Basilisk

Hey all! I have two mixes to share in this thread. Both are recent recordings, unusually long, and feature music from the last decade or so. I put a huge amount of work into both of them and hope this forum is still home to some adventurous listeners dig in! This first mix was recorded to showcase the Techgnosis Records sound... but there's a lot more going on here than just that! Full details and download links: https://djbasilisk.com/mixes/esoteric-expanse-1/ This second mix is too long to fit on SoundCloud... my goal was to create something unhindered by time constraints without repeating any project or label. The end result spirals through quite a few different styles before returning to where it began: Full details and download links: https://djbasilisk.com/mixes/dj-basilisk-uroboros-1/

Maybe there's a revolution going on but it's not coming out of anything we'd normally associate with the psytrance scene. Check these out: https://darkleader.bandcamp.com/album/dark-leader-005 https://dearsoil.bandcamp.com/album/rambal-cochet-ufo-researcher

There's quite a lot of interesting stuff coming out of the modern acid house, analog techno, and dark disco domains that ends up sounding like something reminiscent of the proto-Goa period (1989-1994). Some entrancing selections below, for those who don't mind the slower BPMs:

Not sure if this meets the threshold for "new" but it's super cool and something disenchanted Goa trance fans should check out sometime:

No, they never do when compared to properly mastered digital files sourced from tape or whatever.

I see some rare and vinyl-only tracks I've been hunting for in digital quality... but Koxbox - WTP and the Tegma releases are vinyl rips.

Ladytron has many great songs in their back catalog (and there are some pretty tight remixes around too). Er, we should probably be a little careful how much we use the quote feature in here though, the page could easily become difficult for some users to load

A few relatively recent selections... some more indie or underground, but still pop format.

Looks interesting... this duo has quite a fascinating discography to explore! Plenty of great sounds for science fiction music lovers...

Naming creative projects is tough enough to begin with, now add 7 billion human beings and a century of increasingly diverse and productive music production and you've got a recipe for name conflicts and shortages. Obviously the best thing to do is pick something completely unique that has zero results on Google (and doesn't sound like any other artist after you account for non-standard spelling). Failing that, picking a name not used in your target genre/market might be acceptable, if the other entity with your name is not too well known in theirs... but in general, as soon as you are mucking around with names that have been widely used, you're asking for trouble. Do your research, check and double check. Or at the very least look into a dictionary to avoid silly mistakes (ahem, Bizzare Contact). On the other hand, even those of us with well-established identities will sometimes have problems... I've been "Basilisk" for 20+ years but I'm far from the only one. Luckily the others are mostly metal bands or doing electro-industrial or something not very related to what I'm known for... but in the last several years a new Basilisk has emerged in Germany, playing mostly hard techno, but often appearing on line-ups at psytrance-adjacent events... I've spoken with him at length and he's been very disrespectful about the whole situation, but I'm not about to abandon an identity I've had for so long... guess I'll just have to beat him at his own game, huh? Sometimes your best option is just to compete in the marketplace of ideas and artistic expression. As an aside, Beatport has been doing something a little peculiar as of late: throwing the country of origin into the names of artists with conflicting names... so now you've got Mohn and Mohn (NL), for example... and since that's the actual name listed on Beatport, this same info ends up in Discogs, and in some extreme cases I've even seen artists adopt these modifiers as their official names on SoundCloud, Facebook, etc.!

I'm guessing this video is actually some kind of sneaky promo for his new album or something along those lines. I'm not sure why the mods haven't moved this somewhere or closed the thread, it's obviously just bait.

Agreed. Plenty of his newer tracks still sound amazing, as do his collabs. He still has a magic touch!

Psytrance isn't dead, it just smells funny.

Two essential projects you must explore: Decoy (a progressive psytrance project by two actual jazz musicians from Australia) and IMPS (Decoy plus Minilogue). This interview might also be of interest: https://australiens.net/features/decoy/

Shadows is the album I was thinking of. I'm not sure it's really all that good, but it is certainly a faithful imitation of WCOOH, and even includes a remix of Freak. Worth a listen if you're seeking more of that particular sound, but don't set your expectations too high.

