Burning Man's Music Trance Beats in Brigadoon
					Every year in August an ephemeral town arises from the dust of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada like the legend of Brigadoon. There, a community gathers from all over the world to build works of art, share music and celebrate their spontaneous deliberate community. It's a mecca for creativity with pilgrims making the hadj for a ritual of renewal that is symbolized by the burning of a massive wooden statue of a man.
	Over the past few months I have been learning about a genre of trance music called Goa Trance, a form of electronic trance music that emerged from the former Portuguese colony of Goa in western India. Burning Man is said to be the largest gathering of Goa trancers in the US. And certainly every night of the festival massive towers of speakers and subwoofers would pulse out the driving beats on the salty mud flats from dusk to dawn. The signature sound of Goa Trance is an incredibly rapid beat (>140bpm) with heavy bass sounds. The music does not progress thematically, its fundamental beat remains the same from beginning to end. The variation in the music comes in the electronic samples that are phased in and out, being distorted sound samples, melodic themes or sampled and processed voices (often speaking short positive messages, Hindu/Buddhist chants or insights for the listeners to contemplate). One of the interesting elements of Goa Trance is the variation in rhythmic phrase. The electronic beats that are used as the fundamental rhythm sound like a pulsing "lub" of a heart with no releasing "dub". The fundamental rhythm could arguably be said to be a one beat phrase with other two, four, eight and sixteen beat rhythm phrases laid on top. This layering of rhythm phrases can make the music seem to spiral slowly on some layers while others spiral rapidly. It may be the multi-tempo nature of Goa Trance which creates its ecstatic and mesmerizing drive. Certainly, to see people dance to it, one sees people responding to all different rhythms, fast to slow. Perhaps the overlaying of rhythmic layers creates in the listener a sense of rhythmic vertigo as symetry of multiple patterns merge. The rhythmic method of trance music, its device, seems to lie in the superimposing of symetrical rhythms rather than in the fusing of polyrhythms. The symbol of the Burning Man is an effigy of the ego, destroyed as a symbol of unification of the community. Perhaps the reason trance music has become the anthem of the Burning Man festival stems from the music's ability to transport listeners beyond self-consciousness to a feeling of group euphoria. The use of rhythm to inspire trance borrows from the shamanic traditions of Africa and Asia where the drum is a medicinal and sacred tool. It seems ironic that trance music is such a technology-centered art. However it is fitting that rhythm re-emerges in this modern art as the avenue to the archaic ritual of ecstasy and transcendent awareness. For more information on upcoming Burning Man festivals, please visit Burning Man Home