Three day Badem bayan tree party. Full Moon February 1988 Goa. Extract from a novel by Ray Castle

Prancing, shimmering, costumed gods and goddesses cast dancing moon shadows with fluoro glow highlights in the luminescence of the lunar light. The most astral of all had silver spiral armlets that were like astroids wound around her arm. She romped about in a thigh-high split-cut silver mini skirt with matching metallic silver sports bra. She emanated chroma radiance with blonde hair streaked green and gleamed lustrous like a female android from Planet Claire.

The DJ, wearing small Vestax headphones hunched over cassettes snatched sneaking glances of the Planet Claire goddess out of the corner of his eye. The green streak highlights of her mane flickered and glowed phosphorescent in the black light as her spring loaded body bounced and pivoted omnidirectional. ‘Black Planet’ by Two Frenchmen, a remix of a B52’s track, was playing. Preparing the next track it dawned on the DJ—as he hunched over the candle lit table with mini Shiva shrine, portable Jap tech, mixer and amethyst crystals—that Asta’s Cyberella aura was like that of a new celestial goddess in his metaverse.

It was the DJ’s debut playing tapes at a Goa party. His nerves were on edge. He’d expected his buddy to join him, at least to share a joint, but he suspected his buddy, Zane, had lost the plot on double dip Gorborchev acid. Ceremonial chillums had been offered the DJ, one he touched to his forehead and took a puff. But he needed to stay focused singly manning multiple spinning tape decks whilst keeping an eye on track times and retrieval of tracks off cassettes needing to be cued. A sangfroid grip on the machines and steadfast precision mixing tape to tape was required for a hysteric dance floor gagging for appetising audio. DJ Jules was on a constant conveyor belt of in-the-moment on-the-spot decision making. A pressured stretching of wired gut instinct, a devil may care flying on the seat of his spandex pants. There were private moments of personal congratulations in finally experiencing himself doing it, segueing clever track connections with smooth mixes having his foot on the throttle of the party and, judging from the response of the dance floor, all was groovy—hunky dory.

A track—‘The Tingler’—with an annihilating twisting acid thump gripped the dance floor like the pounding teeth of a heavy earth works front end loader. Bodies tipped upside down. Some dancing on hands feet in the air, heads bouncing on a pulverised dance floor, limbs flailing disconnected from torsos, sweaty heads with hair-matted dislodged from necks by the piercing roar of the razor edged electronic body blows that sliced and diced and guillotined them. Heads rolled like a coconut shy gone amok. Dancer participation with The Tingler became polarised like metal iron filings in a magnetic field. The head strong ate it up like a rotary hoe with rapid twisting feet churning up the dance floor. The maniac centre of the dance floor became a frenzy like piranha feeding on sirloin. Whilst others were seriously flattened by the take-no-prisoner caterpillar wheels of the ferocious futuristic techno sonics of the The Tingler, it becoming for them, in their hallucination, a decapitating towering technosaurus dump truck laden with ballistic basalt boulders that threatened to crush their skulls and pommel their bodies into pulp.

Jules shook at the knees, stricken with consternation. What the fuck is going on? Had he collapsed the party? Hang the DJ. A lynching mob must be on their way? He understood music, he’d weeded out the dross and clearly identified the gems, he’d sequentially played key popular pieces, the journey had a connective narrative. He’d built continuity with appealing tracks, but also pushy tracks, all serving to fill and invigorate the dance floor. He’d incrementally nudged up intensity thresholds according to the body heat he was reading. He’d risen to the occasion. He knew he could do it, besides there were plenty of shambolic would-be DJs in Goa who got to have a go fumbling around at smaller parties with tape decks off their faces with no idea.

But this was an entirely different occasion. It was prime time—a Goa full moon party. He was indebted to Zsu, the organiser, for her trust in him and whom he’d been bewitched by with green eyes that held a universe of secrets. Many music collectors didn’t want to DJ, it was too stressful, they just obsessed about finding the music, possessing it, exchanging it with other collectors and DJs like a fungible currency, who just wanted to dance to it in the magic euphoric space of the party without the pressure of knitting it together making a dance floor allegory hunkered over tape decks. Better to let others put their neck on the party chopping block and aspire to DJ it and appease high expectations of ravenous, hardcore, Goa dancers.

The dropping of The Tingler by Jules had been premeditated, it was one of the most chewy pieces of new music and it was doing what its faceless creators (midi maverick Atari boffins in a North European home studio in the depths of winter) never dreamed possible on a psychotropic dance floor in India. The Tingler was fulfilling its reason to exist: i.e.—tip a party when everyone was full loaded on a full moon in Goa in 1988, the year before the Berlin wall came down, the apogee of the second summer of love. The ferociousness of the force of The Tingler’s never-heard-before freakquencies was such that it could become a game changer or, at the worst, clear the dance floor, which it nearly did. But this was music of the future, it was shock of the new. It took guts to play it. The East-West ancient-futuristic hybridisations of Goa acid parties celebrated the cutting edge in existential electronica that was psychically transporting as much as it was danceable, all played off cassette decks like a mosaic of musical-machine-post-modern-cut-up. Revolutionary rave signal sounds opened up new transpersonal transcendental experiences on revelatory beaches in electric jungles and past life ruins and under numinous banyan trees.

