The state of trance
The sun transmits prismatic rays over Anjuna beach, Goa. A camaraderie of new age travellers sink their heels into microscopic beads of white sand, which ferociously leap to the static pulse of spiralling basslines that have no beginning and no end.
The technological mysticism, behind this no beginning and no end, is the use of DAT tapes to cut up instrumental samples and loop them continuously. A vinyl wouldn’t last long in the sun’s buttery glaze and the wind’s tumultuous turns, so it was a limitation that unlocked a different realm of dance music which clasped hands with a similar state of mind. By the mid 90s, Goa had earned its stripes as a psychedelic hotspot for new age travellers looking to escape their mundane lives and expose themselves to a life with no rules, no expectations, and no dead ends. At the musical forefront of this movement was Goa Gil, a hippie from San Francisco inspired by groups such as the Grateful Dead and Psychic TV, who embarked on a spiritual path in India. In an interview with Michelle Lehooq he defines music as “a way to go into a trance, and a party as a vehicle to transmit ideas and knowledge”.
However, this perceived abundance of freedom became the victim of its own success. Michelle Lehooq in her essay “A Post-Colonial History of Psychedelic Trance” accurately explains that “white hippies that came to Goa in search of an alternate, more liberated way of being, often replicated the very systems of exclusion and oppression they were ostensibly escaping”. This was due to hippies living in a siloed utopia that did little to nurture or give back to the local community. This idea that hippies would extract, adopt and exoticize Indian and other non western spiritual practices, was partly the product of western media romanticism and led to the rise of rave tourism, alongside the introduction of the ‘psychedelic diaspora’ that spread to Israel and Australia (Graham St John). It’s also worth mentioning the definition of ‘new age’, which is the art of linking self improvement with spiritual beliefs, in order to exist outside of any form of religious practice. The day goa trance lost its credibility, was the day where people stopped questioning their intention for engaging in a community built on good ‘faith’, which led to inevitable consequences. Prior to that, it was influenced by the exploration and discoveries of American researchers that date back to the time of the Beat Generation.
Hedonism and protest through the psychedelic world
The Beat Generation was coined by Herbert Huncke in 1945, who picked up the word ‘beat’ (i.e. to be beaten down) by ostracised people from the carnival and circus communities. Later introduced to the media by John Clellon Holmes, he summarised this subculture as involving “a nakedness of mind, and ultimately of soul…a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness” (Steven Watson, The birth of the beat generation: visionaries, rebels, and hipsters, 1944-1960). It was a literary subcultural movement, consisting of poets from San Francisco and New York such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. They adopted a spiritual resistance to literary traditions that explored themes within sexual liberation, music, psychedelic drugs, and buddhism. The Beats paved the way for later counter cultural youth movements, such as hippies and new age travellers, who engaged in these hedonistic ideals.
Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters are a good example of those influenced by this movement (which also involved Neal Cassady). It was the bridging gap between the Beat Generation and the hippies. “It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that we were hippies because it wasn’t in the news yet” (Magic Trip documentary, 2011). They regularly ran parties in the San Francisco Bay Area, called ‘Acid Tests’, and regularly booked the Grateful Dead to perform. The idea of these events was to mix music and other art forms with psychedelic research. The Trips festival came shortly after, run by Stewart Brand who also published the Whole Earth Catalog. A diary excerpt from an old Trip festival-goer reads “it was kinda like re-birthing or going way back to the beginning of life forms” (Prankster History Project, 1999). The magic bus, ‘Further’, was the otherworldly vehicle of the Merry Pranksters who took a road trip across the USA in 1964. It was an ephemeral trail of chaos and ludicracy. But eventually, the hippie bubble burst. Over in the UK, the Battle of the Beanfield, was an event that took place in 1985 where police prevented new age travellers setting up for the Stonehenge festival. 537 travellers were arrested and women who were pregnant and with children were violently beaten. It was a dark day for the traveller community and marked the turning tide of blissful hedonism to underground rebellion. That’s not to say blissful hedonism was a negative thing. Ken Kesey undertook LSD trials in the 60s, which were actually an undercover operation by the CIA to see if they could put people under the control of interrogators. This polychromatic gang of lunatics were resisting more than met the eye.
