The Birthplace of Trance
I arrived in Goa in late December, just as the season was reaching its peak. The entire west coast of India had transformed into something that felt less like a place and more like a frequency—a particular vibration that existed nowhere else on Earth.
This wasn't my first encounter with trance music. I'd danced at Solstice Grove in England. I'd experienced the zero-equals-one revelation in Tulum. But Goa was different. Goa was the source. The origin point. The place where it all began.
To understand what was happening on those beaches in the early 2000s, you have to go back to the 1960s. To a generation of young Americans and Europeans whose minds had been blown open by LSD and whose imaginations had been electrified by Eastern philosophy. They weren't content with the materialistic, utilitarian worldview of the West. They wanted something deeper. Something older. Something true.
So they created caravans. Hundreds, then thousands of them, reviving the ancient Silk Road passage into the East. They traversed Turkey, Iran, Armenia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—spending long summers on deserted islands and beaches in the Aegean Sea before pushing deeper into Asia. And when they reached the west coast of India, they found Goa.
Goa was different from the rest of India. It had been colonized by the Portuguese, not the British, and as a result it had a more liberal, Western sensibility. The laws were looser. The culture more permissive. The beaches pristine and mostly empty.
These travelers made Goa their new home. They built communities on the beach. They swam naked. They ate coconuts. They explored Hinduism, yoga, tantra, and psychedelic culture with the fervor of people who'd finally found what they'd been searching for.
And for a decade at least, these communities flourished.
The acid-rock music of the '60s evolved into multi-day, multi-night open-air concerts where people lost their shit completely. But then, in the mid to late '70s, something magical happened. Analog synthesizers and primitive sequencers were invented. Some band—legend says it was The Who, though no one knows for sure—played a concert in Goa and left a bunch of equipment behind.
That equipment became the first recording studio in Goa.
And in the hands of a few weirdos who knew how to manipulate electrons and frequencies, something entirely new was born.
There are certain people in every scene who understand the magic before anyone else does. The wizards. The early adopters. The ones who stay around all year while everyone else goes home.
In Goa, by the mid-to-late '80s, there were a handful of producers living in remote huts, making music that no one had ever heard before. They were working with analog moogs and digital synthesizers, exploring the relationship between mathematics and sound.
What they discovered was profound.
Eastern music—especially Indian classical music—operates on a drone concept. Instead of plucking individual notes, you create a drone sound. Then you layer another droning sound on top of it. And another. And another. The accumulation of these layered drones creates echoes, reverberations, and harmonies that cannot be achieved through traditional Western melody.
This is how you create the trance feeling.
It's the difference between Apollonian and Dionysian music. Western music is structured, melodic, compositional. Eastern music is circular, meditative, ecstatic. Once these early producers understood how to emulate the droning structure of Indian music using electronic synthesizers, they unlocked something ancient with futuristic tools.
They were translating spiritual technology into digital circuitry.
I'd heard the stories before I arrived. How DAT players—Digital Audio Tape—had become the sacred vessels of the scene. DAT recorded sound at above-CD quality in real time, and just like Deadheads and Phish fans were recording concerts on DAT in America, the Goa producers were recording their tracks at the highest possible fidelity.
Because these weren't just songs. They were spells.
Sound moves air at specific frequencies. Depending on how you arrange those frequencies, you can make someone want to relax by the beach. Or you can make them want to rip someone's head off. Or you can make them want to dance for three days straight without sleep.
The producers in Goa understood this. They weren't just making music. They were manipulating the vibration of reality itself.
And here's the thing: the same year that Albert Hoffman accidentally discovered LSD—1943—was the same year we split the atom. Just as we broke into a new dimension in the realm of physics by birthing quantum mechanics, we simultaneously broke into a new realm in the capacity of the human mind by discovering a chemical that could trigger mystical experiences with scientific precision.
LSD allows you to zoom into the sound wave. It lets you perceive properties and characteristics of sound that are invisible in ordinary consciousness. It's like the sound comes into focus. The fuzziness resolves into a line with infinite detail.
And if you're a producer, if you're sitting in a hut in Goa with a synthesizer and a head full of acid, you start to realize: I can arrange these frequencies like a magician arranging symbols in a spell. I can create sounds that open portals. That shift consciousness. That transform the dancefloor into a temple.
But the music was only half of it. The other half was the culture.
Because in the early '90s, when trance was still underground, there was a protocol. A sacred code.
The producers would travel to festivals and parties with DAT players. You'd sit with them for hours—four, five, six hours—and you'd trade tracks. They'd give you a track. You'd give them a track. You'd listen together. You'd exchange music the way martial artists exchange techniques or skateboarders exchange tricks.
And there were rules. If a track hadn't been released yet, you couldn't share it with anyone else. If it was on a CD, you could play it publicly. But if it was unreleased, you could only play it at specific times. On specific days. In specific contexts.
If you broke the rules, you got shunned. Other DJs would stop trading with you. You'd lose access to the spell book.
It was exactly like the bootleg culture in America with the Grateful Dead and Phish. Except instead of live performances, these were studio tracks. And instead of capturing a moment in time, they were capturing the cutting edge of human consciousness encoded into electromagnetic frequencies.
The people who made this music were the ones on the true frontier—both technologically and spiritually. They understood quantum physics and ancient shamanism simultaneously. They knew how to build circuits and how to cast spells.
They were the new wizards of the global village.
I met one of them on Anjuna Beach. His name was Ravi, though I'm pretty sure that wasn't his real name. He was French. Or maybe Israeli. The lines blurred in Goa.
"You want to understand trance?" he said, sitting cross-legged in the sand, rolling a joint with hashish he'd brought down from the mountains. "It's not about the music, man. It's about the glitch."