The music was so different and strange and weird that the DJ had to weather castigating comments like, techno witch. And so after a thermometer reading of The Tingler’s impact on the party Jules made a tactful decision to follow it with something contrasting, something less gnarly, something soothing like a sonic smoothie—a cucumber and yogurt track, an easing-up palliative after the fierce chilly rush of The Tingler. The perfect track sprung to mind in a split-second eureka aha moment, as if a spirit guide had suddenly appeared on his shoulder. Hastily he scrambled to find a cassette titled, RESCUE REMEDY. Pulling it out of its case he became distressed to discover that the ideal track was at the end of the tape and required a rapid fast forward. Anxiously he wondered whether he could cue it on time in the JVC boogie box player before The Tingler ran out?

After checking the numbers on the tape clock of the Sony Walkman Professional and comparing the track time he’d written in neat felt tip pen next to The Tingler’s title on the inner sleeve of the cassette he had to make a crucial decision. Two and a half minutes worth of The Tingler remained. Could he make it?

Jules slotted the RESCUE REMEDY cassette into the JVC to cue it. Tiny wheels rapidly fast forwarded it to just near the end of the ‘A’ side. Jules hit the stop button and nudged the rewind button to the beginning of the yogurt and cucumber track, then ejected it and transferred it to the empty Walkman and hit the play button to pulse the strip lights on the mixer just as The Tingler ground to a halt.

The resuscitated P.A. with the cucumber and yogurt rescue remedy track surging through it lurched the dance floor back into full trot with all moon juice stompers jumping on board. The DJ had weathered flak from some dishevelled dancers. Asta stood at Jules side like a guardian angel. Her cute celestial prettiness had the effect of a coolant on the hot flabbergasted air around the DJ.

“Jules your play was fabulous,” she lent into his ear to reassure him. “Don’t be phased by those twisted trippers off their tits. Partying here is a wild ride. It’s just Goa histrionics. It gets so crazy. I love it when the music takes the dance floor into the unknown.” His mind was in a squeeze. Dancers demanded his concentration and tapes were winding, there was no dropping the ball, he couldn’t afford to fuck up. He latched a dutiful eye onto the Walkman that was playing and another eye he fixed onto the JVC boogie box and hit its stop button; then listened with headphones for the first beat of the track by toggling the rewind and forward buttons. He stole a quick glance back at Zsu. Her face had completely changed, like quicksilver. He thought of alchemy and how quicksilver was associated with Mercury, messenger of the gods, a metal of enormous density, yet so liquid. For a brief moment he felt himself levitating above the humble wooden DJ table on which was installed a burning candle and incense, a small brass dancing Shiva nataraj, a lingam and the two nifty Walkmans that delivered a quality signal from his chrome TDK tapes.

The DJ’s eyes seized upon a cassette case, the spine of its inner sleeve bearing the title—SOUND MIRROR. He deftly manipulated the buttons on the portable Jap-tech devices like that of a slight of hand conjuror. He was totally at one with these devices, he’d been sleeping with his Walkmans since he arrived in Goa this season. Jules released the pause button on the cued track he had loaded into the other Walkman. As he did so he was hit with a flash realisation. You can be whoever you want to be, and here, the most alpha smoking god of all is Shiva. He then felt a warm glow of empowerment as the track he had just set in motion had an Om Namah Shiva mantra inside it and was gaining traction on the dance floor triggering brand new responses like an elevator to new galaxies.

Then a remarkable revelation took up residence in DJ Jules head: Other than when the music stopped, or the track sucked, no one looked at the DJ, the DJ was not there to put on a show, was not there to entertain, was not the centre of attention. The DJ table with bamboo and palm fronds around it was not a temple with lots of lights illuminating it and eye catching art and decor. It was a private place, kind of shrouded in secrecy, where cassette tarot cards were shuffled. Where special sequence spreads were laid out, where tracks were selected like magical cards that the dance circle of the party had evoked and the DJ had picked up on and channeled like a co-creative collective feedback loop. DJ-ing in Goa in 1988 was a new experience for Jules. Totally unlike singing and playing keyboard in a band on a stage performing a show flanked by a P. A. The more out of the picture the DJ was the better the dynamism of the dancing. No one facing a stage. If there was a show, it was on the dance floor. Everyone dancing in multiple directions, the sound spread around the space just like the open air of the super nature where the play space was freed from the square box of a dark night club where speakers were set up like a stereo hi fi rather than a holophonic sense surround experience, just like the cosmos above and so below. The whole free fluid feeling flow of the group emotion in motion on soma other than booze and powders was liberating compared to a stage and cubic night club with a bar. The essence of the experience was what was happening on the dance floor. It was a dance floor far from reality inhabited by a spectacle of inimitable entities: time travellers, humanoids, occultists, wizards, gurus, prophets, seekers, devotees, dance dissidents of all ages from all over the world whooping it up in digital dust.

Ray Castle