abasio

Well, that's psyshops imfamous shitty service for you. I never use them anymore even if Saiko doesn't have what I want I'd rather wait than use psyshop

I'm pretty much the same, pictures just never connect or my memory is not good enough or something. Just thought I'd inform everyone of that important fact As an example all I can think of for the last one is Poisoned Dancer and I know that's not an album

Very nice! And yes trance came first I am sure of it.

↑ very nice

So far that has been my favourite of the bunch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upu1TslhOHE

Artist: Tripswitch Title: Geometry Label: Section Records Released: 1 October 2010 Style: Downbeat, Chillout Tracklist 1 Circularity (7:24) 2 Concentric Circles (8:57) 3 Goldbach's Conjecture (6:34) 4 Floating Point (7:12) 5 Strange Parallels (7:21) 6 Tesselation (8:04) 7 Harmonic Mean (9:10) 8 Stereogram (7:14) 9 Glide Reflection (8:04) To use an old football cliché: this is a game of two halfs. The first 4 tracks of this album are a real let down, they sound like they were made to go on Circuit Breaker but were not good enough. The style is similar, summery and with bright open melodies but they lack the spark that ran through the first album and made it alive. The first 4 tracks on Geometry are pedestrian, they don't lift me up or make me take any notice of them. In a word, they are bland. The second half of the album though is excellent. Starting with the fifth track Strange Parallels, the music suddenly comes alive. From before when I forgot even what album I was listening to, suddenly I am lifting the digipak from the floor and wondering "what is the name of this track?". Strange Parallels is very organic and accoustic, just like the previous tracks probably were (I can't really recall anything about them) but this track has that spark I thought was missing. The melody really grabs me and draws me in and I breathe a sigh of relief that this album is not a complete waste. The next track, Tesselation, sounds exactly like it's title: some clever synth work really manages to sound like it is tesselating, like an old fashioned pinball or an original Mario game. Harmonic Mean sounds like it could actually have gone on Circuit Breaker as does Stereogram & Glide Reflection but in a more mature way. One thing I don't understand is the timing of releases nowadays. This album is definitely a summer album, I probably would have loved this album a million times more if it had been released in May or June, but no they released it in October, just in time for the cold weather to come in and for this album to feel out of place. If people listen to it at the wrong time of the year and don't really enjoy it, when summer rolls round they won't remember it. Nick is British so unless the sales in Australia and other southern hemisphere countries are so much better than in Europe and the rest of the north, then I just don't understand it. There is so little money in the underground music industry at the moment so you think they would be smart enough to time their releases to maximise popularity (= recommendations to friends → more sales) instead of releasing it to appeal to a much smaller number of people. I like the second half of this album but it's not good enough that it's going to stick in my head until next summer when it'll probably sound a lot nicer. So all in all this is half a good album released at the wrong time thus giving all the wrong feelings. It is not good enough to warm me up in the cold winter months like some albums (Abakus' debut springs to mind) so it just doesn't really make me want to listen to it. I hope that I will drag this back out come summer and maybe go down to the beach and play it but that is half a year away and it is hard for me to remember anything for more than a few minutes, let alone 6 months. Next time Nick, wait until the time is right if you're going to deliver a highly seasonal release.

Haha fantastic

Very good album, I like this one a lot. np Androcell - Entheomythic

My views Oh and a big thanks to Rotwang for recommending the Suns Of Arqa CD. It is excellent, very different from other Arqa stuff pretty reminiscent of MotY stuff

Christmas Present to myself Androcell - Entheomythic Suns Of Arqa - Scared Sacred Kaya Project - Desert Phase Remixes Enichkin's Guide to Musical Dimensions Of Space & Time also got Steve Roach - Structures from Silence yesterday from my GF and I have ordered the new Cymphonic album: post mortem investigations, Offthesky - fluorescence & Markus Guentner - doppelgaenger from Databloem's online shop. I noticed that Markus Guentner - doppelgaenger was very expensive in other stores so got it before it went out of stock.

