dark trance, for instance, may consider their practice to be “hardcore” next to the “hippie” trancer, the spiritually experienced pass derogation on and, in general, build sophisticated folk-pathologies about, the “wasteful” lives of the latter, with a common complaint lodged regarding the abusive use of mind altering substances—especially Ecstasy.11 The responsive motivation of “spiritual partying” is widespread among intentional ritualists like the earlier Return to the Source club in Brixton, London’s ID Spiral and in the global Earthdance movement. In these events, the psycho-somatic transitional power of meditation and yoga provide typical inspiration for organisers who adopt the language of yoga and chakras to orchestrate and promote their events. For example, with member practitioners of Sahaja Yoga, the UK party organisation Kundalini have thrown intentional events they call the Kundalini Illumination Experience since the mid-1990s. Responding to the doof’s devolution from the original Goa vibe, and committed to improve nothing less than the “health of the human psyche”, Australian DJ Krusty (aka Paul Gaffney) has developed events with a therapeutic intention. Together with his partner Mari (who is incidentally DJ Kundalini), Krusty (2008: 19) laments that the “divine intention has slipped away into obscurity”, and is now “overshadowed by a male dominance energy structure, the compulsive obsessive pursuit of contemporary values— success, fortune, fame, sex, power—which are globally out of balance and soul destroying for humanity”. The all-night rituals like the “Experimental Shamanic Trancedance, Sacred Plant and Sound System Workshop” held at Victoria’s eco-arts retreat Opoeia in 2006, involve Aboriginal-style smoking (smoke cleansing ceremony), a sound system and fire technology.

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Figure 12.3 Opening Ceremony, Rainbow Serpent Festival 2009, Australia, Photo by Jonathan Carmichael.

The assumed efficacy of such events is routinely derived from reflexive understandings of “ritual” and “ceremony” re-assembled from folk sources, popular culture and anthropological theory, alongside the historicised inspiration found in the likes of Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey”, providing event-organisers and designers with templates with which they model and construct their events. While the appropriation of symbolism and traditions may express primitivist fantasy, such as in promotions for Germany’s Indian Spirit festival, which has instanced “totem poles” and large hanging dream catchers placed on the dance floor, more than often the “original” object or has been lost in a concatenation of borrowings and exchanges (see St John 2011). In other cases, respect is demonstrated towards cultural authorities. And ritualising is not necessarily remote from those providing the inspiration. In the case of Melbourne’s Rainbow Serpent Festival (RSF), traditional owners and their representatives are part of performances of the Opening and Closing Ceremony. At the 2008 event near Beaufort, thousands gathered to witness an elaborate “Welcome to Country”, a smoke cleansing ceremony led by Gundidgundjundmara elder and local traditional owner Uncle Ted Lovett. The ceremony also involved didjeridu performer Gnamahare and body painted dancers from the Koorroomook Thanampool (“possum women”) dance group representing the Kirrea Woorroong and Peak Woorroong tribes of the Gunditjmara nations of South West Victoria. With such performances, Aboriginal authorities act to welcome event-attendees to the land, evoking its ancient heritage and providing participants with an understanding of their own legitimate presence, performances that have become critical among a population confronted with the ongoing crises of colonial dispossession and ecological maladaptation. The Opening Ceremony’s conclusion would be difficult to determine as spectators were encouraged to enter the circle and stomp a

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large “sand painting” prepared on the dance floor (a serpent encircled earth depicting the Australian landmass) to the rhythms of tribal beats amplified. The stomping continued in that place for the next eighteen hours. From a performative point of view, the RSF Opening Ceremony accommodated the utopian diversity of counterculture, accommodating activist and ecstatic pursuits within its framework. The festival is that juncture where the carnival (a time of inversion, transgression) and the ceremony (where cultural authorities are propitiated and reaffi rmed) collide, where excess and ethos are juxtaposed. As the premiere event in the world psytrance calendar, Portugal’s Boom Festival, is the preeminent locale for the expression of the tensions I have been discussing. The week-long summer festival held near the village of Idhana-a-Nova in the Beira Baixa mountains since 1997, attracted near 40,000 enthusiasts on my visits there in August 2006 and 2008. The event hosts what is in all likelihood the world’s largest open-air dance floor, the Main Stage floor catering for at least 4,000 to 5,000 people and operating twenty-two hours a day for a week. In 2006, the Main Stage featured a tall bamboo pagoda design with a high-performance audio-visual assemblage designed for enhancing expressive/transcendent states. Over one hundred DJs and bands from many different countries performed a range of electronic trance genres. As dance floor occupants from over eighty nations submit to sustained low-bass frequencies, hypnotic melodies and the effects of various consciousness alterants, they “consume profitlessly” and share intimately. On the Main Floor, mind-alterants are consumed with attention to effect, release, longevity and impact over hours and days. The intoxicated will leap with full body in and out of dance, exposed to music that will not relent for days, amplified through a quality sound system by skilled DJ/producers on a dance floor optimised with video projections, décor, lighting and misting systems to enhance and prolong the experience. As a benchmark counter-cultural drama, Boom is also a vehicle for progressive causes. Thus it hosts a Healing area and Eco-centre (with displays and workshops on the ecological sustainability initiatives undertaken by Boom). The festival is also host to a concentration of the conscious sacra of the global psytrance and visionary arts community accommodated in one extraordinary venue over one week: The Liminal Village. Promoted in the village zine as a “dynamic confluence of people, traditions, energy and information”, a “real-time, open source, visionary experience” and a “practical imaginal realm where we can speak, dance, listen and learn”, the Liminal Village demonstrates how trance festivals have become what is further self-identified as “concentrated hubs of exchange and transformation—open systems interzones between the conventional bounds of time and space”. Having evolved from a “Convention Area” in 2000, and emerging as the Dynamic Mythologies tent in 2002 before it was upgraded with its current name in 2004, the Liminal Village is the culmination of the work of Interchill Records manager, Naasko Wriple, in alliance with

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Figure 12.4 Eco Centre and Liminal Village, Boom Festival 2008. Portugal. Photo by Jakob Kolar: www.jacomedia.net

