Dancecult
January 1, 2009
Graham St John
38 citations
Psytrance music culture, particularly at events like Portugal's Boom Festival, exhibits religio-spiritual characteristics through three trajectories: ecstatic self-transcendence, performative self-expression, and reflexive engagement with conscious alternatives. The article examines neotrance within contemporary trance events, the countercultural inheritance of 'tribal' psytrance festivals, and how participants' 'ultimate concerns' are dramatized within the festival framework. These elements together offer insights into the spiritual and communal dimensions of psychedelic festival culture.
Dancecult
January 1, 2015
Deirdre Ruane
35 citations
Transformational festivals often include psychedelic support spaces staffed by volunteers who typically view psychedelics as tools for personal growth. These volunteers must adopt the contrasting language of harm reduction to gain access and legitimacy at events. Harm reduction, originally a grassroots heroin advocacy movement, has become associated with medicalized views of drug use. This article examines how support workers navigate these conflicting discourses across different drug policy climates. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at seven festivals in the UK, US, and Portugal, including participant observation and interviews with nineteen support workers, the study found tensions between psychedelic and harm reduction discourses within organizations and with medics, security, organizers, and police. The findings suggest mainstream harm reduction may poorly fit psychedelics, potentially creating divides that damage trust between users and workers.
Dancecult
January 1, 2011
Graham St John
10 citations
Goa Gil is a central figure in psychedelic trance music, blending roles as a DJ, producer, and spiritual leader across decades and continents. His 2007 compilation "Worldbridger" reflects his aim to connect physical, spiritual, and cultural worlds through "trance dance rituals" that appropriate sacred sites and tribal icons. Gil's career spans from 1960s Haight-Ashbury to Goa, India, and the evolution of Goa trance and darkpsy. He is both celebrated and criticized as a controversial "techno-shaman" who embodies ambivalence within global psychedelic scenes. This article examines his anomalous status in DJ culture.
Dancecult
January 1, 2013
Graham St John
8 citations
Psychedelic electronic music culture, from Goatrance to psytrance, cultivates a socio-sonic aesthetic infused with the sensibility of exile and expatriate compatriotism. Participants adopt the figure of the alien in transpersonal and utopian projects, repurposing cosmic liminality, space exploration, and abduction narratives from science fiction. This posthumanist pretension resembles Afrofuturist sensibilities, which are identified with, appropriated, and reassembled. The article explores the interface of psyculture and Afrofuturism, focusing on Israeli psychedelic artists and the dance floor as an orgiastic domain where mutant utopias are propagated and alien identities danced into being.
Dancecult
January 1, 2012
Joshua I. Schmidt
8 citations
In Israel, psychedelic electronic dance music culture has become unusually prominent in the mainstream. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article compares how secular and orthodox Jewish youth use trance-dance parties to serve their respective community needs. These contrasting uses reflect the distinct socio-cultural circumstances and conditions of each group.
Dancecult
April 20, 2012
G. John
5 citations
Psychedelic trance music and culture (psyculture) emerged from a seasonal dance party scene in Goa, India, during the 1970s and 1980s, shaped by a diverse, heterogeneous exile sensibility. Rather than fitting a single formula, Goa trance and its later forms are internally diverse, influenced by expatriates and bohemians from many countries who brought experiences from cosmopolitan urban centers. The DJ-led trance dance culture in Goa absorbed innovations in electronic dance music production, performance, and aesthetics throughout the 1980s, leading to the Goa sound and festival culture in the mid-1990s. Rooted in an experimental freak community, psyculture inherits this diverse exile experience, blending conscious self-realization with ecstatic self-abandonment.
Dancecult
November 23, 2023
Graham St John
The acid house rave scene of the early nineties found an unlikely champion in Terence McKenna, a counterculture figure whose recorded speech under the influence of psychoactive tryptamines produced an alien-sounding “elf chatter.” Producers of psychedelic electronica have since mined McKenna’s “unEnglishable” vocalizations as a precious sonic resource. Over three decades, McKenna has become likely the most sampled individual in electronic music history, with artists adopting his voice as a template for the unknown. This practice, termed mckennasploitation, evokes the “apocalypse” of self and culture central to ecstatic dance movements and echoes McKenna’s prophesied “Eschaton” in an era of accelerating crisis.
Dancecult
November 23, 2023
Trace Reddell
Psychedelic experience makes cognition in extended brain-body music systems especially agile, requiring a sonic rhetoric that emphasizes transformative agency. Drawing on the recursive listening spaces of dub, three forms of psychedelic electronica—ambient house, trip-hop, and glitch—foster an echological sensibility unique to records assembled from bits of other recordings. Longform albums in these genres serve as sonic pharmakomedia, pharmacologically activated non-human agencies that sustain psychedelic mind-machine systems. Managing set and setting through music selection is common in psychedelic research, therapy, and personal practice. The article puts indigenous shamanic practices in conversation with neuropsychopharmacology, sound studies, and music production to offer a diagnostic inventory of the sonic substance's effects.
Dancecult
January 1, 2004
Tobias C. van Veen
A book by Riccardo Balli, a longtime insider of the international underground electronic music scene, aims to resist the process of historification, which the author compares to museification and death. Balli, a DJ, label owner, composer, novelist, and live performer, offers a firsthand account rather than a critical or historical analysis, seeking to preserve the scene's living, experimental spirit rather than allowing it to become a static, commodified artifact.
Dancecult
January 1, 2004
Daniel Paul Schnee
This book, written by a longtime insider of the international underground electronic music scene, resists the process of historification, which the author compares to museification and death. The author, a DJ, label owner, composer, novelist, and performer, offers a firsthand account of the scene's culture and ethos, aiming to preserve its living spirit rather than reduce it to a historical artifact.