Burning for you

CAVE IN Psymbolic's visuals enhanced the Geologic Festival in May.

You don't have to drive a VW bus to Nevada to get your fix of Burning Man culture. In the last year, psy-trance and the closely related Goa trance—uptempo, freakier cousins to trance music—have crept into Chicago. Goa and psy-trance are growing global subcultures, popular with hippy travelers and grown-up electronic-music fans alike. But until recently, Chicago has been anything but a hotbed of activity. Now, promotion/visual styling outfit Psymbolic is establishing itself as a one-stop shop for Goa and psy-trance events, not only creating interactive visuals and decor, but also booking and promoting many of the acts for regional festivals and club events. Psymbolic curated Saturday 7's Connexionism gathering at Vision.

Psy-trance is closely related to Goa, the style of underground dance music named for a former Portuguese exclave on the west coast of India. In Goa, expats wandering the hippy trail in Asia in the late '60s and early '70s held psychedelic jam sessions on the beach, probably inspired by the local Indians' traditional full-moon festivals, the area's carnival culture and Indian percussion. But it wasn't until the '80s that Goa emerged as a genre—a fusion of eastern, industrial, acid-house and rock perfect for extended, often drug-fueled outdoor gatherings. In the '90s, Goa spread as vacationing Israeli soldiers brought the music back home from India, where it produced some of the genre's biggest names, such as Infected Mushroom.

Psymbolic's creative team of Julee Dawn Wood and Troy S. Milstead met eight years ago while Wood was in Texas on holiday break from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They hit it off and she decided to stick around. In Austin, the duo went from planning events at concert venues to art direction for party promoter Universal Mind Productions. They brought in Goa-trance artists, created 3-D decorations from Lycra, and Plexiglas and constructed multimedia installations for large-scale events.

The Texas rave era peaked around 2000, but the massive outdoor events were not exclusively youth-focused. "There's a dark stigma that is tied with raves because of the drug use and big pant–wearing, pacifier-sucking people, but we really catered to a different crowd at that time," Milstead explains. "It was an older crowd; a lot of them had attended Burning Man, a lot of the people were into industrial music—raw energetic music."

Eventually, the couple began accepting residencies in nightclubs and concert halls in Texas, and focusing more on its projections. Christening themselves Psymbolic, the two customized projected video loops and synched them to the rhythms and content of the music. "We shot all the footage to cater to whatever themes the artists might be portraying through their music, because a lot of the electronic music has samples of messages that are riddled within it," Milstead says.

About a year and a half ago, the pair settled in Chicago, where Wood is completing her degree at SAIC. Psymbolic has already participated in half a dozen area nightclub events and ten roaming regional festivals since then. After joining in the Midwest Annual Goa Experience event in November 2004, the outfit got a call from local club promoters PureFuture and brought in a pair of DJs, decor, and interactive visuals and promotions to amp up January's Infected Mushroom gig. With its access to social networks and online forums, Psymbolic promotes on a whole different wavelength. Psymbolic has also sought to bring other tribes into the fold. Conscious of Chicago's healthy IDM scene's aversion to trance, Milstead invited local IDM, dub and breakbeat artists to Geologic Festival in Murphysborough, Illinois, at the Shawnee Cave Amphitheater.

A packed house at Sound-Bar includes regular trendy clubgoers—hipsters rubbing shoulders with urban tribalists. There are "quite a few dreadlocks, heavy piercings, intricate tattoos" on display, Milstead says. The crowd is "definitely into self-modification. They spend a lot of time on their appearance to appear outside of the norm." But the big difference between busy Chicago and laid-back Texas psy-trance events is the crowd's attitude, Milstead says, in Chicago, "They want to be there; they don't just happen to be there."

Connexionism takes place at Vision Saturday 7.