When deep into the music at a trance party, most people dance a sort of mechanized primal stomp, working their arms like pistons and clomping their feet. Although these maneuvers may look awkward, they are a natural reaction to the music's rigidly 4/4 industrial-sounding beats, which, though sublime to the dancers, may sound to the untrained ear like anything from rotating chopper blades to the repetitive clatter of a machine shop. Atop these beats are layered morphing sonic curlicues of all sorts, and if the hard beats of trance music provide dancers with an anchor, the top end of the music can, under the right conditions, facilitate an intense psychedelic experience.

Which is to say, trance parties are cathartic, massively cathartic. As one longtime fan put it, "A good trance party breaks you down and then smooths you out."

To lead people through this process, a trance party must respect the values of the scene. This means organizers must provide proper music and a good sound system, of course, but also tasteful decorations or scenery and, significantly, a strong sense of trust -- after all, in the pursuit of a meaningful psychedelic experience, a person must drop the emotional barriers that protect him or her from the strains and hazards of everyday life.

One of the striking features of a trance party is the delicate balance of free-spiritedness and an almost total lack of sexual vibe. People may be half-dressed, dancing feverishly and glistening with sweat but, to be sure, one does not try to do the primal stomp with another person. If one of the goals of trance parties is catharsis -- even group catharsis -- it is nearly always achieved on an individual basis.

But according to David Dobson, a New Zealand-based DJ who has played at Japan's largest trance event, the Solstice Music Festival, for the past two years, catharsis is not simply an end in itself: "If we can go somewhere and just let go, then we start to taste life a little bit. We become a little more awake and alive and, hopefully, we start to see a little bit better in which direction we want to go."

Japan is host to dozens of trance parties throughout the year, and the ways in which they set the scene for people to let go vary greatly. Within the trance community, there may exist some agreement on the fundamentals of a proper party, but the parties themselves reflect as much the diverging philosophies, goals and budgets of the impresarios who organize them as they do any common trance ethic.

Solstice Music Festival

While living in London a decade ago, trance parties gave direction to Masachika "Chika" Fukui, a co-organizer of the Solstice Music Festival and the A&R producer of Solstice Music, the organization's record label.

"For me, [the trance scene] changed my life," Fukui says over an iced coffee in a quiet cafe in Shibuya. "I felt that I could do whatever I really wanted to do. Coming from Japanese culture, I felt that I was always pushed to do things. Pushed to go to school. Pushed to study."

Indeed, no one at this year's Solstice Music Festival, held July 19 to 21 in the shadow of Mount Fuji, seemed pushed to do much of anything. In the late afternoon of the festival's second day, before the night's activity began, thousands of people lounged about their bedraggled campsites, some lolling in hammocks, others swigging beverages or cooking noodles over portable stoves. Despite the crowds, there was also a sense of calm, of people unwinding.

This twilight downtime was in direct contrast with the formidable level of energy that these same people would be kicking up within just a few hours. Naturally, most of the action took place on the dance floor. But for some, any pocket of the event's acreage would do: One Japanese woman, who wore a striking red latex dress, was doing some type of psychedelic kickboxing well behind the stage, while a Caucasian man wearing shorts and a bandanna on his head squatted on the ground and rhythmically massaged the grass in front of him. Some time later, he climbed up a rock at the edge of a small lake and began conducting an imaginary orchestra.

After throwing a series of smaller parties at the now-defunct Geoid in Roppongi, Chika and his business partner, Akira Kidoguchi, whom he met while attending college in Canada, began the Solstice Music Festival three years ago with bold ambitions.

"We wanted to do something that attracted people from inside Japan and also from outside. To introduce Japanese culture to other people and also introduce Japanese people to this kind of culture."

This year, the event drew an estimated 10,000 people, required a staff of more than 250 and a budget nearing 80 million yen. Among the many world-class trance acts performing were Hallucinogen, Saiko-Pod, Synthetic and Coxbox.

But if Solstice has succeeded in spreading the music and creating a cultural exchange, many hard-core trance enthusiasts complain that the popularity of the event has created a sort of lowest-common-denominator trance culture. High on their list of gripes are the event's decorations. While this may seem a petty complaint, to many attendees proper scenery is as vital to the overall experience as the music. In this sense, the huge paintings flanking the stage were especially suspect. When the moon rose, illuminating the mist and revealing the natural beauty of the tree-covered mountains that surrounded the event's location, the paintings -- garish depictions of New Age iconography -- glowed obscenely beneath fluorescent tubes of black light.

