death of goatrance

On 2006-07-05 13:55, kaz wrote:

Quote:

On 2006-07-03 05:16, WereBear wrote: Quote: On 2006-06-30 16:13, kaz wrote: Goa is dead? No shit, is this thread a newsflash from 1997 or something? Respect to be respected. There's still producers doing goa trance.

There is movement without life too. Just very, very little.

On 2006-08-09 21:55, WereBear wrote:

That is a opinion of someone that didn't experienced a good live of classical goa.

Even though many full on have problems on what it is now, goa haves its own problems too. Analizing your opinion, we all should destroy what its ancient, and build up new tech buildings in theyr place.

The thing is, i can go to a full on party and have a good time. Why people can't try to be pacient and give it a try to goa trance? I'm sure that you would change your opinion about it.

On 2006-08-15 18:10, Alectrance wrote:
i hate who destroied psychedelic trance with psytrance

Then it happened. Psy and Goa had a illicit child named Full-on

On 2006-08-17 13:25, Hypersubject wrote:
This is a brilliant thread! I thought I would offer my two cents in the hope of saying what some of us goa trancers might be thinking.

What is it that makes Goa trance so different from psytrance today?

All dance music touches on the tribal theme, of course, because of its nature. But how deep does it go? How far are you interested in taking it? Goa fuses the ancient and the modern more than any other genre I can think of (you would think tribal house had a lot of potential for this but history seems to have proven otherwise). All those ideals of the group creating a collective consciousness together and raising each others' vibrational frequencies in a hope of mutual transcendence, that desire to return to the roots of human nature, the return to the source, everything that gets disregarded these days as new-age bullshit - Goa is the only EDM genre that actively promoted that excellent kind of bullshit.

This is just me, but I prefer my trance to have a spiritual element. This doesn't necessarily mean mythological Indian themes, it just means that the main focus is on something larger than yourself, something more than just you getting your groove on. It can be Indian or futurist or alien-themed or absurdist or whatever.

You can often see whether people had this spiritual element in mind when they created the music. My thinking is, less and less psy producers and DJs these days do this.

What do you think of when you hear the word "psychedelic"? Do you think of funky colours, swirling fractal patterns and crazy hallucinations? Or do you think of the word in its more abstract, original sense: "mind-expanding"? The latter doesn't depend on drugs, although they contribute to it. If you do enjoy the occasional trip, do you do it to be "blown away by all the fuckin sick colours and shit" (as a friend of mine said once) or do you do it for reasons that are less about entertainment? Do you contribute to acid and mushrooms being called "recreational" drugs or are you helping to show that they can be more than this?

The same difference applies to dance music. Some kinds of music are just more "spiritual"; they have elements that are more 'ancient' than others. Take for example acid house and happy hardcore. If you try to let yourself become totally absorbed in each of them and just let go and dance your arse off... which one makes it easier to do this? I suppose for the sake of it you could argue it's just as possible to do it with happy hardcore, but I'm hoping you'll agree that there is something about acid house that is better for the transcendental experience. It's more repetitive, it's richer in resonance, it sucks you in, it almost intimidates you, it plays with your mind... and it does this usually with only one type of synth! Put simply, acid house is more PSYCHEDELIC.

I think this is the reason for Alectrance's post - "i hate who destroied psychedelic trance with psytrance", and all those people in here that are talking about the nostalgia for Goa and how there is a Goa spirit that is timeless. It is because what Goa represented is timeless - the true psychedelic experience. What psytrance has "evolved" to become has been stripped of a lot of its spiritual, ancient+modern, communal elements. If you agree with my definition of the word "psychedelic", then modern psytrance is less psychedelic than Goa.

If psychedelic for you means funky colours and powerful drug-like effects, then the modern stuff is just as psychedelic, maybe even more so with those "whoooaaa" crazy FX sounds being exaggerated in genres like dark psy.

Now here's the thing: I'm 19 years old. I missed the Goa era, and I have never experienced a Goa rave. All I have been able to do is to listen to and read as many of the artefacts as I can and let my imagination tell me how wonderful it was. Of course I've experienced a kind of transcendence and collective consciousness at modern psy events - who hasn't - but it's nothing like what I've been told about. I hear these stories from people of all ages above mine about how enlightening and eye-opening their youth was because of the culture they participated in. If you mention psy today most people my age (in Australia at least, anyway) will say "psytrance - fuck yeah, I love Infected Mushroom!!! That guitarist is insane!"

I'm a bit disappointed because my generation has not been able to enjoy a music culture with spiritual elements. In the 60s they had shitloads of it, in the 70s they got Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd and whatever else evolved from the last decade, in the 80s they enjoyed acid house and techno, in the 90s was Goa... I go out to psy events now and see people sucking on lollipops and others too scared to dance for fear of judgment. Was it always like this? It seems to me as though psytrance has evolved to be accessible to people that really "aren't into any of that spiritual stuff" and would prefer to just munch on a disco biscuit and listen to lots of whoosh sounds through high pass filters.

You can say Goa is "dead", but only in the same way that jazz is dead, or baroque music is dead, or funk or 50s rock is dead: they aren't the current fad. Yet they are still huge sources of inspiration and creativity and they lend their influences to all sorts of music today. The Goa spirit, on the other hand, is alive and well; it's just waiting for us to indulge in it.

I don't want my generation to miss out on the beauty that is the Goa spirit, which is why I'm aiming (as an amateur producer and DJ) to take Goa - whether it is "dead" or not - as a starting point once again, and to branch off and evolve down NEW paths, more spiritual paths than might just appeal to those kids at my age who don't have an outlet for this kind of thing anymore (I think Shpongle have been successful in doing this and I love them for it). It's as if we've created full-on and dark psy, realised it lost something special during the process, and then decided to take a step back and start again. We have to make a reason to have those insanely good doofs again, out in the forest or on the beach or on a hilltop, where the real magic happens.

I know some of you agree with me, and know that this can definitely be more than just idealistic fantasy, so I look forward to being part of a new wave of really fucking decent music with you.

Sorry about the rant, I'm sure this kind of thing has been said before but I just wanted to give my spin on it.


DISCLAIMER: I really, really love listening to (and creating) all kinds of psytrance so please don't take this as some sort of elitist judgement on the others!! They all have their good parts and bad parts, just like Goa; I only mean to say that they tend to lack something in particular which Goa definitely has.

On 2006-08-17 16:27, psytones wrote:
Impressive. I've made some good fruit lunch thingy with porridge. And I've printed out his post in paper form.
I'll enjoy my food now, and read his thoughts. Looks interesting