Yard Hippie

F*** Buttons - Tarot Sport This is some pretty cool noise stuff from last year (according to Discogs. Thought it was a 2010 release myself). At first I wasn't so sure as it's quite abrasive and very exhausting to the ear but after a few listens I'm digging what they've done here. The first track on the album, 'Surf Solar', has an awesome repeating sample right the way through and when they eventually drop the thing it feels like your anchorpoint has been dissintegrated and you just float higher and higher. Cool and unlike anything else I own. Lusine - A Certain Distance Again I thought this was a 2010 but discogs says not Very nice, warm, techno beats underlaying nice pop stylised vocals. Two Dots is the most pop-ish of the tracks on show here (gotta love her voice), the rest are more abstract with less of an obvious chorus structure (excluding 'Twilight' which is extremely vocal driven but perhaps personally weaker than 'Two Dots'). My favourite on here has to be 'Gravity' in which the beat is generated through majorly chopping up spoken word segments. Lusine's previous work 'Language Barrier' is absolutely outstanding also but is in a very different style, so much so that it's difficult to compare the two. I'd say that as a whole I enjoy 'Language Barrier' a lot more, but that's because I'm an ambient head at heart Pillowdiver - Sleeping Pills Does exactly what it says on the digipack; this provokes an extremely pleasent feeling of warmth and sluggishness that can only be nice after a long days graft... Messes with my brain so much but I don't really know what to say about it. It's experimental, guitar driven and gloopy slow. Awesome release even if I can't express how nice a piece this is.

Got me also. Girlfriend says she loves the track names and wants to hear them. Rotwang, you cracked me up even more than the OP

Keep repeating these but as Kathmandu mentioned, Ultimae pulled out all the stops with Imaginary Friends but even more up my street was the amazing Hope on Fluid audio. I'm sure there is at least one more as well I've listened to and really enjoyed but can't remember for the life of me right now. Slightly tipsy If you do get Hope consider going through Fluid's own website and picking up the very limited edition Dials by the Moving Dawn Orchestra. It arrived for me this morning and it's a fantastic EP. Maybe it's on Saiko too.

Funny, I was listening to this only last week and found it extremely warm. Only the ambient cd though, maybe that was it. Great release but for some reason I hardly ever put it on

I like Closer as well, incredibly dark and moody ambient, but I do have to be in the right mindset to play it through. 'Musik' is my favourite of his.

Well you're comparing two entirely different forms of acid; if you want chaotic acid just dip into a bit of goa/psy like koxbox's dragon tales. With that sort of music you're dropped into a vast swirling psychedelic whilwind but with Hawtin it's much more about a deep, very complex analysis of each individual sound stripped down to the barest of essentials. It's more clinical and obviously not up your street but to me it can feel a lot more like 'real acid'. I guess the two styles focus on two very distinct aspects of the psychedelic experience.

Heh, that's funny, just listening to 'Sheet One' now and I come on here to find you've ressurected my long dead topic on the absolute master of minimal acid. It's a shame you don't enjoy his work but it's not exactly for everyone; specially if you're used to layers upon layers strung together with a doof-a-doof If only you could feel what I feel when I hear those acid lines...

Absolutely love this comp. It didn't hit me immediately but now that I've listened to it a good few times it just grasps me by the throat and pulls me under it's spell. Very nice mood music In some ways it's a shame this album sends proceeds to charity as it seems to be getting overlooked as some sort of cheap charity trick; don't fall into this mental trap, it's truly one of the best releases I've heard all year.

Have really enjoyed: Scanner - Rockets unto the edges of edges (very powerful experimental stuff. In a league of it's own) Brock Van Whey - White clouds drift on and on (drone music to really get lost in plus a 2nd more dubby mix of the whole thing by Intrusion which may as well be a totally different release) Lissom - Nest of iterations (more lovely drone. Extremely atmospheric)

Don't forget Distant System - Spiral Empire. Personally the best space-infused album I've come across. Agree with Orbit Constructions as well, comes a close second

Not listened to enough uptempo to really commment but for chill my favs for this year in no particular order are: Aes Dana - Leylines Solar Fields - Movements (Val)Liam - Daydreamer Rena Jones - Indra's Web Kilowatts - Undercurrent Possibles (only very recently recieved) V/A - Vampire Sunrise V/A - Hope Other cool downtempo discoveries that I find incredibly psychedelic are 'Lissom - Nest of Iterations' and 'Scanner - Rockets, unto the edges of edges'. That Scanner album especially has just totally blown me away. Not sure whether they should be included in these lists though.

Surprised that the only 'proper' comments to this have been so overly negative. I can't say I actually own the album but from listening to it through other means I didn't find it bad at all... In fact it's been on my 'to buy' list for some time now. I guess I'm really just posting this to balance out the bad and would probably elaborate more if it were not for the fact that I rarely listen to still buyable albums I havn't yet purchased more than just enough to get some sort of grasp on whether I actually like them. In fact I rarely use other means at all but Abasio's review got me interested and I liked the concept. It doesn't sound like it'll be competing for 'best of 09'' but still it doesn't seem to warrent such negativity. I thought it was a solid and fairly cool release.

Lissom's 'Nest of Iterations' Boards of Canada 'Music has the right to children' Slackbaba - 'And the beat goes om...' All work well for me for some reason. Not sure if they classify as 'ingenious' but they're my personal favourites in my collection edit: Oh and they're not psytrance of course... Obviously I didn't think this one through... Psy/goa cool names: Pigs in Space - pigs in space Total Eclipse - violent relaxation X-Dream - trip to trancesylvania Astral Projection - trust in trance Hallucinogen - The lone deranger Voice of Cod - gone fission can't think of any other great ones right now but I know there are many

My dissertation was an excuse to 'interview' a few friends over their views on psytrance parties, drugs and some sort of airy fairy connections with spirituality. I found nothing scientifically sound, invented a lot of the final phrases I quoted and found absolutely nothing of interest I can't even remember what my hypothesis was... As for it being 'just another subculture', well that's true sure but if you're going to study subcultures then you need to pick one first and I found the psy scene to be particularly interesting. I mean it's a group of generally young people that on the surface travel to old mills/secluded fields/converted churches etc to dance all night taking various mind altering substances under the watchful eyes of Ganesh, Shiva and whoever else the organisers choose to pin up. To me that was absolutely fascinating, especially in a country where religion and spirituality are receeding further and further into the background every day. It's just that as soon as you start to look properly it becomes very hard to decide anything substantial because for the most part it is all totally superficial *shrugs*. I had a lot of fun though and for some reason the lecturers loved it

Best I ever found was a set of articles put together by Graham St John in my Uni library. Very much doubt it's available properly as pdf etc online... clicky I used it in my university dissertation quite extensively but it took some time to break down what they were saying. There's a chapter if I remember by Erik Davis on Goa trance (going back some time now, could be very far from the mark). Other than that there's stuff on Maffesoli's neo-tribalism like this one <-- just an abstract, basically just an example of the many, many attempts to stick Maffeseoli's spin on the classic subculture idea. To find anything interesting academically on psy/goa though you really do have to dig through the crap. Mostly you'll just run into papers on drug abuse minimisation strategies etc.