Can we talk about Psytrance? Like, as a movement?

Musically it had less than nothing to offer outside of an MDMA environment (to me, anyway) - but the energy of it all was fun to be around.

dual xpost

i was talking to gareth bout this the other day and i was surprised the way that people into this always seems to ally themselves with the same other music genres, ie D'n'b and Dub. even those musics arent anything to do with, it historically, or sonically. But everyone I knew who went to HEadcharge etc etc always said "I like every type of music. you know, like Lee Perry and Grooverider". whats the connection exactly?

it does, to me, seem more like a forum for drug consumption then any sort musical movement.

seeing me friends continue going to these evens has been troubling to me for numerous reasons. the amount of drugs they've been doing makes me nervous. they have almost stopped listening to any sort of other music. & the people they meet at these things (and are now hanging out with), although very nice, are basically a bunch of space cadets. maybe i wouldn't be so critical if as a result weren't going to (as i shudder to even think the name) darkrave¡ *shudders more*

they smoke mad pot and they hate babylon. it's not that complex, is it??

you will notice the kid on the right is wearing a hoody with a grey alien on it. i remember in early 1995 reading an early copy of xlr8r called "the jungle issue". it had an interview with goldie over some cheesy hyperdelic background, on the facing page was some us d'n'b dj sitting on a huge plastic magic mushroom.

as far as dub, that's an even simpler musical connection. the last thing i listened to before i went to sleep last night = observer allstar's "casanova dub". it's an endless horn vamp over an unchanging rock-solid rhythm, instead of focusing on crazy drop-outs and bizarre sound effects like lee perry might tubby just lets the vamp play and play and play and twist and slowly shift in and out of phase with the bassline until it seems to detach and float away from the rhythm entirely. this is another main trick in the psy-house bag - aside from deep tribal house it's as dubby and spatialized as any dance music gets.

http://www.efestivals.co.uk/images/logo.gif

(although: totally otm abt the niceness being coupled with space cadetism, um, yeah, I'd just love to come to your club night and meditate for peace but, like, haha, seriously)

which would explain, partially at least, its almost total alien-ness to most dance people, and, also, its huge popularity in places like mexico, israel, thailand etc

http://gnosis2000.net/pics/e2e4.jpg

it makes me wonder = what were djs spinning in goa in 1985-1992?? what were they listening to mid-morning when they were taking naps/breaks??

i guess the centre of this scene is now israel, rather than goa?

and, is it true, that the israeli govt put pressure on india to police goa a little more, because of the numbers of israelies going there?

http://stat.discogs.com/R/146622-001.jpg

The scene peaked as goa trance, which tended to be quite fluffy, around 94-95 and then started getting harder and darker eventually splintering into psytrance, cybertrance, and all manner of names which I have forgotten.

progressive house has kinda fallen out of favor, though...new thing is...electroclash -sigh-

Acid house was also massive.

it's too bad there's not a psychedelic techno scene centered around old black dog =(

Ozric tentacles were a definatle early influence to a lot of producers so was system 7 and the orb.

Juno Reactor paid tribute to front 242 by having them remix a track off their bible of dreams album.

I used to play some adam beyer, empirion, and eye q records stuff like metal master and alien nation at psytrance parties.

goa trance came from india I thought?... ?????

Anyways, perhaps I am confusing another Indian type trance/dance music with "Goa"?

good point actually, i wonder, how far back do goas eurogeois roots go?

okay, i'm wayyyy off, this sounds nothing like what i thought GOA Trance was. I love misappropriating dance genres haha.

close but not quite.

I got into it around '97 and followed it up until sometime last year. Basically the history since it formed as a genre goes something like this:
1992-1994 Pretty much indistinguishable from german and acid trance. I fact Harthouse released many tunes that I would classify as Goa and Eye Q is a bona fide part of the scene (Kox Box and that Goahead track). Platipus also released some Goa around '94-'95 before they went all cheesy trance.
1995-1997 The golden age I would say. Many classic albums. Israel becomes a powerhouse. Characterised by multi-layered melodic fast acidic stompers.
1998 X-Dream released "Radio". Stripped down (the basslines are just one repeating 16th note, this becomes the standard for a while) kinda techno-ish dark sound.
1999-2002 The sound gets darker, slower and more minimal. Until by 2001 it seems completely dominated by stuff that sounds like Progressive trance. Melodies, layers, sense of humour, everything is dropped. Cass & Slide who used to make Goa become stalwarts of the Progressive scene.
2002 - now? The "full-on" sound makes a resurgence albeit the IQ is dropped by about 40 points. The basslines are these big rolling affairs (see the whole 3D Vision catalogue, on second thought, don't) which leave no room for anything else. But just because there is bass don't expect there to be funk. If you look at the real Goa you will notice there is no bass, at least not in the 30-100hz range which gave it a certain floatiness.

Recommended listening:
Pleiadians - IFO ("Maia" if you want only one track) & Family of Light albums. My favorite producers (also check their stuff under the name Etnica). The first is a great example of the '95-'97 sound taken to extreme.