"The glitch?"
"Yeah. We found a glitch in the Matrix. You take these sounds"—he gestured to the DAT player sitting between us—"and you arrange them in this very specific order. And you give people a little pill. And they bounce up and down for three days. It's like a cheat code for consciousness."
He wasn't wrong.
But it wasn't just a chemical trick. It was deeper than that. It was about the convergence of technology and mysticism. The marriage of the future and the ancient past.
Because what was happening in Goa wasn't new. Humans have been gathering in circles, eating sacred plants, and dancing to rhythmic drumming for tens of thousands of years. The trance state is one of the oldest technologies we have.
But now, for the first time in history, we could amplify it. We could digitize it. We could encode it into frequencies and beam it through speaker systems powerful enough to vibrate your entire skeleton.
We could create a mystical experience with industrial precision.
By the time I arrived, Goa's Golden Age had technically passed. The peak years were 1996 to 1999—the solar eclipses, the massive parties, the sense that something genuinely new was being born.
But the infrastructure was still there. The circuit was still alive.
And the circuit was global.
You could start in Europe during the summer—June through August—hitting underground festivals in Germany, Switzerland, Portugal. Then in September you'd fly to India. You'd buy fresh hash from the plantations in the mountains. You'd make your way down to Goa and stay through December, dancing on the beaches, trading music, living in bamboo huts.
Then, just after New Year's, you'd work your way to Brazil for the massive parties in Florianopolis and São Paulo. You'd spend a few months there—February, March, April—before heading to Thailand for the spring season.
And by summer, you'd be back in Europe, starting the cycle again.
It was a global tribe. A nomadic culture. And the thing that connected us wasn't nationality or ethnicity or language. It was the beat. The mathematics. The primitive, universal connection we all have to rhythm.
That's what made this different from rock concerts or pop culture. When Elvis performed, people stared at him. He was the spectacle. The audience was passive. Watching. Consuming.
But in trance, there was no stage. No separation between performer and audience. The DJ wasn't a rock star. He was a facilitator. A guide. You weren't there to watch. You were there to participate.
You became part of the show.
And because the music was instrumental—no lyrics, no cultural specificity, no language barrier—anyone from anywhere could plug in. A Brazilian could dance next to a Russian next to an Israeli next to a Japanese traveler. And the only thing that mattered was whether you could surrender to the rhythm.
On my third night in Goa, I went to a party in the jungle. It was December 28th, the week between Christmas and New Year's when the energy on the coast reaches a fever pitch.
The party started at sunset and didn't stop until two days later.
I took a small dose of LSD around midnight. Not enough to lose myself completely, but enough to open the aperture. To see the mechanics of what was happening.
And what I saw was this:
The DJ wasn't just playing music. He was conducting energy. He was reading the crowd—sensing when to build, when to release, when to take us deeper, when to bring us back. He was manipulating our nervous systems in real time, using sound as the interface.
And we weren't just dancing. We were offering ourselves. We were participating in something ancient, dressed up in futuristic clothing. A ritual that had been passed down through millennia, now mediated by machines.
At one point, around 4 a.m., the music dropped into a deep, droning bass. The kind of frequency you don't hear so much as feel in your chest. And layered on top of it were these high-pitched, modulating synth lines—spiraling, echoing, creating harmonics that seemed to fold space.
And I understood.
This was what those early humans must have felt when they first discovered rhythm. When two cavemen in a cave picked up rocks and started tapping them together and realized: We can communicate through vibration. We can feel each other through sound. We can dissolve the illusion of separation and become one organism, pulsing together.
Music was never just entertainment. It was proof of consciousness. Proof of something divine moving through us.
And here, in Goa, at the turn of the millennium, we were doing the same thing our ancestors did. Except instead of rocks and sticks, we had synthesizers and speaker systems. Instead of caves, we had beaches and jungles. Instead of shamans, we had DJs.
But the spell was the same.
Looking back now, from 2002, sitting in this apartment in New York with Akiko typing as I dictate, I can see how Goa fits into the larger story.
Because Goa wasn't just a party destination. It was a node in the global network. A pressure point on the body of the Earth where a specific frequency was being generated and amplified.
And that frequency was spreading.
It spread to Burning Man, which inherited the same values—radical self-expression, gifting economy, temporary autonomous zones, participatory art. It spread to Brazil, to Thailand, to South Africa. It spread through the internet, through DAT tapes, through the travelers who carried the music like seeds and planted it wherever they went.
The scene in Goa taught me that culture isn't created by corporations or governments or celebrities. It's created by weirdos in huts who figure out how to make magic and then share it with anyone willing to listen.
It's created by people who understand that the real revolution isn't political. It's consciousness. It's the ability to dissolve the illusion of separation and remember that we're all part of the same organism.
And the tool for that dissolution—the most ancient and most futuristic tool we have—is music.
Not music you watch. Music you become.
By the time I left Goa in mid-January, I'd traded away most of my possessions. I gave my backpack to a kid from Germany. I gave my camera to a girl from Brazil who said she wanted to document the scene before it disappeared.
I didn't need them anymore.
Because the thing I'd come to India looking for—proof that there are good people everywhere, proof that faith can be restored—I'd found in abundance. Not just in Pushkar with Vishnu and the miracle of my passport. But here, in Goa, in the global tribe that gathered every year to remember what it means to be human.
I left with nothing but a DAT tape a French DJ had given me. A recording of a six-hour set from a party I'd danced at but couldn't fully remember.
"Play it when you get home," he said. "When you're back in Babylon. When you forget what this felt like. Play it and remember."
I still have that tape.
I've never played it.
Because some spells are too powerful to cast alone.