You know those people with bongos and dreadlocks you occasionally see loitering around South Coast university towns? Y'know, the ones wearing patchwork tea cosy hats and ethnic-print harem pants. Well, do you ever ask yourself what they get up to during the ten months of the year when there's no Croatian festivals based around a brief lunar eclipse for them to go to? Do you ever wonder what kind of music hippies listen to now that Bob Dylan makes lingerie ads and reggae is all about drug murders and shooting homosexuals again?
Well, worry no longer. The answer to all these questions is psytrance.
For the uninitiated, psytrance is the sound and the look of Europe's (honestly, psytrance is more European than Zucchero and Sepp Blatter chanting "Seven Nation Army" at the Pamplona bull run) nu-hippie movement. The name of the associated music genre is a simple smashing together of the words "psychedelic" and "trance", but the culture surrounding it is far richer than that. It was always something that people I went to college with came back from Goa talking about, it was something that even people who like gabber didn't really understand. Everyone knows it exists, but no one knows how or why. It's a completely esoteric movement that I've always been a little fascinated by.
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