As the scene is being over-run by you

[psytones]

http://forum.isratrance.com/viewtopic.php/.../106434/forum/1

 

I think the psy scene is in kinda trouble since a few years. As usual and as it has happened to other subcultural movements before, many different styles have evaporated out of the oldschool, original sound. They address lots of different people and/or states of minds, which is really a great thing. But it kinda got stuck and repetitive - but why?

 

I think it’s just the usual: business and hedonism.

 

Isn’t it funny, that in such an international, globally widespread scene (I think there never has been any comparable movement before, at least from the being absolutly globalized perspective) CD-realeases rarely sell more than a few hundred copies and still you have like a total jungle of different labels popping out the “killah releases” like a catholic hausfrau is popping out babies?

 

And in the quest of success most labels are just greedy of popping out the “newest”, “freshest” – well, or whatever that means – so that for most labels the recency became more important than the quality. If I read the descriptions from psyshop, which I guess do all come from the releasing labels, it is mostly brainless, proposterous hokum. It usually sounds like a sleazy washing powder commercial, just that the target group isn’t middle-class houswives but some slightly bemused fringe group that chose to live a tightrope between drug madness, drug addiction, keeping it somehow alltogether and believing that this lifestyle would really have some spiritual potential to it.

 

And most of the music sounds excactly like that. Italy’s musical embaressment Eros Ramazotti is for mid-aged, female clerks with widish asses who still believe some day they got picked by a magic prince. Britney Spears is for teenaged school girls who hope that their braces won’t keep them from getting their first kiss this summer holiday. Eminem is for their counterparts: teen-aged school boys with ugly, shiny sneakers and ridiculously gay belt-buckles who struggle with severe acne and hope that their summer holiday conquest won’t have any braces. Well, most Goa music nowadays is for malnourished, anemic wanna-be Terence McKennas who masquerade their addiction to drugs and their lust for transient, meaningless fun with a bunch of colorful, weird clothes, kitschy accessoirs and a mostly verbally spiritual correct habit, that often comes off a little overblown and out of place.

 

But the truth is: The majority of Goa fraggles are basically just big consumers. Consumers of new “killah releases”, heavy consumers of drugs, of course, consumers of laser shows, consumers of dancefloors and, most of all, consumers of an old and long vanished idea of a better life as a hippie. Even the conversation often seems like some kind of conspicuous consumption, as the topics often seem very much to go around in circels (drugs, high dosed drug-experiences, which is my favourite drug, myths about safer use of drugs, the most apprecciated artist that is about to play next night and is by no means to be missed, and, of course, boom shanka, mind & soul, just be yourself and all that pseudo spiritual load of crap).

 

Uh, and btw: Of course, you don’t have to *dance* on a dancefloor to consume it. You don’t even have to *listen* to the music that’s being played, it’s much more simpler: Just stand there in the middle of everybody, scream, cheer and whistle your ass off, with a can of warm, moldy beer in your hand and some amphetamines circling your metabolism and making your lower jaw compulsively nibble somewhere around the hair line over your ears, is all you have to do. Being such a drooly, gasping and noisy drug monster, you can always say, who ever is on stage just right now, makes the dancefloor “go crazy”.

 

May, 2006. I was at the tragically dreadful wet and rainy Sonnentanz festival in Austria (still, the irony of that name makes me titter ) and the second night or so, when I walked towards the dancefloor alone, there was this group of – hm, well, I think I’m gonna call them Goa hooligans – behind me that sang that famous soccer tune: “Oléééé, olé, olé, oléééé”, just they didn’t put their favorite soccer team in it, but the phrase “super Goa, oléééé, olééééé.”

