This week’s Flashback Friday features an artist who has had a massive impact on the scene (and on my own experience of it), and not just in terms of music: Space Tribe.

Olli Wisdom was a member of the glam/gothic band Specimen in London in the 80s, but towards the end of that decade was exposed to electronic music on the beach of Koh Phangan in Thailand. After two years of DJ’ing there, he went to Goa in 1990, where he spent several seasons as a partier and DJ, in addition to organizing his own events. In 1993, together with his brother Miki and their friend Richmond, Olli created a clothing line called Space Tribe that had a lot of the colour already present at the parties. They hoped that their first production run would help them get through the season – and the entire stock sold in 2 weeks. In 1994 the patterns became much more fluorescent and fractalized, the same year where the music for Goa parties also became much more refined and psychedelic – as Olli described it to me, music producers went to Goa and saw the parties in that year, so they started producing music that was specifically created for those events.

Although Olli had made some tracks in Goa (he worked with Johann in a studio there), the production was quite basic compared to what would soon come (an early version of ‘You Can Be Shiva’ was eventually issued on Dragonfly Classix). In 1994 he produced 4 tracks at Butterfly Studios with Simon Posford: Machine Elf, In the Hands of the Shaman, Geo-Matrix, and Flipout the Dolphin [which is actually a desk mix of In the Hands of the Shaman]. The first of these appeared on vinyl in 1994 and was issued on the first TIP compilation (Yellow) in early 1995. The first solo track that he produced at Butterfly Studios without Simon Posford, ‘The Great Spirit’, has had its original mix released for the first time on Dat Records’s compilation Analog Dreams.

Machine Elf – a reference to the multi-dimensional beings found on the other side of the veil in a DMT trip – is a full-power stormer of a track, with a full-frequency range of sounds, from piercing screeches to bouncy spring-like ‘boings’, with a strong rhythmic pulse and forward momentum… a perfect uplifting night-time track.

Olli was a popular DJ in the early years of the scene, playing all-night sets to take partiers on a deep shamanic journey. I heard him play all night twice in Japan, in a club in 1994 and near the base of Mount Fuji under the full moon in 1995, both of which were unforgettable events, the first having launched me fully into the recognition of what this music and scene was capable of doing. He played off DATs at least until 1999 and the last time I heard him DJ (using CDs) was in 2004 – his current focus is live sets of his own music, much of which is currently more collaborative, produced with artists like Dick Trevor, Laughing Buddha, Mad Maxx (their Mad Tribe project is very popular), and Johann.

A massively important artist on the scene, whose influence on the sights, sounds, and spirit of the parties continues to be experienced over a quarter century after his first trip to Goa!