A variant of the trance genre that originate in Goa, India, in the 1980s. The Goa scene had its roots in the late 1960s, when hippies from the United States moved there to evade the U.S. military draft. Once a community was established, it became attractive to hippies and free-thinkers, who continued to arrive there even after the draft ended in 1971.
Many of these people had musical roots in '60s psychedelia, and they continued to pursue that by listening to 1970s electronic music after the '60s psychedelia died out. Gradually, they began to add their own synths and drum machines to this, and to do their own mixes. Party scenes that developed used these mixes along with some live-performed analog synths, plus audio clips from 1950s science fiction movies, and this became a full-blown genre by the early 1980s.
A unique aspect of Goa trance is that it did not grow around vinyl or turntabling. Most performers used cassette tape, or later in the 1980s, compact discs, for their source material. One explanation for this concerns the climate in Goa; it is very hot there in the summer, and apparently it was difficult to store vinyl without it becoming warped by heat. As such, beat-matching when transitioning between songs did not become a prominent feature of the genre because it was too difficult to do with tapes, and so Goa trance came to feature more variation in tempo than most electronica genres. It also resulted in many Goa trance tracks being very long, to reduce the number of transitions. Some DJs prepared long tapes with simple cross-fading between tracks, and then allowed the tape to play unattended during performances.
Goa trance had its heyday in the 1990s. After this, most sources indicate that harder styles begin to become more popular in Goa, and so the genre faded in its own home town.