Psytrance

By the time the names for musical styles hit the mainstream press they’re often about to go out of fashion. However, a festival of psytrance music recently held in Brixton, south London, suggests that this genre is moving out of specialist clubs, away from the meditation and yoga crowd, and is about to become more widely popular. The Glastonbury Festival will devote a whole day to it this summer. It has had various names, such as psychedelic trance and Goa trance. As these names suggest, it’s a blend of psychedelic and trance music, essentially electronic in nature with a thumping beat and highly repetitive style which makes the average listener drift into a dissociated state. The reference to Goa is not accidental: it was originally very much linked to blissed-out hippies swaying to the beat on the beaches of south India.