Nomad Codes

little more than a bed, a batik print and his gear: Macintosh Power Book, Akai sampler, keyboard, DAT deck. I’d heard two of Johan’s intense tracks on the Dragonfly label’s Project II Trance (under the name Mandra Gora), which along with Juno Reactor’s Transmissions and the Ethnotechno and Concept in Dance compilations, is the best stateside introduction to Goan trance. But Johan doesn’t like to DJ—he’s one of those hardcore power dancers who treat the night as one long track. “With a combination of good music, a good spot and good dancing, it’s like a cosmic trigger goes off,” he says of Goa’s greatest rites. After a night of such cosmic gyration, Johan would return to his studio, download his vibes, dump the bytes onto DAT, and pass the tape onto his DJ friends. “It was like a perfect feedback loop.”
    When Johan first arrived in Goa six years ago, the techno-trance scene was totally off the map. Synchronicities abounded. “It was like a poker game no one could follow.” But these days he’s starting to sell his stuff in the West, and though he plans on setting up a large Goa studio as soon as he can figure out the right bureaucrat to bribe, he’s pessimistic about the future of the East’s nomadic underground. “Soon we’ll have a global digital network where everyone will know where everybody is all the time.” He looks me in the eye as only a German can. “What you’re here to write about is already dead and gone.”

    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 right before your eyes. As Raja Ram, an old moustached prog rocker-cum-techno musician, told me, “You have to become a neuronaut to understand this music. We’ve gone from flint-rock to the moon landing 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.”
    One of these inner astronauts is Ollie Wisdom, whose Bamboo Forest party was the best of the season. Ollie’s one of Goa’s rising stars, an ex-Goth from a circus family who learned the DJ ropes on the Thai island of Koh Pha Ngan. I had decided not to artificially stimulate myself for his party, so I crawled into bed, setting the alarm for 5 a.m. 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 surf the channels. I zapped between technicolor twilight zones until an immense metaphysical boredom set in. “Techno is the sound of the universe being created and destroyed every second,” he said.
    I woke up woozy as hell, but dragged myself out of bed and headed down the jungle path, past cool, dark trees and rows of Enfield bikes and mopeds. Rounding a large banyan tree, I found a Mad Hatter’s acid test of a party: banners of Shiva and blaxploitation hussies hung in the breeze; patches of bamboo coated with a rainbow swath of luminescent paint glowed in the black light; a phallic purple pillar stood in the center of the dance floor, crowned with a pumpkin-sized quartz crystal. As hardcore techno pounded, someone set a large wooden pentagram on fire, and in the witchy light I could see a large pyramid lashed together with bamboo in the distance. From inside, Ollie lorded over the crowd, decked out in shiny silver pants and Jetsons shades. He rolled his hips, flipped through DATs, pressed buttons like one of Raja Ram’s neuromancers.
    When Ollie’s final cut faded around 11 a.m., I picked my way through the iridescent bushes and approached him with notebook in hand. Bad move. He was sitting in a circle outside the DJ hut, sharing a smoke with a man whose short hair was twisted up into two chartreuse Martian devil-horns. I asked if I could set up an interview. He and his friends turned on me with maniacal disgust, like I was a Mormon covered with dogshit. “Nooooo! Go away!”

    One DJ I did manage to nail down was Gil, the dread-headed Kris Kringle who spun at the hilltop party. When he DJs in San Francisco and other Western cities during