 

It was at that moment, it hit me: I am at a soccer match in some British stadium, or at an overcrowed beach in front of ugly white tourist blocks in Spain, or at a ski piste in Switzerland, or at an camping site in Italy, or at Disneyland in Florida, or Mardi Gras in former New Orleans (now known as Atlantis), or at the local Burger King just next to the local charts disco, or at the Love Parade in Berlin, or just sitting at home after work watching those spirit crushing so called comedy shows. I’m just at another place where that mob-driven, hedonistic numbness is the idealized behaviour-pattern of that streamlined common sense that degenerates our little planet so much. Basically, I could be anywhere except nature - there isn’t much difference anymore between a psyparty and any other civilized place where people consume things some vibrant business-men have arranged for them.

 

It used to be a huge difference between psyparties and the crappy ordinary world. The latter is so utterly contaminated with mindless consumerism that makes *things* becoming more important than *people*, while the former used to be more about *just being people*. But today, psytrance has become ordinary, or: The ordinary people with their ordinary interests and ordinary habits have arrived at psytrance.

 

And that is the problem: On the one side, you have those, who want to make a shit-load of money, or to get appreciated by the masses, and on the other hand, you have those, who want to have some brainless, absent-minded weekend-fun. So you have Skazi, Domestic, Infected Mushroom and all that Goa-Rave-Pop-Trance-musical-warfare-against-good-taste-shit behind and on the stage and all those dimwits screaming like it is some kind of a Tokyo Hotel concert at the dancefloor in front of it.

 

Or you have some pointless noise that sounds like a vacuum cleaner dubbed over a traction engine for those who obviously want to keep it undahground, man!

 

Don’t get me wrong, there is still lots of good freaky music out there, but the market forces in psy aren’t different from those at the New York stock exchange, so you just don’t get to hear it on parties - or at least very rarely. You rather hear that mass produced CCC-Trance (crappy, childish and cheesy) for the masses, which is, from a musical point-of-view, simply a catastrophe and an embarresment for the whole scene.

 

So, who’s with me? Who wants that difference back that it once used to make? How are we gonna get it? Where? I don’t want to ditch or snub anyone here. These are just my personal observations after dawdling away 11 years in psytrance wonderland. I really miss the un-normality that I thought the term psychedelic always referred to: That simple, basic and sometimes very hard “be-it”. No attitude, no fashion, no style, no raving madness, no narcism. Just let the woofs hittin’ your vulnerable brain cells and getting yourself brutally kicked out of reality into reality simply by the music, which is impossible with all that stopstarts, snare roles, siren sounds and that one special consistently emerging melody, that tries so hard to be utterly euphoric but just manages to be as poetic as the emotional and spiritual profundity of a barbie doll.

 

So what to do? Could it really be that this whole scene and its basic non-verbal idea of just *purely being* had have so little real substance? Or have I been so fuckin’ delusional all this years, thinking of that idea as sharing it with others without having to talk about it? Or is the idea still there, but those parties aren’t the “place-to-be” anymore? So, where is it then?

 

Maybe it’s just a fuckin’ awful decade we are living in. When some US-warmongers and their European poodles try to bring up World War 3, when religious and political conservatism is gaining more and more relevance in most of our societies and when our so called elites try their best in fulfilling Orson Welles’ and Aldous Huxley’s darkest prophecies, while those who would have got the potential to make some difference rave their nights and brains away with mind-crushing doses of MDMA and crappy kindergarten-guitar-riffs over some hectic, neurotically discontinuous basslines.

 

Or maybe I’m just getting old and turned into a severe cynic at the abyss of my thirties!?

 

Well, anyway, just some thoughts.

 

Cheers.

[Shaft]

I can't speak for the scene itself.. I just buy music I like. Yes I'm a consumer, no I don't give a monkeys.

 

Oh, this would fit in General much better.

[AlieNed]

quote :

Anything is going to the End

anyway we still can choose , soon we may loose the chance to choose from

[slyman604]

just come to a party in the US, no one knows or cares about psy here besides hardcore fans.

 

kind of ironic actually, the land of comercialism is the least commercial when it comes to psy.

