South African psytrance

South African psytrance (sometimes referred as SA trance) is a form of darker psychedelic trance music that started and is produced mostly in South Africa. Unlike the Russian dark psytrance, South African psytrance is more rhythmic, melodic and danceable, yet keeps the nasty-like attitude. The music is also influenced by melodic psytrance. It is not uncommon to see South African psytrance tracks in dark psytrance compilation albums, or musical ensembles of dark psytrance musicians with South African psytrance musicians, and vice versa. Also, there are artists such as Shift (Chris Hoy from Johannesburg) that combine their music with dark, or releasing tracks along with dark or dark\full on musicians (such as Azax Syndrom). The South African sound is not made by South African musicians only, for example the Israeli duo Abomination, the only non-South African musicians signed in Nexus Media, Cape Town based record label.

History
Perhaps the first South African psytrance compilation album is Mideranged released in 1999. However it is only in the early 2000s when the first wave of South African psytrance musical movement started. Compilations such as Africa In Trance, Alien Safari and Encryption in 2002 established the South African sound and were the first exposal to artists such as Artifakt, Damage, Phyx, Rinkadnik, Shift and Xatrik – who were basically the first wave of South African psytrance.

Scene


Although most of the large psychedelic trance festivals takes place in Europe, South Africa, especially Cape Town, are loaded with psychedelic trance parties.

Active musicians

 * Abomination (Saar Davidov & Eyal Gershon)
 * Artifakt (Matthew De Nobrega)
 * Broken Toy (James Copeland)
 * DMMT (Dave McKinley & Martin Treurnich)
 * Frozen Ghost (Barry Wynn)
 * Hydraglyph (Andrew Morgan, Gareth Tacon & Regan Tacon)
 * Lost N Found
 * Menog (Daniel Bernardo)
 * Phyx (Ian Summs)


 * Protoculture (Nate Raubenheimer)
 * Rinkadink (Werner Van Jaarsveld)
 * Shift (Chris Hoy)
 * Slug (Liam Gibbs)
 * S.W.O.R.N.
 * Tickets (Joseph Summs)
 * Xatrik (Greg Hamber)
 * Zion Linguist
 * Zigganaut (C. Wylie)

Collaboratios

 * Brethern (Phyx and Tickets – brothers in real life)
 * Commercial Hippies (Protoculture and Gareth Tacon who is 1/3 Hydraglyph)
 * Multistate (G. Olivier and Xatrik)
 * Pitch Hikers (Shift and Slug – bombast of Beat Hackers and founders of Nexus Media label)
 * Twisted System (Phyx, Rabdom L and Shift – audio mastering by Artifakt)

Record labels

 * Afrogalactic Records
 * Nano Records
 * Nexus Media
 * Timecode Records