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Background: I have never been a Filteria fan. When he was a new artist I assumed it was kind of new school stuff but when I read all the amazing revews here from Goa fans and the comparisons to Pleiadians, I tried a couple times to listen to Sky Input, but I had a similar reaction to most of the other handful of negative reviewers: there are good Goa sounds and melodies but once the tracks get going it becomes a sort of wall of monoculture, like, I love chocolate cake but I don't want every space in my fridge and cupboards squashed full of only chocolate cake. (I should also mention incidentally that IFO is not one of my most favorite albums, though I do like it and listen to it quite a lot. I feel it has more color than Sky Input). I read that Daze of Our Lives is considered by many an improvement on the earlier albums so I have given it my first couple of listens. I am trying to let go of my biases, but that is hard to do, but I do need to say that the best bits of this album are really good and there are certainly moments where there is a really interesitng and unique sound. For me the really good bits are when he goes more ambient / downtempo and lets the music breathe a little. My favorites are the first and last tracks. I think he should try a whole album of downtempo. The other stuff, I like it OK, and I will give it more listens. It's technically good; the melodies are good; the effects are really good, but I honestly have to say that for most of it I don't get that really magic feeling that I get with older Goa or something like RA. It is hard to put my finger on it and it may be down to preconceptions. It might be something to do with the mastering or just Filteria sliding back into his tendencies for a relentlessly constant level of energy in a track. There are colorful melodies and organic effects yet many of the tracks for me feel a little on the flatter, less colorful, more homogenous kind of side in terms of their overall impression. This is just my subjective personal preference. I should mention this album does have quite a few Posfordlike elements that are done quite well, the warping chords and bright arpeggios. He has also nailed the weird, stuttery vocal effects although I do wonder if these were verging on being over-used here, though that's a minor quibble. This is no Hallucinogen 3 for me though, unfortunately. I award that title to Artha's incredible Influencing Dreams. I give tracks 1 and 9 9/10. The rest, I would have to give it more listens to really rank it fairly but my current feeling is if I was just rating the technical achievement it would probably be about 7 or 8/10 but in terms of my own enjoyment, 6/10. So for the whole album: 7/10.

Psynews-25 🐈 https://dropout-productions.bandcamp.com/track/ocelot-happy-birthday

Oh wow, I didn't even realize. Happy 25 years Psynews! I'm arriving late. This is wonderful! Mountains of excellent information, from albums and songs to so much more. I own and am aware of HUNDREDS of so many great / excellent albums thanks to this website! So inspirational and life-changing. Many sites don't last this long. Shout out to the community, Mars, Joske, and all of you / us - the WE that keep it alive. Thanks for sharing this positive milestone!

And we love to do some more (hopefully) Thanks, it makes us and the artist happy that even after so many years it is still standing: means a lot (quality wise). ...and that is what we still keep aiming for @ cronomi : albums that can last the time!

In fact when I stopped overthinking this I started actually finishing my tracks. Before that it was an endless recursion loop of "this is not good enough, that it not thought-out enough". My first completed psytrance track took me more than a year to finish (If I discount my another poorly mixed half-assed effort which has been finished and self-mastered when I was dead drunk but was surprizingly liked by some people here). I still don't consider myself good enough and sometimes i feel that my next track sounds worse than the one I've made right before that - this used to frustrate the hell of me but I now stopped bothering about this, it is counterproductive.

That's very true! Some other stuff, that always bothered me: - the transitions always needed to be smooth, e.g. the new parts couldn't just enter abruptly, they somehow had to be 'announced' or 'signalled' which obviously is great for flow, but at the same time undermines the energy and surprise factor of the track, not to mention it's challenging technically, - I always somehow felt and required from myself that my next track needs to be 'better' than the last one - longer, more sounds, more complex, more emotional or weird, etc. which is destructive for a creative process, because in reality the quality of your output (and to be frank, your assessment of your work) is changing over time and even between the days, so it's practically impossible to be 'better' all the time - this results in quickly scrapping off the ideas that were good, but 'not good enough' for the track to be better, - time - there's always to little of it, be it because of family & work commitments, or simply because people need to sleep - who ever thought this was a good idea!?!!

