Goa  India had always been a party paradise beach head for dance music and drug taking. The traveler hippies danced to the most happening, mind expanding, groovilicious, cosmic-infused, counter culture music that was available.

The backdrop, in India, the home of religion, was exotic, mystical, bizarre, eccentric, uninhibited, decadent, hedonistic, spiritual, transpersonal, transcendental. Beyond nationality, fashion media hype, and music industry charts.

A constantly sunny, stoned, alternative, freaky, LSD state of mind, influenced the sounds that worked in this exotic sub culture –  beach head – dance floor. Between 1987-90 there would have been, maximum 300-400 people on the dance floor.

Genre didn’t matter. Commercial and underground blended into an esoteric, dislocated, psychedelic, functionalism. The contextual twist is fascinating, when you consider that the Bee Gees Saturday Night Fever cuts were played in the 70s on the beaches of Goa. Belgian New Beat and Industrial Electronic Body Music with eclectic wacky House Music and Rock all coagulated into a hybrid, disco, techno, fusion, in the late 80s.

At this time, ‘Techno’ (music made with computers) was experimental, fringe, fresh, experimental, very alternative and challenging. The outdoor parties of Goa were primarily an LSD ‘happening’, with lots of mystical references, and strange ‘acting out’. Albeit, there were fluffy Ecstasy-melody gestures in the sweeter morning cut selections.

Attitude and vibe eclipsed fixations about ‘genre’.
Quirky, eccentric, unique dance tunes, all of which had their own personality, or magic spell, provided the situational, entertaining, engaging ‘juice’ for wild abandonment on the dance floor.

Journey music for trippers. Not one dimensional, or the fixed style, 4/4 beat which Goa Trance in the mid 90s evolved into. The spirit of Goa in the late 80s was playful, spontaneous, inventive, experimental, explorative, eclectic. At the end of a season (four months of partying), the best cuts were distilled down into cream-selections by DJs who did marathon sets, playing from tape players, and later dat players. Special mixes were made, joining various versions of songs together.

During the party, the DJ was anonymous, obscure, behind a palm tree, out of site, in the jungle, not the centre of focus on a pedestal – the star personality – as it has become, which is very much a music industry business influence. The focus was on the dance floor. The dancers were the party. The music, drugs and context opened doors. The music came from multiple sound sources, speakers in the jungle, mostly four stakes in surround formation. There was lots of creativity in decoration, using fluro and black light.

The idealised spirit was: Unity on the dance floor through shared peak experiences, beyond culture, society, fashion, ego and money. In its most romanticised form and context, it was an existential, electronica, acid bath, psychodrama.

One or two Djs played the entire party with a rich mosaic of mentasmic music –  cinematic, atmospheric jig saw piece ditties – making up a 10 hour journey, from dark into light. Up until the early 90s this was very alternative, and illegal. The local cops in Goa were paid bribe money to stay away.  The main stream music industry did not know about it, the artists making this maverick music did not know their music was being played in such a surreal situation. Acid House and Rave started running parallel to the underground Goa scene in the early 90s, and various strands of techno/alt-house/trance/breaks blended.

‘Goa Psy Trance’ was marketed in London in 93, heralded by with a plethora of labels and magazine sensationalism. Artists started making music specifically for Goa. The outdoor party scene, as well as warehouse parties, became an alternative to traditional clubs world wide.

The cuts I collected, played and went on  to produce in the late 80s and early 90s stand up well today, in 2004, as evocative, influential dance music. The ideas and imaginative techniques employed by nascent techno artists at that time were truly innovative, radical, unique, entertaining, unusual, original; and well tested in the hard-core Goa school of serious trippers.

This was not cheesy house music or radio songs, and seldom album tracks. We are talking,  alternative dance cuts you were unlikely to have ever head before, which awakened you to new sensorial perspectives, pushing the envelope of rhythmic composition and ideas in music. Often there were political or science fiction references in the use of sampling. It was cut n paste post  modern da da dance. It was an invitation to travel, explore inner and outer spaces, you had never experienced before.

In hindsight, this unique period in electronic dance music was, and still is, a catalyzing, vibrational. electronic enzyme; which had the power to mobilize a collective movement that went out over the planet, later to be called ‘Goa Psy Trance’, but tending to be more generic in bass line 4/4 groove architecture, and of recent, grossly bereft of new ideas.

Inevitably making fashion out of art, homogenises its sharp idiosyncratic edges into a highly formularised style, hence the dilemma of the current state of ‘Goa Psy Trance’, which has become almost square and fundamentalist in form. In fact, today, ‘Techno’, that weird computer music of the 80s, has become corporised into a ubiquitous  contemporary generic form of doof wall paper, heard every where. The same commodification happened with that other great psychedelic musical counter culture, Rock N Roll.

My set at ‘ Feeling Weird’ will be a quintessential selection of key, rare cuts –  very individual in personality – from the seminal period before the rise of Goa Psy Trance as a global movement. This music, for connoisseurs of  psychedelic electronica, stands up very well, in the current climate of retro and a profusion of tired formula. Especially for those that never experienced the first original wave of psychedelic techno of the late 80s and early 90s, which truly was weird, out on the edge of society sounds. The original Goa groove.

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