[abasio]

The scene has been in a low point with loads of pop people liking the music & the predictable pandering to these people who BUY music but are not really into it! They will get bored & move on to something else as all pop people do. I ask my pop friends if they still listen to the music they liked 15 years ago like I do & not one of them still listens to what they liked 2 years ago

The thing is they go to the record store & buy music. If they still listen to it years later probably doesn't bother the artist selling it. They want tsome one to give them money for their work. Quite a lot of the people who complain about the way the scene has gone don't even buy music anymore & just download saying I'll buy it if I really like it but never do.

They are killing the scene & it is partly their fault that music has become bland repetitive POP!

 

IMO

[RTP]

It was at that moment, it hit me: I am at a soccer match in some British stadium, or at an overcrowed beach in front of ugly white tourist blocks in Spain, or at a ski piste in Switzerland, or at an camping site in Italy, or at Disneyland in Florida, or Mardi Gras in former New Orleans (now known as Atlantis), or at the local Burger King just next to the local charts disco, or at the Love Parade in Berlin, or just sitting at home after work watching those spirit crushing so called comedy shows. I’m just at another place where that mob-driven, hedonistic numbness is the idealized behaviour-pattern of that streamlined common sense that degenerates our little planet so much. Basically, I could be anywhere except nature - there isn’t much difference anymore between a psyparty and any other civilized place where people consume things some vibrant business-men have arranged for them.

Scooter Concert! I had the vision being on a Scooter concert! But that makes no difference, I felt the same like that guy ... only I was not at Sonnenklnag but at some normal gig, but anyway.

 

Yes, the dude is very right (and it's a really good post ... such intellectual talk doesn't fit to Isratrance I always thought).

But when the development of our music is like that you can't really stop it, there's too many people that prefer the mindless drug crap music. Or well, they probably don't care and would not be able to distinguish Dimension 5 from Skazi in their drugged up minds. And industry noticed. That's why they now release cheap crap music. Because nobody cares! Or well, the ones who care are in such a minority that it doesn't harm business when they don't buy releases/go to parties. The expanding of the mindless scene is still bigger and stronger than the amount of people that jump out of it. That is the point: we just have to wait until the drop-out rate is higher than the expanding rate, then industry will see that they will make less and less money and stop hyping it and slowly leave the terrain until in the end it will be calm again. But we must have the patience to wait until this point, which is god knows when. Until then it will get worse and worse. And still worse. It will expand so much that in the end you have the people there in our scene you'd never have wanted there. But the industry doesn't matter - CDs are sold, tickets are paid, money is earned. And that's the only thing that matters to them. The going down of the scene doesn't even come to their minds, it's their profit after all.

 

All in all the unfotunate fate we thinking psyheads that still go to parties share is, that we actually give a damn about our scene! And the others don't. And they are in the vast majority.

Just wait until the chavs come. They are already there, but wait until they come in masses! Then there will be poice raids not because of drug issues, but because of mass fights and violence!

[Late]

I ask my pop friends if they still listen to the music they liked 15 years ago like I do & not one of them still listens to what they liked 2 years ago

IMO

That´s just people in general, the majority of humans just are not that passionate about music, it has nothing to do whether they listen to pop or non-pop (for lack of a better term) there`s a lot of excellent pop music out there.

 

Well then, the intial post, copy&paste or not, had some good points and some clichèd "grumpy old man" stuff in it.

I haven´t been to a "big" psy party or festival in ages but from what I see and hear atleast over here there are plenty of underground happenings.

 

For some reason I have never really cared for these "state of the scene" opinions because I feel that I am not a part of any scene, especially anything global. For example I always wondered about the enormous amount of anti full-on/tube whine, when in reality nobody forces me or you to listen to it nor go to parties where they play it.

