Monday, January 14, 2008

Speaking of Retro: The Goa Gil Petition

As further evidence of the general nostalgic air breezing through the San Francisco scene, I give you this petition for the illustrous godfather of Goa Trance, Goa Gil, to put together a "retropsychedlic DJ set from the 1990's consisting of classic, head-ripping, heart-exploding, soul-empowering DAT material."

For those of you scratching your heads about the medium of choice here, there's been a long email thread on the local psytrance list about "back in the day" when many artists put out otherwise unreleased material on DAT. Goa Gil was/is famous for having a huge collection of these DAT recordings, and I remember watching him play a set on DAT several years ago at the How Weird Street Faire (the thing about DAT, though, is that you don't really mix tracks so much as you line them up and press Play, which has also led to some comments about "DJing" with DAT).

Reading the comments of the 67 (now 68) people who have signed this, as well as the general comments on the 604list, it's pretty evident that the SoMarts "Return to Goa" sparked something up in the scene, especially among the older scenesters. As with the gay scene, maybe it's necessary for all the dance scenes to periodically touch base with their roots, just to remind us all why we got into the scene in the first place.

No comments: