About the Book

Hosting a rich interdisciplinary harvest of work on the culture of global psytrance (psychedelic trance), this volume includes research attending to psytrance as a product of intersecting local and global trajectories. Contributing to theories of globalization, postmodernism, counterculture, youth subcultures, neotribes, music scenes, dance ritual and spirituality, the chapters address psytrance in Goa, the UK, West Coast USA, Thailand, Israel, Japan, Greece, Portugal, Czech Republic, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere. Themes addressed include theories of subculture, neotribalism, and scenes; the hybridization of aesthetics, genres, and subcultures in psytrance; cosmopolitanism and dance; globalization and the role of new communications media and music technologies in production, performance and fandom; psytrance and the global underground; Orientalism, travellers and tourism; psychedelics, entheogens, and the ritual "experience"; trance carnivals and transgression; and contradictions within psytrance countercultures. These themes are addressed as they emerge at the local/global or regional/international junctures of psytrance.