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The story of psytrance is full of sweeping drama. Its origins can be traced to the open, empty beaches of India, where psychedelic rock was once played to slow-moving Western tourists. Over time - and because the climate in Goa lends itself to dancing - quintessential prog-rock sounds were added to a different beat. Lyrics fell away and swirling harmonies were instead used to evoke cosmic, perhaps chemically-enhanced landscapes.
The leisurely pace of that rock tradition was also jettisoned, since psytrance tracks today operate at a lively speed of 140 bpm, if not faster. Guitars have likewise been replaced with synthesizers and various markers of Asian music, be they genuine or merely appealing, exoticized stereotypes.
Other recognizable elements are worth noting. Rather than operate "horizontally," passing through the verse-chorus-verse structure of pop songs, say, psytrance evolves "vertically," i.e., as various peaks of complexity or volume. Their frequency and duration are not predetermined; building metaphors of flight or space travel upon that format is not difficult.
Tie-dye canopies also add to the spacey atmosphere.
Consequently, a great deal of contemporary psytrance turns the druggy imagery of a '70s heritage into more futuristic tales of astronauts or interplanetary adventure. This, after all, is a style designed specifically to escape the here and now - with thoughts of vertical movement.
Bearing that in mind, it's intriguing to look at some exponents of this style around Russia, and see whether physical geography plays a role. Put differently, if psytrance is a danceable form of bold escapism, does it matter where it's written? Does is bear any local indicators at all?
Let's start in Moscow, since this week sees a couple of new releases from the St Petersburg Sunstation project. Both those publications come from the capital, more specifically from Anix Gleo (aka Aleksandr Liventsov) and Astroff (Sergei Prilepa).
Those same gentlemen are shown in the first two images above; hard work and happiness seemingly predominate.
Liventsov is a remarkably productive young man, since he authors not only music, but also works of prose and a wide range of graphic art. He perceives a common emphasis across these projects as "the search for [complete] reality and 'UFO' elements in every track." Actuality, therefore, is not truly complete without the inclusion of some classic psytrance cosmology.
Escapism, in that case, is also nothing more than fidelity to one's potential. Almost a moral prerogative, in fact, leading us closer to the kind of assertions once made by Paul McCartney - that if politicians took LSD, then war, famine, and poverty would cease. They ought to.
Stories woven into [ornate] sentences as the fabric of imaginary fates
Liventsov's prose narratives, pondering that laudable yet hypothetical maximalism, are "woven into [ornate] sentences as the fabric of imaginary fates." Thoughts of experiential plenitude must necessarily involve events and horizons beyond ostensible experience.
Working hard to exhaust his own creative potential, Liventsov refers to himself as a "miniature factory." The surroundings of Moscow inspire such industrious, if not incessant escapism that this young musician sees decreasing differences between himself and the machinery with which he operates.
As elements of humanity fade away in this mechanized environment, we reach the ethos of Liventsov's newest recording, "Stupid Me And My Smart Computer." Here he directly invokes elements of cyber- and steampunk science fiction, themselves based on a similar mismatch between technical progress and human experience.
People, it transpires, work very hard in order to exhaust the ideal, maximum efficiency of the tools they've made. Whether they should do so, however, remains moot. A disconnect emerges between the reverie of "fiction" and unforgiving rigor of "science."
Whose tastes am I following? Mine or those of the computer...?
Liventsov accompanies his new works with a small text verbalizing that tricky issue: "I really don't know who did more for this music: me or my computer? If the computer breaks down, I'll be without music. If I 'break down,' the music will live on - or others will easily be able to revive it... Whose tastes am I following? Mine or those of the computer...?"
The new recording from Astroff takes a much more humorous stance towards these sci-fi extremes. The dystopian tendencies of cyberpunk are swapped for the stagename "Fungus Funk," characters like Duck the Mechwarrior, and a declared intention to make listeners "laugh and dance." Rather than melodramatic or otherworldly self-portraits, therefore, Astroff prefers to employ the kind of imagery shown above, taken from the earth's periphery. From this world.
The boundless, enticing expanses of science fiction are here colored with romantic irony to the point where bitter-sweet humor dominates. Our musician, therefore, has nothing to say, but his music can still be ominous on occasion. Where Liventsov's driven prose ends in doubt, Prilepa's rhythmic structures continue. They can be unrelenting. The people at Sunstation describe the new Astroff compositions as: "Fast pumping beats and acid riffs to lacerate your brain."
