Samadhi Presents: The Z-Machine Album Launch :: Wessex Scene Online

Samadhi Presents: The Z-Machine Album Launch

6th December 2005
Chas Parham

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It hasn’t been long since I was first corrupted to the ways of psy-trance back in semester 2 last year at an event put on by Samadhi’s partner in crime Eufloria. Glade festival in July then further intensified my addiction but the long months since then have been spent in cold turkey. What joy to be back in Southampton and to find it’s less than a fortnight until my next fix!

The event is a launch party for Z-Machine’s debut album. I have to admit that I have no idea who Z-Machine is. In fact, if you asked me to name psy-trance producers/DJs, I could probably give you two. But with this type of music names, I think, are unimportant. What matters is the music, atmosphere and dancing.

Getting to M-Club early to take advantage of the cheap entry before 10:30pm I was happy to see that the attendance was already good. There was also a reasonable student contingent at a night that seems to be attended predominantly by residents, which was also good to see. To further my excitement the Glade crew was there too.

As to be expected from a night of psychedelic trance, the decoration was stupendous. The upstairs room was flooded in UV light, the walls and ceiling strewn with shapes of all sizes and fluorescent colours, pink, yellow, green, orange. Adding to the psychedelia were the some of the people themselves, many dressed in clothes that reactive to UV and sporting wool wrapped dreadlocks.

The music was thumping and certainly psychedelic. Psy-trance surpasses other dance genres in the multitude and complexity of sounds used in each track. The different sounds add to or create their own beats, they merge together to make new sounds, constantly changing and morphing, all at a quick and pounding pace. Psy-trance is also perfectly capable of getting dark and scary too, a quality I like in my dance music.

Yet another endearing feature of this type of music is the type of people it attracts. Everyone is friendly and open-minded and there are many distinctive characters both in dress and dancing style. People throw themselves about in the most amazing ways to this music, it almost demands it of you, and consequently you can groove without feeling self-conscious, just like nobody’s watching.

If you’re a raver and you’ve not yet experienced psy-trance, I suggest you try it. Your next chance is Eufloria, at M-Club, on November 18th. But be warned, you might not be able to give it up.