I Misaligned Their Chakra's (A Story from the Psy-Trance Years)

For a few years, I was really influenced by the sounds of goa and psy trance, a journey which began with my first exposure to the Perfecto Fluoro compilation back in 1996, which in turn led me to the original and Goa Essential Mix. In 2001 or so, I rallied with a crew of DJs and we began throwing a series of underground parties under the name of Psychedelic Trance Liberation Front. PTLF originally started in Minnesota, and one of our crew members, DJ Brian E pinged them to get permission to start our own branch. Think Sons of Anarchy chapters without the violence, blood and motorcycles ;) The name appealed to our sense of humor, and really was in turn a nod at the cheesy state of trance affairs at the time. Each party we did was named after a track from the legendary producer Man With No Name. Initially all the focus was on psy-trance and goa, but very early on I began to have a feeling that there were two different crowd elements going on: there was us on the one hand, which were a bunch of guys who liked to throw parties, liked hard trance music and Dr. Dre records and who definitely enjoyed more than one pint of lager. On the other hand, there were the psy-trance stans. You know the kind - each genre of music has them, people who define themselves so much by a particular genre of music that they almost become caricatures. I didn't really understand the power of stannery until our fifth or sixth party. By that point, we had begun secondary rooms to feature other forms of music; from a promotional and business standpoint, it brought in more people. More people allowed us funding to keep the next party going. We were doing ambient rooms, drum n bass rooms, electro and even had a live industrial rock band play at one of them. (Shouts to the mighty Deviant) These secondary rooms were already riffing the psy trance stans - we had diluted their pure crusty vibe you see. But things didn't come to a head until our fifth or sixth party, which was an outdoor all-nighter in the hills west of Boulder, Colorado. We had our usual diverse crowd, and a few of the cats from the Denver house music collective Spank DJs crew were in attendance. At the last minute, I decided to bail on the seriousness of an hour and a half of psy-trance and invited Damon Willard from the Spank DJ crew to do a diverse, eclectic old school set with me. I'd always been more in love with the art of DJing and playing music more than just defining myself as a "name-your-genre-dj". It just felt right at the moment, and mind this is around 3 or 4 in the morning. We proceeded to tear it up, and you could feel the energy in the crowd of people went up a notch. We were dropping a mixture of house classics, early 80s new wave records, blended with acid techno and acid house, old school hip hop records, cutting and scratching - right on top of a mountain in the outdoors. It went off! Except it didn't. Because I was busy having a good time, and the majority of the crowd were into it, I didn't take into account the psy heads here were busy enjoying their acid trips - which word came back to me later that apparently we greatly affected by mixing 'Lucky Star' with 'Acid Trax'. And not in a positive manner. So the little psy-trance scene here split off, and all of the sudden there were purist parties. No more secondary rooms, no more diversity in music.... and these purist parties somehow seemed to always occur on the same nights PTLF did their parties from that point forward. Co-incidence I'm sure of it! but do I regret it? Not one bit! Related: Seventh Day Mixtape, Illusions of a Dream Mixtape City of Bass: blogging daily about the electro music scene. Follow via twitter, or subscribe to the RSS feed