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a network of visionary groups. In 2006, the area featured a solar-powered bamboo temple called the “Omniplex”, part of a cultural compound which, through workshops, panels, presentations, displays, art galleries and cinema, staged various alternative concerns: peace, health and wellbeing, ecological sustainability and visionary consciousness. In part a response to festal excesses, and drawing inspiration from Terence McKenna and, in particular, his views of accelerated novelty, the space represents a conscious effort to adopt a language, architecture and vision of transformation using anthropological discourse forged in the study of ritual, and specifically ritual thresholds. When I inquired in 2006, Naasko indicated that he was unaware of Van Gennep or Turner, and that when he began using the term in 2004, it signified “how psychedelics model the death experience, and the role of such imaginative and energetic encounters in psychedelic spirituality. People paid very close attention”. As promotional literature had it, visitors to the space were to be transported to “the outer limits of consciousness”, recognising that travellers must depart “the liminal space back into the material, everyday world of our immediate locale”, the integration with which perceived as “both a personal and a community function of re-evaluation and re-contextualization”. With thousands of people passing through daily, the Liminal Village would thus be an evolved intentional multi-mediated and interactive experience enabling the exploration and transmission of population causes. In 2008, the village hosted panels, presentations, lectures, discussions and workshops on themes like “stewardship”, “cooperation”, “balance”, “sustainability” and “interconnectivity”, thus transmitting the keynotes of the event’s theme that year: “We Are All”. The ultimate concern of interconnectivity was also prominent in the “liminal zine” Pathways. In his feature article “Permaculturing the Future: Planetary Culture Building in a World of Liminality” whole systems designer Delvin Solkinson writes that permaculture is an integral part of the solution towards a “revitalized planetary ecology”. In the new expanse of communications technology and web networking we are on the liminal brink of a whole new kind of consciousness. With the rise of industry and toxification of the biosphere, our civilization teeters at the edge of apocalypse. The emergence of world culture brings with it the promise of an integration and connectedness that will create a bridge for widescale positive change (23). Discussing festival culture more widely, countercultural commentator, Erik Davis (who also presented in the Liminal Village), stated that the festival is “an incubator of novelty. A Petri dish of possibility where the future forms of community and consciousness are explored. We often think that our social pleasures are separate from the serious work of envisioning and implementing a more healthy, harmonious and sustainable world. But the festival suggests that maybe our future lies in both directions at once and that maybe you

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Figure 12.5 Liminal Village, Boom Festival 2006, Portugal. Photo by Jakob Kolar: www.jacomedia.net

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can have your cake and eat it too”. Furthermore, “bridging ritual and party, nomad village and experimental future culture, the festival today is where dancing and design become one” (Davis 2008: 50, 54). With the Main Floor the primary locale for expressive and ecstatic states, and the Liminal Village hosting reflexive and visionary pursuits, Boom is a complex liminal juncture enabling transgressive states at one extreme and a license to experiment with progressive practices on the other. Where ecstatic and conscious practices constitute sacred work, and possess transformative efficacy, for proponents of either Boom is more than “just a party”, it is indeed a cultural incubator.

CONCLUSION Psytrance contextualises the varied experience of the sacred sought by its participants. It is a distinct feature of this global alternative movement that ritualisation transpires alongside the carnivalesque in the context of the festival (or indeed, the party). And it is a distinct characteristic of this movement that the liminal dimensionality of its festal culture is amplified in the lifestyles of its participants. Complicating conventional approaches to transition adopting “liminal” drawn from the rites of passage model, the chapter has addressed the protracted liminal career of psytrancers. Evident in youthful adulthood, in orgiastic neo-tribes, in the atmosphere of expectancy in which participants are immersed, and in efforts to mobilise cultural transition, the threshold becomes something of a sophisticated career. Since multiple causes are performed and presented within their precincts, psytrance festivals are meta-dramas, accommodating diverse sacra, pathways and possible outcomes. In the macrosphere, they accommodate ecstatic and reflexive trajectories, with commitments to self-abandonment through excess complimenting and/or contradicting the pursuit of ethical consumerism, with varying collaborations and hybrids between. Given the pursuit of variant trajectories—on the dance floor, in the marketplace, at the workshops, in the conference— such festivals are hyper-liminal in character. This is apparent in the way psytrance has been the vehicle for paradoxical, yet definitive, countercultural trajectories: the ecstatic orgy and the conscious duty; the transgressive rupture and the progressive ideal. In its preeminent cultural manifestations, the psytrance or visionary arts festival is heir to the traditions of the carnival and the ceremony, facilitates the performance of risk and discipline, accommodates the outlaw and the in-lore, is a stage for poetics and politics. In the festal realms that express and give life to the countercultures populating them, conscious ritual practice and the observance of ethical commitment (from the Liminal Village, to the PAN movement, to Krusty’s workshop to the RSF Opening Ceremony) dance with indulgence and the temporary dissolution of self (the “main floor” at most festivals). While these polarities generate tensions, habitués oscillate between transgressive and progressive modalities, and indeed event organisers continually modify and redesign their events

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to accommodate this dance—a microcosm of the world lived and desired beyond the threshold. In a study which has begun exploring these tensions, this chapter has shown that habitués perform adverse sacrificial logics in the complex interstices of psytrance festivals, and that movement participants are able to traverse multiple causes within the festival, circumstances potentiating modifications, alliances, hybridity.

NOTES 1. The word “entheogen” means, as the fi lm’s subtitle suggests, to “evoke the

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

divine within”, the reputed function of a range of so-called “entheogens” including cannabis, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, DMT, Salvia divinorum and other plants and their psychoactive compounds. A status that appears to have been magnified following his death in 2000. DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is a naturally occurring tryptamine found in many plants worldwide and is created in small amounts by the human body during metabolism. DMT-containing plants are commonly used in several South American shamanic practices, and it is often one of the main active constituents of the drink ayahuasca. “The Status Quo of the Trance Community”, Mushroom Magazine, Dec. 2008, no. 154, p. 7. And which in Goa, for example, leads to what Arun Saldhana (2007) calls “viscosity” and the concomitant discrimination against those who do not possess a “freak” demeanour and a white appearance (i.e., Indians). Lucy Legan, interviewed at Boom Festival, August 1, 2006. (accessed March 3, 2009). I have experienced this, for example, at a multitude of events, including Earthdream 2000 in the south Australian desert, Soulclipse (a total solar eclipse festival held in southern Turkey over Easter in 2006) and Boom, which in 2006 hosted a “Galactic Temple”, an open geodesic dome in which workshops, discussions and decodings (readings of one’s “galactic signature”) were conducted daily. That the corporation is among the chief makers of (non-rechargeable and non-recyclable) alkaline batteries widely classified as hazardous waste (sources of harmful potassium hydroxide), a corporation pushing unsustainable lifestyle and non-renewable energy practices, goes some way to explaining the exasperation of participants. It appears that while Sonica were reliant on last-minute fi nancing that such corporate sponsorship provided, Duracell were responding to the mounting dangers of obsolescence in a period and amongst youth cultures embracing rechargeable energy alternatives in a range of devices from digital media players to palm-top computers and cell phones, not to mention threats from self-powered (i.e., shakelights, dynamos, solar-powered) flashlights, in use among psytrance populations and sold by festival stall holders. The street name for MDMA, “Ecstasy” is typically manufactured with methamphetamines, ketamine and other substances. The contempt for “etards” seems due to its normalised status as a club drug, indeed Ecstasy becoming integral to clubbing in the modern city. Psytrance enthusiasts typically distinguish events between metropolitan clubs and those open-air events located in the bush, forest or desert, (i.e., at locations remote from the city), in the same way they would distinguish phoniness from authenticity.