When I started making electronic music almost 10 years ago i used Reason 3 and didn't have problems with that. Then there was a break for a few years where I started using ableton every once in a while. I struggeled using that DAW in general to that time because i never constantly used it. By that time i always had a lot of unfinished loops and never finished anything. Then 4 years ago I had a lot of free time and suddenly finished one track. That was the point from where i was able to finished one track after another. Here is how I work now: I always start with a kick, bassline and snare loop. Then start experimenting around with synth, loops and crazy effect chains to get something nice and interesting. So I end up with maybe a 1-4 or 8 bar loop i really like. Once I have that I often create a simple intro or build up before it. This gives me the right feeling of how this loop will sound in a complete track. By having this i already have a few elements i can play with. I take these and change them to get the next few bar. What really helps then is closing your eyes and listen to what you've got so far. Imagine you are standing on the dancefloor having a lot of fun enjoying the music and dancing and now try to figure out what you would like to happen in the music in this situation. Do you want it to become stronger, more loaded with sounds or do feel that it's time to go down a bit and get more emotional or maybe it's already time for a break? Of course you can change everything afterwards. i.e. on my latest project i started with a great bassline and a pretty nice drop. This part is now located in the end of the track. mixing and making everything sound good is something i do on the fly. Of course when the track is almost done I start to polish things here and there, sometime for hours. changing some sounds because they are rythmically good but just don't work in the whole mix. compressing, thinking about my stereo field and so on. I do these already while working creativly bot i redo this again and again in the process and especially in the end.

of course it was more work back then, but i rather appreciate the finished piece of music than the amount of work put into it. no sane person is going to say "lame, he's modded his 303 with a midi input and doesn't use the built in sequencer that's a pain in the ass to work with". and i don't care about how many microedits some psycore artist did to achieve his fx, i still don't like the music. my opinion depends on how it sounds.

Hello my good Sir ! First of all, it is obvious that you need some hugs. Here is a picture of some kitties. I sincerely hope that it'll make you feel cheerrier. Now, you do have a committed a monstruous sin toward the Goa God ! You have lacked some faith ! May you be forgiven, o fool ! On a more serious basis, you base your thinking over a misconception. That conception is that this scene is only about old guys who gigged in the 90's, and that Newschool producers are all frustrated by that time. That is wrong. We are quite a few to be young here. In the scene, we have many people that are born between 1990 and 1995, and that haven't known the Golden days (I myself am 22). This scene is younger that you think. Of course there is ! You don't know this scene enough obviously. The Neo Goa scene is at the moment is the most creative niche within Psytrance these days. There are many examples, but i'll just tell you to listen to Kolovrat by Lunar Dawn. Give it a head, and you'll see how modern and creative they are. Also, I will confess something. I don't really dig Oldschool Goa. I love Newschool. It's more modern, less dusty, and in my view, Neo Goa is not the attempt to resurrect an old corpse, it is the ultimate developpement of modern psytrance. It's something fresh that brings more magic to the scene, and that gets more and more trendy. So, no obsession with Oldschool. Also, some artists do produce Oldschool style. They do it very well. Space Tribe and Dickster - Alien Sex Fiend OOOD Astral Projection - Mugen remix KURO, Masa, Matsuri The Muses Rapt - Human More generally, there's nothing wrong with keeping coming again and again to Oldschool. It's just like metal and rock music. There are classics that people never get tired to listen. Cheers !

Eh it's still a highly relevant and an interesting tangent. I think it's totally crazy I didn't even think of people mastering for festivals or parties, but I guess that's because my music consumption is home listening 100% Personally I listen to so much music that I do notice the differences(Unless it's a trashy audio system, but then everything sounds equally shit regardless), it is a massive change whether a track is flat, sharp, bloomy, soft or whatever you want to throw in here. You don't even have to get technical about it, just the way it sounds is enough. And as said, newer equipment get more and more revealing as the years go by. On parties people will pay even less attention to these things because everything is loud regardless and the sound systems already colour the music pretty heavily(There's a saying everything sounds great in a party). At least to me, mastering can make and break a track as I automatically gravitate toward things that sound more enticing and pleasing rather than boring and flat and the production has a huge impact on how the bass sounds, how sharp or dull the highs are, how busy it sounds or how much breathing room the layers have. Homogeneity is also an issue I agree, not everything should sound the same, but for the sake of consistency for an album that's a different thing.. Now obviously people who do mostly notice these things are not the majority, but why does one have to always go for the lowest common denominator? This is why we have the loudness war in the first place. Musical quality is the most important one yes, but again if something sounds like it's been through hell like the tracks in my original post, then it doesn't matter, the tracks will be forgotten. a couple pages back I posted a comparison of D5 iron sun and it's remix, tell me you don't hear a difference with them. Or another album I find unfortunately lacking in audio department was M-Run, he had 2 tracks on Erta Alé mastered by Colin and they sounded much better than anything in the album. I still find the album brilliant in it's own right, musical-wise, but I do not go back to it as much as I'd want! And to note this is not directed at anyone in particular even if it might seem so, just talking general principles what kind of a change you can achieve just with how things sound.