Dolmot

Twilight, of course.

Anyone want to guess Cologne, Germany?

It's punchy and crunchy and airy and cool, just like in the 90s.

I've been listening to Vibrasphere's Selected Downbeats 1 and 2. They remind me of what a difference there can be between a properly designed downtempo track and just slowing down stompy trance to 100 bpm.

Did you copy-paste this from some forum that uses #beddf7 on #004173?

I can bring one to the winner of the karaoke battle!

Avi + Lior Making a full album!

Heh, samples tuned at the Amiga default of 8363 Hz. And channel doubling for extra volume when 63 wasn't enough. A bit wasteful but IT was able to handle fairly many channels on mid-90s hardware, being written in Asm and all. Comprehensive centre panning too. I hadn't paid attention to that before... I used another colour scheme but that's the thing, alright. I think my fingers still remember half of the keyboard shortcuts. Mouse was something only those FT2 nancy boys used. And I dare to say most DOS-era games since the introduction of sample-capable SBs/GUSs used module music until CD audio and mp3 became truly viable. Often it was just there in its own dir. Sometimes you had to rip them from a bundle file. The same thing with demos. Grab it, open it, check the composer's every trick. That's how you learnt the trade. Quite fascinating that you didn't need a pile of hardware synths and sequencers to make a legendary track back then (either). Trackers had their limitations but boy it was fast to write your instant techno. Steal a kick sample, set row skip to 4, and push Q until the pattern is full. Repeat with hats. No wonder a lot of mods sounded like that too. Good times. I should check whether the collection CDs I bought from Maz still read.

I think that's no longer an unpopular opinion per se but just being picky. Nowadays we can afford that because there are thousands of oldschool and modern releases out there, even for free. In fact, there's more than we can practically browse through. Even after I limit the selection to my favourite subgenres and releases that have got some acclaim, I regularly end up deciding that it's not worth it to download the bits for free. Being that picky does not make one a cool guy or a connoisseur, though. It's more like unfortunate or possibly a sign of abundance. There's just no way around the fact that only one release in ten can be in the top 10%, and one in a hundred in the top 1%. And if 1% is so much that it can fill our waking hours, we can afford declaring the rest "bad" or "unremarkable", no matter how good it really was. (Don't ask how to measure that objectively...)

Don't worry, the next one will be some variation of "your favourite tracks" (or "underrated tracks") again. Interestingly, this type has far less YouTube spam.

http://www.psynews.org/forums/index.php/topic/67117-classic-tracks-that-you-think-are-nothing-special/ But OK... E-Rection - Out Here We Are Stoned is a shitty, pointless, ungroovy and forgettable track. It absolutely shouldn't be on like 15 compilations and mix CDs.

Heh, a goa yearmix. The timing reminds me of the origins of genre names topic. Namely, after a lot of digging, the earliest reference to "goa trance" as a description of music on any release I managed to find was Concept in Dance - The Digital Alchemy of Goa Trance Dance, a US version of a UK compilation in 1994*. Obviously plenty of earlier references to Goa (the place) can be found, and many trance releases were retroactively assigned to the genre, but where was the term first used? Can you find other CDs/vinyls, promo sheets, party posters or anything similar using those particular words together to describe the music? It might be that the term is exactly 20 years old this year but maybe not? I'd be happy to find more examples of its origin. Good timing for a series, nevertheless. And nice selection. (* You could also argue that in this case it should be read as "trance dance from Goa" and not "Goa trance" but who knows. There's a literal "goa trance" there and it's good enough for me.)

Year and a half to reply. Are you an ent?

Heh, I remember one case when a discussion on an unrelated forum turned into "what's the worst music you've ever heard". Of course, most of the cool kids hurried to nominate rap or some latest boy band/star. (Around here absolutely everyone is supposed to listen to metal, not the "mainstream" stuff. The irony is staggering. OK, I digress...) Anyway, among the common candidates I spotted "Some band called Infected Mushroom. It was all just weird alien bellowing." Nowadays a few psy fans might agree but that was years ago when they were still sort of respected on this side. It was amusing to see from someone who probably didn't know much else about the genre and could have named anything as "the worst music in the world". It surely had left an impression on him.

Well, often albums as a whole for obvious reasons... I think I had to play Astrancer - Koilon from Spiritual Rising at -6 or 7 dB compared to the next track in a mix to match the overall level. Unsurprisingly, not a single element manages to stand out from that flat mass. Most unfortunate because it's a neat track.

I thought Vincent aka Aes Dana was a member of Asura until 2001, and Elie was produced collaboratively in 1999 or something. Because Asura now refers to a solo project, it makes sense to list Aes Dana there too. Correct me if I'm wrong...

One more interesting release: Digital Alchemy (Oct 1994), which was released in the US as Concept in Dance - The Digital Alchemy of Goa Trance Dance. Check its covers and booklet. Moonshine had mixes called Psychotrance too since 1994, but they were largely techno and never took the goa/psy path. Fairway had Hypnotic Trance in 1994. Sound of Gaia Party (June 1995) has "goa trance" as a subtitle on its cover.

