Psytrance and the Spirituality of Electronics :: Electronic Music

Psytrance and the Spirituality of Electronics Electronic music is generally broken into techno, house, trance, hardcore, breakbeat, and ambient music, along with affiliated smaller genres that float between categories, like trip-hop, electro, IDM, and others. Ambient is easily recognized by its separation from dancing, which is normally manifested in slower tempos and less distinct rhythms. Breakbeat (of which drum'n'bass makes up most of the faster genres, while there are slower genres as well) is distinguished by an emphasis on ways of dividing a bar of 4/4 time other than the standard one. (Notably, there is a focus on the second half of the third beat, though this comes about in various different beat patterns.) Hardcore (an important subset of which is called â€Å"happy hardcore†) is distinguished by its extremely fast tempos (generally over 160 bpm) in 4/4 time. House is distinguished by its focus on the second and fourth beats of 4/4, though it also shares many stylistic characteristics with disco, funk, and other popular musics, that help distinguish it from trance and techno. Of these, techno is generally not as fast (around 100-120 bpm) and tends to be more minimalistic, while trance is more melodic. House and trance are by far the most popular genres of electronica, though house tends to be more popular in clubs and trance more popular at the parties often known as â€Å"raves†.1 Within trance, psytrance is distinguished by its generally higher tempo (135-145 bpm), more focus on sixteenth notes and exotic scales, and most noticeably, through the use of general sounds other than percussion and pitched sounds. Stylistic traits2 Formal features: Tracks tend to be between 6 and 12 minutes long, with most clustering around 7 or 8 minutes. Most of the tracks begin with about 30 seconds of very atmospheric sounds. These introductions convey some suggestion of the beat (but definitely not the bass drum), but in the tracks I have analyzed here, they are more beat-less than usual, and last much longer than usual, since several are the first tracks of their albums. Sometimes, there is a return to this ambient sound at the end of the track, but it is generally not as long. Between this introduction and conclusion, the body of the track has two halves. The first introduces the major thematic material, while the second rearranges it, sometimes altering the bass. Most of the themes are eventually layered onto one another at the end of each of these halves, creating two climaxes.