At the core of this initiation, according to Gil, is trance, an experience of
psychoactive grace. Here is the description he gave to the San Francisco writer and
trance DJ Michael Gosney:
When there’s no problem, and everything’s set up right, and the music just
flows, then it can come to the point where you go into the trance, and
everybody’s going in a trance. And it builds and builds. When it’s just perfect,
and it’s a perfect song for the moment, perfection opens up in that moment,
and it keeps sustaining itself. Then it becomes so perfect in the moment, with
the trance, magic starts to happen. Everybody all at once will start to get
tingling up their spinal column, and outside of their skin, like your hair’s
standing on end. Everybody will be getting it all at once. It will be so perfect
in the moment that that feeling just sustains It can build and build and build
‘til it comes to a point where it goes ssssssssshhhh through everybody all at once,
like a bolt of lightning.^7Gil’s language lends itself equally to a Deleuzian or tantric gloss, but the real
strength of his claims lies in their core appeal to experience. Besides a certain
inherent ineffability, such experiences emerge as largely unspoken intensities within
a cultural context that eludes and even actively undermines the usual
anthropological markers of religion. The psy-trance party allows the commingling
of age-old ecstatic techniques with attitudes and technologies that reject tradition in
the name of an open-ended, novelty-seeking alternative techno-culture. This mixed
quality helps explain how and why the pagan primitivism of psy-trance’s gnosis is
also wedded to apocalyptic expectations. We return to move forward, accelerated.
As if on cue, Gil slapped on two remixes he had made while visiting San
Francisco the previous summer. The original tracks were made by Kode IV, a
German duo who bragged in interviews about producing techno tracks in five
minutes. Gil blasted the tunes at ear-splitting volume, the first of which sampled
Pope John XXIII, Aleister Crowley dropping Enochian science, and a sadhu
shouting “Bum!” Then Gil played his “Anjuna” mix of “Accelerate.” He towered
over me as he repeated word for word the sample he cribbed from some flying-saucer
movie: “People of the earth, attention.” Gil’s eyes bored into mine, as if he was
channeling the message directly from the aliens. “This is a voice speaking to you
from thousands of miles beyond your planet. This could be the beginning of the
end of the human race.” For a moment, I could hear the Morlocks call.
Spy in the chai shop“Goa Gil” self-consciously presented himself as a carrier of tradition, and he slagged
a number of Goa’s younger DJs for being on ego trips instead of cultivating the
proper devotional attitude. The idea that DJs carried the burden of the tradition
made me even more intrigued to speak to Laurent, the French DJ who had
pioneered the electronic parties back in 1983 but, to my knowledge, didn’t spin at
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