A psytrance festival that was to have taken place in South Gloucestershire, UK in September has been cancelled, after locals blocked it, describing the music as “a form of torture”.
Goa Cream Festival has been running for nine years, with the last two editions being held at Yewtree Farm near Thornbury. However, they’ll have to find a new venue this year as local councillors turned down their licence application after complaints from residents.
Not many though. Avon and Somerset Police say that they received just eleven after last year’s event.
Those that did take the trouble to write in complained about headaches and shaking windows, with one bemoaning that: "It was non-stop heavy bass music; it was almost inhumane and a form of torture."
A highly subjective point of view, it must be said. Some would say that compared to other forms of dance music - gabba, for example - psytrance is positively melodious. As a genre it evolved out of early '90s techno and although it’s not to everyone’s tastes, its adherents tend to be fluffy hippy-ish types more interested in saving the planet and aligning their chakras than inflicting ‘torture’ on the denizens of middle England (or indeed anyone).
Goa Cream’s organiser Piers Ciappara claimed at the hearing that during last year’s festival monitors had been positioned in the direction of the nearby M5, but admitted that in 2024 they hadn’t had a sound engineer on site. Organisers had had to monitor sound levels themselves.
And it probably didn’t help their case that they were only able to submit "screenshots of equipment readings" and "numbers scribbled on pieces of paper” to environmental health officers.
"Last year we only had handwritten notes and photographs because the week after the event my colleague who had the sound system had a bad accident," Ciappra explained to the hearing.
"He nearly chopped his hand off cutting the grass so he couldn't put a spreadsheet together – but this year we have a professional team with us."
Anyway, the upshot is that Gloucestershire’s psytrance massive will have to find somewhere else to party this summer.
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