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https://www.beatport.com/release/safe-travels/3078936 Four track EP, stylistically it's all over the place, so I'll introduce each track separately Star Matter - melodic goa inspired by Global Sect sound Safe Travels - oldschool melodic full-on, homage to late 00's Dacru style (Ephedrix, Aquila, Alternative Control and similar) Impossible Landscape - more modern take on morning/progressive style The Distance - also a kind of morning track with some melodic elements. This track was written in collaboration with another Psynews member, Astralprojection, who provided some melodic ideas, mixing advices and motivation to pull it off

Thanks Mentaloscope. Keep an eye out for the next album it's right now being mastered.

I don't think it necessitates an "ultra cringe-worthy cheese fest" as simplistic major/minor diatonic chord progressions are typically more cheesy than richer harmony. Voice leading, my friend. Do you imagine that one jumps up and down like a silly Balearic rabbit? Consecutive chords in a GOOD professional level chord progression usually share notes in common and half-step movement in resolution is ideal. One voices the chords and inversions and notes with sophistication and maturity. I'm familiar with arpeggiators and delay effects, and it's true that one must take care for the space of a mix, but this is tangential, I would say. What I generally feel in most "formula" prog and fullon is this minor triad "sigh" as the only harmonic context beyond the bassline indicating the key we are in. I need a little more to FEEL actual human emotions. I sincerely doubt that anyone in their right mind would call the superlocrian mode "cheesy", or any other modes of the harmonic minor scale, for example. Don't confuse poor initial compositional results and first attempts with a bad conceptual approach. Honestly, you should just work on your prog-rock attempts more and after significant effort you may find that you have something amazing. No one said that achieving the next level in psychedelic trance was easy. Maybe you will bring some cool new fusion to this world! I think that one will pass through many throw-away melodies and harmonic structural ideas before one arrives at something that SOUNDS good. One must be ruthless and not settle for the first thing that comes along. Often times one can recontextualize the chords with regards to the bassline, "counter-tonic", relative-major/minor, recontextualizing a sustained minor triad as the 3-5-7 of a new 1, etc. The chord voicings and the VOICE-LEADING are what will determine the meaning (context) of a melody, and this can be as subtle or as obtuse as you make it. Honestly, I think that the reason most dark psy features very little melody is this fear of "oh that's cheesy" when one first even begins messing around with a synth. One must embrace the initial cheese, study music more, and then improve the cheese until it's a 3-year aged fine parmesan lol...

you do not produce psy i suppose? once you go in with all these rich chords, progressions and concepts that work for old music and bring it into electronic dance music you almost inevitably end up with an ultra-cringey cheesefest. i've had the same idea a while back and wanted to bring some of the magic that i know from my prog rock background into psy and the results have all been despicably bad. the only way i've found to do harmony in a tasteful way in our context is to use sublety. lots of it. if you want to hint at a chord, you might for instance use an arp-like melody and play the chord defining note a single time in a whole bar, you might as you mention use delay, you might use a reverb tail of a heavily filtered note, you might use the resonance of your filter to emphasize a particular frequency while playing the root note, you might use a pad that uses a waveform that emphasises a particular overtone… if you want to go deeper and more complex and don't want to risk ending up with unlistenable shit, you go deeper and more complex with sound design.

That was the same ratio of good to bad back in the 90's. People simply have rose-coloured glasses and think that the past was always better, and forget that they are cherry-picking their favorite tracks from an entire year of goa-psy that was "meh" quality. I can honestly propose 10-20 tracks from the entire 90's and then decide that the 90's were better... What is missing? Music. No one dares take a risk anymore. We have managed to recreate mainstream society within the rave scenes. We reward conformity, punish eccentricism, etc. Everything is about some Big-Assed-Mafia-Festivals and their copy-paste lineups that are all based upon obvious sycophantry and court intrigue. But what is mostly missing from ALLLLLLLLL of electronica? Music. People study "electronic music production techniques" and I'm pretty sure that there are University courses for this new field. What is missing? Music. Am I referring to Music Theory? No, although you WOULD think that it would be useful for our thousands upon thousands of producers to be able to communicate effectively with trained musicians. Am I obliquely implying that the trance musical public is musically ignorant (aka, went from Pop or Rock directly into Trance, and thus have never left shallow-cool-kid superficial musical concepts behind, which is why most people think of Skazi or Infected Mushroom when you say "guitars in trance"... what if Segovia or Sabicas were to be a trance producer?) Yes, I suppose that I am insinuating that we are an ignorant scene who gets what we deserve, LOL. What do we want to do about it? How many damned posts must I read in which someone seeks something that copies 90's music ("is there anything that sounds like X-Dream or Etnica etc?") The very idea of asking for copies of greatness ignores what made that music great in the first place: it's originality was certainly part of it. We are basically glorifying the idea that it's possible to a achieve a formula that isn't formulaic. Sorry mate! It doesn't work like that. Death to the formulas. See those funny black and white keys on that keyboard? Those are "notes". Despite the Biggest Names Ever insisting that technology has rendered "notes" redudant, I can assure you that not only are they ever-relevant, but that there is an order and structure to how these notes are connected to each other! This structure is obvious to any serious musician or MUSICAL composer who has studied their relationship. Believe it or not, any semi-competent musician or composer from NON-ELECTRONICA can tell in 1 second if you know what you are doing with those "notes" and the sad fact is, most producers are NOT even semi-competent at MUSIC, but they still proffer this idea of technology or a plugin being able to fix that. I hold out hope for the fusions achieved when actual musicians start playing with technology and making it a tool in service to music. What we currently have is music in service to technology. We need to up our musical game a bit.

Except that very small fraction of these melodies is any good IMO.