244 Graham St John BIBLIOGRAPHY Ambrose, Joe. 2001. Moshpit: The Violent World of Mosh Pit Culture. London: Omnibus. Bataille, Georges. 1988. The Accursed Share, Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone. Bell, Catherine. 1997. Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press. Davis, Erik. 2008. “The Festival is a Seed”. Pathways: Liminal Zine 02, 50–54. Durkheim, Emile. 1970. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Trans. J. A. Spaulding and G. Simpson. London: Routledge. Gauthier, François. 2004a. “Rave and Religion? A Contemporary Youth Phenomenon as Seen Through the Lens of Religious Studies”. Studies in Religion 33(3–4): 397–413. . 2004b. “Rapturous Ruptures: The ‘Instituant’ Religious Experience of Rave.” In Graham St John, ed. Rave Culture and Religion, 65–84. London: Routledge. . 2005. “Orpheus and the Underground: Raves and Implicit Religion, a Critical Analysis”. Journal for the Study of Implicit Religion 8(3): 217-265. Gerard, Morgan. 2004. “Selecting Ritual: DJs, Dancers and Liminality in Underground Dance Music”. In Graham St John, ed. Rave Culture and Religion, 167–184. London: Routledge. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. 1976. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, London: Hutchinson & Co. Kripal, J. 2007. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Krusty, DJ. 2008. “Trance and Dance: Buss Doofs and the Shamanic Vision”. In Rak Razam and Tim Parish, eds. The Journeybook: Travels on the Frontiers of Consciousness, 15–22. Undergrowth. See also: . Leary, Timothy, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert. 1964. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Lewis, J. Lowell, and Paul Dowsey-Magog. 1993. “The Maleny Fire Event: Rehearsals Toward Neo-Liminality”. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 4(3): 198–219. Maffesoli, Michel. 1993. [1982]. The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy. Albany: State University of New York Press. . 1996. [1988]. The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. London: Sage. Malbon, Ben. 1999. Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy and Vitality. London: Routledge. McAteer, M. 2002. “‘Redefi ning the Ancient Tribal Ritual for the 21st Century’: Goa Gil and the Trance Dance Experience”. B.A. Thesis, Division of Philosophy, Religion, and Psychology, Reed College. On-line at: . McKay, George. 2000. Glastonbury: A Very English Fair. London: Victor Gollancz. McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Musgrove, Frank. 1974. Counter Culture and the Open Society. London: Methuen and Co. Olaveson, Tim. 2004. “‘Connectedness’“ and the Rave Experience: Rave as New Religious Movement?” In Graham St John, ed. Rave Culture and Religion, 85–106. London: Routledge. Partridge, Christopher. 2006. “The Spiritual and the Revolutionary: Alternative Spirituality, British Free Festivals, and the Emergence of Rave Culture”. Culture and Religion 7(1): 41–60.

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Pike, Sarah. 2001. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and The Search for Community. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Reynolds. Simon. 1998. Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture. London: Picador. Rietveld, Hillegonda. 1993. “Living the Dream.” In Steve Redhead (ed.), Rave Off: Politics and Deviance in Contemporary Youth Culture, pp. 41–78. Aldershot: Avebury. Rill, Bryan. 2006. “Rave, Communitas, and Embodied Idealism.” Music Therapy Today 7(3): 648–61. Sagiv, Assaf. 2000. “Dionysus in Zion”. Azure Spring 5760: No. 9: . St John, Graham. 2001a. “Alternative Cultural Heterotopia and the Liminoid Body: Beyond Turner at ConFest”. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 12(1): 47–66. . 2001b. “Doof! Australian Post Rave Culture”. In Graham St John, ed. FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor, 9–36. Melbourne: Common Ground. . 2006. “Electronic Dance Music Culture and Religion: An Overview”. Culture and Religion 7(1): 1–26. . 2008. “Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance: An Introduction”. In Graham St John, ed. Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, 1–37. New York: Berghahn. . 2009a. Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. London: Equinox. . 2009b. “Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival”. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 1(1): 35–64. . 2010. “The 2012 Movement, Visionary Arts and Psytrance Culture.” In Joseph Gelfer, ed. 2012: Refl ections on a Mark in Time. London: Equinox. . 2011. “Tribalism, Experience and Remixology in Global Psytrance Culture.” In Courtney Bender and Ann Taves, eds. What Matters? Ethnographies of Value in a (Not So) Secular Age. New York: Columbia University Press . Forthcoming. Global Tribe: Religion, Technology and Psytrance. London: Blackwell. Saldanha, Arun. 2007. Psychedelic White: Goa trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Solkinson, Delvin. 2008. “Permaculturing the Future: Planetary Culture Building in a World of Liminality”. Pathways: Liminal Zine 02, 22–29. Sommer, S. 2001/2002. “C’mon to my House: Underground-House Dancing”. Dance Research Journal 33(2): 72–86. Stanislav, Grof. 2008. “Psychedelic Research: Past, Present and Future”. In the Journeybook, 95–102. Sylvan, Robin. 2002. Traces of the Spirit: The Religious Dimensions of Popular Music. New York: New York University Press. . 2005. Trance Formation: The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of Global Rave Culture. New York: Routledge. Takahashi, Melanie. 2005. “Spirituality Through the Science of Sound: The DJ as Technoshaman in Rave Culture”. In Michael J. Gilmour, ed. Call Me the seeker: Listening to Religion in Popular Music, 239–266. New York: Continuum. Takahashi, Melanie, and Tim Olaveson. 2003. “Music, Dance and Raving Bodies: Raving as Spirituality in the Central Canadian Rave Scene”. Journal of Ritual Studies 17(2): 72–96. Taub, Gadi. 1997. A Dispirited Rebellion: Essays on Contemporary Israeli Culture. Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad. Tomlinson, Lori. 1998. “This Ain’t no Disco . . . Or is it? Youth Culture and the Rave Phenomenon”. In John S. Epstein, ed. Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World, 195–211. Malden: Blackwell.

246 Graham St John Tramacchi, Des. 2000. “Field Tripping: Psychedelic Communitas and Ritual in the Australian Bush”. Journal of Contemporary Religion 15(2): 201–213. . 2004. “Entheogenic Dance Ecstasis: Cross-Cultural Contexts”. In Graham St John (ed) Rave Culture and Religion, pp. 85–106. London: Routledge. . 2006. “Vapours and Visions: Religious Dimensions of DMT Use”. Doctoral Dissertation. University of Queensland, Brisbane. Turner, Victor. 1967. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage”. In Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, 93–111. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. . 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine. . 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications. . 1985. “Process, System, and Symbol: A New Anthropological Synthesis”. In E. Turner, ed. On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience, 151–73. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. [1909]. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan. Woodhead, Linda. 2001. “The World’s Parliament of Religions and the Rise of Alternative Spirituality”. In Linda Woodhead, ed. Reinventing Christianity: Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Aldershot: Ashgate.

DISCOGRAPHY Xamanist. 2009. Initiation. Ektoplazm (10 x File, FLAC, Album): EKTLP02.