 

Also, I see great innnovative music being released all the and like the article said, new labels pop up all the time just because of the impetus of music that deserves to be heard: Exogenic, Psy-Harmonics, Dada Stream, 6-d Soundz , Creative Space, Freakdance, Faerie Dragon, Demon tea making a comeback, etc... the list goes on and on.

 

To the "grumpy old man" stuff, it has been around for ages. I recall reading somewhere that in the mid-nineties there was similar "Scene ruined by crap music" statements on goatrance mailing lists when e.g the Hallucinogen` debut album came out. So it`s nothing new.

 

Sure certain nasty phenomena can come out of the growth of the "global scene" but as consumers of music and the dance floor we can always vote with our wallets.

 

p.S Am I the only one who thinks this "chained" view of the posts in crap?

[reger]

Scooter Concert! I had the vision being on a Scooter concert! But that makes no difference, I felt the same like that guy ... only I was not at Sonnenklnag but at some normal gig, but anyway.

you went to scooter ?

 

 

 

ale - check "options - display mode - standart", its at the top of the page, on the right side, right above opening post. if thats what you meant

[RTP]

you went to scooter ?

no, I actually never went to Scooter, but I was thinking that if I was on a Scooter concert the people would also scream like crazy at every break and during every tune just like on the party I was at that time. I wouldn't have been surprised if all of a sudden Scooter would appear on stage. That was my feeling. I felt like on a Scooter concert although I never have been to one

[reger]

no, I actually never went to Scooter, but I was thinking that if I was on a Scooter concert the people would also scream like crazy at every break and during every tune just like on the party I was at that time. I wouldn't have been surprised if all of a sudden Scooter would appear on stage. That was my feeling. I felt like on a Scooter concert although I never have been to one

ok

[rino]

you went to scooter ?

Even if he had been to Scooter's concert, so what? Whassup? Are you too spiritual to attend it? Did Shiva touch your forehead with his index finger and tell you that Scooter is music for non-enlightened losers? Or does your over-the-top psychedelic self esteem prevent you from understanding how can anybody like such "popish" music? Not that I like Scooter, but the ironic manner in which you asked the question makes it seem like potential Scooter fans are idiots... And the mere fact you dislike them does not place you in any privileged position.

 

You know how it goes reger: live and let live. If one chooses to go to a Scooter concert, are we competent enough to make fun of that person?

[reger]

Even if he had been to Scooter's concert, so what? Whassup? Are you too spiritual to attend it? Did Shiva touch your forehead with his index finger and tell you that Scooter is music for non-enlightened losers? Or does your over-the-top psychedelic self esteem prevent you from understanding how can anybody like such "popish" music? Not that I like Scooter, but the ironic manner in which you asked the question makes it seem like potential Scooter fans are idiots... And the mere fact you dislike them does not place you in any privileged position.

 

You know how it goes reger: live and let live. If one chooses to go to a Scooter concert, are we competent enough to make fun of that person?

at times your reply's seem to be adequate, im affraid that this is not the case, this time it was bit "over the top", calm down, youre not a bulldog

 

nah, i just think that scooter is shit, nothing more, nothing less, taking other people ideas and bringing them to brainless zombies as their own. they are there to copy-paste any big hit of 80/90 and on out there. no recent album without covers, says alot. sure, at first they were remix group, but those times are over and they are not "the loop" or whatever was their nickname. anyway, yes, to put it simple - scooter is shit and vast majority of those who hail them are brainless teens, just like emo shit pop rock. boring, with no substance, laking innovation/freshness and with horible "mc hp" cheese lyrics consisting of "yeah yeah yeaa yeaaah aaargh allright crew" and other cheesy shit, those who enjoy that yelling are the ones to be least considered grown ups with own taste, just chasing the trends. kiddy pop.

and yes, real psy is better than scooter at any time.

[Bahamut]

Some old Scooter tracks are actually on the same level or even less crappy than most darkpsy and fullon.

And since I judge an artist by their best works, Scooter > quite a lot of psy artists.

