My own limbs had first plumbed that zone during Grateful Dead shows in
California in the early 1980s, especially during the legendary second sets. But in
contrast to the Dead’s notoriously loose if often resplendent noodling, Goan trance
seemed more economically engineered for psychedelic journeying.
Let’s be clear: most of the psychedelic characteristics of psy-trance are functional
rather than simply representational. That is, they trigger and extend psychedelic
perception as much as they signify it with characteristically “trippy” cues. Just as the
combination of Fluoro-lite dyes and black lights seems to virtualize visible objects to
suitably tweaked nervous systems, the music’s sonic after-images and timbre trails
disintegrate conventional spacetime and allow shimmering micro-perceptions to
emerge on the melting border between sound-waves and internal sensations. Portals
appear, resonating geometries that seed further cognitive and somatic shifts, while
the relentless and essentially invariant rhythm—what the Australian-Goan DJ Ray
Castle calls “quantum quick step” (ENRG 2001:165)—at once anchors and fuels the
voyage. Repetition becomes a carrier wave, the audible beats seemingly dissolving
into pulsing nervous systems whose mutual entrainment brings on a collective
intensity which transcends— yes, transcends—the usual dance-floor heat.
Enough of this. Seeking relaxation and discourse, I wandered over to chai land and
plopped down next to a crowd of Brits. Pete was in pajama pants and an open vest,
his aristocratic features oddly framed by long scraggly hair. Hunched next to him
was Steve, a skinny blond rolling a spliff.
“Have you seen The Time Machine?” Steve asked me. “There’s this noise that the
Morlocks use to call the Eloi underground. That’s exactly how it was five years ago
when my friends and I first came to Goa. We heard this booming rhythm in the
distance. We didn’t know where the fuck we were, but we just crashed through the
jungle with our torches. The sound was calling us. I got real paranoid that there was
some alien intelligence directing the computers, like the Morlocks, summoning us
to a place where they were gonna eat our souls.”
Pete nodded as if nothing his friend says could surprise him. “My first party, I
just got the feeling I was in some spiritual Jane Fonda gymnasium,” he says. “Boom,
boom, boom, and everyone going into trance. It was quite alienating actually”
I asked them how Goa parties differed from the raves in England. “Here people
know about the history of freakdom, of free-form living,” said Steve as he passed the
smoke. “That vibe is carried forward with the music. In England it’s not really
freaky anymore. It’s too organized. People are wearing the right kind of T-shirts,
whereas here people will rip their T-shirts apart and run down the beach.”
Steve and Pete’s comments showed how Goa functioned as a locus of tradition.
How “spiritual” you consider this tradition depends on your definition of the term.
“Free-form living” implies sensual practices and low-commitment lifestyles at least
as much as it implies supernatural notions of the Tao or spiritual practices of, say,
choiceless awareness. But it is precisely this “pseudo-spiritual” mix, incoherent or
even repugnant to observers but rather delicious to participants, which characterizes
bohemian or freak religiosity—what I am calling its spiritual hedonism.
258 GOLDEN GOA’S TRANCE TRANSMISSION