Artist: Asura Title: 360 Label: Ultimae Released: 10 October 2010 Style: Ketamine Trance, Ambient Tracklist Chapter I - Before 1 El-Hai (Featuring Ayten) (5:52) 2 Regenesis (5:54) 3 Altered State (Album Edit) (8:27) 4 Atlantis Child (10:33) 5 Erase (5:45) Chapter II - After 6 Halley Road (8:15) 7 Longing For Silence (7:46) 8 Getsemani (6:29) 9 Le Dernier Voyage (9:14) 10 Virgin Delight (9:25) This album is Asura and it is Asura done well as you would expect from Asura as he is himself. This is to say that while there is nothing new here, no groundbreaking stuff, no change in style (360 is still facing the exact same way) from Life² the music is still very strong. Just like in Life² there are some fairly ambient tracks and some stronger "Ketamine Trance" tracks, that is to say how regular trance sounds like if put through a Ketamine filter, with a connecting cinematic feeling running throughout. Occasionally the music can get a little too ethnic sounding, like it scarily did in the opening track which for me is by far the weakest on the album, which does spoil it a bit but is made up for in the quality of the non-ethnic parts, the parts that sound real and not clichéd. It is definitely a grower, the first time I heard it I only really liked Regenesis, which is my favourite Asura track of all time now, but on repeated listens all tracks bar the opening track showed themselves to be very nice deep "Asura" tracks. The main problem is that opening track because being the first track it sets the scene for the rest of the album. When I listen to the album now, I skip the first track and go on to Regenesis because this way I have the album introduced as a wonder so the rest of the music fits into this wonderful setting and I find it more enjoyable. When I listen to the album with El-Hai as the first track I have a cheesy ethnic shanty shanty sitting in a shack with no shoes and no soul feel so the tracks that follow it are spoiled by the memory of the dirty hippiness of that opening track. So don't expect any groundbreaking ideas from Asura with 360, if you weren't a big fan of Life² then I will doubt that you'd like this any more than that. If you thought that Life² was decent enough you'll likely be let down here as it is rather similar and decent followed by the exact same decent doesn't really do it for many people. If you loved Life² and are just desperate to hear more of the same then you will probably really enjoy this album. It is a good album with a lot of good tracks but it doesn't get as much air time as it would have done if it had had the same quality but had taken a slightly different direction. This album wold have been better as 270 or at least 350. Next time, I hope that Charles will grace us with something a little different as he certainly has the talent but just needs a bit more inspiration.