Spirallianz - Blast Food (especially "One Way LTD") for an example of the minimal sound. Even better if you can hear the silver edition eps (http://www.discogs.com/release/95950).

and these tracks (the last one is not recommended but representative):

Total Eclipse - Waiting for a New Life (early stuff)
Technosommy - Electron Bender (proper Goa)
Prana - Boundless (ditto)
Hallucinogen - LSD, Shamanix
Astral Projection - People Can Fly (Israeli stuff)
Infected Mushroom - Psycho (more Israeli but after the 16th note bass takes over)
Cydonia - April Fools (guitars...wicked)
Parasense - Boomerang (minimal but fast and with energy)
Son Kite - Youngel (progressive psy)
Nomad - Schyzo (neo-fullon)

Also, there's a certain group of producers who went on to make chill-out music. This stuff on average is a lot better these days than your average psy. It's still from the same ghetto, people outside the scene don't really know about it. For this kind of stuff you should check out Shpongle (same guy as Hallucinogen) and Ishq.

http://duskdigital.com/gallery/duskfilm-animation?page=2

http://www.techgnosis.com/hedonic.html

That was a cool soundsystem.

(Also, is that track with the theme from Bubble Bobble famous? Can someone hook me up with that shit? 'Cos, I mean, Bubble fucking Bobble, yaknow?)

Personally, without drugs the music is of little interest to me. Even with drugs I got bored of it fairly quickly.

so...i think i'll swing by the psytrance tent at next week's party, just to check things out...james holden's djing at the same party, bound to be good!

OMG I think I like Psybient.

I got here completely by mistake - I was listening through a friend's Steve Hillage/System 7 reccomendations and was giving Mirror System a listen, and then Spotify just moved on without my noticing to an album that Mirror System had done a collaboration with an artist called Bluetech and suddenly I'm listening to all stuff called things like Shpongle and it's... INSANE.

Not what I think of as being "trance" at all- it's like bits of glitch and lots of the gentler end of Aphex ambient stuff all mixed up with ethno-techno and lots of droney wibble and some genuinely mindbending psych sounds and AAAAARRRRGGGHHHHH - I really am enjoying this.

This way badness lies, right? I should stay the fuck out of this stuff, huh?

Some of this stuff really does sound like Hawkwind meets Aphex Twin which is pretty much my idea of musical heaven.

o_0

Come on, someone talk me out of this. Where are the ILX dance nazis when you need them? ;-)

Shpongle seems to be the trance(ish) artist it's OK for trance haters to like, or at least back in the days of IDM the electronic music communities I vaguely floated around would regularly hate on trance with some vehemence but every so often someone would big up Shpongle.

(Just an observation and not a claim that this makes him better or worse)

I was never hugely into this stuff, but in my days of just having discovered electronic music and devouring every subgenre of it I could find in the hope of achieving profound unified understanding I dimly remember liking Juno Reactor, Man With No Name and (whisper it) Ozrics-related trancers Eat Static, all of which still sound pretty good in small doses if I'm honest, but I have not a clue what has happened in the psytrance world since the 90s.

Who are you and what have you done with Kate?

I've haven't been to a warehouse/beach party in 15 years, am reasonably well groomed, and I've liked psy for nearly that long; particularly the short-lived psy-breaks microgenre, suomisaundi (Finnish freeform), and psybient. For all the praise for sound design in minimal house earlier this decade, I know of no electronic genre that forefronts fiddly engineering as much.

To be honest, much psybient washes me over with about as much memorability as random Steve Roach: I enjoy immensely it as environment, but I can't be arsed to figure out what track I just heard on shuffle. In that respect and other respects, its not terribly different from FSOL or the Beyond/Waveform artists of the mid-90s it emulates.

As Kate noted, Sphongle and Simon Posford's other projects (Celtic Cross & Younger Trees) are nicely textured fare that err just on this side of the charmingly loopy / ethno-dreck abyss. Other decent (among the online community, at anyrate) psybient names include Bluetech, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Entheogenic, Ishq, Ott, Pitch Black, Solar Fields, and Shulman. Satumnaisuus and Jikkenteki have released fine free-for-download psybient. Just reading that list of names is cringeworthy.

I was surprised as you were, Ed!

Honestly, one minute I was listening to my usual dodgy Steve Hillage prog records, the next I've fallen down a rabbit hole. The Bluetech album was on for about 20 minutes before I realised it was not what I was meant to be listening to - and I checked because it was actually quite good to program to.

It is exactly the fiddly engineering bobbins that amuse me so much about it. There's lots of playing with the stereo field, which always excites me, lots of phase shifting and turning sounds inside out. It's got a lot of the kind of "weird sounds" aspect of IDM but put into a format which is much more fun and pop and engaging than, say Autechre albums that make you feel like you've just sat through a really dry as old bones physics lecture and are just exhausting to listen to. It just kind of activated the bubblegum bit of my brain.

That said, I was caught up in some pretty hardcore maths this afternoon, perhaps if I'd been paying more attention I wouldn't have liked it as much.