Nomad Codes

(and frequently bare-chested) freak fauna. They sold Compaq computers to missile developers in Hyderabad, a full day’s drive to the east. “We like the hippies! They’re in their own world! Do you know where the party is?”
    With its bucket shower, scorpions, and outhouse (not much more than a chute into a pig trough), my abode was hardly plush. But like the saddle sores you might get at a dude ranch, such rough edges keep the straight tourists at bay and add an adventurous texture to the delicious lethargy that Anjuna otherwise affords: free parties, great drugs, jumbo prawns, cold beer, cool bikes for rent.
    Along with Xavier’s restaurant, where the beatnik pioneer Eight-Finger Eddie sits every night like some ancient mariner, Anjuna’s greatest tourist draw is its Wednesday flea market. What began decades earlier as a lazy venue for local vendors and destitute hippies has swollen into a glorious seaside mall. Wandering past acres of blankets and bangles, vests and singing bowls, spices and raw chunks of amber, I felt like some reincarnated Portuguese trader armed with American Express. The freaks have their own section, where travellers sell blank DAT tapes and Drum, Stussy tank-tops and original rave-ware. I wasn’t surprised when an expatriate American fashion photographer told me that some of the East’s traveling techno freak designers made up to a 1000 dollars a day on the streets of Tokyo, money they just poured back into their nomadic drift.

    Goa is only one stop on the hippy trail that three decades of drop-outs, drug lovers and mystical travellers have carved into the East. But Goa is perhaps the only boho roost where techno is as ubiquitous as faded blue jeans. The electronic beats seep out of half the houses and all the cafes, morning, noon and night. In three weeks’ time, I heard Pink Floyd once. I did not see one acoustic guitar.
    For a certain underground breed of DJ, Goa is an esoteric Mecca, and they flock from every corner of the globe—New Zealand, Japan, Israel, Italy, France. Established music-makers arrive with their fall crop of trance tracks for exchange and tasting, while rising stars train like athletes and perform as much for their fellow DJs as the crowd. The Orb’s Alex Patterson has passed through, the famed London remixer Youth is a regular, and Sven Väth—Frankfurt’s techno Kaiser—fell in love with the place.
    I run into Väth at the Shore Bar, an open-air seaside cafe with the ambience of Amsterdam-by-the-beach. It’s dusk, and the sun slips like a swollen egg into the Arabian Sea as fishing trawlers crawl along the horizon. With his pale bald dome, soul patch and slightly devilish eyes, Väth looks like a techno Mephisto. As an acid jazz take of “I’m In With the In Crowd” bubbles in the background, Väth tells me how surprised he was with Goa’s hip musical edge when he first visited a few years ago. “One of the first Goa DJs, Laurent, came up and said how much they liked my early, 16-bit recordings. Hardly anybody knows those records!”
    Väth’s been back to India every year since. On his previous visit, he recorded DAT samples that showed up on Accident in Paradise , whose strongest cuts are now in regular rotation. “The Goa sound is a very special deep trance,” Väth says. “It’s a serious thing. These people are not kids, this music is a part of their lives. Now when I produce or DJ in Frankfurt, I try to give the people there this kind of feeling. In India I fill my energy, and in Europe I put it out.” This year, Väth lugged 150 kilos of turntables and vinyl into India just so he could make a real Goa party.
    DJs are the maestros of the information age, and not just because the discs they spin are largely electronic 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. DJs are made of information. But in Goa, where the inability to mix makes selection particularly important, they tend to drop their guard and swap tapes.
    A few of those tapes are brewed locally. Johan is a young German producer who looks like Anthony Kiedis with a brain. He lives in a huge house in a small inland village, his room containing