Did trance ruin the "special" music of Goa?
A global scene that began in India gave birth to some of dance music's trippiest records—and a few of its worst.
Early in the novel Moon Juice Stomper, by the DJ Ray Castle, an everyman raver called Jules is in a Goan restaurant ringing a friend in Australia, telling him that “the most vile fun is being had” and that he’d better get himself over there. The parties, he says, represent “the wildest edge of experience,” peopled by “tribal warriors,” “galactic star divers” and “laser cowboys,” all engaged in a “cosmic conspiracy” in which “all kinds of crazies [are] gettin’ down.”
What Castle is describing, in one of the novel’s more sober passages, is the stage for what he calls “special Goa music.” But what that means to whom, exactly, is a generational question. Since the late ‘60s, Goa has been a bacchanalian Mecca for wanderers and seekers who’d reached the end of the so-called Hippie Trail, whether they’d come for the “high hippie music” of, say, the Grateful Dead or the “machine-gun music”—the kind with Roland drum machines—that followed.
When the DJs replaced the bands at the centre of Goa’s sandy stages, the wind and heat compelled them to mix with tapes instead of records. But the hostile weather had a big upside: it created more space for edits, shaping a recognisably unique sound that avoided vocals (unless spoken) and applied intense rhythmic pressure; though DJs in Goa often did the edits themselves, the San Francisco remix service Razormaid! was also emblematic of the freaky Goa style.
The subject of three recent compilations, by the labels Sound Migration and Full Circle, is the Goa scene’s initial bursts of industrial, new beat, synth pop and proto-techno records during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. What’s worth noting here is the scarcity of “trance”—as in “Goa Trance”—from the compilations’ titles and liner notes, where the word, when mentioned, is variously dismissed as part of a “catchphrase” and the last exit towards “high-speed oblivion.”
Gonzo Goa Party Music ‘87-’94 [Sound Migration, 2023]
Gonzo Goa II Party Music ‘86-’93 [Sound Migration, 2024]
Kicking Dust: The Goa Way, A Full Circle Compilation [Full Circle. 2024]
In style and sensibility, Kicking Dust and Gonzo Goa instead evoke a kind of naive ecstasy. With the exceptions of Chris & Cosey’s eternally fantastic “Exotika” and Richie Hawtin’s “F.U.2 (Re-edit),” a techno all-timer that drills through the mind’s eye with spirographic perfection, the music often feels intuitive yet not wholly sure of itself. This, to me, suggests a scrappy kind of innovation, where bold ideas emerge in the moment and are held together by little more than crossed fingers.
Only once is the result less than inspiring. On “Dreams (Final Dance),” a straight-to-video Phrygian lead struggles to carry some badly rinsed ‘80s dance music tropes (belch-preset bassline, bad-porn vocal). Your mileage with a few other tracks will depend on your tolerance for the orientalising habits of that era’s European producers—not least Peyote’s “Alcatraz,” a demure prototype for the German duo’s stinking breakthrough hit of 1998, “Power Of American Natives.”
But the margins of success or failure for music that embraces this much risk are remarkably thin. One track that nails the brief, by some miracle, is C.C.C.P.’s “Orient Express.” Its imperiously tasteless synth melody, which resembles nothing so much as a despotic national anthem in a vaporwave hue, honks with farcical pride, underscored by an absolutely hoofing kick drum; a more on-the-nose name for it might’ve been “The Irony Curtain.”
If the music sometimes indulges in taking the piss, other tracks manage to hit some uniquely sinister notes. “You Can Run" (Razormaid Mix),” by 3 Times 6, is a special case in point. Starlit melodies twinkle as though gesturing to our better angels, but the rest of it is wading in filth; vile fun indeed. There are Giallo screams, Mortal Kombat-adjacent taunts, and a frankly evil bassline that sounds like a gang of wasps having a big one at Alton Towers.
With artists like Jah Wobble and Psyche among the other contributors, there’s serious pedigree here. People do bang on a lot about the early ‘90s as a great time for dance music, but Gonzo Goa and Kicking Dust illustrate exactly why the case is made so forcefully. And yet I’ve rarely heard compilations from that era that feel this essential. Besides being exceptional, the compilations also share the explicit belief that by 1994 the belle époque was done. I was curious: why?
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One track across the compilations has given me chills whenever I listen, and it’s Syntech’s “Discontented.” Few records I’ve come across have earned the right to be called “epic” quite like “Discontented,” whose Weatherall-baiting cosmic acid arpeggiations, arranged with graph paper precision, climb towards a steely prog Italo crescendo. It is magisterial with a touch of the absurd, as though it was music for the coronation of a space cowboy.
in hindsight, “Discontented” also sounds like one of the skeleton keys for whatever turned “special Goa music” into “Goa trance.” By the mid-’90s, Goa-as-concept was everywhere, and the music itself grew in refinement if not ambition. Paul Oakenfold popularised the new sound to a global audience with 1994’s “The Goa Mix,” which combed the industrial grit clean (compare that with Ray Castle’s Goa-themed mix for Sound Metaphors—about as smooth as a sailor’s hands).
A few months after the Oakenfold mix, i-D, the Grim Reaper for things that are cool, ran a Goa feature asking, “Is Trance The New Acid House?” You can see the result of this trend-chasing in a Channel 4 news report from 1995 about what’s billed as the Goa trance scene, though the broadcaster speaks exclusively to promoters and DJs in the UK, all of whom display a conspicuously gaudy, fluoro-syncretic visual style.
