Trance Psyberdelic
1997
Goa Trance / Psytrance
I honestly really couldn't tell you what the differences between Goa trance and psytrance are. They seem to be used interchangeably to describe the same type of psychedelic dance music, and for those that claim to listen to both, everyone seems to have a different opinion about what makes one and what makes the other. At the end of the day, It's all kind of inane and mind-numbing since there's no consensus, but Goa trance is a highly acidic form of trance that originated in the tiny coastal Indian state of Goa in the early 90s. Tourists from Europe then found their way to its beach raves and brought it back home, and Paul Oakenfold popularized it further in December of 1994 with the airing of his Essential Mix aka the Goa Mix on BBC Radio 1. In the US, it also found favor among both the cyberhippies and Silicon Valley-types who took psychedelics, and those two walks of life would coalesce together at Burning Man and provide a platform for the music in the Nevada desert. And for some reason, in the late 90s, it seems that people started labeling Goa trance as psytrance too 🤷♂️.
So, while I've never been able to say that I genuinely like this stuff, there are a couple tunes on this 1997 comp from the often underwhelming, LA-based Moonshine Music that actually managed to resonate with me a little bit. Trance Psyberdelic has a dark vibe to it, overall, and it seems to put its best foot forward with its 10-minute opener in "Dominion," by UX. But you have to endure all this fast and corny, acid stab-addled, eyeroll-inducing muck to get to its most transcendent part, which occurs in the second half, when a complete changing of the rhythm seems to suddenly occur.
I guess what Goa and psy basically come down to, though, is that you either fall prey to the foundational beds of acid stabs and squelches or you don't. And I definitely don't. And I love a thick, layered, textured, intricate sound where there's all these little pieces that make a dance track whole, and when pretty much any other genre does it, I'm blown away by it. But that's just not the case for me with this music here. Goa/psy appears to be an acquired taste, and while I've found a very small handful of tunes over the years that I do enjoy to some degree, I don't think I'll ever actually end up acquiring that taste.
