The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance

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.

Graham St John is a Research Associate at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, and was recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Interactive Media and Production at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, and an SSRC Residential Fellow at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico. His recent book Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures was published by Equinox in 2009. His edited collections include 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). He is the Executive Editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. (www.dj.dancecult.net).

List of Plates and Figures Psytrance: An Introduction, Graham St John Section I: Goa Trance 1: Goa is a State of Mind: On the Ephemerality of Psychedelic Social Emplacements, Luther Elliott 2: The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes: The Case of Psytrance in Goa Anthony, D’Andrea 3: The Ghost of Goa Trance: A Retrospective, Arun Saldanha Section II: Global Psytrance 4: Infinite Noise Spirals: The Musical Cosmopolitanism of Psytrance, Hillegonda Rietveld 5: Psychedelic Trance Music Making in the UK: Rhizomatic Craftsmanship and the Global Market Place, Charles de Ledesma 6: Re-evaluating Musical Genre in UK Psytrance, Robin Lindop 7: (En)Countering the Beat: Paradox in Israeli Psytrance, Joshua I. Schmidt Section III: Liminal Culture 8: DemenCZe: Psychedelic Madhouse in the Czech Republic, Botond Vitos 9: Dionysus Returns: Contemporary Tuscan Trancers and Euripides’ The Bacchae, Chiara Baldini 10: Weaving the Underground Web: Neotribalism and Psytrance on Tribe.net, Jenny Ryan 11: Narratives in Noise: Reflexivity, Migration and Liminality in the Australian Psytrance Scene, Alex Lambert 12: Liminal Culture and Global Movement: The Transitional World of Psytrance, Graham St John Notes on Contributors Index