13
Hedonic tantra
Golden Goa’s trance transmission^1
Erik Davis
In the early 1990s, I started tapping into the growing psychedelic undertow of
dance and electronic music. With the exception of the Bay Area, the United States
was largely out of step with this dimension of the techno scene, and it was only
through stray clues—a boast by a British backpacker, liner notes on an import
ambient CD—that I first heard about Goa. When I interviewed Orbital for Spin,
Paul Hartnoll confirmed the rumors: on the west coast of India, in the ex-
Portuguese state of Goa, an old hippie haven hosted raves every winter, massive
techno freak-outs that were less parties than rites of passage. These parties rode the
cutting edge of psychedelic techno music—what we now call psy-trance—and they
attracted New Age traveler types as well as the raver elite. Some suggested that Goa
was the true source of raves, or at least of their spiritual essence, that ineffable
gnostic intoxication whose articulation usually leaves outsiders in the dark.
Techno historians already know that English working-class kids brought raves
back from Ibiza, the cheap vacation island off Spain whose weather, mellowness,
and lack of extradition treaties made it a Goa-style hippie colony decades ago. The
original Ibizan DJs were certainly freaks, mixing Tangerine Dream in with their
disco. But the holders of bohemian lore will tell you that the authentic esoteric
lineage of electronic trance dance lay further east, in Goa. When I spoke to Genesis
P-Orridge, the leader of the magickal techno/industrial outfit Psychic TV, he said
that “the music from Ibiza was more horny disco, while Goa was more psychedelic
and tribal. In Goa, the music was the facilitator of devotional experience. It was just
functional, just to make that other state happen.”^2
Contemporary attempts to characterize underground dance culture’s experience of
this “state” often turn to the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, whose
writings have helped us wrestle with non-ordinary states of consciousness and
perception without recourse to either religious or reductivist languages (see
Reynolds 1998:245–6; and Chapter 14 in this volume). The notion of a plateau,
derived from cybernetic philosopher Gregory Bateson’s studies of Balinese
aesthetics, helps characterize a state of becoming whose intensities are realized
without climax or resolution. Similarly, the famous “Body-without-Organs,” a
phrase cribbed from Artaud, can be said to describe an immanent and literally dis-
organized field of animate matter, at once a pure virtuality and a synthetic bundle of
molecular affects.