Updated 2 years ago
After five months, the history of psytrance, year by year in NYC and the entire eastern seaboard is completed, with all available flyers, listings, essays, obituaries, interviews, asides, Youtubes (including annual playlists), links to photos, reviews, comments from Trip Out New York, NYC604, DMT, Safetdance Yahoo Groups, the 604 and Dewline email lists, and even highlights of comments from the Isratrance North American forum, major developments in technology and culture, all proofread and spellchecked – about 600,000 words, the equivalent of three huge novels.
Everything interesting that I can recall or gather from all the sources has been included. I didn’t do too much digging in Facebook comments, because I wasn’t there, so the passion isn’t there. If anyone wants to go back and compile those, I will add them if you send it to me. The timing was fortuitous, as Yahoo Groups deleted all online content, including to my surprise old emails, last December.
And as an aside, speaking of Facebook, the cliquishness and fragmentation it inspires is proof that Marshal McLuhan was on to something when he said the medium is the message. More specifically, people should understand this – the images you use in Facebook events are not immortal. They eventually go away. You have to actually have them in a photo gallery somewhere. I ran into this issue a few times, especially in the late 2000s. And finally, I would like to say that the dear old graphic, static Flyer is a lost art. Please let’s not neglect them, ever. Some organizers just completely ignored them, and left a bunch of black and white text-based craters to remember them by.
Coronavirus offered me some time to get this finally done. The history format will continue through the 2020s as events start up again. I have started a basic framework going back to the 1800s and may at some point go backwards in time, back to the 80s, 70s, and earlier, and even expand into psychedelic/hacker/Zippie/hippy culture and/or other music genres such as the types of trance that isn’t psy., but I doubt it as even going this deep into a micro-niche was very time-consuming.
The main page has a table for all missing flyers to help us fill the gaps.
Thanks to all for your assistance in this endeavor. Please send me any relevant additions, stories, comments, corrections, etc
