Travellers, beaches, cassettes
Goa became a meeting point for international travellers after the late 1960s. The parties did not begin with trance: psychedelic rock, reggae, disco, industrial, new wave and electronic music arrived in successive waves.
Cassettes and private edits made it possible to change music’s length and order. The DJ worked as editor and courier: a physical network of people moved the repertoire long before the internet.
Network nodes
Technology in circulation
What is documented
Peer-reviewed research gives this period names and dates. Eight Finger Eddie, a jazz bassist, arrives in Goa in 1966 and is described as the scene's instigator. Goa Gil arrives in 1970 from San Francisco, looking for him.[01]
Gil's first season as a DJ is 1973–74, playing cassettes “off the porch of some house” in Anjuna, with a suitcase of psychedelic rock, soul, jazz and blues. The next season he uses a small Fender PA with a friend's generator; in 1977 he gets a proper stereo mixer with multiple inputs.[01]
This is not a trance scene: it is a party scene where the music changes decade by decade, and where the DJ works as editor and courier. Cassettes make it possible to cut, shorten and reorder — the editing happens long before there is software for it.[01]
Other documented names from the period: Fred Disko, throwing parties in Nepal in 1985 and Thailand in 1987; Laurent, a French DJ active from 1984 to 1993; and Ray Castle, from Auckland, who shares a season with Gil in 1991 — the earliest documented link between Goa and New Zealand.[01]
What we do not know: no source we found gives a dated first use of the term “Goa trance”, or separates a reel-to-reel phase from a cassette phase. The literature has cassettes throughout the 1970s.[01]