Artist: Solar Fields Title: Origin #1 Label: Ultimae Released: 8 December 2010 Style: Downbeat, Ambient Tracklist 1 Silent Walking (6:41) 2 Unite (9:25) 3 Bigger Stream (6:17) 4 Almost There (7:17) 5 Next Waiting (7:42) 6 Embraced (5:27) 7 Going In (7:50) 8 Automatic Sun (3:32) 9 Reborn (9:11) 10 OCT (15:50) This album, a collection of unreleased tracks from Solar Fields over the last 10 years, came out of nowhere so there was very little time to build up my hopes or have any real expectations which I think was a good think because I would have been pretty disappointed with this release. You see, Solar Fields is an album artist: he creates albums that you should listen to from beginning to end and that flow in a wonderful way like a very good story. Obviously then a collection of tracks made over a span of 10 years which were deemed inappropriate or (dare I say it?) not good enough for an album or compilation release is not going to have the thing that Solar Fields really has going for his music, that sense of continuity, feeling and emotion all connected through once piece of audio storytelling split up into several chapters. Origin #1 is more like a book of short stories, by the same author but not connected to each other. In the same way just as one is getting interesting it is over and you feel disappointed but you are quickly through the weaker ones. I have to say it, so I will get it out early on: this album has some BAD tracks on it. Track 3: Bigger Stream is actually painful to listen to. Sure it might be pleasant enough if you heard it on the radio among with other tracks like it and you never knew who it was from, but then neither would you look into who it was by as it is just bland and cheesy. To know that it came from an artist like Solar Fields though is where the pain comes in, how could he have sunk so low? What was happening in 2005 when he was releasing the Masterpieces that are Leaving Home & Extended? Had he taken a blow to the head or was he trying to impress some dumb hottie he met at a party? Either way it is best to be stricken from my memory: lalalalalalaaaaaa Solar Fields never made it! But damn, it still comes on every time I play the CD. This was the first Solar Fields track that I skip when listening to a CD but unfortunately it was not the last. OCT is also a very weak track, which is a damn shame because it is by far the longest. It is an uptempo track in the feel of Mirror Edge: in which I mean it is bland and doesn't really go anywhere. It's not bad per say but it is a long way from good and once again I am shocked that Magnus could have produced it. Those are the only 2 terrible tracks on the album. The rest of the music is really good, especially the second track Unite which is among my all time favourite Solar Fields tracks of all time. The beats, the melody, the whole atmosphere of it are perfect. It is a wonderful track and is beyond a shadow of a doubt worth the money for the album all by itself. The only problem with the track is the knowledge that the next track is such a lte down. Imagine you are sailing among the stars with the Earth just a tiny speck beneath you, then a few seconds later you are hurled to the ground, passing through the earth's crust to the hell which contains Britney Spears and James Blunt (I know they are not dead but their music will already be in hell). This is my feeling after listening to Unite, followed by Bigger Stream. Unite is excellent and I really do feel like I am sailing through the stars, as if me and the sky are one but just like it is not connected to the following track neither is it connected to the preceding track. The rest of the music is good, the sort of tunes you'd expect from Magnus over the years, some cool beats, nice melodies, melancholic atmospheres and an overall feeling of class that Solar Fields manages to exude in (almost) all his music. There is little sense of continuity and there are those 2 bad tracks but it is definitely worth getting. The blurb says that this is the first album in a series of 4 to be released. While I am looking forward to hearing them as it's always good to have more Solar Fields music, I fear that these releases will water down the Solar Fields catalogue. I hope that for the next three, more thought is put into the presentation of the tracks, perhaps some light mixing, that way Magnus can see easily when 2 tracks just should not follow each other. I also hope that there are no more forays into the more pop like sound or the Mirror's Edge style (I still don't credit that album as a Solar Fields album).

Artist: Elve Title: Emerald Label: Virtual Released: 30 July 2010 Style: Ambient Tracklist 1 Epena Ceremony (4:13) 2 Plant Cell Perceptions (9:02) 3 Tree Memories (9:08) 4 Pollen Forms (2:10) 5 Delphinium Dream (4:31) 6 Green Lake (2:05) 7 Waterfalls (3:23) 8 Emerald Forest (2:41) 9 Mesmeric Sun Kingdom (11:59) 10 Plateua (8:52) 11 Eden (6:32) How to describe this album without repeating everything I said about the first Elve release Infinite Garden? They are strikingly similar albums on casual listens. They are bright and sunny with long drawn out electronic sounds merging harmoniously with the sounds of nature: birdsong, rivers trickling, wind rustling leaves etc. They are both minimal yet packed full of detail. On first listen of each you could be forgiven for thinking that they are the same album. It is only in the details that the differences can be seen and once they are seen I felt like kicking myself for thinking they were so similar. You see, while the storyteller is the same and has a very unique way of telling stories that makes you instantly recognise that it is him, while both albums may be set in the same place in the same era, the story is completely different. A journey can be made by the same people using the same modes of transport but the experience turns out completely different. Whereas Infinite Garden was a romp around a stately garden with no other human sould to trouble you, Emerald is a step beyond the borders of neatly kept gardens of the Infinite Garden, beyond the tamed landscapes and cared for aviaries. Emerald is a step into a more wild landscape, where the rivers run free, the grass is overgrown and animals may be hungry. Each track is beautiful, describing wonderful landscapes like a paradise but like with places that seem like paradise from the outside, once you get on the inside them and you can see the exquisite detail, it is at once fascinating and disturbing. The music takes me through lush forest with a canopy hundreds of feet up that the sunlight just makes it through. It takes me rivers too wide to cross, waterfalls too high to climb and to clearings that are uneasy in the absence of trees. This land is truly a kingdom beyond man's influence and it is a priveledge to be able to wander it's landscapes using Elve's soundscapes. So if you have listened to this and thought it was just like Infinite Garden then listen again, try and see beyond the storyteller and listen to the story being told. I prefer this to Infinite Garden; I like the raw openess of Emerald, I like the wildness and the darker side of paradise.

