A festival story. The characters are imagined; the clothes are real.
Every house in the village had hung its star.
They glowed from the verandas, paper on bamboo frames, red and yellow and green, one above every doorway along the laterite lane, swaying in a breeze that smelled of salt and frying onions. Behind me the Arabian Sea had swallowed the sun at six. Ahead, through the open doors of a whitewashed chapel, children were rehearsing a Konkani carol, and a woman at the keyboard stopped them every four bars.
I was holding an empty DAT case.
The label was in Dom's capitals, faded to a ghost of blue: SABINA · ESTRELA · 21 DEC 94 · ONLY COPY.
Dom Pereira taught me everything I know about sound, in a back room behind a Goan bakery in Swindon. He fixed my kick drums, my posture and my habit of apologizing to faders. In March he died between one Tuesday lesson and the next. His sister gave me a box of cables, his folding stool and this case, with a note tucked inside: If you ever get to Goa, find Sabina's tape. She never once heard it on a big rig.
The carol ended. The woman at the keyboard saw what was in my hand and rose very slowly.
"That," said Sabina Coutinho, "is Domnic's handwriting."
✦
She walked me to the beach in her church sandals, talking fast. In 1994 she was twenty-four, playing keys in a hotel band in the capital: weddings, dinner dances, a great deal of ABBA. Dom, home for a season from England, ran the hotel's sound. One night he borrowed a synthesizer and a DAT machine and kept her till four in the morning, building a trance track around a melody she'd written for her mother's star.
"He gave the tape to the sound man for the big sunrise party on the twenty-first. I was playing a wedding that night." "I never heard it. Not once. Not on a proper system."
"Who was the sound man?"
She pointed north, to a single bulb at the far end of the bay. "Menino. If a tape stayed behind on this coast, it stayed with him."
I told her I had the closing set at the sunrise gathering on this beach in three days.
Sabina looked at me a long moment. "Then we have three days."
✦
Menino Fernandes ran a shack with eight plastic tables, a fridge humming like a subwoofer and a hand-painted board of fish thalis. He was seventy-one and listened to me the way old sound men listen, head tilted, as if my voice needed EQ.
Then he fetched a battered suitcase from the back.
Thirty-eight DAT cassettes, each small as a matchbox. Thirty monsoons had eaten every label to a pale smear.
"DJs left them," Menino said. "For dinners. For safekeeping. Then they flew home." He opened a cracked ledger and ran a finger down the blue ink. 21-12-94. Sunrise. 4 bins, 6 tops. 1 DAT returned. "Yours is in there somewhere."
"How do I play them?"
"In the market town, one man still keeps a deck alive." He closed the lid gently. "But listen, bai. Some of these will play once. Some won't play at all."
✦
Naik Radio House was six feet wide and smelled of solder and jasmine from the flower sellers outside. Market-day crowds rolled past the door with sacks of red chillies. Mr. Prakash Naik, sixty-four, in a pressed white shirt, set a DAT deck on the counter like a surgeon laying out instruments.
I reached for the first tape. He laid two fingers on my wrist.
"Not yet. First it must breathe." He wound it fast to the end and back, the transport whirring. "Thirty years wound tight in this damp. Ask it to play cold and it sticks to the heads and tears."
So we worked. Wind, rewind, play five seconds, eject. Tape nine: a burst of hi-hats. Tape fourteen shed grey dust across the heads, and Mr. Naik cleaned them with a swab in total silence while my pulse ran at 145. Sabina sat on an upturned crate, fanning herself with a market receipt.
Tape thirty-one hissed, clicked, and a young man's voice filled the shop.
"Sabina, take one. Estrela. Twenty-first of December. Stars are up."
I had heard that voice every Tuesday for six years. I had never heard it at twenty-nine, laughing at the end of a sentence.
I put my hand flat on the counter. Mr. Naik stopped the tape without being asked.
Sabina's eyes were closed.
"It is tired," Mr. Naik said, tapping the cassette. "An old tape gives its best on the first full play. Every pass after that takes a little more of it away. So the first play goes into a recorder, wherever that play happens."
"Then the recorder comes to the beach." Sabina opened her eyes. "It was made for a beach."
✦
The rig stayed silent until six, by law and by Menino's rule: the village sleeps. Before that, three hundred of us waited on cool sand under strings of paper stars, while village women on mats behind lanterns poured sweet chai and sold bread rolls from steel trays, as they had in 1994.
Menino walked the stacks with a torch, cupping an ear to each speaker, nudging one top two inches left. Mr. Naik arrived on a scooter with the deck wrapped in a bath towel, set it on Dom's folding stool beside the booth, patched it into the mixer and a small recorder, and sat cross-legged beside it like a man minding a sleeping baby.
Sabina came straight from late carol practice in her good blue dress. She looked at the dancers, then at herself. "I am not standing here like a wedding guest." I dug my spare cotton tee out of my bag, swirled lime and violet and pink, and she pulled it on over the dress and knotted it at her hip.
At six I pushed the faders up. Rolling Goa trance basslines, old arpeggios climbing like birds, then deeper psytrance as the stars faded. The crowd stamped the sand flat. A land breeze came cool off the hills behind us, and over the palms the sky went from ink to pearl.
At 6:58 I nodded to Mr. Naik. He pressed play.
Hiss rolled across the beach. Then Dom's young voice, bigger than the sea: Stars are up.
Three hundred faces tipped toward the sky.
The arpeggio came in, bright as struck glass, then a bassline rolling like a wheel over wet sand, then the melody: five climbing notes and a sixth that leaned upward, like a hand lifting something onto a hook. Sabina gripped the edge of the booth.
