Chapter 25 Electronic Dance Music: Trance and Techno-Shamanism GRAHAM ST. JOHN This chapter addresses an assemblage of spiritual technologies implicit to ‘electronic dance music’ (EDM) movements, with a specific focus on psytrance, in which the author has extensive field experience. It explores technologies of the senses – spiritechnics – that are harnessed to optimize liminal conditions within EDM cultures, an exploration that assists understanding of ‘trance’ as it is identified within these cultures. In the optimal dance event-centred cultures of EDM (e.g. raves, clubs and festivals), with the assistance of an assemblage of sensory technologies, DJs, sound engineers, visual artists, event enablers and dance floor inhabitants themselves typically collaborate to affect the dissolution of normative modes of consciousness. The phrase ‘technoshaman’ is often deployed by commentators in efforts to draw favourable comparison with universal shamanic ritual practice. But while EDM producers can and do act as intentional agents of transformational – for example, with postliminal therapeutic – outcomes, assemblages appear more commonly committed to the cause of liminality itself. As discussed in this chapter, EDM productions are often devised not so much to orchestrate the transformation-of-being and status that is the common objective of rites of passage and shamanism, but a superliminal state of being in transit – an experimental field of experience optimized by technicians and event- habitués with the aid of an assemblage of sensory technologies. EDM and religion From disco, through house, techno and acid-house raves, to clubbing and festival developments, in the last four decades EDM has grown increasingly popular. The phenomenon has drawn the attentions of scholars who have identified religious and spiritual characteristics of transnational EDM cultures and their events (see Gauthier 2004a, 2005; St John 2004a, 2006; Beck and Lynch 2009). That EDM events contextualize collective alterations of consciousness, especially among adolescents, has drawn disparate responses. They have triggered moral panics, like that expressed by Christian fundamentalists, 1 the zealous architects of the so-called ‘RAVE Act’ (2003) in the United States, 2 or the Zionist reaction to transnationalizing youth culture in Israel (see Meadan 2001). On the other hand, they have sparked prophecy (Spurgeon n.d.), emic evangelism (see Fritz 1999) and other declarations of self-awakening (Johner 2011). In diverse approaches, commentators identify scenes as contexts enabling an immediate, exceptional, even religious experience. Insights have been forged, for example, on liberation (St John 2004b), ritualization BLO_26 Chapter 25.indd 278 BLO_26 Chapter 25.indd 278 11/18/2016 8:48:27 PM 11/18/2016 8:48:27 PM