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Neo-nomads

06 Nov 2011 Leave a Comment

by goamusic in Uncategorized Tags: consciousness, dance, electronic, global, goa, neo-nomads, psytrance, shamanism, spiritual

Psytrance is characterised by specific techno-tribal associations committed to (re)producing a distinct vibe. The genre is unique in that its public events are likely the most culturally/nationally diverse dance music events worldwide. It is also of interest here since elements within this movement hold conscious religio-spiritual pretentions. While there is a paucity of published ethnographies configuring the religious and spiritual characteristics of this global movement, Anthony D’Andrea’s study (2007) of “global nomads” who are mobile in a freak-diaspora characterised as a digital New Age began to correct this. Psytrance evolved from Goa trance, which had emerged as a reproducible and sought-after style of electronic dance music by the mid-1990s. With roots in the psychedelic counterculture and EDM developments of the 1980s and 1990s, psytrance is characterised by a diversity of subgenres, scenes, and concomitant aesthetics. With post-Goa scenes evolving across Europe, Israel, North America, Australia, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, and elsewhere, public events range from small-scale parties to large international festivals, the latter typically accommodating a diversity of sub-scenes and styles. Lasting over-night or perhaps during week-long campouts, events are favourably held in open-air locations where dance floors may be positioned in bushland, forest, beach or deserts, where participants will often celebrate celestial events (e.g. the full moon or a total solar eclipse) or hold parties to mark seasonal transitions.

Psytrance is replete with the characteristics of an alternative spirituality, which has flourished since the 1960s. According to Linda Woodhead, advocates of the “new spirituality” would express commitment to: a spiritual relativism which sees a profusion of religions and symbol systems adopted in the belief that they offer access to similar divine truths; a “new age” of unity, peace and spiritual enlightenment; the understanding that everyday reality manifests “a deep and unifying spirit or life-force” recognisable in the holistic/ecological mantra “All is One”; and an expressive “radical immanence” which sees participants accessing this underlying “life force” or “energy” through direct experience (Woodhead 2001: 81-2). Psytrance carries this cultural continuity of relativism, hope, holism and experience, the latter commitment certainly not the least as detected in the reworking of the Hendrixian question in the title of the debut album of the chief act in the Goa/psytrance movement, Shpongle: Are You Shpongled? (1998). It should also be recognised that psytrance is infused with the reflexive-utilitarian (visionary) and expressive-Dionysian (ecstatic) dimensions of the counterculture that Frank Musgrove had identified as “the dialectics of utopia” (1974: 16). As a vehicle for developments in responsive alternatives to dominant practices and for collective self-abandonment, psytrance constitutes a musical and cultural movement that embraces principal aspects of the 1960s-inspired new spirituality. Festivals like the global Earthdance phenomenon, San Francisco’s Synergenesis, or the UK’s Turaya Gathering (promoted as a “Holistic World Fusion Arts Gathering”), along with Australia’s Rainbow Serpent Festival, or Intention and other events operated by British Columbia’s Tribal Harmonix, among other international events and global sites accommodating a host of therapeutic, artistic and ecstatic pursuits, illustrate that the milieu inhabited by psytrance participants is one in which conscious alternatives and transgressive commitments have recombined.

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