The Inverted Sublimity of the Dark Psytrance Dance Floor

Abstract

Photo by Richard CattienBased on my experiences and understanding of Hungarian, Czech and Greek psytrance parties, this text offers a concise view on the aesthetic categories triggered by dark psychedelic dance floors.Such dance floors incorporate crowds of varying sizes, influenced by psychedelic drugs, and dancing through the night (and sometimes through the morning) on a music which can be considered the hard core of psytrance.Quality darkpsy music involves the organic evolution and breakdown of distorted and interwoven sound layers of high complexity, with an underlying tempo which exceeds 150 BPM, and often collapses down to zero or speeds up to hyperspeed.The main preoccupation of this genre seems to be the continuous transgression of its own perverted boundaries, both musically and semantically: the distortion, reversal, speeding up and destruction of rhythms and layers, the use of both menacing and nonsensical sound patterns, the continuous oscillation between horror and humor creates its characteristically demented atmosphere.When consuming psychedelic drugs such as the popular LSD, the flow of the music captivates the participant, and triggers a series of hallucinations, which traverse beyond and obscure the categories of everyday reality, disengaging the participant into a zone of the unknown.In this manner the dance floor generates an excess of (un)reality, a Baudrillardian (1988) simulated medium from which distinct aesthetical sensibilities arise.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.