Hello psynews forums! I joined this with one main purpose - to discuss a particular topic.
I am a DJ for myself. I mix stuff for myself with audacity, timeline editing and fades and such, and do it to simply enjoy listening to this music further. This stuff sounds better mixed. But I want to choose what I'm hearing. I have dance parties of one in my bedroom, and I don't even do drugs(anymore).
So maybe I'm different from the typical listener of this stuff. I'm not "for real", I'm not "part of the scene" or whatever, I'm just some douchebag in the corner, but I've been listening to psytrance about 90% of the time that I've spent listening to music in the past 5 or 6 years.
I have one big problem with the "psy trance" genre as a whole. Spoken words. Pieces of language floating in the sea of sound.
I don't fucking care. I don't care what terrence mckenna has to say about DMT. I don't care what some random scientist voice has to say about quantum theory or perception or ANYTHING. I don't want to hear Neo, Morpheus, or the Oracle. And I most definitely don't want to hear an accountant type of guy talking about net cash.
It stops my brain. It interrupts my thoughts. I don't tolerate it. If I hear it, that means the song is going to be left out of my listening space, if it's too far from the beginning or end to be cropped out with the mixing.
The sound communicates by itself. Words aren't needed.
Some chanting or sensual vocal sound is okay - nah, that type of thing makes it more enjoyable for me. I'll put up with some "om shanti shanti" if it's tastefully used(which is my opinion).
A lot of times I'm left feeling like I'm really listening to the wrong genre. I think psytrance sounds amazing - I don't want to listen to any other music because nothing else sounds like this - but when at the top of a buildup you have to slap in some "blah bluh blah" it ruins my whole world.
I'm a visual artist. I don't make psytrance. If I'm unhappy, my choices are change myself or change the world - unless I'm going to start making psytrance someday, I really don't have much choice but to eventually give up fighting through the sea of "ruined good music" to find the stuff I like. I'll go listen to jazz or something. At least there, when they use vocals, the people actually SING... instead of just non-musical talking.
Some of the artists I think are better seem to avoid that stuff. Anahata and Artha, for example. And Toward the Castle definitely doesn't center itself around a mckenna sample.
My elitism reminds me of typographers complaining about text that isn't kerned right. I'm absurd. I know.
Am I the only one that feels this way though?
Maybe it's a matter of taste. I think Explicit's album is really cool. Maybe it's the fact that most of psytrance out there is some terribly uncreative wank, and vocals themselves aren't a bad thing, it's just that they're tastelessly used across the board.
So says the douchebag in the corner - "you guys are doing it wrong!"