On a string of compilations and LPs around that time, Goa trance often looked and sounded like a too-literal copy of the psychedelic style pioneered by DJs like Laurent, Fred Disko and Goa Gil. Sometimes, the music is merely second-rate. Or sounds like white hippie shit. In one especially egregious case it resembles a dark reboot of Inspector Gadget. Worse still, more than a few indulge in gap year kitsch. But the style’s worst trait is that it cannot help getting carried away with itself.
Simon Reynolds once identified the “maximalist” impulse in Goa trance artists like Hallucinogen, but on top of ascribing that to an “absurd generosity” of musical ideas I’d also argue that there’s an unattractive Emerson, Lake & Palmer showmanship at work; I also wonder if there wasn’t an imposter syndrome fuelling this style, an overdetermination to interpret the scene’s transcendent potential from a cohort of artists with fewer first-hand experiences of the Goan hippie myth.
Some Goa trance tunes—Etnica’s “Tribute,” Psychaos’s “They Tried To Grab Me,” Spectral’s “Moonstone” and X-Dream’s “Do You Believe (Sync Mix)”—are actually insanely good. But too often I’ve found flatulent 303 lines that need a Pepto Bismol and a lie down. And because I should stress that I didn’t emerge with this opinion after 30 minutes, I’ve gone through most of the music on this list with open ears but, alas, my third eye shut.
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Dance music scenes undergo fascinating make-or-break shifts when the emphasis transfers from DJs driving the sound to producers replicating it. In the case of, say, ghettotech, the anthems inspired by the radio blends of Miami bass and sped-up techno helped a style also known as electrofunk become “the indigenous sound of Detroit.” On the other hand, it could go the way of tech house, where the scene is flooded with pap. (I’ve gone deep on both genres for RBMA and RA, respectively.)
Perhaps my hesitation around the Goa trance era is that it falls short of feeling like a lived-in musical culture. But you’d have to wonder about how true that is of the period spanning Gonzo Goa and Kicking Dust. After all, the lives of Indian locals and their relationship to the scene are, with noble exceptions, absent from Western accounts of this music; meanwhile, the few Indian people who appear in Moon Juice Stomper are cast as crooks and worse.
Was Goa itself incidental to the distinctly European and American character of the records, DJs and dancers who got together on Anjuna beach? In Arun Saldanha’s compelling 2007 book, Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and The Viscosity of Race, he describes being at a party and witnessing “whites taking up the dance floor in the morning and somehow managing to dispel Indians again and again,” through a mostly implicit set of subcultural rules.
He goes on:
“Why would a white microcosm be re-created if the whole point of going to India and Goa is adventure, escape, becoming different? … Young whites are in Anjuna seemingly to sample and develop a lifestyle quite different from what they’re used to, but the way they do this betrays the limits of their escape and rebellion… an escape from whiteness can perversely reinforce it.”
One of the intriguing ideas Saldanha proposes, besides safeguarding the interests of the local families that benefit from rave tourism, is a “freaking” of whiteness that makes possible the “proliferation of race,” or, in other words, a remixing of Goan party stereotypes: “white chai mamas, Indian deejay celebs, some Bollywood breaks and house alongside the monotonous psytrance, locals teaching the in-crowd to dance.”
Summoning that reality requires a degree of imagination that neither the compilations nor Castle’s autofictional novel—otherwise significant documents of Goa’s dance music heritage—should be responsible for realising. But as it is, their respective portrayals of paradise are by turns idyllic and insufficient; when one of the DJs in Moon Juice Stomper brings up Charanjit Singh, the Indian acid house pioneer, the cursory chat elicits no greater reflection.
In her i-D travelogue the writer Bethan Cole mentions that “Goa the location has become Goa the state of mind.” That strikes me as the scene’s enduring strength. Through a tweaked-out sound that spoke to the cloistered exotica in which ravers found themselves, “special Goa music” feels like a familiar yet unknowable world; a second summer of lust that drove its devotees to ecstasy, madness, paradise—and possibly, once the drugs had worn off, a good job in finance.
The Gonzo Goa Way: further listening
Push! – The Invincible Spirit
Killer Machine – The Laser Cowboys
Space Dance - Laserdance
Outer Space Odyssey - Voltage Control
Space Trouble - Why Not?
Jabdah - Koto
Tune In (Turn On The Acid House) - Psychic TV
Neue Dimensionen - Techno Bert
Program It (Instrumental) - DAF
p:Machinery - Propaganda
A Split Second - Flesh
Addiction - Skinny Puppy
Paranoimia - Art Of Noise
Masterhit (Masterblaster) - Front 242
The Great Divide - Portion Control
”Special Goa Music” mixes
Unveiling The Secret: The Roots Of Trance - Dave Mothersole
Back To Disco Valley - Full Circle
Gonzo Goa Party Music ‘86 - ‘93 Launch Party at Schrippe Hawaii, Berlin - Ray Castle
The Microplastics Digest
What I’ve been paying attention to this past month.
LISTENING
Works - Egberto Gismonti
Comme de Garçons, Volume 1 - Seigen Ono
DE9: Closer To The Edit - Richie Hawtin
Reminiscent Suite - Mal Waldron & Terumasa Hino
READING
Goldsmiths Realism: How London’s radical university ate itself - Miles Ellingham (The Londoner)
No Tags: Conversations On Underground Music Culture - Tom Lea & Chal Ravens
Tyll - Daniel Kehlmann
Amusing Ourselves To Death - Neil Postman