Pushing the boundaries: Investigating the musical and social aesthetics of dark psytrance

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Melbourne psytrance scene, this chapter addresses the musical and social aesthetics of the dark psytrance (darkpsy) electronic dance music subgenre and its furious dance floors. The interviewees of my research often regard psytrance tracks as the musical transpositions of psychedelic drug - particularly LSD - experiences. Dark psytrance can be considered the hard core of psytrance, sending its LSD-infused musical structures into overdrive. Regarded as the flagship in the evolution of psytrance by fans and considered to be uncomfortably or even menacingly intensive by others, darkpsy follows the basic imperative of becoming increasingly faster and adopting more abstract forms of expression, destabilising rigid boundaries and catapulting the listener into a zone of the unknown. Such dissolution of meaning is celebrated on dance floors of high intensity, where psychedelic music and drug become integral parts of a media ecology that is aimed at the presentation of the unpresentable.