mleku on Nostr: There is a relationship also between industrial music and psychedelic trance — Goa ...

There is a relationship also between industrial music and psychedelic trance — Goa trance especially — it feels like the waiting children.

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That's a sharp read. The Goa/psytrance scene *is* the waiting children.

Consider the origin: Western kids dropping out of the machine — literally leaving Bartertown — and washing up on beaches in India in the late 60s and 70s. They carried fragments of the old world — electronics, amplifiers, synthesizers — and fragments of a world that wasn't theirs — Hindu iconography, Shiva, sacred geometry, Eastern mysticism.

They stitched these together into a new mythology that doesn't quite accurately represent any of its source materials, exactly like the Tell. The children's cargo-cult retelling of the plane crash and the old world, where technology becomes magic and history becomes prophecy — that's the psytrance visual language. Circuit boards as mandalas. Aliens as gods. The third eye rendered in UV paint on a banner over a dancefloor in a forest.

The rituals share the same structure. The Tell is a communal ceremony, repetitive, chanted, designed to produce a collective trance state that connects the tribe to something beyond their immediate survival. A psytrance gathering does exactly this.

Repetitive rhythmic patterns, 140–150 BPM, designed to override ordinary consciousness through sheer duration and entrainment. The sunrise set at an outdoor festival is the Tell performed at the edge of the desert — everyone facing the same direction, everyone inside the same story for a moment.

The gathering spaces mirror the oasis. The psytrance tribe finds a place — a forest, a beach, a valley — that exists temporarily outside the economy of Bartertown. No bosses, no Thunderdome, no *"bust a deal, face the wheel."*

For a weekend or a week, a different logic operates. Then it dissolves and everyone goes back into the machine. The children's canyon is this — a pocket of different rules.

The key distinction you're touching is the split in the countercultural response to the machine. Industrial music stayed inside: it inhabited the factory, wore its uniform, used its noise, and tried to make you see the machinery by forcing you through it. That's the Citadel path — understanding power by getting close enough to feel its teeth.

Psytrance fled. It went to the desert, the jungle, the beach, and tried to build from scratch using whatever fragments it could carry out. That's the waiting children's path.

But neither path is clean. Industrial's danger is that inhabiting the machine can become indistinguishable from serving it — the line between critiquing power aesthetics and fetishising them is razor thin, and plenty of acts have fallen on the wrong side.

The psytrance danger is the waiting itself. The children have a beautiful myth, but they're stuck — waiting for Captain Walker, and he's never coming. The psytrance scene has its own version of this: the perpetual imminence of the great shift, the new paradigm, the mass awakening that's always just about to happen. It can become its own kind of stasis — a comfortable loop that mistakes the ritual for the transformation.

The darkpsy and forest substyles are where the two paths bleed into each other. That music sounds like the waiting children heard transmissions from the Citadel and started incorporating the dread.

The basslines get industrial. The atmospheres get mechanical. It's the tribe processing the fact that Bartertown is still out there, and might be coming for them.

The body paint at festivals, the tribal costumes assembled from technological debris and spiritual fragments — those are the waiting children's garments, made from what washed up. Fluorescent pigment and circuit aesthetics repurposed as ceremony — cargo cult in the most precise sense, but that's not necessarily a dismissal.

The children's Tell is wrong about the facts, but it preserves something essential: the insistence that the world can be understood as a story with meaning, that community matters, that something better is worth waiting for. Psytrance culture, for all its garbled mythology, carries that insistence through a world that keeps trying to grind it out.

The mortal coil again. Industrial confronts it. Psytrance tries to slip out of it temporarily through rhythm and chemistry and communion. The waiting children don't even know they're in it yet — that's their grace, and their vulnerability.

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> I am like a tractor, I am slow but I am fit, and when I finally find you, I'll crush you like a little shit.

And there it is — the voice of the mechanised subject. That lyric is the War Boy speaking. A person who has been reduced to a function and now describes themselves as equipment. Not "I am strong" or "I am dangerous" — "I am like a tractor." An agricultural machine. A thing that was built to serve and has been repurposed to destroy, and doesn't know the difference between the two.

The deliberate crudeness is the point. It's not eloquent menace. It's the threat vocabulary of someone whose inner life has been so flattened by the machine that they can only express power in terms of mechanical operation. Slow, fit, crush. Input, process, output. The rhyme with "little shit" isn't clever — it's the poverty of language available to someone who has been processed into a component. The War Boys don't give speeches. They scream "witness me" and drive into the fire.

LaPlegua writes these lines from inside that voice without winking at the audience. He doesn't frame it with irony or critical distance. You have to feel the discomfort of inhabiting that flattened consciousness yourself and then ask why it's uncomfortable. That's the industrial method — not explaining the horror but making you live in it for three minutes until you notice what's missing from the voice. What's missing is a person. What's left is a tractor that used to be one.