Words by

Sindri Eldon

“I don´t get Nasa,” people would tell me. “That place gives me the creeps.”
But Nasa didn´t worry me at all. You see, any question you can ever have about the place´s admittedly mysterious nature can be answered with cocaine.
“How did they get the financing?”
“Cocaine.”
“When did this place become popular?
“The same time cocaine became popular.”
“How do they get all those bands to play there?”
“Cocaine.”
“What else goes on in that place anyway?”
“Cocaine deals.”
“Where are the fucking bath rooms?”
“Where you do the cocaine.”
I said my name to the woman at the desk, a weathered fortyish thing who looked bored out of her skull, and she let me in. Wow, I thought, President Bongo actually came through. After my short stint in the music industry, I had picked up several “golden rules”, and one of them was Never Trust A Man In A Techno Band. Rules, apparently, were made to be broken.

The ultimate niggaz
And then, from behind the mixing desk, I saw it happen. I have no idea how or why I didn´t know this was going to happen. And at a GusGus show it was so underlying, so unavoidable, just so goddamn inevitable that it seemed like everyone knew it.
A woman started dancing. And not the usual hey-I-kind-of-like-this-song kind of hip gyrating that usually accompanied some bimbo´s second Breezer, but a wild strut that went all over the floor, the kind of hot-blooded pouncing moves that could only be made to a staggeringly cold and rhythmic electronic beat. And it did not take long for others to follow her example.
I spotted a foreigner, that despite his sarcastic comment to a friend, had a glint of recognition in his eye. There were acts like this all over Europe, and everyone wanted to be them. They were the club´s ultimate niggaz; the ultimate shining examples of revolutionary non-conformity that sees an inevitable transformation from ridicule to admiration.
In the end it all became so incredibly appealing to mix it with these freedom fighters that I jumped right into the fray, ripping off my army surplus jacket and exposing a violet hawaiian shirt I bought in Japan a year ago. And as I swayed there with them, I closed my eyes and drifted away to something surprising, something so completely serene that I wasn´t even there any more.

And she appears in a stained wedding dress…
In the time it took me to fantasize, the dance-floor had turned into an insane jumble of sweat-soaked corpses bouncing unstoppably to the DJ’s beat. A slobbering drunkard started clawing at my leg and begging me for “some coke, or speed, or anything – please, I just don´t want to stop dancing!”
I booted him off and went back to our table, and as I sat there waiting, the band came onstage.
“Hi. We are Gus Gus, and we´re going to play some old songs, possibly mixed with some new ones. We´ll call it a dance rehearsal,” President Bongo said, brandishing a cowboy hat and his trademark suit. Behind him, the two masterminds behind the music, Biggi Virus and Buckmaster De La Cruz, immediately commence much button-pushing to magically bring the good stuff into existence. At first I thought Earth, the band´s freshman, was going to be a no-show, but then she suddenly appeared in a stained wedding dress, elicting much cheering from the crowd.
If the audience had already become an ecstasy-riddled scene from Ibiza Uncovered, the band had mutated them into a single pulsating organism, throbbing to their techno like a dying, beached whale, shuddering while struggling to take it´s last breath.
I felt stoned, but alright. And from the looks of it, that was how everyone else felt: Like this was the greatest thing they would ever do, like nothing would ever matter again, and like the end of the road was not where you had to stop and get out of the car but a place where you could finally rest, dream and hope that driving back down the road, you find everything you lost on your way there.