ABSTRACT
Listening to psytrance is an intensely corporeal experience: forces of affect, emotion and cognition collide, often with psychoactive enhancements, to create rich, inner virtual spaces. In this chapter, the author uses Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherology to examine how the rich, inner virtual spaces created by psytrance music are imprinted on the external physical spaces in which parties take place, through creative and practical acts of spheropoesis on the part of composers, party organisers, DJs and décor artists. Drawing on autoethnographies from parties and interviews with scene insiders, they describe the similarities between the internal experience and external spaces of psytrance parties and argue that this blurs the boundary between internal and external, heightening the altered state of partygoers and creating a liminoid party sphere, in which they temporarily dwell together.
