This lively textual symposium offers a collection of formative research on the culture of global psytrance (psychedelic trance). As the first book to address the diverse transnationalism of this contemporary electronic dance music phenomenon, the collection hosts interdisciplinary research addressing psytrance as a product of intersecting local and global trajectories. Contributing to theories of globalization, postmodernism, counterculture, youth subcultures, neotribes, the carnivalesque, music scenes and technologies, dance ritual and spirituality, chapters introduce psytrance in Goa, the UK, Israel, Japan, the US, Italy, Czech Republic, Portugal and Australia. As a global occurrence indebted to 1960s psychedelia, sharing music production technologies and DJ techniques with electronic dance music scenes, and harnessing the communication capabilities of the Internet, psytrance and its cultural implications are thoroughly discussed in this first scholarly volume of its kind.

About the Author
Graham St John is a Research Associate at the University of Queensland's Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, and was recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Interactive Media and Production at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan, and an SSRC Residential Fellow at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico. His recent book Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures was published by Equinox in 2009. His edited collections include Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance (Berghahn 2008), Rave Culture and Religion (Routledge, 2004), and FreeNRG: Notes From the Edge of the Dance Floor (Common Ground, 2001). He is the Executive Editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. (www.dj.dancecult.net).

Reviews

"The Local Scenes and Global Cultures of Psytrance provides a valuable insight into a world-wide movement which has had comparatively little study so far." -Rupert Till, University of Huddersfield, UK, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture

"A valuable contribution to academic understandings of, and writing about, the ongoing strength of EDM cultures." -Susan Luckman, University of South Australia, Cultural Studies Review

Book Information
ISBN 9780415898164
Author Graham St. John
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 500g