Contributors

Chiara Baldini graduated from the University of Florence in English Linguistics. She has been a trance enthusiast for more than ten years, following parties in Brazil, USA, Turkey, India, Australia, Israel and Europe. Her passion has led her to conduct an extensive research focusing on the historical evolution of the ecstatic cult. She has participated in the “What is trance” panel at Portugal’s Boom Festival in 2008, highlighting the parallels between psytrance parties and Greek Mystery Cults. She is currently working on a book on the historical and mythological roots of trance parties. Anthony D’Andrea is a cultural anthropologist (University of Chicago, PhD), Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Limerick (Irish Social Science Platform), and International Alumni Lecturer at the University of Chicago. He is author of Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa (Routledge International Library of Sociology, 2007). His research interests and publications are in the fields of new forms of religiosity, labour and mobility in contexts of globalisation. Charles de Ledesma is a music writer, teacher and journalist who is currently researching a PhD in British psytrance culture at the University of East London, UK. He has contributed to the 2007 publication, the Boom Book, on global trance culture, and has written for numerous guides and collections on world music. Charles has also presented programmes for radio on global music styles. He lives in northwest London with his Australian wife, Karen. Luther Elliott, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist who has worked on music, drug and computer-mediated subcultures. His Goa/psytrance fieldwork was conducted among trance travellers and local participants in Australia, South Africa, New York and India. More recently, he has been conducting research on independent high schools, video gaming and the transformation of substance use around Hurricane Katrina. Luther has

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taught at a number of New York schools, including Sarah Lawrence College, NYU and Fordham University, and is currently a researcher at National Development and Research Institutes in NYC. Alex Lambert is a psytrance DJ and a postgraduate student at the University of Melbourne where he has also completed an undergraduate degree in cultural studies and an honour’s thesis on the Australian psytrance scene. His field of study concerns online social networks, globalisation, identity, performance and critical Internet theory. Alex lives in Melbourne and regularly attends outdoor psytrance parties (“doofs”) in the state of Victoria. Robin Lindop is a PhD candidate at the University of Salford Popular Music Research Centre (UK). His research is focused on the UK psytrance scene, exploring post-subcultural ideas and comparing the psytrance community to other electronic dance music cultures in light of its countercultural origins. He has presented papers at numerous conferences, including the 2008 ACS Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference at the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica. Hillegonda Rietveld is Reader in Cultural Studies at London South Bank University, UK, where she is subject leader in Music & Sonic Media. She has been involved professionally in club and DJ culture since 1982. Her publications, such as the book This Is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and Technologies, address the development and experience of electronic dance music cultures. Jenny Ryan is a doctoral candidate in communication at the University of California, San Diego, where she is devising a multi-sited ethnography of alternative, sustainable communities and the possibilities of new media in enhancing civic participation, community bonding and cultural production on the local level. Current research projects focus on digital literacy and commemoration of the dead online. Her Master’s anthropology thesis, titled “The Virtual Campfi re: An Ethnography of Online Social Networking”, explored the ways online social networking sites have come to be embedded in the everyday lives of American youth. Arun Saldanha is Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Minnesota. He has published Psychedelic White: Goa trance and the Viscosity of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and several articles on Goa’s psytrance scene. Other research interests include postcolonial theory, Deleuze, philosophy of biology and the Indian Ocean. Joshua I. Schmidt, a DJ and fi lm-maker, is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the Department of Behavioral Sciences, Ben-Gurion University

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of the Negev. His research interests include popular music, youth, leisure culture, anthropological linguistics and cultural transformation. Partial to visual anthropological methodologies, he has produced two ethnographic based fi lms on Israeli psytrance culture. Graham St John was recently an SSRC Fellow at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico, a postdoctoral Research Fellow in Interactive Media and Performance at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, and is a Research Associate at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies. Graham has published widely in the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, Australian studies and studies in religion, and he is the executive editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. Several edited collections are included among his publications: Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance (Berghahn, 2008), Rave Culture and Religion (Routledge, 2004) and FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor (Common Ground, 2001). His book Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures was published by Equinox in 2009. Botond Vitos is a cultural anthropology graduate from the ELTE University, Budapest, Hungary, commencing his PhD candidature at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, in 2010. He recently completed an MA thesis on the peculiarities of the Czech psytrance scene. Conducting two-phased fieldwork based on participant observation, in 2004 and 2007 he visited eight significant psytrance parties in the Czech Republic. His research interests include EDMC studies, the cultural contexts and meanings of ritualised drug use, and the relationships between music and technology.

Index

A Aboriginal, Australian, 210, 236, 237 accelerated culture, 72, 76, 187–188 acid house, 32, 56, 69, 71, 74–75, 76–81, 84, 197, 210 acid rock, 73–74, 81 acid techno, 77, 97, 106, 121–122, 128 Acid Tests, 24, 223 aesthetic, 69–85, 91–94, 98–107, 207; sensibilities, 1–5, 10, 114–129, 165–168, 213–214 ageing, 36, 41, 47–49, 52 Ahimsa, 92–93 Albrecht-Crane, Christa 90 Alchemy Records, 105 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 13, 151, 155, 167 alternative spirituality, 11, 210, 227 ambient 2, 74, 77–78, 93, 98, 102, 103, 117, 122, 133 Anashim Yafim (beautiful people), 136 Anjuna beach, 3, 26–31, 28–29, 33, 57–62, 72, 78, 92, 94 appropriation 7, 28, 235; of other music styles, 120; cultural, 143, 198; symbolism and tradition, 237 Archaic Revival 171, 183 archetypal patterns 176 Armstrong, Karen 64 arpeggio: arpeggiated sixteenths, 74–75, arpeggiated synthrefrains, 94 Arsim, 136 assemblage, 8, 9, 32, 160, 223, 229; desiring assemblage, 91–92, 96–98, 107 Astral Projection, 78, 89

Astrix, DJ, 71, 82 Attis, 171 Australia, 14, 70, 159, 203–217, 222, 232–233, 236–238 authenticity, 40, 121, 198; paradox of, in popular music, 55, 57 ayahuasca, 224, 143n3

B Bacchae, The, 13, 172–184 Bacchantes, 181–183 backpackers, 35, 42, 44, 49–52, 57–59, 61, 132–133, 143 Badiou, Alain, 62 Bahia, Brasil, 3, 9 Bakthin, Mikhail, 165–167 Baldini, Chiara, 13, 170–185 Balearic: anthem 74, beats, 78; Balearic Sunrise parties, 83 Balot~, Nicolae, 155 Barlow, John Perry, 189 Bataille, Georges, 230–231 Baudrillard, Jean, 162–164 Bennett, Andy, 5, 6, 7, 11, 41, 135, 141, 198 Berezina, Anna, 197 Bestival, 119 Bey, Hakim, 72, 186, 197, 199 Black Sun, 95 Bley, Johann, 34 Bloch, Maurice, 159 Blue Room Released, 81, 103 Bom Jesus Cathedral, Goa, 60 Boom Festival, 1–2, 4, 107, 111, 220, 225, 227, 228, 230, 238–242 Bourdieu, Pierre, 8, 41, 46–47, 48, 120 boyd, danah, 189 Brand, Stewart, 188–189, 223

252 Index Brazil, 8, 51, 58, 71, 82, 84, 105, 107, 224, 225; Bahia, 3; Pirenopolis 230; Porto Seguro, 49 Briggs, Asa and Peter Burke, 187 bulletin boards, 192–193, 199 Burkert, Walter, 182 Burning Man, 190, 192, 198 Butterfly Studios, 94–96

