Read Nomad Codes for Free Online

integrated with an ecstatic religious state.” When the scene decayed, the heaviest psychedelic warriors split, taking their musical alchemy with them. Some went to the Spanish island of Ibiza, while the more esoteric heads went east. Though Gil was from San Francisco, he had trodden a similar path. “You have to find him”, Genesis told me. “He’s one of the links.”
    But Gil is too lost in his craft to talk, and I merge back into pulsing psychedelic bardo of the dance floor. I’ve never seen people move like this: at the edge of their bodies, ceaselessly flowing, like Deadheads bonedancing in overdrive. Disembodied vocal samples float through the air like ghosts, triggering mindfucks left and right: “There are doors.” “The last generation.” “Everybody online?”
    Craving touch-down, I head for Goa’s gypsy version of a chill-out room. In an adjacent field, local village women have laid out rows of straw mats and piled them high with fruit and cigarettes and bubbling pots of chai. Scores of freaks flop out on the mats, smoking copiously by the light of kerosene lamps and sipping syrupy brew from scalding glasses.
    I plop down next to a crowd of Brits. Pete is in pajama pants and an open vest, his aristocratic Tory features oddly framed by long scraggly hair. Hunched next to him is Steve, a skinny blond twentysomething rolling a spliff.
    “Have you seen The Time Machine ?” Steve asks me. “There’s this noise that the Morlocks use to call the Eloi underground. That’s exactly how it was five years ago when my friends and I first came to Goa. We heard this booming rhythm in the distance. We didn’t know where the fuck we were, but we just crashed through the jungle with our torches. The sound was calling us. I got real paranoid that there was some alien intelligence directing the computers, like the Morlocks, summoning us to a place where they were gonna eat our souls.”
    Pete nods as if nothing his friend says could surprise him. “My first party, I just got the feeling I was in some spiritual Jane Fonda gymnasium,” he says. “Boom, boom, boom, and everyone going into trance. It was quite alienating, actually.”
    “I just get a feeling of conspiracies, mass conspiracies, huge conspiracies,” Steve counters, passing me the spliff. “We’re under some bigger control at this point, and there’s a lot more going on than we know.” When the smoke hits my brain, I can almost see the plots thicken. I ask him how Goa differs from the raves in England. “Here people know about the history of freakdom, of free-form living. That vibe is carried forward with the music. In England it’s not really freaky anymore. It’s too organized. People are wearing the right kind of T-shirts, whereas here people will rip their T-shirts apart and run down the beach.”
    As the early sunlight streaks the sky, I leave the duo and head back to the dance floor. Dawn is Goa’s sweetest moment. The bpm slows, and the night’s bracing attack gives way to a smoother, narcotic trance. According to Goa’s more shamanic DJs, the change of pace has a ritual function: after “destroying the ego” with the night’s hardcore sounds, “morning music” fills the void with light.
    The dawn light floats through the clearing like incense, and a deep resonating chant emerges on top of the lush, succulent beats: “Om Namah Shivaya.” It’s a mantra devoted to Shiva, the Hindu god of tantric transformation and hence something of a freak favorite. Slowly, a global rainbow emerges from the gloom: Australians, Italians, Indians; Africans in designer sweatshirts, Japanese in kimonos, Israelis in polkadot overalls. A crowd of old-time Goan hippies ring the clearing, grey-haired and beaded creatures who dragged themselves out of bed just to taste this moment. As the dust fills my nostrils, I wonder whether Goa’s raves were anything more than digitally remastered Be-Ins. Maybe something far more strange and ancient than beatnik