Goa Gil (born Gilbert Levey, October 11, 1951 – October 26, 2023) was an American-born musician, DJ, remixer, and party organizer. He was one of the founders of the goa trance and psytrance movement in electronic music.
Gilbert Levey was born on October 11, 1951, and grew up in San Rafael, California. He witnessed the birth of the hippie movement and acid rock, and was involved with the freak collectives Family Dog and Sons of Champlin. Feeling that the San Francisco musical scene was falling apart, he took off in 1969, going first to Amsterdam and then to India, settling in Goa. Here he discovered the sadhus, wandering holy men living off the forest, covering themselves with ash. Soon, Gil himself became a Sadhu, Baba Mangalanand, in the order of the Juna Akhara, under the Guru, Mahant Nirmalanand Saraswati.
Goa Gil in the 2001 film Last Hippie Standing
During the early 1980s, many Goa hippies were becoming increasingly fascinated with early electronic music such as Kraftwerk. Gil and his fr