C Cabbage (Leeds), 99 Can, 91 carnival, 165–166, 229, 238, 242 carnivalesque, 2, 14, 151, 165–167, 228–229, 242 Carroll, Lewis, 13, 151, 155 Castlemorton, 126 Centre for Contemporary and Cultural Studies (CCCS), 4, 6, 8, 127, 223 Chapman, Dale, 124 Chianti Summer Solstice, 172–176, 183 Ciani, Maria Grazia, 178–179, 183 Clarke, Fraser, 98 club, 32, 41, 71–72, 79, 92, 97–98, 100, 119, 122–124, 138, 225, 228; clubbing, 5, 8–9, 51, 52, 225; clubbers, 123, 124 Cole, Frank and Michael Hannan, 11, 34–35, 74, 92–94, 107 collective emotion, 206, 207–208, 217 collective memory, 191, 199, 203, 206, 208, 214–217 collective narrative, 164, 206–209, 217 communitas, 59, 64, 68, 138–139, 199, 204, 206, 208, 214, 225 complexity 1, 8, 69, 204; co-present and virtual spatial, 14; of social life, 50 computer-mediated communication, 187–188 Connell, John, 56 consciousness, 22, 33, 79, 163, 233, 236, 240; altered state of, 140, 154, 170, 177, 211, 214–215; altering, 3, 74, 162, 221–222, 238; social 38; collective, 188, 192; transistim, 134; psychedelic state of, 153–154, 156–159, 168; universal, 191 contact zone, 45, 50–52, Cooke, Tristan, 94, 97 cosmopolitan, 3, 7–8, 10, 13–14, 21, 33, 45, 55–56, 62, 69–71,73,

77–78, 81, 83–85, 96; cosmopolitanism 10–11, 13, 37, 55–56, 62, 69–72, 76, 78 Cosmosis, 89, 95, 115 counterculture, 1, 8, 14, 24, 211, 222, 229, 238, 242; the 1960s, 41, 129, 153, 186, 188, 197, 210; globalisation of, 50–52; countercultural, 9, 13, 23, 26, 35, 41–46, 49–52, 57, 59, 72–73, 77, 82, 126, 173, 189–190, 198, 210, 221, 227, 240, 242; mesibot 131, 139 Creamfields, 119 Criminal Justice Act (CJA), 97, 99, 126 criminality, 52; criminalisation, 99, 177 Crisbo, 92, 97 Ctrl Z, 124 cultural capital, 47, 120, 187, 193, 206 cultural drama, 233; counter-cultural drama, 238; meta-drama, 242 Cybele, 171 Czech Republic, 10, 13, 151–153, 160

D D’Andrea, Anthony 9, 11–12, 33, 40–54, 60, 70, 74, 135, 230 dance floor, 1, 5, 8, 44–45, 70, 76, 83–84, 138, 159–168, 180, 191, 209, 214–215, 227, 232–233, 237–238, 242 dark psytrance (darkpsy). 2, 76, 78, 101–102, 114, 116–117, 153, 168, 193, 204, 206–207, 224, 231, 236 Davis, Erik, 2, 11, 31, 34, 76, 128, 171, 183–184, 240, 242 de Ledesma, Charles, 13, 89–113 Debord, Guy, 187 deconstruction, 12, 55–56, 59, 62–64 Deleuze, Gilles, 9, 13, 23, 52, 74, 90–92, 94, 98, 100, 190, 207 demence, 13, 151, 153–168 Derogatis, Jim, 118 Derrida, Jacques, 55–56, 59, 62–63, 207 deterritorialisation 23, 191; deterritorialising, 91, 94, 100 dichotomy, 128,135, 136, 139, 141, 145; dichotomous pairs, 131; dichotomic idiosyncrasies 134 Dionysus, 144, 172–183; Bacchus, 172–184; cult of, 13; Dionysian,

Index 174–176, 179–180, 228, 229, 235; Dionysian rituals, 171, 177, 182 Disco Geko, 224 disco, 45, 69, 75, 76, 79, 116, 181–182; electro(disco), 32; Eurodisco, 80, 93; post-disco, 91, 93; psychedelic electronic disco, 30 DJ magazine, 119, 120 DMT, 103, 191, 222, 224 Doof (artist), 89 doof, 11, 14, 200, 203–206, 208–211, 214–217, 232, 236 Douglas, Mary, 157–159 Downs, David, 198 Dragonfly Records, 34, 71, 78, 94, 95, 96, 101 Dream Creation, 96, 101, 103 Dreamspell Calendar, 233 dub, 2, 73, 93, 96, 102, 117, 122, 125, 126; ambient dub 98; dub reggeae, 114, 119, 122, 124; psy-dub 193 dubstep, 114, 117, 118, 122, 128 Duracell Powerhouse, 234–235 Durkheim, Emile, 213, 232

E Earthcore, 215, 232 Earthdance, 98, 114, 210, 236 Eat Static, 124 EBM (Electronic Body Music), 32, 75, 76, 77, 80, 84 Ecstasy, 32, 33, 60, 73, 76, 156, 236, 243n11. See also MDMA ecstatic cult, 171, 183, ecstatic: experience, 14, 171, 172, 176, 183–184; state, 25, 170, 175, 182, 242 Ed Tangent, 124 Eidot-Hamizrax (Oriental Jews), 136 electro, 2, 75, 93, 117, 128 electronica, 84; downtempo, 117; postpunk, 79–80. See psychedelic Eliade, Mircea, 174, 177, 178 Elliott, Luther, 11, 12, 21–39, 226 entheogen, 222, 225–226; entheogenesis 223; Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within, 221; entheogenic liminalisation, 220, 224 Escape From Samsara, 100 Etruscans, 173 Euripides, 13, 172, 174, 175, 176, 179

253

F Facebook, 193, 194, 196 Far Too Loud, 124 Fearsome Engine (Tristan and Laughing Buddha), 107 festival 1–3, 7, 13–14, 21, 24–25, 30, 35, 50, 57, 70, 74, 82, 89, 98, 100, 102, 105, 107, 114, 117, 119–122, 124–127, 129, 153–158, 161–163, 165, 168, 173–174, 177, 186, 190, 192–193, 209, 215, 220–223, 225–235, 237–243; film, 42 Fleming, John “OO”, 119 Flescher, Jacqueline. 155 forum. See Internet freaks, 9, 26, 28, 72, 73, 76, 163, 190, 194, 227; aesthetic 126; freak ethos of Goa, 35, 36; freak utopians, 221; “Goa freaks” / “psytance freaks”, 30, 42–46, 48, 50–52, 57, 59, 61, 80; free festivals, 9, 114, 126, 223 free party, 3, 82, 83, 119 Friendster, 194 Fufluns, 173, 176 full-on, 71, 115–119, 121–122, 124, 125, 133, 145; neo full-on 38, 104 Fuller, Buckminster, 189–190

G Gaudi, 125 Geertz, Clifford, 157 genre, 1–5, 12, 13, 23, 32–34, 36–38, 55–56, 71, 73–74, 78, 83, 90, 91, 98, 100, 102, 115–129, 132– 133, 168, 190, 226, 238; actual genres 13, 115–129; literary, 167; metagenres, 13, 115–129; subgenre, 7, 32, 71, 80, 103, 114, 116, 118–121, 124–125, 128–129, 190, 193; talk, 47 gentrification, 49, 51 Gibson, Chris, 56, 70, 210 Gibson, William, 188 Gil, Goa, 27–28, 30–31, 37, 45, 71–72, 75–76, 80, 170–171, 180, 190, 223–224 Glade Festival, 105, 114, 125–127 Glastonbury Festival, 100 globalisation, 10, 12, 41, 50–52, 69–70, 82, 84, 135, 141, 210 Goa trance, 3–4, 6, 11–13, 21, 31–38, 56–64, 71–72, 74, 76–78, 81,

