BORAT MEETS THE MATRIX
Ancient folklore meets the cybernetic future at Ozora, a psytrance festival in the Hungarian woods
Hallo from Berlin, where I have gotten caught in the drag net of immigration bureaucracy and am temporarily blocked from returning to Los Angeles. There is no guestlist at passport control honey! Still, it’s a potent time to be adrift in Berlin, especially with so much political turbulence in the air: Ravers for Palestine and Strike Germany are leading a boycott of some of the city’s baddest clubs due to their alleged censorship of pro-Palestinian artists, leading to DJs and influential labels like Pan cancelling their gigs at Berghain. The strike has been picking up major press, although as The Guardian noted this week, the club simply replaced the acts, and people still queued to get in.
There is always a rift between emotionally charged online chatter and more messy on-the-ground realities, but a different piece of hype news that I’m surprised hasn’t made more of a splash on the streets is the legalization of weed in Germany. Probably this is because selling cannabis is still prohibited, so dispensaries or dreamy riverside lounges aren’t yet a thing—and unlike Thailand, for example, where DIY weed shacks were thriving when I visited last spring, most of the action in Germany is taking place behind closed doors, in members-only community clubs. In fact, legal weed doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact on Berlin’s polydrug party culture at all. (“Who cares…” drawled a fashion gay I met at weeeirdoes, Lolsnake’s Thursday night party at Saule. “Everyone just wants to do 3-MMC…”) Anyhoo, I’ll be reporting on this more shortly!
What brought me to Europe in the first place was an invitation to speak at The Chambok House at Ozora festival, which is second only to Boom as the largest psychedelic trance gathering in the world. While a psychonaut once described Boom to me as “one of the world’s largest open-air drug markets” thanks to Portugal’s drug decriminalization, Ozora takes place in Hungary, which has some of the most repressive drug laws in the EU under its right-wing government. I felt the state’s scrutiny as soon as I stepped off the plane and was pulled aside to have my bags rifled through by stern-faced soldiers, and was also warned by festival staff that further police stops were likely en route to the festival.
Perhaps this is why, after miles of driving past endless cows and watermelon stands through the Hungarian countryside, getting deposited at Ozora’s gates at golden hour felt like such sweet relief.
The first thing that struck me was how stunning the festival site looked. Unlike most music festivals that rely on pre-fab constructions from plug-and-play production companies, Ozora’s structures—including at least eight stages, plus dozens of bridges, towers, stairways, tea shacks, gardens, and healing huts—were architectural marvels painstakingly hand-crafted by artisans over its two-decade lifespan. Even more remarkably, these structures remain in place throughout the rest of the year because the festival owns the bucolic forested grounds where it takes place. This has allowed the site to evolve into a whimsical, wabi-sabi wonderland, like if Burning Man didn’t have to tear everything down and was allowed to build upon itself each year, endlessly mutating into ever-more intricate forms.
For example, a towering peacock-adorned staircase connecting the main stage to a panoramic hilltop area was built entirely by sweaty bodies hauling 150,000 kgs of wooden planks, without the aid of machines. (You can read more of its story over at The Ozorian Prophet, the festival’s newspaper.)
Even the ticket-scanning machines at Ozora resembled sculptures of hermaphrodite-like genitalia:
The other thing that made Ozora in a class of its own is its almost mythical lore: the festival started as a solar eclipse gathering in 1999 by a Hungarian sheep herder (!) named Daniel Zimanyi, who learned the nomadic shepherd trade from roaming around pastures with his father since childhood. Zimanyi, who was affectionally nicknamed Danibácsi, was devoted to Hungary’s goa psytrance scene, and spent his life creating the festival grounds around his family farmhouse using recycled and natural materials found on-site, with traditional Hungarian craftsmanship techniques. Sadly, Zimanyi passed in 2018, but journalist Frederick Bernas was able to capture a quick interview with him in a radio episode for Monocle in 2014:
How many 30,000-person music festivals do you know that were started by sheep farmers??? Exactly. This mind-boggling origin story is also why Ozora is so much more than just a ten-day rave (although it is also that); instead its roots, as Monocle put it, “lie deep in the earth and culture of the land” that it takes place on. Much of the festival’s programming includes local and global folk traditions, including an opening ceremony involving csikósok—the horseback-riding cowboys of Hungary’s grasslands—galloping in circles before lighting a pagan bonfire as thousands of attendees rush towards the stage screaming and dancing. On my last night, I was delighted to stumble upon a Brazilian folk band encouraging the crowd to jump around like pogos, while the band sitting next to me on the shuttle back to the airport, Tau & The Drones of Praise, described themselves as “if the Stooges went to Mexico to smoke toad and make music with traditional Irish instruments.”
