Nomad Codes

the summer monsoon, he’s known as Goa Gil—only one of the items that makes Gil less than well-loved by today’s younger DJs. Gil lives in a spacious brick house behind the Orange Boom restaurant and alongside a pile of rubble he calls a temple. “Come in, come in,” he barks before I even introduce myself. A large collage of rave flyers, psychedelic posters and photos of Hindu holy men covers one wall.
    Just as I start to get comfortable, Gil’s pretty young French wife Ariane—herself the child of Goan freaks—begins interrogating me. “Why are you writing an article for? You’re going to spoil everything.” She complains about a piece in i-D magazine that resulted in floods of Brits. “Now we get the Americans and all the hip-hoppers coming,” she whined. I assure her that the hip-hoppers have better things to do. She grabs her sunglasses, and storms off to the beach.
    But Gil knows he has a story to tell, so he tells it. Growing up in Marin County in the ’60s, Gil took the bus down to the Haight after school. He fell in with Family Dog, the loose freak collective that sparked the psychedelic concert scene before Bill Graham moved in with dollar signs in his eyes. In 1969, fed up with “rip-offs and junkies and speed freaks,” Gil bought a one-way ticket to Amsterdam. He then made his way overland to India, where, among other things, he discovered the sadhus.
    Hymns in the ancient Vedas describe these wandering holy men as long-haired sages who lived off the forest, covering themselves with ash and drinking the elixir of the gods. Today, some of India’s hundreds of thousands of sadhus are strict ascetics, some are simply beggars, and some resemble Hindu Rastafarians. These impressive, bloodshot souls wander about, wearing their hair in long dreads and finding spiritual sustenance in charas, India’s yummy mountain hash. Before they smoke the clay pipes called chillum, the sadhus cry out “Bum Shiva!” the way Rastas bark “Jah!”
    Not surprisingly, the freaks took to the sadhus. Gil went whole hog, living in caves, wearing orange robes, and coaxing the Kundalini up his spine. But he still found his way to Goa’s firelit drum circles every winter. Despite persistent false rumors that the Who or the Stones or the Beatles left their gear on the sands of Calangute, the source of Goa’s music machines was a fellow named Alan Zion, who smuggled in a Fender PA and two tape decks overland.
    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.
    Gil and his friend Swiss Ruedi quickly joined in, but the techno transition was not smooth. The freaks were attached to their Bob Marley, their Santana, their Stones. Ruedi had to enlist a bodyguard to ward off a rock fan’s blows.
    “How can you listen to the same music for fifteen years?” Gil now booms. “I used to love the Dead when I was growing up, but I can’t listen to that stuff anymore. It sounds like cowboy music.” Gil thinks that music is always flowering, but that the juice moves through different genres, always one step ahead of the record companies. “Now it’s in techno. Music has gone through a complete cycle. It started in ancient times with tribal drumming, and