Dolmot

Bah. Like it or not, the Oriental/Indian/Goa connection has become so strong that it's one of the best established, even defining features of this scene, all the way to the name of a (sub)genre. For a comparison, take a look at metal and its different branches. Nobody probably denies that stuff like skulls, swords, spikes, blood, black shirts, near-illegible logos and grainy black-and-white forest scenes have been done to death (heh) already years ago. Nevertheless, those are recognisable features. Browse through a random pile of CDs and you can easily spot power metal from its chrome, folk metal from its medieval look, and black metal from its grain. Then you can dress similarly on a festival and connect with other people. Things like that form the scene and differentiate it from other genres. Inevitably, you'll also find a crapload of people who very cleverly spot these recurring themes and decide to think different. That's nice. I think what's really bugging you is cheap production, not its content per se. It's very possible to follow a theme yet to bring a new twist to it. The other option is to rip the first Shiva image found by Google search and a chant from a '95 sample CD, already appearing in dozens of tracks. Or mushrooms on fractals...sometimes it's hard to tell whether people are really trying or just being nostalgic / tongue in cheek. Like in metal. Full respect to people who try (and manage) to innovate, but it's not that terrible either to follow the established themes as long as there's something noteworthy in the overall product. Plain copy-paste definitely appears just lazy and pointless.

Germany-Algeria, what a game.

I've always counted it as a subgenre of house instead, mainly because it's 1) not psychedelic 2) not trance That didn't stop me from collecting it in my house years, though. I'd just hesitate recommending it when trance is requested.

In most 90s games the actual audio data was either in separate files or bundled into larger lump files. There were ripping programs that detected and extracted them. In fact, sometimes you could just load a whole data file to an audio editor and spot the audio segments. It was almost always plain PCM data until compressed formats like mp3 started to arise. With those tricks you can get the exact source wave. However, the audio was regularly stored as something like 8-22 kHz so it won't become hi-fi even with these fancy direct extraction tricks. Digital or even reasonable analogue sampling from the gameplay output shouldn't introduce any significant error compared to the original resolution. The only real benefit I can imagine is choosing your interpolation algorithm in upsampling, but sometimes the original rough playback is actually preferable as that's how we remember it. Also try googling. Often people have already extracted the sample banks and they're floating around...

I was posting it but your reply appeared when I was previewing. And your switching was indeed unnecessary. I also went through my lists and noticed that strangely many releases there are free downloads, sold out, or only available directly. There's not much on Psyshop I can genuinely recommend as "best of" anything. Well, there are loads of Suntrip worth getting but everyone knows that already, right? (Meanwhile, I'm just placing my own order and I'd like to ask if there's something I've missed this year, but that might already count as thread hijacking...)

It wouldn't surprise me much that new school labels and artists are better represented and more active on Spotify than old school ones.

The player of marimba

Holy carp. England is out too? I know they're regularly a butt of many jokes but already after two games? Oh well, what should you expect after losing two games in a row, Uruguay included...

Wow.

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...