Eps 1623: The history of Psytrance
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Kathy Mitchelle
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Goa Psytrance tends to be even faster than other forms of Psychedelic Trance, often being influenced by sounds of the east, particularly India. According to the Goa Trance story, music during this time is characterised as Psychedelic Dance-Trance. By 1990-91, Goa had emerged as a popular destination for parties, with Goa-style parties spreading across the globe.
It was an ultra-high, halcyon moment -- an entirely new world of music, dancing -- an entirely new experience for parties had opened up. The beaches in Anjuna were most loved places, the music went from Pink Floyd and artist Janis Joplin all the way through to 80ies, as the first free parties started reaching global levels. By the beginning of the 1990s, Goa had officially hit the map as a worldwide party destination, with sounds and styles associated with Goas rapidly expanding scene expanding into Britain, Australia, Japan, and Germany, gaining official worldwide attention in 1994.
Parties such as Pangaea and Megatripolis in the UK helped to generate numerous labels across several countries promoting psychedelic electronic music reflecting the spirit of Goa parties, Goa music, and Goa-specific artists, producers, and DJs. By 1970, the first DJs in Goa were fond of psychedelic rock bands, and would usually play the music of more well-known bands like Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, and The Doors. The first people who did this were Goa Gil and his friends, who had been living in Goa since the late sixties, and had been experimenting with different styles of music for dancing to .
An early capital of hippies, Goas love affair with electronic music was born in the 1970s, inspired by the sounds of Kraftwerk, and then further developed by the likes of Fred Disko, Ray Castle, and Goa Gil. In the 80s, Goa Gil fused dance and psychedelic rock, and though the sounds came from all over, inspiration could not come from anywhere else than Goa. At the same time, there was electronic disco in Detroit, and due to all the hippies, there was still the psychedelic influence from 70s music.
The hippies during that period celebrated psychedelic parties that were influenced from different genres of music, ranging from acid rock to reggae. With their newfound freedom, hippies celebrated at beaches and held psychedelic parties influenced by music that they had grown up with, ranging from Acid Rock to Reggae. During the 1970s, the first psychedelic parties and outdoor parties were held on beaches of Goa, with psychedelic rock like Pink Floyd and The Doors being the type of music commonly heard at these events.
The psytrance culture has grown to festivals around the world, attracting millions. The genre was further developed by a group of DJs and producers known as Goa Trance, who began playing and producing psytrance music in Goa, India, in the early 1990s. The sound of Goa Trance is strongly influenced by Indian classical music, with their sounds featuring complex, multi-layered beats and melodies designed to induce trance-like states in the listener.
Some years later, during the height of the rave movement, we could see various genres emerging, with their own moods and sound structures, like Nithhonot/uplifting trance, psytrance, and progressive psy. Not to forget that the genre was inspired by a number of older genres like psy rock, industrial music/EBM, which led to an entire slew of mid-period breakthroughs and traveling DJs adding to experimental sound engineering, leaving us with some of the best psytrance albums to date. The blending of elements from a number of different existing genres like trance, techno, house, Native Indian music, etc., has also created a number of styles in artists who are willing to birth new subgenres of psychedelics.
The early 1980s was when we could begin adding the term electronic dance music into the Psy-EDM. For this article, we are going to call out the music scene that we love, the psychedelic electronic dance music, including goa, progressive, psy-trance, uplifting, darkpsy, woodsy, jack-on, or whatever other psychedelic music that you have heard and danced to at festivals and psy parties. Although Psytrance is a wide-ranging term; the Dance music community has associated goa with the psy community, and used the terms interchangeably.
Many of the original Goa trance artists are still making music, but they simply call their musical style PSY. Other legendary artists such as Astral Projection, Hallucinogen, Talamasca, Infected Mushrooms, GMS, Electric Universe, just to name a few, were some of the best ambassadors for 90s Goa Trance music. Well, everything started with the 1983-84 Goa Season, which was the first electronic, goa music, which was... up to Goa 1983-84 Season, and during that season, we were all night long, tripping & dancing on, to, normal music -- Talking Heads, Burning Down The House, Billy Idol, White Wedding, and, Rebel Yell, The Cult, Born To Be Wild, Tina Turner.
This genre has given rise to various sub-genres, ranging from Full On Sound to a darker style, which is, still stirring the soul. Psybient, also known as Psychedelic Ambient or Ambient Psy -- is a genre of electronic music containing elements from ambient, downtempo, psychedelic trance, dub, world music, new wave, ethereal wave, and IDM.