Liminal Being: Electronic Dance Music Cultures, Ritualization and the Case of Psytrance

Abstract

The dedication to ritual is persistent throughout electronic dance music cultures (EDMCs). From small regional parties to sprawling international festivals, from club-nights to week-long events, from techno to dubstep, organizers and participants are committed to phenomenal and embodied trans-formational experiences. It is common for participants to express the view that they feel more ‘alive’ within these contexts than at any other time. Across EDM scenes, the core of this activity is commonly identified as the ‘vibe’ (St John, 2009, Chapter 4), the sociosonic context for transcendent conditions accentuated through audio-visual media and design, event management practices, dance performance and pharmacology. This chapter addresses ritualization in EDMC with a focus on psychedelic trance (psytrance) and its event-culture. Rooted in Goatrance, global psytrance culture (or psyculture) offers con-texts for intentional ritualization, with music producers, DJs, VJs, event management, fashion designers, label managers and enthusiasts collaborating to enable transitional conditions through liminalization. Their interventions form romantic and esoteric responses to conditions of disenchantment arising in transitional sociopolitical con-texts: nascent democratic, libertarian, postcolonial. In this chapter, I recognize psytrance as a post-Goa EDM event-culture that has emerged in locations worldwide where the liminal, or in-between, condition of dance, and indeed ecstatic dance, is seminal. In this movement, music technics and event design are optimized to facilitate states of being-in-transit. Scholars have typically sought to comprehend participation in EDM cultures as a ‘rite of passage’ enabling transition from ‘preliminal’ to ‘postliminal’ conditions. Yet, harnessing and repurposing sensory technologies, psyculture is an assemblage of practices designed to augment threshold conditions. Ritualization is not necessarily intended to effect passage to another status but to inaugurate or prolong a state of liminal being. In this way, psytrance, in all of its diversity and resourcefulness worldwide, is a superliminal culture.