Nomad Codes

symbols for the night: peace, OM, anarchy. Though his music was old, his mixing rough and his generator tepid, Jörg soon sinks the dancers into the groove. I start taking snapshots. Unlike Goa, where blissed-out hippies can transform into ferocious assholes at the sight of a camera, nobody seems to care. An Indian sadhu passes through the crowd, talking with a grizzled Italian in orange robes who occasionally whipped out a conch shell and blew. Who is the holy man? I wonder. Who is the pothead?
    After a bug-eyed Jörg leads us careening through an eon’s worth of cartoon wormholes, dawn finally arrives, dusting the rocks with pale purples and rusty reds. Fairy-tale temples emerge in the distant mist, but it’s no hallucination. Jörg climbs up on a rock and pumps his fist, exhorting us into a supreme embrace of the moment. It is nighttime, daytime, alltime, and as the rising sun and the setting moon touch the horizons on either side of us, the heavenly bodies perfectly balance the land on which we dance. Like great sex, great parties move the earth.
    I climb up some huge boulders to get a view of the high and wholly bizarre scene. A young Japanese man with a bandana sits smoking atop a slightly unsteady rock. “Go slow,” he softly warns as I sit down gingerly on the rock face. “Go natural.” Abé lives in Tokyo, but doesn’t like it much. “People forget nature-mind,” he says, gesturing above to the morning’s crystal blue dome.
    Then it hits me. There’s nothing “natural” about the sounds echoing off the rocks. These melodies and beats are created, recorded, and reproduced in the digital ether of electronic circuitry. Techno’s frenetic data-dense intensity seems totally contrary to Abé’s air of bodhisattva calm. “So do you really like this music?” I ask him.
    “Yes,” he says, tapping a hollowed-out coconut mixing bowl hanging from his neck. “I like primitive sounds.”
    And that’s the paradox of the techno-freak. As we hurtle into the twenty-first century, these transient refugees from the First World have poached the info tech that’s speeding up the march of progress and made an abrupt about-face towards the archaic. Technology is mobile, so they drag it to the rocks and jungles. Technology loves connection, so they sync it with the ancient wheel of the heavens. Technology simulates, so they make it mimic the fear and splendor of shamanic trance. The Goan beaches that spawned this ecstatic digital primitivism may be lost to media hype and packaged tours, but the hardcore technofreaks will just lose themselves in the porous Third World landscape. After all, the full moon follows you everywhere you go.
    1994

CAMEO DEMONS

    The Sun City Girls

    Alan and Rick Bishop are two halfbreed desert rats on the cusp of middle age who live in Seattle and make music, when they do, in a trio called Sun City Girls. Rick’s on guitar, Alan plays bass and sings, but the brothers play with lots of other things as well: double-reed pipes, gamelan, puppets, language, demons, audience expectations, states of consciousness. The third Girl is named Charlie Gocher, and he’s a scraggy Californian transplant the Bishop boys first met in the openmic scene in Phoenix over twenty years ago. Gocher plays drums—open, slippery, consternating drums—and he writes and occasionally lets loose some mighty ornery post-Beat rants.
    The Bishop brothers are addicted to third world travel, and have been so since they first hit the Moroccan hinterlands in 1984. Gocher joined a Bishop expedition only once, during a 1989 trip through Indonesia. One night in Yogyakarta, a seaside city on the coast of Java, the trio stumbled into an itinerant Kuda Kepang group, a family troupe that entertained the crowds with a ferocious, gamelan-fueled mixture of magic tricks, hobby-horse theater, and glass-eating, fire-breathing performance trance. Whenever tourists stopped, the leader cracked a bullwhip next to their heads and scared them off.
    The Girls, characteristically, held their ground. Years before, when they first hit the stage with their peculiar mix of sardonic rock, outsider improv, and hippie mysteriosa, they could only get gigs at punk shows, and the crowds responded to their baffling sets and bizarre costumes with anger and violence. The band came to aggressively taunt these people, dishing out verbal abuse, sarcastic musical moves, and the occasional cup of urine. Guys like that can certainly deal with a stingless