254 Index 83–84, 89–90, 92–94, 97–99, 101, 103–105, 107, 114–115, 126, 128, 170–171, 190–192, 213, 223, 227, 230, 236; haunting of, 13, 62–64. See also psytrance Goa, India, 1, 3, 6, 9–13, 21–23, 26–38, 40–53, 57–64, 72–77, 80–81, 83–84, 92–93, 95, 98, 190, 223, 225, 226; Goa’s authenticity, 30, 35–36; Goani, 181–182 Gore, Christina, 93 Gosney, Michael, 28, 30, 190 Great Mother, 176 Green Nuns of the Revolution, 89, 90, 95, 107 Green, Dave, 190 Greener, Tracey, 6, 7, 11, 151, 154, 191, 210 Grof, Stanislav, 221 grotesque realism, 13, 151, 165–167 Guattari, Felix, 13, 23, 52, 74, 90–92, 94, 98, 100, 190 Guise, Anselm (Ans), 105

H habitus, 8, 46 hackers, 187–189 Haight-Ashbury, 12, 23–25, 27, 36–37, 49, 226 hallucination, 29, 151, 155, 157, 165, 166, 199; collective hallucinatory experience, 137; hallucinatory communitas, 138; hallucinatory dynamics, 139; consensual hallucination 188 Hallucinogen (Simon Posford), 5, 71, 78, 89, 90, 95, 96, 102, 103, 190, 224 Halsey, Bill (Cosmosis), 89, 95 115 hard house, 77, 80, 101, 117, 121, 128, hard trance, 2, 77, 80, 101, 106, 114, 121, 125, Hardy, Ron, 79 harm-minimisation, 173, 180; harm reduction, 177 Harvey, David, 23, 37 Harvey, Larry, 190 hedonism 52, 72, 84; aesthetic, 154, 159; spiritual, 11, 128; urban escapist, 79; wacky 183 Hellenistic Greece, 171, 183 hi-NRG, 75; NRG, 121, 128

hip hop, 8, 11, 76, 91, 128 hippie, 8, 23–27, 30, 35, 37, 38, 42, 49, 51, 72, 74, 82, 84, 119, 134, 153, 154, 176, 178, 190, 197, 210, 212, 213, 236; chic 9, 121, 126; in India, 26–27, 29, 32, 43–44, 45, 48, 50, 60, 171; Last Hippie Standing 21; travel 57–59; quasi, 230 Hofmann, Albert, 171 Holden, James, 118 Hollands, Robert, 6, 7, 11, 151, 154, 191, 210 Huxley, Aldous, 3, 24, 79, 153 Hybrid UV, 121, 122 hyper-liminal. See liminal hyperillusion, 151, 159, 162, 165

I Ibiza, 9, 11, 26, 32, , 48, 49, 51, 60, 74, 80, 83; of Asia, 43 Infinity Project, The, 6, 77, 78, 95, 96 Internet, 3, 6–7, 14, 35, 57, 84, 103, 120, 186–289, 194, 203–204; discussion forum 14, 203, 208, 213, 214, 216; forum, 3, 7, 104, 117–119, 122–123, 125, 134, 140, 189, 192, 195–196, 203–216 Isis, cult of, 171 Israel, 3, 10, 34, 44, 51, 59, 61, 63, , 82, 84, 89, 100, 131–146, 224, 228; backpackers, 59, 132–133, 143; Israeli full-on, 105; Israelis, 45, 51, 58–60, 63, 131–146; Israeli psytrance, 107, 128, 131–145; transistim, 13, 131–145, 228 isratrance.com, 137 Italy, 10, 13, 14, 170, 172, 174, 175, 180, 183, 220, 234

J Japan, 3, 10, 13, 51, 59, 71, 81–83, 84, 100; Japanese 8, 51, 74, 81–83 Jesus, 62 Jowers, Peter, 93–94, 95 Juno Reactor, 81, 92

K Kerény, Karl, 176, ketamine, 107, 174, Killing Joke, 94,

Index Kimmerling, Baruch, 136, 140, 141, 142 Kleinenberg, Sander, 118 KLF, 75, 78 Koh Phangan, 3, 9, 35, Kokoszka, Andrzej, 154 Kotarp, 81 Kott, Ian, 178 Koxbox, 102 Kraftwerk, 32, 75, 80, 100; Man-Machine, Trans-Europe Express, 75 krautrock, 73, 80 Kripal, Jeffrey, 235 Krusty, DJ, 236, 242 Kundalini, DJ, 236 kykeon, 172

L Lamb, Dominic, 92–93 Lambert, Alex, 14, 203, 232 language games, 155–156, 165, 206, 208 Latour, Bruno, 191 Laurent, DJ, 31, 73, 76, 93 Lawrence, Tim, 91–92, 96, 102 Leary, Timothy, 23, 26, 221–222, 223, 225 Liminal Village, The, 225, 238, 239, 241, 240, 242 liminal/liminality, 10, 59, 70, 72, 84, 186, 199, 203, 206, 208, 214– 217, 220–221, 224–227, 240, 242; hyper-liminal/liminality, 220, 242; liminal culture 13–14, 220, 226; liminalised, 9; liminal moment, 204, 211, 214–216; liminal space, 7, 59, 186, 240 liminoid, 221, 226–227 Lindop, Robin, 13, 114–130 linguistic economy, 140 Liquid Crystal Vision, 223 Liquid Djems, 124 Liquid Records, 105–16, 109n24, 125 literary nonsense, 151, 155–156, 165, 167 little cultures, 11, 127–128 London clubs: Renaissance Rooms, 89; Tyssen Street Studios, 97; Woody’s, 92 London, 3, 13, 32, 34, 35, 71, 75, 78, 83, 92–93, 95–100, 102, 103, 122, 236 LSD, 3, 22, 23, 24, 25, 57, 60, 79, 132, 153–158, 161, 163, 165–168,

255

171, 191, 194, 221; experience or “trip”, 93, 101, 107, 119, 143, 153–155, 162–167, 209, 224 “LSD”, by Hallucinogen, 96 Ludwig, Arnold M, 154–155

M machine aesthetic, 69, 84 maenads, 176, 180, 182–183, Maffesoli, Michel, 7, 41, 183, 186, 196, 199, 207, 213–214, 217, 229 Man With No Name, 95–96, 115, manía, 177, 182 Martino, Paul, 194 Marx: cultural Marxist, 9; “spirit of Marx”, 63–64 Massey, Doreen, 55 massification, 100 Mathesdorf, Kai, 73, 76, 190 Matkin, Shajahan (Riktam, GMS), 97, 109n22 Matsuri Records, 34, 83, 101–103 Matt Coldrick, 95, 104. See also Green Nuns of the Revolution Maurice, Mark, 92–93 McCracken, Grant, 127 McKay, George, 42, 126, 223 McKenna, Terence, 171, 183, 211, 222–224, 240 McLeod, Kembrew, 116 McLuhan, Marshall, 24, 187 MDMA, 22, 31, 32, 33, 82, 132, 191 Megadog, 126 Megatripolis, 78, 98, 126 Melbourne, 3, 14, 228, 232, 237 mesibot (trance parties), 131–141, 145 MIDI, 33, 104 Ministry of Sound, 119 mobility, 8–9, 42, 50, 61, 70; music and mobility, 56 Mood Deluxe, 106, 124 motorik, 69, 72, 73, 78–78, 83 Munro, James, 92–93, 109n18, 227 Music Box, The, 79 MySpace, 192–194, 196, 200n6 Mysteries of Eleusis, 171 Mystery Religions, 171–172, 182, 184 mystic revival, 183

