Goa Trance, Goa Trance

As the hippie tourist influx tapered off in the 1970s and 1980s, a core group remained in Goa, concentrating on developments in music along with other pursuits such as yoga and recreational drug use. The music that would eventually be known as Goa Trance did not evolve from one single genre, but was inspired mainly by EBM like Front Line Assembly and A Split-Second, acid house, techno (The KLF's " What time is love?" in particular), and psychedelic rock like Ozric Tentacles, Steve Hillage and Ash Ra Tempel. In addition to those, oriental tribal/ethnic music also became a source of inspiration. A very early example (1974) of the relation between psy-rock and the music that would eventually be known as Goa Trance is The Cosmic Jokers (a collaboration between Ash Ra Tempel and Klaus Schulze) highly experimental and psychedelic album " Galactic Supermarket ", which features occasional 4/4 rhythms intertwined with elements from psy-rock, analog synthesizers and occasionally tribal-esque drum patterns.

One of its trademark features is reference to early\mid-1990s classic Goa Trance music, and this genre is often exhibited in Finland's forest party scene. At these parties, mostly Goa Trance and Suomi-style psytrance can be heard.

As such it has an energetic beat, almost always in common time (4/4) meaning 4 quarter note pulses per bar. Time is marked with kicks (bass drum beats) on each quarter-note pulse, a snare or clap on the second and fourth pulse of the bar, with an open hi-hat sound every second eighth note. A typical track will generally build up to a much more energetic movement in the second half then taper off fairly quickly toward the end. The BPM typically lies in the 130 - 150 range, although some tracks may have BPMs as low as 110 or as high as 160. Generally 8-12 minutes long, Goa Trance tracks tend to focus on steadily building energy throughout, using changes in percussion patterns and more intricate and layered synth parts as the music progresses in order to build a hypnotic and intense feel.

The music very often incorporates many audio effects that are often created through experimentation with synthesisers. A well-known sound that originated with Goa Trance and became much more prevalent through its successor, psytrance, is the organic "squelchy" sound (usually a saw-wave which is run through a resonant band-pass or high-pass filter).

Several artists initially started producing goa trance music and went on to produce psytrance instead, perhaps most notably Electric Universe who pioneered goa trance with 2 albums in 1995.

Koxbox from Denmark have Goa Trance tracks on the sound track of the movie Pusher most notably the track Fuel On.

Source: Wikipedia > Goa Trance