The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Goa Trance

Yesterday at about 2am, I was walking down a grassy path in Goa, India, weaving past old houses and rock cutouts to Anjuna, a beach that’s played host to psychedelics-fueled parties since the 60s.

The evening was dedicated to the re-opening of the legendary Shiva Valley, a beach shack that transforms on Tuesday nights to a club filled with black lights, fluorescent paint and Goa Trance. 

Goa Trance rose to prominence in the early 90s, combining elements of techno, new beat and various other forms of electronic music. It's fast and hard, designed to facilitate trance-like states that reference the region's centuries-old spiritual traditions.

Goa Trance was amplified when it arrived in London. Megatripolis, an underground club night that started at The Marquee, championed the genre, and the British DJ Paul Oakenfold broadcast it to the masses in The Goa Mix, a two-hour set he played in 1994 on the BBC Radio 1 Show The Essential Mix — a set so revered that it has its own lengthy Wikipedia page. 

The music is often punctuated with vocal samples from old sci-fi films, laden with references to drugs and time travel and other things mystical. Revelers can feel as nostalgic for the 90s as they do for some primordial era beyond the horizons of visible time.

C4 + back to the 90s

But in the here and now, the 90s nostalgia is real. I certainly feel it, and it was probably inevitable — all things return, even cargo pants and early MacOS desktop aesthetics. Songcamp is the latest community to tap back in, announcing that their Camp 4 Collection (aka C4) will revolve around the tried-and-true millennial pastime of burning CDs (editor: Gen X burned CDs first, pal).

The minting mechanics and visuals reference the actual act of writing to blank discs. Starting tomorrow, buyers will be able to mint one of the five songs (per disc) that C4's 15 musicians created during the camp.

It’s a novel way to make on-chain music more tactile, referencing the machinations of a not-so-long-ago tradition that physically recorded data onto a tangible object.

And burning CDs, notably, was a process that was often shared — a notion assuredly not lost on the Bandcamp builders. It was the height of the mixtape game. Throughout the years, I gifted dozens of mixed CDs to my people. The act of curating a mix of music for a single person and then actually wrapping it and handing to them was a special practice that died with the convenience of Spotify. Playlists, clearly, still exist, but convenience never yields the best gifts, and without an object, they’re just not as meaningful. Perhaps Songcamp’s C4 can help revitalize that tradition.

The garish light of too much

In a recent update on his project Catalog — a decentralized community-built metadata library for book people (not connected to the music NFT platform of the same name I often reference here) — Glenn Poppe discusses his practice of sharing links whenever a topic or work comes up in conversation — as well as similar shortcomings in what can feel like a less meaningful digital world.

"The links add context for sure — cover art, summary, page count, etc. etc. — but something also gets lost in the click," he writes. "Each option available feels like a poor translation, zooming in while limiting the view. For example, if I point to Amazon or Goodreads, the book becomes a product to buy (with star reviews, cross-sales, one-click commerce). If I point to Wikipedia, it’s an artifact to be summed up. A book is both of these and more.”

He continues: "The challenge of referencing a book lies in serving both (1) what is fixed and shared between the covers with (2) what is dynamic and meaningful outside them." 

Poppe’s observations are rooted in the evolving role of differentiation. “When fewer books existed, readers just referred to them by their author or their first lines / incipits,” he writes. “If a home only had one book, they could call it ‘the book.’”

The Internet has created what’s effectively an infinity of content, books and otherwise. And despite the great joy of knowing how much diverse beauty exists across that great ocean, it’s hard not to feel wistful for an era when there was less choice. Infinity can be overwhelming.

Perhaps we can create more manageable ponds of content by treating each cultural artifact as a network in and of itself. That’s a vision Poppe and co-builder Rory Ou have for books, to evidence the great connective power of the “web of authors and editors and publishers and cover artists and subjects and referrers and adapters and booksellers and librarians and critics and readers” that come into each book’s orbit.

We’re building in that same manner with the Crate Coalition’s For the Record, a weekly conversation series with music heads where we track all music mentions — the labels, the artists, the venues, the radio stations, the blogs and every other named character of that person’s musical world. Each person is a singular node of experience, and looking through the eyes of the curator is a uniquely gratifying opportunity — one that can help shield our eyes from the garish light of too much.

Coda

Goa Gil, one of the founders of the Goa Trance movement, died about a month ago. In his life he saw many permutations and evolutions of the movement he helped start. With it came new lexicons and ways of interacting with the tradition. Goa Trance is often referred to as “604,” for instance, referring to the music’s tempo — usually between 130-150 beats per minute. It’s part of the nomenclature that only revealed itself to me when — guided by an Indian friend — I stepped into Shiva Valley and, for a moment, sampled that longstanding culture.

For several hours I danced in the sand, glued to the DJ booth and truly lost in some trance-like catharsis. I spent long minutes with my eyes closed. When I re-opened them, the people around me had shifted, or left altogether. Newcomers emerged, and the sky began to grow brighter. I felt in that moment like one of those nodes of experience, a singular vantage into this wild, shared reality. In each of us, a network, an object, a book — here to read and be read, tumbling forward in this great search for meaning and connection.

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.