Goa Trance

martin

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IS IT

<i>As me and Jemimah dance in the sand, I can feel the sun's warm cowl slip over my very being, the water goddess lapping in waves around our ankles, confirming us as cosmic surfers; far from the warmongers and the grey cathode ray sheep with their suet puddings and stella artois, we're exploring new modes of being, inhabiting a new paradise, a...</i>

OR IS IT

'FLYING RHINO'? RHINO'S CUNT, MORE LIKE, YOU FUCKING BEACHBUM ZOMBIE FILTH - WHY AREN'T YOU EXTINCT?

Discuss.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I went to Return the Source a few times when I was getting completely off my nut every weekend and found that it was pretty good for That Sort of Thing. I guess this was around '94?

Whilst massive squelchy acid and ludicrous snare rolls have their downsides, there is something admirable about their sheer functionality.

I didn't notice a lot of cod-spirituality then, but in retrospect it was all very very wrong in terms of ideology.

My main problem with it at the time was that a lot of my friends found it impossible to listen to anything else, even during the week. They had no truck with jungle, for example, which I think was what did it for me in the end.

After I exited, they ended up on a pretty daunting trajectory which meant getting totally off it from Friday evening to Sunday night and then recovering all week - all to a goa trance soundtrack. Some of them apparently did this for several years without a break.

"Trance is shit" but I have some that is great from mixes a mate did me. Trans Pact, I think was one of the labels.

It also seems OK to like early trance like Hardfloor and stuff like Jam&Spoon.

I am not sure how goa fits in with stuff like The Liberators and the acid techno stuff - that seems less burdened by all the hippy nonsense.
 
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martin

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I went to Return the Source a few times when I was getting completely off my nut every weekend and found that it was pretty good for That Sort of Thing. I guess this was around '94?

I am not sure how goa fits in with stuff like The Liberators and the acid techno stuff - that seems less burdened by all the hippy nonsense.

Well, that's interesting because I only really heard references to 'Goa Trance' around '95 - when I was far too interested in fast music to really dig it anyway. But what put me off was the people. It wasn't so much the cod Indian spirituality, just endless shots of ponytailed DJs' faces, trying to look all intense and profound, against a backdrop of computer-generated galactic systems.

Having said that I used to go to Megatripolis around late '94. They had a chillout room and some French kid in sunglasses disrupted a presentation by some 'class war druids' around the time of the Anarchy in the UK festival. I used to dance to it a bit, I can't actually remember much about the music (and that's not down to excess drug intake). It was sort of amusing, but a pile of hippie dross in retrospect.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I'm not sure about the evolution or the dates, but maybe it was "trance" up to a certain point and then became "goa" later on.

Megatripolis was a mixed bag, really. I can't remember much about it, but I quite like the ideas of clubs where a lot of things are going on like talks etc. The talks before Dead by Dawn at the 121 Centre around the same time were about a million times better of course, as was the music.

I do remember Phil Hine doing a talk at Megatripolis on Chaos Magick and being heckled by some hippy for being too "dark" and then me in turn heckling the heckler, etc. That was fun.

A lot of it has not aged well: http://www.megatripolisarchive.co.uk/default.htm tho only a couple of the photos made me cringe.
 
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mms

sometimes
i went to megatripolis a few times, i think i avoided all the drummers and the hippy market stalls, apart from on the way to the toilet, i also avoided the main room too. i just remember one or two of the ambient rooms being good and interesting stuff in the side room, like autechre djing etc.


dead by dawn and before that vfm were good, i remember them, and a club called quirky.
 

swears

preppy-kei
What was megatripolis anyway? So it wasn't a regular rave, because you had market stalls and live instruments and "talks". Looks a bit cheesy anyway, from the photos.
 

martin

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What was megatripolis anyway? So it wasn't a regular rave, because you had market stalls and live instruments and "talks". Looks a bit cheesy anyway, from the photos.

