drank in the pleasure of their mutual moves. Eros charged the air, but I felt none of
the sleazy, late-night vibes common to urban clubs. I recalled something Genesis
had said on the phone, when he traced Goa’s mode of ecstatic dancing back to
1960s London clubs like UFO and Middle Earth. “Unlike most popular dance,
trance-dances aren’t about sexual encounter,” he said. “Instead, you dance like a
dervish to accentuate your artificially induced mental state to a point that’s equal to
and integrated with an ecstatic religious state. You’re seeking illumination, not
copulation.”
Now I knew what Genesis had been talking about. Gil’s set was a story about
illumination: after the initial hook compels you to get up and go, a gradual
intensification of psychedelic effects brings the bodymind into a space at once heavy
and incorporeal, an exquisite dark night of the soul that more or less matches the
splintering plateaus of a drug peak. Dawn proclaims a sweet return, as the rising
heat and light reconnect you to the human family, to nature and the faces of all
your fellow travelers, radiating feelings at once loving and impersonal. However
deterritorialized the core of the evening, its flights were mobilized inside an
essentially narrative frame—a frame that, if not fixed in the archetypal basement of
human consciousness, is at least hardwired by the metabolism of psychoactive
substances.^4
Genesis’ comment also helped me realize something about the Goan beat, which
to outsiders can seem inexcusably monotonous and unfunky. By minimizing
syncopation and flattening any potential sinuousness in the grooves, Goan trance
releases energy from the gravity well of the hips. This redirects the pelvic undulations
that anchor the more sexual energies of dance, deterritorializing them across the
entire frame, and especially the upper body
Such displacement has been explained in part by the action of MDMA, which is
notorious for generating libidinal attractions that cannot, for men anyway, be
genitally fulfilled (Reynolds 1998:246–8). But MDMA is a secondary drug within
psy-trance, and even psychedelic phenomenology only takes us so far. Perhaps we
need to invoke tantra’s esoteric physiology. As Ray Castle noted, Goa’s “sound
frequency alchemy” revolves around “raising the kundalini serpent energy in the
body’s chakra system” (ENRG 2001:162). In addition to the frequent use of
ascending arpeggios and digitized glissandi, psy-trance’s quintessentially impersonal
and non-copulating beats might help trigger such ascendant energies. At the very
least, these highly directed vibrations serve as immediate, functional analogs for the
secret life of shakti.
Castle’s rhetoric may simply be another example of freak appropriation of the
East, alongside the Ganesha tapestries, Rajasthani handbags, and pervasive stink of
Nag Champa. But I think not. In the midst of his morning mix, Gil introduced the
mantra “Om Namah Shivaya,” intoned over sitars and a bubbly beat. Spinning far
outside of orthodoxy, East or West, Gil knew who he was invoking:
Shiva, dread-headed lord of destruction and transformation, your electric
drum heralds the close of the world.260 GOLDEN GOA’S TRANCE TRANSMISSION