Silent Discos

Palolem, like the rest of Goa has a midnight restriction on any loud music outdoors. However, rather than bribe the local police as they do at the party places in North Goa, the outdoor clubs in Palolem have come up with another solution: Silent Discos. We’d already been given the low down from our friend John, a long term resident here who explained that when you go to the clubs you rent a pair of wireless headphones which have two or three channels of music which you can choose to listen to whilst on the dance floor. Neither Maren or I could quite get our head round it, thinking that it must be very strange (as I’m sure many of you reading this are), but after being approached a couple of times on the beach by people promoting the clubs, we decided to go along and see what it was all about.

And strange it was! As you get close to the club and walk in the first thing you notice is a complete lack of music which has been replaced by the noise of many people talking and the sight and sound of people shuffling on the dance floor all wearing headphones. We quickly rented a couple of pairs of headphones for ourselves so we could join in. On channel A they were playing cheesy pop classics and on Channel B it was dance music that was mainly of the (bad) electro house variety. The first game we started as we sat down and enjoyed a drink was to guess which channel each person on the dance floor was listening to, which in many cases was easier said than done but a lot of fun. We were struggling with one guy in particular, who we eventually decided was listening to the cheesy pop, at which point he approached us and said “I hope you know which channel I’m listening to, as if you can’t work it out that means I’m a really bad dancer”. This was the first friend we made that night, Tobias, a TV producer from Denmark.

The whole club feels like one big social experiment and gives you some very interesting, if sometimes unwanted, insights into human behaviour in a club. The first was listening to the sounds coming from the dance floor that are normally drowned out by music booming from the speakers. Perhaps if you wanted to measure how good a piece of music was for a party, you should just measure the level of volume coming from this dance floor as each track was played. The whoops, hollering and people singing is very odd thing to hear by itself. When a particularly popular piece of pop music came on, half of the dance floor would sing along. However imagine the kind of singing you hear from someone when they are listening to something on their iPod and multiple that by a hundred odd people who are getting increasingly drunk. And whilst one half of the crowd is singly along (very badly) to Living on a Prayer, the other half are trying to look cool dancing to house music. As a result the dance floor and the party itself feels disconnected and there isn’t really a unified soul to the party. In fact every group of people at the party seems to be having their own party, which I guess is usually the case at any club, but in this environment you are painfully aware of it and can easily get sucked into each different vibe from each different group. What is also really odd, is you notice all the things that music normally drowns out, like every single drunken conversation, especially the more argumentative ones which isn’t particularly pleasant.

And, as was the case with a Russian guy that had one too many to drinks, when someone falls over crashing into people and a table, you can hear every bone crunching sound as their arse hits the floor. In short, the ugly side of people drinking is amplified by the lack of sound to drown it out. Even going to the toilet is a weird experience, with the silence that is normally present at the urinal even more awkward, as you hear every sound made by men having a piss. For me though the funniest thing was that the place was so quiet that there was even a dog asleep on the dance floor, which made for a most amusing photo.

That said we had a lot of fun. For the most we danced to the cheesy music as I found it almost impossible to take the place seriously. You can’t get into a dance music vibe when all of a sudden half of the people in the club are jumping up and down singing along to some 80s pop classic. Dance music is very serious business after all. So we joined in with the silliness, able to switch on and off the music as we pleased and when we took a break to have a drink we could engage in some fascinating people watching able to observe all sorts of social dynamics in a new light.

We also met several of our new friends there and made a few more. It was the last night for a Kiwi couple we’d met the day we arrived that were on their honeymoon and they’d dragged along as many people as they could to the club, including half of the staff at their (and our) favourite restaurant on the beach. It was particularly amusing when I lent one of the young Indian guys we know who works nearby a set of headphones so he could have a dance. He could surely battle it out for craziest dancer in Palolem. We also met an English artist, Jos, who does some incredible psychedelic art which will be buying some of before we leave Palolem. Along with him in the odd mix of people was Master Lee, a martial arts expert from Korea who was there with one of his pupils quietly enjoying the night getting stoned. And finally I must mention again, Tobias, who we said was one of the “pockets of fun” in the club throughout the night and was one of the few people we found that seemed to be at the “same party” as us.