It was a Thursday night club held in Heaven, on the Embankment - sort of big dancefloor area, stalls selling hippie tat, fanzines, overpriced Lucozade, etc. Had a sort of loose anarchist / underground / free festival vibe. If you wanted to sit on a cushion while a man in a dress told you to fuck the Criminal Justice Act and a white rasta girl asked if you wanted to join a Knitting For Peace rally, you just had to walk upstairs and it was all there. I must have liked it a bit as I went about 7 or 8 times, admittedly though that was cos that's where all my mates went and they refused to come and see Blaggers ITA with me
 

john eden

male pale and stale
It also had the advantage of being either free to get in, or ridiculously easy to blag, iirc.

Started by Fraser Clark, a hampstead hippy who did the Encyclopaedia Psychedelica zine - "zippy" was his thing. I always assumed he was trying to market himself as being a kind of UK Tim Leary 30 years too late.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
All these confessionals!

I went to Megatripolis a few (far too many) times. The time the Hardkiss lot played was good, but yeah, more interesting stuff in the chill out rooms. Funny times. Megatripolis wasn't really a strictly trance club though - you'd get people like DIY playing house and quite a few techno Djs as well IIRC. Mind you there were loads of hippies and smart drinks and glowing things and fractals.

Although it was a bit late in the day ('96?) I did go to this Escape From Samsara thing at Brixton Academy cos they had the Experimental Soundfield system - that was quite impressive I have to say - something like 8 huge stacks arranged in a circle around the floor with the music being panned around in 360. Didn't Underworld play their first gig in a field at Glastonbury on this system? Some of the music was quite mental and very fast by the end of the night, but made much more interesting by the fact that the needles were constantly jumping :D - I thought it was deliberate at the time, disappointed to find out it was technical problems.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Martin and John describe Megatripolis very well.

Fr4ser Cl4rk used to advocate drinking bleach didn't he? Something to do with reoxygenating the body.
 
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Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Whilst massive squelchy acid and ludicrous snare rolls have their downsides, there is something admirable about their sheer functionality.
Trance almost works like a 'control case' for ardkore, doesn't it? It's got the same dancefloor-centric functionalism but one way or another didn't end up with the novelty-drive that powered the evolution of ardkore, so it's evolved via rather gradual technical refinement instead.
 

low band

Well-known member
goatrance is without doubt the worst musical 'style' of all time.

i remember going to megatripolis once or twice back in the day, Terrence Mckenna talking about DMT and a rather strange fella looking a bit worse for wear rolling around in his pyjamas on the stage next to him... this was in the time before the word 'goa' was being attached to the then 'trance' music. As was mentioned above, i remember hearing Acid Tracks by Phuture jumping and skipping in the main room, it sounded great.

i went off the whole thing when Hardfloor started being played all the fucking time, and everyone wanted to sound like them. the whole London Acid Techno stuff was pretty poor n'all, the production on all those type of records sounded the bloody same.

goatrance was more middleclass, lots of girls with tanned stomachs.

bloody rubbish.

now Alex Knight, he did proper 'trance' sets back in those days.
 

mms

sometimes
What was megatripolis anyway? So it wasn't a regular rave, because you had market stalls and live instruments and "talks". Looks a bit cheesy anyway, from the photos.

i managed to avoid all the things they've got pictures of and never really encountered any trance, but people did give head massages there, good looking girls so that was nice.
yes martin i remember being hit on by older gay men there several times as well, and at the first big chill. which was a mix between horrendous hippies and people playing ok records. i went there with a grade 2 crop black sunglasses and a black underground resistance shirt on though, but thats just me, mixmaster morris called me and and some mates rude punks or something.
 

low band

Well-known member
actually, my life long stuggle with being 'piss shy' may indeed stem from going into those mirror covered urinals they had in Heaven... lsd, speed and the resulting tiny knob were not a good combination.
 
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