N Nano Records, 109n24, 125 neo-pagan, 134, 144; festival, 223; spirituality, 171

256 Index neo-tribes, 1, 7, 41, 186–187, 198, 200, 213, 229, 242; neo-tribal, 5, 7, 186, 190–191, 198, 234 New Age, 84, 98, 210; culture, 145; movement, 196; musician, 78, travellers, 126, 196, 199; scene, 44, 74; spirituality, 194 noise, 32, 75–76, 93, 94, 105, 108n9, 109n20, 203, 206; ambient, 217; noise control legislation, 37; pollution, 60 Noll, Richard, 153 nomad, 76, 190–191; neo-nomad, 51–52, traditional, 82 Northern Green Gathering, 117, 126 Novak, Steven J., 153, 168 Noy, Chaim and Erik Cohen, 142 NRG, 121, 128 nu-skool breaks, 124

O Odzer, Cleo, 30, 48, 61, 72 Orb, The, 74, 77, 78, 93 Orchid Star, 124 Osiris, 171 Ott (Grover Smith), 95–96, 103–104, 108n12–13, Ozric Tentacles, 114, 129n12 Oztrance, 14, 201, 205–206, 208, 210

P Pagan (club), 93 Panjaea, 92 Para Halu, DJ, 161, paradox, 160 ; of authenticity, 55, 57; ecstatic/activist, 235; in Israeli psytrance, 131–148; musical, 128 Parallel YOUniversity, 98 Partridge, Christopher, 11, 97, 126, 210, 227 Party People (Brighton), 99 Paterson, Alex, 93, 108n8, Paul (Apostle), 62 Pechnick, Robert N, 153 Pendragon, 100 Pentheus, 175–180 PHB (Phonology as Human Behavior), 140 Phuture, 79; “Acid Tracks”, 74 Pincus, Mark, 194–195 Planet Zogg, 122 Planetary Art Network, 233 Plenitude, 127

PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect), 134, 136–137, 210, 212 Posford, Simon (Hallucinogen), 5, 89, 90, 96, 102–103, 109n14–15, 190, 224 post-rave, 128, 197, 204, 209 post-Zionism, 142 Prana, 95 Project Storm, 114, 125 Psaras, Dino, 81 psy-chill, 114, 118, 121 psybient, 2, 114, 118, 224 psybreaks, 2, 114, 118, 123–125 psychedelia, 47, 119 psychedelic experience, 25, 116, 119, 134, 153–159, 164, 166, 168; collective (hallucinatory/psychedelic) experience 137, 154, 158, 164–165, 186, 199 Psychedelic Experience, The, 23, 223 psychedelic: aesthetic, 3–4, 5, 76, 82, 84, 98, 118–119, 124, 165; art, 63, 186, 214; assemblage, 8; chill-out, 98; cosmopolitan, 37, 73, 96; countercultures, 24, 222; culture, 107, 155, 171; decorations, 166; diaspora, 224; electronica, 21, 70, 73, 74, 84; festival, 3; humour, 13, 106, 151; language, 155–156; light, 74; madness, 151, 153, 168 . See also demence; meaning, 161; movement, 72; music, 32, 38, 50, 69, 72, 73, 77–79, 83, 89, 92, 103, 105–107, 118–119, 155, 208; mysticism, 57; neopsychedelic, 98, 103; New Age, 84; Israeli psychedelic electronic dance music culture (PEDMC), 131–146; origins of term, 3, 23; rhizome; 105–107; ritualisation, 220, 223; rock, 25, 57, 71, 84, 126, 129n12, 228; sensuality, 93; sociality, 21; spirituality, 240; trance. See psytrance; traveller, 30; trip, 154–155, 158, 162–163, 166, 204, 224 psychedelicise (psychedelicisation), 4, 13, 118–121, 124, 127–128 psychedelics (drugs), 13, 26, 74, 79, 81–82, 107, 138, 152–153, 155, 158–159, 161, 164, 168, 184, 204, 222–223, 226; See also LSD

Index psychoactive, 3, 176–177, 180, 191, 231, 241n1 Psychopod, 95 PsyMusic (UK forum), 90, 125 Psytrance Euphoria, 119, 123 psytrance: Australian psytrance, 203– 217; Czech parties, 151, 168; festival, 2–3, 14, 30, 82, 114, 121–126, 153, 165, 168, 186, 192, 220, 222, 226, 228–229, 231, 233, 235–243; Israeli psytrance culture. See Israel; movement, 8, 128, 171, 189, 192, 198, 220–221, 230; music (psychedelic trance), 1–3, 5, 7, 13, 21, 34, 36, 44, 50, 56–58, 61–64, 69–72, 75–76, 82–84, 89, 92, 96–107, 114–129, 131–132, 143, 186, 191–192, 204, 212, 223–224; scene, 14, 23, 32, 40–48, 50–52, 59–60, 62, 64, 70–77, 82–84, 115, 118–121, 125, 127, 154, 172, 197–198, 203, 207–210, 216; studies, 11, 14; UK psytrance/ culture, 90–109, 114–129. See also Goa trance

R Rainbow Serpent Festival, 112, 209, 222, 237; Opening Ceremony, 237–238, 242 Ram, Raja, 34, 36, 38, 77, 78, 94, 96, 101–102, 107, 109n21, 224 Ram, Uri, 141 raves (rave culture), 11, 32, 35, 42, 43, 46, 51, 70–71, 77, 81–82, 98–100, 126, 133, 139, 154, 173–174, 177, 190, 197, 204, 209–210, 222, 225, 228, 232; raving, 210 Red Earth, 114, 125, Regev, Moti, 70, 133, 137 Return to the Source (club and label) (RTTS), 71, 78, 83, 97–98, 100–101, 109n17, 236 Reynolds, Simon, 32, 42, 48, 69, 73–74, 80, 91–92, 94, 100, 101, 102, 108n9, 126, 139, 228 Rheingold, Howard, 189 rhizome, 13, 90–94, 98, 100, 105, 107, 191; rhizomatic, 41, 53, 69, 71, 74, 82, 84, 89–91, 96, 99, 102–103, 107, 189–190,

257

Rietveld, Hillegonda, 11, 13, 69–88, 228, 230 Riff Raff, 121–122 rite of passage, 26, 58–59, 76, 220– 221, 225–227, 242 ritual, 4, 25, 40, 42, 72, 75–76, 82, 84, 128, 133, 138–139, 151, 155–168, 170–171, 176–177, 182–184, 186, 190–191, 203–204, 208, 214–215, 217, 221–227, 236–237, 240, 242; conscious ritualising, 14, 220, 223, 225, 236, 242 Roland synthesisers, 79, 108n13; TB303, 79, 93, 108n7, 108n11, 108n13; TR808, 79; 909, 93, 108n7 Russell, Arthur, 91, 93, 96, 102 Ryan, Jenny, 14, 186–202

