Goa Gil @ Treasure Island: Events in Hyderabad

Colours Of India is presenting a Psy-Trance night with Goa Gil on 6th March, at Treasure Island.

Goa Gil (real name Gilbert Levey) is an American-born musician, DJ and party organizer. He is considered to be one of the founders of the Goa trance and psy-trance movement in electronic dance music. Born in 1951 and brought up in San Francisco, he witnessed the birth of the hippie movement and acid rock, and was involved with the freak collectives Family Dog and Sons Of Champlon.

Feeling that the San Francisco musical scene was falling apart, he took off in 1969, going first to Amsterdam and then to India, settling in the hippie mecca of Goa. Here he discovered wandering holy men living off the forest and covering themselves with ash and drinking the elixir of the gods. Gil himself became a sadhu of sorts, Baba Mangalanand, in the order of the Juna Akhara.

During the early 1980s, many Goa hippies were becoming increasingly fascinated with early electronic music such as Kraftwerk. Gil and his friends soon gathered some equipment and started DJing and playing live music all night long on the Goa beaches. The mix of outdoor electronic dance parties with Eastern mystical and spiritual overtones came to define the aesthetic of the psytrance movement.

For Gil, dance is an active form of meditation and the use of trance music is a way to