“I think the name [Goa trance] first cropped up in the early nineties in Germany. It was popular in Asia, too, in Goa where a lot of my friends were going and where I went. And also in Japan what they were playing in the clubs was trance. It was a whole bunch of different techno, industrial stuff. And I guess psychedelic trance really happened around 93 in London when a lot of people who were travelling in Goa came back, inspired by a particular vibe of music that was played there—and honed into that sound. It felt quite fresh at the time. And then the media got hold of it and christened it ‘Goa Trance.’ It became a very strong category of music, then, which has limited it ever since I think.”

– Nick Taylor, in an interview with Michael Gosney, 1998

“Rather than embracing the potential of the internet and taking the lead in developing convenient, affordable, easy-to-use methods of downloading music, the music industry has concentrated instead on protecting a business model whose core business revolves around the manufacture, sale, ownership, and possession of physical property.”

– Reebee Garofalo, I Want My MP3: Who Owns Internet Music?, 2003

“Techno is the perfect travelling music, being all about speed: its repetitive rhythms, minimal melodies, and textural modulations are perfect for the constantly shifting perspectives offered by high-speed travel. Alternatively, the fizzing electronic sounds all too accurately reproduce the snap of synapses forced to process a relentless, swelling flood of electronic information. If there is one central idea in techno, it is of the harmony between man and machine. As Juan Atkins puts it: ‘You gotta look at it like, techno is technological. It’s an attitude to making music that sounds futuristic: something that hasn’t been done before.’”

– Jon Savage, Machine Soul: A History of Techno, 1993

“The job of a DJ is to take individual tunes out of the collective whirlpool, data flow, and create an information chain-reaction-statement out of it. And when the artists hear their music reinterpreted in a mix, their tunes take on a life of their own. One tune can have magnificent bearing and influence upon the direction of a collective movement. Then other tunes come which mirror that one back, which creates the evolution. It’s more than any one artist. It’s greater than one. All we really can be is a clear vehicle, or channel, to allow something much greater and universal to flow through, without attaching too much personality or ego identification to it.”

– Ray Castle, An Evolving Ecology of Intuitive Circuits, 1997

As one of the original Goa DJs, Ray Castle has a lot of interesting things to say about the movement. You can read more of his thoughts on Fusion Anomaly and Metaray, his homepage.

“Sound recording literally turns music into an object, such as a CD, but more important, it allows music to function as a thing that one possesses rather than a structured temporal event to which one must give oneself up.”

– Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value, 2002