Good questions. Regarding goa, as we all know, a notable dance scene was there, it adopted electronic ("trancey") music, and eventually the terms merged. But when and how did it become widely acknowledged? Carlo Andrea Raggi aka Cirillo had projects like Anjuna (1991) and Goahead (1993). Especially the latter was already somewhat close to the goa trance style. The genre was still just "trance", though. In 1991 there was Goa EP from Gaia Tonträger, and in 1992 S.M.I.L.E. - Tribute to Goa. Gaia released early, proper goa like Mandra Gora (Johann Bley) - Mandrake EP in 1994. I actually remember one of my friends saying something along the lines of "if it has goa or gaia in its name, it's this kind of stuff" in the mid-'90s. To him they were almost interchangeable. One factor worth mentioning is Oakenfold's Goa Mix (Wikipedia), broadcast in December 1994. It had both proto-goa and early examples of what we'd consider pure goa trance, such as Hallucinogen and MWNN. It was sold as "The Goa Mix" on CD too in 1995, and surely established the connection between Goa and the sound even among the wider audience. Other notable examples of early "goa" and "psychedelic" releases, really meaning the same as we do, include: - Hard Trance + Psychedelic Techno 1 and 2 (1994) - Global Psychedelic Trance 1 (May 1995) - Fill Your Head with Phantasm - Psychedelic Trance (June 1995) - Goa Trance 1 (October 1995) and 2 (? / 1995) - edit: also Tantrance - A Trip to Psychedelic Trance (November 1995) - Distance to Goa 1 and 2 (? / 1995) - Goa Gil - Techno Spiritual Trance (? / 1995) - The Sound of Goa Trance 1 and 2 (? / 1995) - Goa Vibes 1 and 2 (? / 1995) By that point the connection was already firm. I find it interesting that the terms "goa trance" and "psychedelic trance" were established practically simultaneously. Especially Spirit Zone and Phantasm heavily used the latter for their compilations. "Goa" prevailed for a while, but I guess there was some kind of burnout from endless literally "goa" compilations, hindu cover art and Indian chants, which started to feel cheesy. A lot of cheap crap was released, after all, like it always happens when something is hot. As the music turned more broody and abstract, some artists distanced themselves from the goa connection and started to prefer "psychedelic trance" or "psytrance" for short. One example is the Psychedelic compilation by 3D Vision. Some of its artists and 3D as a whole were among the first in the big switch. Those are my quick theories but please discuss. (Also, fuck the rich text editor, which decided to remove all my urls due to one formatting error somewhere in the beginning. Never again.)

I am. Not sure about the "within reason" part.

Hey hey hey, I suspect some people posting here are not actually drunk. That's totally against the spirit. (Spirit, get it?!) I'm slightly drunk now. However, we'll start playing the Eurovision drinking game soon. After that I'll most likely be royally drunk. Cheers...

Well, I simply bought the Colours of Shiva re-releases, which should be music-wise accurately reproduced, relatively cheap and convenient. The original CD titles are listed in release notes. They cover the goa heyday from 1995 to 1997, whereafter TIP arguably turned more techy and muted on average. Possibly worth buying for their historical significance alone.

Three Om Three. (OK, yesterday...)

Well, it's probably the very best known downtempo act in this scene. Downtempo lists tend to be shorter so it's easy to get to the top through quantity alone. Shpongle got 11 votes, Globular 8, nobody else more than 5. The average points of top 10 were all quite similar, possibly excluding Kurbeats who got top marks from all three people who managed to discover and/or to appreciate them. Anyway, Museum is a well produced and colourful album with plenty of themes and nice performances. I just listened to it yesterday and today. Am I not allowed to vote for it? I voted Filteria too, even though it might be more hip and cool to nominate something more underground than these sellouts who dare to sell a thousand copies! And to produce more than three albums. Surely past their prime... Still better than Isratrance.

How about starting with a "thank you" before offending other people's musical tastes?

Alright... Uptempo: 1: Filteria - Lost in the Wild (Suntrip) 2: Shantifax - Complete Tranceformation (SarnarSchourt) 3: Trinodia - Astral Clouds (Ovnimoon) 4: Nervasystem - Time Travel (Anjuna) 5: VA - Blacklight Moments (Suntrip) 6: BlackStarrFinale - AURYN (Neogoa) 7: Radical Distortion - Back in Time (Eutuchia) 8: VA - If I Wasn't Human, I'd Be a Trance Track (Cronomi) 9: VA - Mind Rewind 2, Past Forward (DAT Mafia) 10: VA - The Kingdom (Zion 604) Downtempo: 1: Kurbeats ‎- Folktronica (not on label) 2: Miktek - Elsewhere (Ultimae) 3: Shpongle - Museum of Consciousness (Twisted) 4: Tengri - Icaros (Peak) 5: 2Minds - Wave Shell (Geomagnetic.TV) 6: Field Rotation - Fatalist: The Repetition of History (Denovali) 7: Zen Baboon - Suber (Electrik Dream) 8: Globular - Magnitudes of Order (not on label) 9: Deep Fried Dub - Slow Cooked (Dubmission) 10: Nuage - Vivant (Purple Hexagon)