Nomad Codes

now it’s come back to tribal trance techno. Where do you go from there?”
    Gil starts pacing about, wildly gesticulating. “I’m basically just using this whole party situation as a medium to do magic, to remake the tribal pagan ritual for the twenty-first century. It’s not just a disco under the coconut trees.” He pauses to light up a Dunhill. “It’s an initiation.”
    Gil slaps on two remixes he made while visiting San Francisco. The band is Kode IV, a German duo who brag about producing tracks in five minutes and which Gil was to join later in the year after one of the members died. He blasts the tunes, and towers over me as he identifies the samples: a sadhu’s “Bum!”, the Pope, Aleister Crowley. Then he plays the “Anjuna” remix of the cut “Accelerate,” towering over me as he repeats word for word a long sample cribbed from some flying saucer movie: “‘People of the earth, attention’,” he booms over the beat. I’m deeply stoned by this point, and his eyes bore into mine, and for a moment I feel like he’s channeling the message to me directly from the aliens, like I’m finally getting the key. “‘This is a voice speaking to you from thousands of miles beyond your planet. This could be the beginning of the end of the human race.’“
    Ariane walks in, breaks the spell and bad-vibes me out of the house. Gil follows me outside, trying to explain the reasons for her underground protectionism: the rising pollution, the clueless young DJs, the sharp rise in prices. Gil shakes his head. “We came here so long ago, to the end of a dirt road and a deserted beach. It was like the end of the world. And now the whole world is at our doorstep. The communications lines are open. Where do we go from here?”

    If Gil had listened a little harder to the music he loves to spin, he would have seen it all coming, because techno is the sound of one world shrinking. The media tsunami that gave backwater hippies like him DAT players and computerized music has also brought fax machines and MTV and journalists to their hideaway. Gil’s stuck in the paradox of the technofreak: you can’t drop out and plug in at the same time. The underground is now networked, and you can’t escape the feedback loop for long. You might even call it karma.
    British club kids can now fly straight to Goa for around 500 bucks, and many arrive with nothing more than cash in their pockets, suitcases stuffed with party clothes and a desire to get “off their face.” They care nothing for India, its art or music or deep spirituality. What had been a magical release valve for expatriates intoxicated by the East has become a thing in itself. “These new people have no idea,” one silver-haired French sarod player who first came to Goa in the early ’70s told me. “They didn’t come overland, they didn’t have to find their own food, and they never really got lost.”
    Most of Asia’s hardcore gypsy freaks don’t come this way anymore. They’ve drifted far south, to primitive spots not listed in the Lonely Planet guidebook. At the same time, Goa’s state and local government have begun maneuvering for tonier tourists and five-star hotels, even though many locals prefer to get their rupees straight from the relatively noninvasive freaks. As the cops crack down on drugs and parties, Goa’s underground is caving in. All this scene really needs is great weather, weak currency and a degree of invisibility (or permeable law enforcement). Goa-style parties have already popped up in Bali, Thailand, Australia and the valleys of the Himalaya. But as the grid invades Anjuna, one of the last pockets of freakdom’s mystical and stridently non-commercial trance-dance culture may fade away like the moon at dawn.

    I decided to hunt down Laurent, the French DJ who had pioneered the electronic parties back in ’83 and had alternately been described to me as a burn-out and a genius. Gil hadn’t been too encouraging. “He probably won’t talk to you. He’s very mysterious.” But he told me where Laurent could be found every day: in the last chai shop on Little Vagator, playing backgammon.
    So I puttered my unhip little TVS moped towards the cliffs overlooking the lush coves of Vagator beach. I clamored down bluffs packed with coconut trees and tall hippy teepees, marveling that the temporary shelters of the nomads the Europeans called “Indians” were now housing European nomads in India. Down on the sand, a scruffy