Goa Gil

Gilbert Levey grew up in San Francisco's 1960s counterculture scene, working as a poster artist for the Family Dog venue at 17 and coming up around bands like Jefferson Airplane, Santana, and the Grateful Dead. In September 1969, at 18, he left San Francisco for India along the hippie trail, eventually settling in the coastal village of Anjuna in Goa, where he studied yoga with gurus in the Himalayas and set out to merge music and spiritual practice.

Performing as Goa Gil, he became one of the founders of the Goa trance and psytrance genres, known for marathon DJ sets that could run 24 hours and for his framing of the party as a modern tribal ritual. He released early remixes under his birth name on San Francisco's Ceiba Records in the 1990s, and later co-founded the project The Nommos with his wife, Ariane MacAvoy, blending psychedelic production with West African djembe rhythms. He continued releasing mixes, including Worldbridger in 2007, until his death in October 2023.