[Guest antic]

Some old Scooter tracks are actually on the same level or even less crappy than most darkpsy and fullon.

And since I judge an artist by their best works, Scooter > quite a lot of psy artists.

+1

 

for example the track "Cosmos" from their first album!

I quite liked the second album too (typical happy-hardcore), although it all speeded downhill after HP got convinced he could sing...

[reger]

+1

 

for example the track "Cosmos" from their first album!

I quite liked the second album too (typical happy-hardcore), although it all speeded downhill after HP got convinced he could sing...

yeah well, cosmos had lyrics too

[visine]

yeah well, cosmos had lyrics too

Ever heard early Scooter work from 1994 like "Unity Without Words Part 1"?

They were pretty good then. Check it out here: http://www.discogs.com/release/51931

I like that track and maybe one or two more from that Scooter era.

 

Of course, it may sound a bit dated today but back then it was on par with many early Trance tracks.

 

I'm not gonna comment on what they did in more recent years, and to be honest I didn't even bother because

I didn't think I'd like it so I didn't buy it...problem solved.

[AlieNed]

Scooter was very great indeed ,i had thier early albums , i wud not say its somehow worse then modern psy (pop psy)

happy hard core style had the same mood as goa , u can hear many similar notes /sounds and sounds pretty nice anyway

and Shiva never told me i shud stay away from Scooter or Green Day as long they doin a good job

and at the point hear the freakest HPs yell ITS WEEEEEEEEEEEKEEEEEND !!!!

http://www.discogs.com/release/374439

[reger]

Ever heard early Scooter work from 1994 like "Unity Without Words Part 1"?

They were pretty good then. Check it out here: http://www.discogs.com/release/51931

I like that track and maybe one or two more from that Scooter era.

 

Of course, it may sound a bit dated today but back then it was on par with many early Trance tracks.

 

I'm not gonna comment on what they did in more recent years, and to be honest I didn't even bother because

I didn't think I'd like it so I didn't buy it...problem solved.

yeah, ive heard that one too.

download, you wont have to buy.

 

Scooter was very great indeed ,i had thier early albums , i wud not say its somehow worse then modern psy (pop psy)

happy hard core style had the same mood as goa , u can hear many similar notes /sounds and sounds pretty nice anyway

and Shiva never told me i shud stay away from Scooter or Green Day as long they doin a good job

and at the point hear the freakest HPs yell ITS WEEEEEEEEEEEKEEEEEND !!!!

http://www.discogs.com/release/374439

hp started to yell long before weekend

[AppA]

Ofcourse, agree to (almost) to everything. Though it seems as one of those 'commercial' vs. 'true' posts, which isn't bad at all (contrary), but it sure isn't new.

Any comparisson with the Dutch hardcore scene flow? Who knows

[qa2pir]

Are really all psytrance fans drug addicted pseudohippies in tie-dye?

 

I really need to visit one of those parties and just watch them

[AppA]

Are really all psytrance fans drug addicted pseudohippies in tie-dye?

 

I really need to visit one of those parties and just watch them

Well, I for instance (like undoubtedly more here) like to explore multiple layers of my own subconscious with certain substances. For that I need a safe place called home. I don't take hyper-dimensious jumps on parties, because, that's already arranged with the music no?

[Time_Trap]

Are really all psytrance fans drug addicted pseudohippies in tie-dye?

 

I really need to visit one of those parties and just watch them

Not really. That's where i disagree with the article.. yes they are a lot of pseudo ppl.. or ppl that just don't know enough.. but there are (or maybe.. were??hm_) people that are 'true' (true. 'true' is relative but you get what i mean) tripperz out there... uhm.....

 

anyways.

[abasio]

yeah, ive heard that one too.

download, you wont have to buy.

That's the spirit

[psytones]

omg. i cant believe you guys are discussing scooter

[psytones]

Dune PAWNS Scooter any day http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?what=R&obid=12242