Circling back to the original question, I'd like to take a stab at it. Modern comparisons to X-Dream's second album are difficult because most new school Goa trance emphasizes Pleiadian maximalism or Dimension 5's emphasis on whirling cosmic melodies. X-Dream circa 1996 is distinguished by a much cleaner sound palette, sunny melodies (with an occasional hint of something sinister), and those warm, bubbling bass lines that everyone loves so much. I rifled through my collection and didn't find too much along these lines... but two albums jumped out at me: Robert Elster's Still Breathing and Solid Snake's Return to the Source, both released in 2016. Yes, they're both on the progressive psytrance tip, both are slower, but the vibe feels right, and those bass lines are certainly on point. As for MFG, that feels a little easier, since Radical Distortion exists (check Asinar for a representative example of their imitation MFG sound). Maybe Artifact303's Back to Space would also qualify. My gut sense is that there's a fair amount of darker new school Goa trance roughly in this dimension (but I don't really listen to enough of it to know). Finally, some potentially overlooked classics at least somewhat related to either X-Dream circa 1996 or MFG circa 1999: Morphem's Out of Focus, Noosphere's Radiated, California Sunshine's Flying Eye Land, Menis' Temporary Insanity, Passenger's For All Man Kind, and The Auranaut's People Want to Be Needed (certain tracks anyway).

You're probably thinking about Future Prophecy, which was pretty much an X-Dream cover band [edit] around when they released Shadows. Plenty of Israeli projects around the turn of the millennium took a lot of inspiration from X-Dream; I'd say Cosma was the best of the lot (in that he learned from X-Dream and created his own unique sound), but there are plenty of others that might scratch the itch.

Spawn is quite a special tune. If you'd like to hear it in the context of a mix, it's briefly featured on In Exile, around the 45 minute mark. https://djbasilisk.com/mixes/dj-basilisk-in-exile/

This is a really cool initiative and I was happy to snap up (and promote) the Prana singles collection! One thing I'm curious about is the sourcing for some of these releases... for full albums or compilations I'd assume it came from the original files, but for some of the collections (Athena, M.O.S., etc.) the material might come from all over the place, but I seem to recall seeing no mention of remastering or any other special treatment. Even if it's just some tracks collected from various commercial releases it would be cool to explicitly state as much, so us collectors have some idea of whether we already have the exact same file prior to purchase.

Sounds like a good candidate for remastering and re-release!

I randomly picked up a copy of Pope of Gegga's "Living in the Past" and it is shockingly good given how there's literally nothing written about it on the 'net. I always assumed it was a dud based on the lack of buzz and a general dislike of most of his single releases... but it's a real technoid treat for anyone also into early 2000s Son Kite, Ticon, and Vibrasphere. https://www.discogs.com/master/view/45134

Hello everyone! I'm bumping this ancient thread to announce that I'm reviving my Essential Selections project on my new DJing and music fandom blog, located here. Some of you might remember the original version of this project but this new version is much more ambitious. I now include more styles, a consequence of having developed a much broader taste in music, as well as brief descriptions of each release. I just published the first entry, a list of what I consider to be the best and most noteworthy albums of 1995. Hopefully I'll be publishing additional entries throughout the coming years

I got curious, against my better judgement, and yeah... WTF is right. Talamasca is technically competent, and the idea is sort of cheeky good fun, but the end result just sounds bizarre. I don't think classic Goa trance really works with the mash-up or megamix format. Side note: I was amused to hear Transwave's Land of Freedom in there, seeing as how that was a tribute to Man With No Name (who is also featured here. That would make it a meta-tribute, would it not?

I'm several years into completely restructuring my entire collection, listening through, and at least provisionally filing and rating absolutely everything. Since I am mostly interested in working with this music as a DJ all albums and compilations have been dissolved into their constituent parts and scattered to wherever each individual track belongs. Somehow it is all magically coming together... and hopefully I'll end up producing some interesting mixes and maybe even a few articles from all this work some day.

I've always disliked build-ups that don't deliver... now you can hear entire sets of this sort of thing, apparently. I tend to look for some combination of complexity, nuance, and style in whatever music I am listening to, and the bog-standard umpa-lumpa psy-prog with stripped-down returns is exactly the opposite of this. But, much like triplets/offbeat bass, people seem to absolutely adore the stuff. Incidentally, it is funny as hell that some of the same parody videos are still doing the rounds years later... Loud's "10 reasons" video has 4.5 million views by now! And people seem to have taken it as an instruction manual, not a warning? I wonder if anyone has ever dared to drop it at a festival...