This seamless integration of folksy traditions with psytrance’s cybernetic tribal goth futurism felt like a revelatory interpretation of a psychedelic festival experience. Perhaps the person who summed it up best—and who I lifted this article’s headline from—was the comedian and psychedelic satirist Dennis Walker (aka @mycopreneur on Instagram) who wandered around Ozora in his underwear last year and described it as “Borat meets the Matrix.”
I’ll admit that my delightful time at Ozora came as a bit of a surprise. I was initially trepidatious about going to a festival devoted entirely to psytrance—a scene that, as the rave academic Arun Saldanha writes, has historically been about “white hippies exploring the lines of flight that open up their bodies to other places and cultures.” The psytrance scene has long been home to the the most annoying kinds of orientalism, as well as the kinds of kitschy aesthetics found in college dorm rooms and local heads shops: Buddhas with lightbeams shooting out of their foreheads, bodies comprised of geometric fractals, you know the fucking vibe.
In his critical analysis of racial segregation and exploitation in the Goa trance scene, Psychedelic White, Saldanha elaborates: “Dancing for hours on LSD, incorporating the etiquette of chillum smoking, letting themselves be united with the entire landscape, or, on the flip side, finding themselves imprisoned in India-psychosis: it is precisely the exoticist and reckless attitudes of foreigners toward India that make their embodiment distinctive.”
But here’s the thing: as I wrote in an essay for DJ Mag in 2020, psytrance is the soundtrack of our transnational, psychedelic age. Its popularity is quickly growing outside of its hardcore fan circles—increasingly, I’m hearing the genre’s slithering, acid-soaked synths and ornate rhythms woven into today’s tweaker techno soundscapes. So while I did spot several white people donning the regrettable combination of dreadlocks and bindis, the crowd at Ozora (and many other psytrance festivals) was extremely global. My neighbors in the artist camping area, for example, were spliff-smoking South Indians who grew up near Goa and produce professional race car events in Dubai—the kinds of third-culture kids I’d much rather hang with than pretentious Tulum-inati spiritualists.
Refreshingly, the festival also bans the waving of country flags, which are typically ubiquitous sights at these kinds of international music events. As a longtime Ozora team member explained to me, “If a festival says no sexism, no racism, and everything else, nationalism should also be part of the bullshit that we are trying to get away from.”
In that essay for DJ Mag, which has never been published online, I attempted to chart an alternative history of psytrance from a post-colonial lens, referencing the work of Saldanha and other writers who have questioned how party utopias are formed through a politics of exclusion and exotification. While there has been an interesting wave of revisionist history around other electronic dance genres like Detroit techno—with a growing awareness of the class privilege, misogyny, and other tensions inherent in these pioneering scenes’ formations— far less attention has been paid to Goa trance, an equally important genre that came out of Asia, and encompasses many of the social tensions inherent to the region.
I wanted to share this essay with you, titled “An Alternate History of Psytrance,” which revisits the roots of the sound as it coagulated on the beaches of Goa in the 80s, but from the perspective of local Indians, and takes you through the contemporary resurgence of the genre in Asia’s underground party scenes. Writing this also gave me an invaluable chance to connect with the OG (and sadly departed) psytrance DJ Goa Gil, a real-deal spiritualist who washed up in Goa from the 60s Haight-Ashbury scene, and eventually earned the title of a Hindu ‘sadhu’, or holy man. Gil spoke to me at length from his longtime home in Goa, pausing only to take big hits from a bong as he explained why a psytrance rave is just “a disco under coconut trees, but a spiritual initiation.”
The essay will drop on Friday for paid subscribers—if you haven’t already, please subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it, and forward this to your friends. Namaste!
Sounds so fun. The title made me laugh.
You had me at Goa Gil. (I was in India a long time, wrote three books about that time - wanted def to have access to the Goa piece et al.) Just upgraded to paid after following you free for a year. Great writing and Gonzo-style journalism. Keep it up.