S sacra, 221, 229, 233, 235, 238, 242 sacrificial logic, 14, 220, 233, 243 Sagiv, Asaf, 138, 144, 228 Saldanha, Arun, 3–4, 11, 12, 30, 35, 45, 55–65, 76, 107, 135 Sams, Greg, 92–93, 108n4, 108n6 San Francisco (Bay Area), 3, 14, 23–26, 36, 72, 75, 192–195, 197–198, 222–223. See also HaightAshbury Sanctuary, The, 92 Sasha, 118 Schmidt, Joshua, 13, 128, 131–148 Semele, 174–175 sequencer, 33, 75, 79, 108n13 Seroussi, Edwin, 145 Shakespeare, William, 62 shaman: neo-shaman, 76; shamanism, 76, 82, 93, 171, 206, 210, 227, 236, 243n3; techno-shaman, 76, 99, 171, 189–192, 194, 210, 214; self-shamanising, 223 Shamania festival, 121, 123, 126 Shamanic Tribes on Acid, 5, 89 Sherburne, Philip, 100–101 Shimonim, 136 Shiva, 76, 122, 171 Shpongle, 5, 96, 102–103, 224 Shuker, Roy, 116–118 simulation, 162–165 Situationist movement, 187–188 Skazi, 82 Slack, Jennifer Daryl, 90

258 Index Slinky Wizard, 95, 101, 109n18 Smith, Jason, 92–93 social networking platforms, 6, 14, 117, 186, 192, 194–196, 200n6, 203–205 Sonica Festival, 173, 220, 232–235, 243n10 Souque, Serge, 97 Spiral Trax, 103 Spiral Tribe, 126 Spirit Zone Records, 34, 98, 100, 102 spirituality, 1, 7, 11, 42, 45–47, 52, 59, 62, 64, 72, 76, 79, 126, 134, 140, 143, 151, 159, 167, 170–171, 191, 194, 196, 198, 210–212, 217, 223, 224, 226– 227, 236; spiritual hedonism, 11, 128; spiritual tourism, 44 St John, Graham, 1–17, 46, 70, 132, 134, 138, 151, 157, 165, 189, 190, 200, 204, 210, 220–246 Stone, Brad, 195 Stonehenge, 126 Strange Daze, 122 Straw, Will. 10, 55, 70–72 subcultural capital, 8–9, 120–121, 128, 187, 196, 198 subculture, 1, 4–8, 41, 44, 48, 50, 58, 120, 126–127, 132–133, 135, 137, 141, 145, 197, 209, 217, 223 suicide, of scene, 59–62 Summer of Love, 24; Second Summer of Love, 32 Sunrise (Manchester), 99 Suomisaundi (spugedelic), 2, 38, 114, 117 Sutcliffe, Steven, 196 Suzuki, Tsuyoshi, 83, 98, 101–102 Swiboda, Marcel, 91–92 symbolic pollution, 157, 159, 165–166 synthesiser, 31–34, 72–75, 76, 79, 94, 100, 108n11

T Tago Mago, 71 Tangerine Dream, 32, 74, 80 tantric yoga, 75, meditation, 76 Taylor, Sabastian (Digitalis, Somaton), 97, 101, 109n19 Taylor, Timothy, 2, 11, 127, 151 techno music, 31–32, 57, 69, 71, 74–75, 77–78, 80, 84, 93, 97, 99–101, 103, 106, 109n20, 114–

115, 118, 121–122, 124–124, 128, 190, 225 techno-shamanism, 76, 99, 171, 190–192, 210, 214 techno-tribal, 7, 189 Teiresias, 175–176, 179 Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), 72, 186, 197, 199–200, 210 terrorism, 61 Thebes, 174–176, 182 Thornton, Sarah, 8, 81, 120–121, 123–124, 127, 187, 196–198 Tigges, Wim, 167 timbre, 93–94, 105, 115, 208 TIP Records, 34, 78, 94, 103, TIP.World, 103, 105, 109n23 Toadstool (Gloucester), 99 Tobin, Yishai, 131, 140 Total Eclipse, 78, 81, 95–97 Tourism, 26–26, 30, 35–37, 41–45, 47, 50, 52, 56–61 TPE Festival, 82 Tramacchi, Des, 11, 138, 154, 159, 222, 225, 228 trance: commercial, 2, 120, 123; progressive psychedelic (trance), 1–2, 227; progressive trance, 2, 57, 118, 120. See psytrance Tranceplant, 232 transcendence, 8, 98, 119, 184, 198, 204, 214, 217, 220, 229 Transient Records, 34, 95 transistim. See Isreal travellers, 2, 9, 21, 26–30, 33, 38, 42, 44–45, 49, 57–59, 80, 83, 92, 98 Trevor, Dick (Dickster), 90, 94–95, 98, 101, 104–106, 108n3, 115 Tribe of Frog (Bristol), 99, 114, 125 Tribe.net, 14, 186, 190–197, 199, 230 trompe-l’oeil, 163–164 Tully, Mark, 59 Turner, Fred, 187–188, 200n1 Turner, Victor, 58–59, 138–139, 186, 199, 204, 214–215, 220, 221, 225–228, 233, 235, 240 Tuscany, 13, 170, 173, 176, 184 Twilight Zone, 81 Twisted Records, 89, 97, 102–103, 168n5

U Ulansey, David, 183–184, 222 underground, 2–3, 7, 10, 14, 29, 49, 57, 70, 75, 78–79, 91–92,

Index 101, 105–107, 120, 133–134, 152, 163, 186, 188, 192–193, 196–198 Ungerleider, J. Thomas, 153 utopia, 9, 24, 70, 196, 199, 229, 235; utopian, 10, 14, 30, 61, 64, 144, 186–187, 189, 190, 221, 235, 238

V Vagator Beach/Village, 22, 28, 31, 33 Van Gennep, Arnold, 220, 225–226, 240 Van Kampen, Jeremy (aka Laughing Buddha), 95–96, 98, 100–101, 104–105, 107, 108n4, 108n10–11 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 176, 179, 182 vibe, the, 2–3, 9, 125, 138–139, 168, 173, 181, 180; clubbing, 8; demented, 151–152, 156–157, 162, 166–168, 227; mega-vibe, Goa vibe, 3, 38, 57, 78, 230, 236 virtual ontology, 206–207 Vision Quest, 82, 85n3 Vitos, Botond, 13, 151–169 Voov Festival, 102

W Waveform Festival, 114, 124–126

259

Whirl-Y-Gig, 93 Whiteley, Sheila, 118 Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, 189 Whole Earth Catalog, 188–189 Wild Things Records, 105–106, 109n24 Willis, Paul, 8 Wingmakers (West Country), 99 Wood, Graham (Infinity Project), 34, 96 wordless discourse Wriple, Naasko, 238, 240

X X-Dream, 101–102, 109n20

Y yoga, 3, 51, 72, 75, 76, 81, 184, 236 Young, Mark (DJ Beardy), 106 youth, 4–5, 7, 23, 25,-26, 42, 58, 79, 127, 132–133, 139, 142–145, 170–171, 173, 177, 221–223, 228, 242; culture, 4, 56, 223, 232, 243n10; movement, 180 Youth, 92, 94–96, 101, 108n4, 108n8,

Z Zionism, 141, 144–145 Zubzub, 124