When asked about the effect of size on an event's integrity, Chika betrays a flicker of concern and quickly lights a cigarette. He acknowledges that size does have its disadvantages but maintains that the only way to attract people from overseas is to have a large festival. Anyway, he adds, Solstice is just one annual event among many smaller parties -- each different from the others -- of between 700 and 2,000 people that his organization throws every year. "Once a year we want to put everything we have into one party and really share the vision with a big amount of people."

Likewise, DJ Dobson recognizes the challenges of large parties but tries to find a deeper meaning. "It's become a social story now," he says. "And we can criticize the event for that, but once you start to move into the mainstream, obviously things are going to get diluted. I'd say for 90 percent of the kids going, these events are just a bit of fun and afterward they go home and do exactly what they did last week. But I'd like to think that for a few of them there's a bit of inspiration."

The Labyrinth

Two weeks after Solstice, a party named The Labyrinth sprouted in a remote clearing in the forested hills of Gunma Prefecture. The event was organized by Mindgames and ran roughly 24 hours.

While the organizers readily recognize the importance of larger trance events, they believe a small party is the only way to realize their own vision. The Labyrinth drew about 800 people, and its budget and staff were roughly a tenth of Solstice's. Nonetheless, it drew such big international acts as Bitmonx, Antix and Process.

"For me personally, intimacy is gained at an event that has between 500 and 1,500 people and [where] you can actually greet every person who comes," says Charles, one of the co-organizers. "It's easy to have a party that's like a circus, that has a bunch of spinning lights and other things going on. But if you can bring it down to as close to a natural level as possible, to a human level, where people can free their minds, then that's really something."

Indeed, when compared with the massiveness of the Solstice Music Festival, the human touches to The Labyrinth were almost poignant. In the final stages of preparation, the crew carefully erected about a dozen knee-high tepees over candles so that when night fell, dancers found themselves stomping within something of an illuminated sacred circle.

The average age at The Labyrinth seemed a few years beyond that at Solstice, with more faces showing a sort of weathered cheeriness than a curious (or bored) youthfulness. In addition to dancing, many people could be spotted observing, chasing or photographing the large crickets and other creatures springing through the untrammeled blades of grass.

After his set, Process spent the rest of the night and following day dancing, which is somewhat unusual nowadays for such a high-profile DJ. Commenting on the party a week later, he said, "The location was beautiful, with water, forest, sun and rain, not to mention the thousands of dragonflies in the morning and those huge butterflies, too."

An enthusiastic DJ aside, the dance floor at The Labyrinth was simply never crowded enough to generate the intensity of that at Solstice. But if this was a shortcoming, it was lost on one of the security guards. Relaxing for a moment on a folding chair, he gushed: "This has been an amazing experience for me. First of all, I can't believe how good the sound is. Second, the attention to detail just blows me away." He trained his eyes on the dance floor where a few hundred people were stomping in the rain and chuckled, "This is just amazing."

Mount Hotaka

"People should climb a mountain once a year for a party," says Jun Lynch, organizer of the second annual Mount Hotaka party.

The event, to be held Aug. 23 to 25, spans the end of one lunar cycle and the start of the next on a stunningly gorgeous plateau high in the Japanese Alps. If Solstice was exceptional for its size and energy and The Labyrinth for its intimate, cricket-friendly atmosphere, the otherworldly cloudscape under a full moon at Mount Hotaka will reward those 7,000 people whom Lynch anticipates will venture up the side of the mountain.

In addition to the locale, the party at Mount Hotaka is unusual among this summer's trance events in that there will be both live bands and DJs. "The trance feeling is still the same," says Lynch by telephone, "but the music is more widespread. Live bands -- especially Japanese bands -- got some influence from the trance scene, and now their music is a mixture of rock and trance."

Among the acts are Domino, Mike Maguire of Juno Reactor, Rovo, a band that features Yamamoto of The Boredoms and a couple of members of Dub Squad, System 7, which features guitarist Steve Hillege of Gong, and the jazz-funk-trance-improvisational band Soft. With a bit of funk and swagger in the lineup, the overall atmosphere at Mount Hotaka is likely to be a bit lighter and more extroverted than a full-on trance party, and the dancing to be less of a stomp and more of a wiggle and shake.

"Last year was the first year to do a high-altitude party and because of the storm and the lightning there was some chaos," Lynch says good-naturedly (and not unreasonably -- many people who attended the event last year say this simply made it more memorable). To provide a smooth flow this year, Lynch's staff numbers a whopping 600 people, many of them dedicated to running shuttles to the plateau. Nonetheless, he cautions, "It's still 1,500 meters so people have to be prepared for the unexpected."

Prepare for the unexpected? Sounds like good advice for any party.