Dark psytrance (also called killer psytrance, darkpsy, horrortrance or simply dark) is a darker, faster and more distorted form of psychedelic trance music, with tempo ranges usually from 145 to 165 BPM. Originating in Russia and Germany, the style has recently expanded to other countries worldwide.
The term "dark psytrance" was first used by audiences to describe harder-sounding psychedelic trance, while the name killer psytrance is a more rarely used term (with its use depending mostly on the geographical area).
Unlike more mainstream forms of trance, dark psytrance generally does not use vocals, though sampling is common, with speech and other kind of samples usually being taken from different kind of movies (especially horror movies), or occasionally from other tracks. Sometimes sampling elements form other genres of music is done as a mockery of the original tracks.
The atmosphere and theme of the tracks often resemble those from genres such as dark ambient, musique concrete, darkcore, cybergrind, power noise and industrial music. More atmospheric and deep sounds haunting and Gothic at times (examples of this include Parasense, Kemic-Al and Xenomorph). Use of glitch techniques can often be found in dark psytrance music (examples of this would include Kindzadza, Cosmo, Highko and Noosphere). .