Six minutes in, the melody stuttered. A chewed half-note, a click, another, and then the deck's display blinked an error code and the channel muted. Mr. Naik's palms came up: Leave it. It will find itself.
My kick was already under my thumb. It landed in the gap, 145, steady, before three hundred pairs of feet came back down on the sand, and I pulled up a lead sound on the little keyboard beside the laptop.
Sabina was already at my shoulder.
She laid her fingers on the keys the way she laid them on the chapel keyboard and played her mother's star into the half-dark, note by note, through a rig her song had never reached. Eight bars. Sixteen. Menino rode her fader up, his cap crushed in his other hand.
On the twenty-third bar, the tape came back.
It landed exactly on the beat. For one bar, Sabina at fifty-six and Sabina at twenty-four played the same five notes and the same sixth, leaning upward together, and the sun came over the palms.
✦
Gold slid down the trunks and across the sand to the water. The sea, black all night, lit pink and violet and lime, the same oil-on-water swirl moving across my velvet tank and long shorts, and across the shirt knotted at Sabina's hip. The track played through to its last echo. Mr. Naik let the tape run to silence, ejected it and held it in both hands.
The recorder's red light burned steady.
Behind us in the village, a bicycle horn honked twice: the bread seller starting his round, the way one must have in 1994.
"Dev borem korum," Sabina said, to Mr. Naik, to Menino, to the folding stool, to me.
Then she stepped down onto the sand in her church sandals and her borrowed tee, took my hand, and pulled me into the crowd, toward the next track, already climbing.
Sunrise colors from the beach in Goa
Everything on that beach carries Magus Fawn's Psytrance design, the same liquid marbling that lit the jungle falls in The Waterfall at 145 BPM: violet, lime, pink, orange and teal swirling like oil on water at first light. Ffion plays the sunrise in the Psytrance crushed velvet tank top ($60), velvet that drinks in stage light and dawn light alike, and the Psytrance unisex athletic long shorts ($60; $65 in 2XL–4XL, $70 in 5XL–6XL), made for hot afternoons and a dance floor of sand. The shirt Sabina knots at her hip is the Psytrance cotton t-shirt ($60), soft breathable cotton printed edge to edge.
- Crushed velvet tank: crushed velvet · dye-sublimated print · sizes S–5XL.
- Athletic long shorts: unisex fit · dye-sublimated print · sizes 2XS–6XL.
- Cotton tee: 100% cotton · listed fabric weight 190 g/m² · dye sublimation on cotton, so the colors won't fade and the image won't crack · XS–5XL.
Everything is made to order. US orders of $70 or more ship free, and international shipping starts at $10. Find your own sunrise layer: crushed velvet tanks · shorts · cotton shirts
What do you wear to a beach party in Goa in December?
Dress for warm sand and a soft dawn chill. December is Goa's dry season, with hot sunny days and nights near 68°F (20°C), so wear a breathable tank or cotton tee, light shorts and sandals, plus one thin layer for the land breeze before sunrise. Choose modest cover for village lanes, chapels and temples.
- The Goa trance and psytrance look: liquid marbling, fractals and mandala prints, flowing layers and bare feet on the sunrise floor. The roots of today's psytrance clothing run straight back to these beaches, so color is the house style.
- Respect the village: cover shoulders and knees when you walk through a village or visit a chapel or temple, greet people before you photograph them, and buy your chai and snacks from local sellers.
- Know the hours: under India's noise rules, loudspeakers in open spaces fall silent from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., so many beach events in Goa run by day or start at first light. Check the event's own times.
- Sun and sand: the sun sets over the Arabian Sea around six and rises behind the palms around seven, and midday is hot. Pack a hat, sunscreen and water, and shake the sand out of your shorts before the bus.
- Music history to carry with you: Goa trance took shape on this coast in the early 1990s, and much of it first played from DAT tapes, which is why unreleased tracks from those years still turn up in collectors' boxes.
Our festival atlas doesn't list a Goa event yet, so for the global psytrance gatherings that grew from these roots, Boom returns July 18–25, 2027, for its 30th anniversary on the Marechal Carmona reservoir near Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal, with 95–100°F days and nights in the 60s°F, and O.Z.O.R.A. fills a Hungarian valley at Dádpuszta in late July and early August, on 55–60°F nights, after growing from a 1999 solar eclipse gathering.
Frequently asked questions
What is Goa trance?
Goa trance is a style of electronic dance music that took shape at beach parties in Goa, India, in the early 1990s. Tracks usually run 130–150 BPM and eight to twelve minutes, built from rolling basslines and layered melodic arpeggios. Its golden age ran from about 1994 to 1997, and psytrance grew directly out of it.
Why did Goa trance DJs play DAT tapes?
In the 1990s many Goa trance DJs played from DAT (digital audio tape) instead of vinyl. Producers could hand a DJ an unreleased track on tape within days of finishing it, and a pocket-sized cassette was far easier to carry to a beach party than crates of vinyl. That's why many early tracks survive only on DATs.
Can you still play a DAT tape today?
Yes, if you can find a working DAT deck; repair shops and audio archivists still service them. Before playing an old tape, fast-forward and rewind it once to loosen the pack, clean the heads, and record the very first full play straight to a digital file, since aging tapes can shed or drop out.
Written by Magus & Lylyth Fawn, the Los Angeles artists behind Magus Fawn. Magus makes VR and digital visionary art and produces Psy EDM. Lylyth makes fractal digital art and runs design and customer care. We've been selling wearable art since 2020 on Etsy (4.7★ from 144 reviews as of October 2026) and here at magusfawn.com. Come say hi on Instagram @magusfawn.
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