Technoshamanism is a loose movement to describe the link between pagan rituals, performance and technology (David Green, Trance-gression, Technoshamanism, Conservatism, and Pagan Politics, 2010). It is most inherently linked to the UK, due to the abundance of illegal raves that took place across the country in the late 80s and beyond. It is essentially looking at raves as not only a form of social escapism, but also spiritual healing and transformation that pertained to the idea of shamanist practices. However, rave subculture exhibited a paradoxical “hedonism in hard times” in which self-expression proceeded through extravagant consumption (Scott R. Hutson, Technoshamanism: Spiritual Healing in the Rave Subculture, 1999). The result of rave culture being gallivanted by the press meant that any counter-cultural ideals were no longer entirely subversive to capitalist systems. Spiral Tribe is a good example of a collective operating outside of individualist ideals, but for the most part, technoshamanism fell into the hands of commodification over any sort of spiritual communication. “Raves should influence people metaphysically outside of the religious sphere” (Scott R. Hutson). It’s important not to compare capitalist individualism to the work of a shaman.
Spirituality as a mood
As the psychedelic landscape turned from hippie jam bands to electronic, it intercepted a different plane of psychedelia: the influence of jazz. The freeform improvised format also had a monumental impact on the development into electronic dance music, such as Sun Ra’s exploration into Afrofuturism (Space is the Place) and his “first steps towards artistic rebirth, a shamanistic transformation of himself as the central force in a bizarre and virtually self-contained universe” (David Toop, Ocean of Sound, 1995). Only this time, artists worked within hyper limitations, through machine drums and samplers with enough time for loops lasting a few seconds. In a 1988 interview with David Toop, Marshall Jefferson explains that acid house was not defined by a drum machine and a Roland 303. His intention was to capture a mood. “The way they’re doing it now it’s not capturing any moods. It’s disrupting thought patterns, man”. This approach to working with frequency to capture a mood is nothing new. It dates back to ancient practices in India and the presence of OM.
Forgotten practices
OM is the earthly vibration which mirrors the sound of the One Tone. It is said that music contains audible sound plus cosmic sound which contains power, energy, and consciousness relating to the word of God. “The OM shapes and organises primordial matter-energy in such a way as to cause atoms to coalesce, thus manifesting physical matter. All that exists is therefore conceived as being fundamentally vibrational in nature” (David Tame, The Secret Power of Music, 1984). In Indian classical musical teachings, it is expected to have a solid grounding in ancient religious texts, whereby the teachings are both musical and spiritual. The lack of harmonics in ragga is due to their tone scales creating a kind of monotonous resonance that is full of nuances due to the refined input of melody, rhythm and timbre. This monotony is akin to the rolling basslines of goa trance which on the surface level seems repetitive, yet it is within that repetitiveness that you uncover the cosmic vibrations. Only the difference is that goa trance adopts a completely western approach as it conforms to western music theory. It is therefore appropriating spiritual healing from the foundational perspective of tonality and vibration i.e. OM.
Shamanism dates back to indigenous populations during hunter-gatherer eras. The origin of the word shaman derives from the ancient Indian word meaning ‘to heal oneself or practice austerities’, or, from a Tungus (Siberian tribe) verb meaning ‘to know’ (Walsh, The Spirit of Shamanism, 1990). In short, “shamanism might be defined as a family of traditions whose practitioners focus on voluntarily entering altered states of consciousness in which they experience themselves, or their spirit(s), traveling to other realms at will and interacting with other entities in order to serve the community” (Walsh, The Spirit of Shamanism, 1990). However, since many indigenous and native cultures adopted unique shamanist practices, it is not tied to one culture, history, or context, therefore, it does not belong to a specific group of people. What is important to understand is that literature has been largely researched through a culturally white western lens, given that traditional shamans would not wish to write and sell books excavating their practice. So what has been passed down, and along, is difficult to decouple from western ideals. To reference psychedelic music today, the use of natural psychoactive substances to unlock altered states of consciousness is comparative to shamanistic rituals. The combination with technology also peers at a resistance against technocracy and to show how technology can be used in a way that fosters community over control. Whether you ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld, our need to enter a trance is one that is culturally and contextually personal, and within.
604-ness
People’s urge to engage with music that exists within the realm of the psychedelic spectrum is an attempt to find a sense of purpose that transcends one that is systematically assigned to them. In this sense, psychedelic music and the accompanying counterculture exists only if those involved partake in freeing themselves of values, rules, and expectations that are present in those systems. However, as the lines between culture and counterculture become blurred, and spirituality is ultimately indoctrinated into a commodified framework, how do you distinguish anarchy from conformity, appreciation from appropriation, creation from extraction?