I'm mostly surprised that a post about psytrance gets over 400 upvotes on HN. I'm a former (goa/psy) trance producer (in another life and century), and recently coming back to the world of producing. Maybe I'm stuck in the 90s, but it still feels to me like that "underground" sound we dance in the forest or desert to. But nope - 400+ upvotes on HN means it's a lot less underground than it is in my head, and even though the millennium was just "2 years ago" it seems like there was a lot of progress in those "couple years".
I’m an engineer who has enjoyed psytrance since the 90's and I’ve sometimes wondered how the two relate, if at all. In some aspects psytrance could be better described as sculpture in motion rather than music. The process of making it also feels more like sculpture than the live, in the moment creation of music on an instrument. Regarding the two, I visualise psytrance as form, motion, colour, etc., with a lot of slowly shifting, but often nested, repetition much in the same way I visualise computational processes.
Same feeling here... Really surprised there are so many upvotes here. Well, the fact that we now have a vocal and even political psytrance only says that this is now part of the pop culture. And the sound has changed as well. Today's music is, well, uhm, different from what was produced back in the DAT tape era...
