Psytrance for people who can't be bothered to dance to it

Like every other walk in the Parvati Valley, the one from Kasol to the village of Chalal takes longer than the maps would suggest. Even the few metres from Kasol’s main road to the Chalal bridge take longer than they should. They are rocky and muddy. They slope dangerously downwards. On the far side, until one reaches the first smattering of stalls and would-be cafés, one navigates a one-lane road of unpaved sand that gives way on one side onto the rocks of the shoreline several dozen feet below. At night, from Kasol’s riverfront restaurants, you can make out people walking to Chalal in the darkness, picking them out by the flashlights on their phones, which blink on and off, or at least appear to, as the walkers swing their arms and thus momentarily block the phones with their bodies.

After visiting Chalal the evening prior, and finding the Cosmic Kasol rave at Pirates of Parvati, or PoP, to be a bit of a bust, the idea of going back for New Year’s Eve did not strike me as very appealing. But having spent four thousand rupees, or sixty-five dollars, on a multi-day pass, and once again knowing that at least one chapter of my novel was riding on my attendance, I grit my teeth and set out.

The Parvati Valley is home to a thriving psytrance culture, a high-altitude offshoot of the Goa trance scene, which was spearheaded by figures like Goa Gil and Raja Ram in the 1980s. I would tell you what makes psytrance music unique, and how it differs from Goa trance in its particulars, except that I don’t know and don’t care. All I know is that, over the decades that followed, the music travelled with Western tourists on the Hippie trail, and with battalions of post-discharge IDF soldiers on the Hummus one, from the beaches of the former Portuguese colony into the mountains of Himachal Pradesh.

Some, like those who would later turn Kheerganga into a trekking hotspot, were keen to get away from the rapidly commercialising Goa scene. Others, summering in the hills and wintering on the coasts, much like the British colonisers before them, only with rattier dreads, toggled back and forth with the seasons. But it would be silly to pretend that clement weather and mountain views were the main drawcards for our twenty-four-hour party people. The ready availability of