This lively textual symposium offers a collection of formative research on the culture of global psytrance (psychedelic trance). As the first book to address the diverse transnationalism of this contemporary electronic dance music phenomenon, the collection hosts interdisciplinary research addressing psytrance as a product of intersecting local and global trajectories. Contributing to theories of globalization, postmodernism, counterculture, youth subcultures, neotribes, the carnivalesque, music scenes and technologies, dance ritual and spirituality, chapters introduce psytrance in Goa, the UK, Israel, Japan, the US, Italy, Czech Republic, Portugal and Australia. As a global occurrence indebted to 1960s psychedelia, sharing music production technologies and DJ techniques with electronic dance music scenes, and harnessing the communication capabilities of the Internet, psytrance and its cultural implications are thoroughly discussed in this first scholarly volume of its kind.
Author(s): Graham St John
Edition: 1
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 270
Book Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 6
Copyright......Page 7
Contents......Page 8
Figures......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 12
Psytrance: An Introduction......Page 14
Part I: Goa Trance......Page 32
1 Goa is a State of Mind: On the Ephemerality of Psychedelic Social Emplacements......Page 34
2 The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes: The Case of Psytrance in Goa......Page 53
3 The Ghost of Goa Trance: A Retrospective......Page 68
Part II: Global Psytrance......Page 80
4 Infinite Noise Spirals: The Musical Cosmopolitanism of Psytrance1......Page 82
5 Psychedelic Trance Music Making in the UK: Rhizomatic Craftsmanship and the Global Market Place......Page 102
6 Re-evaluating Musical Genre in UK Psytrance......Page 127
7 (En)Countering the Beat: Paradox in Israeli Psytrance......Page 144
Part III: Liminal Culture......Page 162
8 DemenCZe: Psychedelic Madhouse in the Czech Republic......Page 164
9 Dionysus Returns: Contemporary Tuscan Trancers and Euripides’ The Bacchae......Page 183
10 Weaving the Underground Web: Neo-Tribalism and Psytrance on Tribe.net......Page 199
11 Narratives in Noise: Reflexivity, Migration and Liminality in the Australian Psytrance Scene......Page 216
12 Liminal Culture and Global Movement: The Transitional World of Psytrance......Page 233
Contributors......Page 260
Index......Page 264