Fast pumping beats - and acid riffs to lacerate your brain
Humor, self-harm, and yearning all operate side by side.
If we move away to other psy- or progressive trance exponents outside Moscow, do any emphases emerge beyond the binarism of drive and self-doubt?
Moscow's Pitch Music have also produced a couple of new trance works, the first of which comes from Togliatti, an industrial center five hundred miles from Moscow. Here we find the male duo known as The Fusion: Stainslav Serkin and Sergei Makarov. Togliatti is often referred to as the "Detroit of Russia." Given the fate of domestic automobile production in recent years, one might expect some cyberpunk tendencies here, too.
And indeed, the musicians' attitude towards their home city is not exactly positive.
Interestingly enough, though, relief from that industrial tedium comes not through the hyperbole of cosmic romance. Both Anix Gleo and Astroff make liberal use of NASA radio broadcasts, taken in turn from space expeditions; in other words, we hear the voices of those who've reached space. Serkin and Makarov, though, find an object of (relatively) distant desire a little closer to home.
It's hinted at in their artwork, shown above.
"Stas and Segei were both born and raised in Togliatti - on the banks of the Volga, which is Russia's greatest river. Here the beauty and expanse of the Zhiguli mountains is juxtaposed to the monotonous architecture of an industrial city. Togliatti suits the kind of performing artist who likes to work in silence, paying no attention to everyday matters - and ignoring the 'amusements' of a megalopolis, which only depress your spirit."
The beauty of the Zhiguli mountains is juxtaposed to Togliatti's monotonous architecture
The picture above shows Togliatti as viewed from those same mountains. The music's bpm, inspired by those noiseless distances, drops and the rhetoric also calms down - explicitly as a result of our location.
Moving further still, the musician known as Martin Cloud also has a new Pitch Music EP, produced on the streets of his own hometown - Nizhnekamsk in Tatarstan. Now almost 700 miles from Moscow, we find ourselves in a much smaller urban center of 230,000 people. Russian mapmakers only granted Nizhnekamsk the status of bona fide city in the 1960s. Prior to that it was known merely as a "working settlement."
Even today, one needn't walk far from the city limits before the vertical structures of apartment blocks turn swiftly into open grassland.
Mr. Cloud himself, a mere 17 years old, is now the proud father of four progressive trance compositions, known together as the "This Is Not Real EP." Once again, the tempo falls - in fact, the apocalyptic drama of our Moscow publications starts vanishing altogether. The surrounding landscape, it seems, stands in for anything cosmic. One emptiness stands in for another - and this time it offers a sense of calm, rather than dystopian anxiety.
It takes little effort to find photographs that capture the piece and quiet of Nizhnekamsk's uninhabited environs. Take, for example, the local hydroelectric power station below: for all the clamorous, even frantic enterprise on display, the limitless forest beyond those factory walls is simply thrown into stronger relief by the bricks and steel.
Why, in a word, yearn for the night sky and other sci-fi abstractions when a surrounding, natural emptiness offers the same experience? The further we move from the urban tensions of Moscow, the more these trance composers draw inspiration from a horizontal, rather than a vertical purview. The usual connotations of provinciality are reversed: a distant, verdant horizon inspires musical of "vertical" intent.
When Cloud recorded his New Year's wishes in January - and turned to distant admirers - he spoke not of faraway planets, but matters much closer to home.
"Hi, everybody! How did you all spend the first few moments of 2011? What did you drink? With whom did you drink? How was it? What did you listen to? How was the music?"
What did you drink? What did you listen to..?
Over the years, this style - born of a '70s psychedelic tradition - morphed into a dramatic, sometimes grandiose consideration of cosmic escapism, frequently tinged with elements of cyber- and steampunk. The pathos of Russian psytrance, it seems, can nonetheless be countered by the unimaginable scale of the land in which its written. Take, by way of (local) illustration, the endless grassy landscape of Tatarstan. All that's needed in order to satisfy an interplanetary Wanderlust is beer, some cheap headphones, and an open vista. Russia has all three in abundance.
Serkin and Makarov, armed with these same, simple tools, wait for the next bus to the Zhiguli Mountains. Any steampunk fantasies en route can be satisfied by ramshackle public transport.
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