fUSION Anomaly. Sampling Paradise

TelexExternal LinkInternal LinkInventory Cache

Sampling Paradise
The Technofreak Legacy of Golden Goa

This nOde last updated July 23rd, 2001 and is permanently morphing...
(8 Chuen (Monkey)/8 Batz (Monkey) - 151/260 - 12.19.8.7.11)

by Erik Davis

Extracts:

DJs are the maestros of the information age, and not just because the discs they spin are basically digital creations. Freed from the gravity of faces and fixed names, underground dance music finds its essence in constant mutation and total overproduction. Sifting through hundreds of records a week, DJs define themselves in part by what they comb out of the data overload. That's why many act like spies, taping over record labels, or buying all available copies of a favorite record and destroying all but one. DJs are made of information. But in Goa, where the inability to mix makes selection particularly important, they drop their guard and swap tapes.

I had decided not to artificially stimulate myself for his party, so I crawled into bed, setting the alarm for 5 am. But the

Bamboo Forest was only a few hundred yards away, and the bass beats warped my

dreams. Two glowing

Tibetan eyes appeared before me in the dark room, and led me up a

moonlit mountain path to an old, white-bearded yogi. He said that

reality was like a television set, and then he showed me how to channel-surf. I zapped between technicolor

twilight zones until a great

metaphysical boredom set in. "Techno is the sound of the universe being created and destroyed every second," he said.

Väth and Johan are friendly enough guys, but many Shore Bar insiders set themselves apart from the rave tourists (and journalists) with the same kind of snobbery you find in London or New York. Given the mystical legacy of freak India, the cliques here have a mystical air, like they're pushing the envelope of consciousness itself. As Raja Ram, an old moustached prog rocker-cum-techno musician, told me, "You have to become a neuro-naut to understand this music. We've gone from flint-rock to the moonlanding in a few thousand years, and now we're on the edge of the world opened up with information machines. This is a new inner space we're exploring."

I had already heard about Gil from Genesis P. Orridge, who had filled me in earlier on the technofreak legacy of late-60s London clubs like Middle Earth (xref J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings series) and UFO. "The basic premise was smoke and light shows, large quantities of ecstatic chemicals, and dancing like a dervish to accentuate your artificially-induced mental state to a point that was equal to and integrated with an ecstatic religious state." When the scene decayed, the heaviest psychedelic warriors split, taking their musical alchemy with them. Some went to the Spanish island of Ibiza, while the more esoteric heads went east. Though Gil was from San Francisco, he had trod a similar path. "You have to find him", Genesis told me. "He's one of the links."

According to Gil, these parties are the direct ancestors of raves. Techno historians already know that English working-class kids brought raves back from Ibiza, the cheap vacation island off of Spain whose weather, slack and lack of extradition treaties made it a Goa-style hippy colony decades ago. While many DJs shuttled between Ibizan summers and Goan winters, some claim that the more authentic lineage of electronic ecstasy belonged to the East. As Genesis P. Orridge put it, "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."

And Goa went totally electronic in 1983, when two French DJs named Fred and Laurent got sick of rock music and reggae. At the same time Derrick May and Juan Atkins created the futuristic disco-funk called "techno", Fred and Laurent used far more primitive tech—two cassette decks—to create a schizo's brew out of New Wave, electronic rock, gay Eurodisco and experimental industrial bands like Cabaret Voltaire and the Residents. They slipped electro-pop like New Order and Blanc Mange into the mix, but only after cutting out all the vocals. It was heady shit, and soon hipsters started slipping them underground tapes from the West.

There's nothing "natural" about the sounds echoing off the rocks. These melodies and beats are created, recorded, and reproduced in the digital

ether of micro-circuitry. Techno's frenetic datadense

intensity seems totally contrary to Abé's air of bodhisattva calm. "So do you really like this music?" I ask him. "Yes," he says, tapping a hollowed-out coconut mixing bowl hanging from his neck. "I like primitive sounds."

And that's the paradox of the techno-freak. As we hurtle into the 21st century, these transient refugees from the First World have poached the info tech that's speeding up the march of progress and made an abrupt about-face towards the archaic. Technology is mobile, so they drag it to the rocks and jungles. Technology loves connection, so they sync it with the ancient wheel of the heavens. Technology simulates, so they make it mimic the fear and splendor of shamanic trance. The Goan beaches that spawned this ecstatic digital primitivism may be lost to media hype and packaged tours, but the hardcore technofreaks will just lose themselves in the porous Third World landscape.

After all, the full moon follows you everywhere you go.

TelexExternal LinkInternal LinkInventory Cache