Updated 2 years ago
Nick from Sonic Beating, Dave Henshaw, Marria Grace, Dean LaVoie and a few others discuss their psytrance art project in Boston in the 2000s.
Divisive = many many many people, yer bound to get shitters, scammers, and over a hundred other negative archetypes I identified. It’s math.
Small scenes make cohesion. You could actually say that about psytrance in general, it’s a small scene so everyone knows everyone. It could never approach even the rave hangar’s massiveness and chaos from Woodstock 99.
But this dynamic starts to break down in something as massive as the NYC metro area in the late 90s early 2000s, where most nights of the week had a party, and one weekend in 2003 had 7 parties.
And I don’t think size was everything…. to generalize I think Boston’s vibe was overall more collegiate and techy, both amenable to a geeky psytrance scene. NYC just has large amounts of locals you generally don’t want to associate with, and this ranged from rough and tumble inner city youths who would never even consider college, to pcp smoking teenage ravers who missed the golden era in early 90s and were trying to make up for lost time without any great exampoles to grow upon. Theft problems kept coming up everywhere, even at renegades, unless it was a smallish invite only early on.
Plus it felt marijuana was a lot more common in Boston than NYC, which adds a huge plus to cohesion.
