Welcome to wonderland

Trance: elevated state of consciousness induced by meditation or by the stimulation of our senses. Psychedelic trance music, with its unique and complex sound made of repetitive beats, stimulates a neurological effect in the brain that tickles the endorphins to make them come alive and allow consciousness to be expanded through the sound of music, allowing you to effectively fall in a trance-like state. People belonging to what is called Psytribe, search for a transcendent experience, trying to feel outside their body and beyond the normal world. In a trance-like state, dancing amongst others, people journey into a connected existence with all that is happening inside the environment of where they hear the music, and perhaps beyond. Psytrance is a movement whose chief cause is dance, whose reason of being is dancing, and whose primary vehicle is the dance floor. It is built from an utopian imagination and attracts a transnational community alien to pop culture, whose common ground is the dance floor itself and which has its common roots in Goa, a destination that in the 70s gave birth to a live music scene where international travellers, artists and spiritual seekers found an exotic outland of experimentation. Festival culture illustrates a heterotopic, carnivalesque and synesthetic context in which participants experiment all available techniques of the self, like drugs, dance, textile fashion, piercings, hair styling, tattooing, spiritualism. Welcome to wonderland – counterculture of psytrance try to investigate this reality at the beginning of this new millennium.