Artist: Electrypnose Title: Sweet Sadness Label: Suntrip Records Released: 24 September 2010 Style: Downbeat, IDM, Psychill Tracklist 1 A5sention (7:06) 2 Histoire d'Histoires (5:55) 3 A Part Of Myself Is Somewhere Else (5:31) 4 Sady (8:22) 5 Triste Gaîté (8:45) 6 A Wasp At The Fairies (2:23) 7 Out There (7:35) 8 Triste Vie (6:50) 9 Perle De Vie (8:56) 10 Dramatic Orchestra (6:09) 11 El Cornio Second Chapter (5:40) 12 Peurs Et Pleurs (4:16) Electrypnose follows up his amazing first chillout album: Subliminal Melancholies with Sweet Sadness in 2010 on Suntrip Records. Now both Electrypnose and Suntrip are more famous for their upbeat trance music but when they decide to release chillout music it is of the highest calibre. Subliminal Melancholies was an album I ignored for far too long after buying it and I only really got into it after hearing an amazing track I didn't recognise on one of my own mixes, looked it up and realised it was Electrypnose. I then started listening to the album and I really loved the unique sound of bright melodic melancholy. Sweet Sadness too has this oxymoronic feel to it where the music is both bright and sad at the same time, as if a depressive is putting on a very good brave face for the world to see but look deeply into his eyes and you can see the pain and hurt hidden deep beneath the façade. This album has more of an IDMish feel to it than your usual psytrance related chillout music, the beats are more complicated, the are times when the music gets quite glitchy and the lengths of the tracks vary from fairly long intricate tracks to short sharp tunes that arrest your attention and then finish abruptly. Unfortunately form me, my favourite track is A Wasp At The Fairies which weighs in at just under two and a half minutes. The track is like a short soundtrack to a animated fantasy intro: it feels like I am deep within a forest at midnight under a full moon and there is life everywhere just beneath, above or to the side of perception. It feels great, I really want to know where it is going but then it's over. That would be my only gripe with the album though and when the problem is that your favourite track is too short you can count yourself lucky that the music begs you to listen to it again. If you liked Subliminal Melancholies then I don't think you'll be disappointed with this album. Electrypnose has done his second chillout album very well, he has managed to stay true to the feeling of the first album while moving his sound forward considerably. The atmosphere is great but seems more polished, more vivid and in my head more animated. The beats have become more varied and in my head give the album a more metallic feel which tugs at the animated feeling I get opposing it while it accentuates it.

Artist: David Abrgel Title: Reverse Universe Label: Freeance Released: 24 September 2010 Style: Mid tempo melodic Tracklist 1 Afternoon (4:36) 2 Strum (4:27) 3 Diversity (4:25) 4 Changes (4:45) 5 Reverse Universe (5:00) 6 Tech A Break (5:05) 7 Liquid (5:07) 8 Rain Season (5:15) 9 Optimistic (3:46) 10 Blue Nation (4:26) 11 Farewell (1:39) This is the sort of album you are either going to love or hate; I know I should hate it, it is cheesy, overly melodic and has some pretty awful singing in it but it turns out into a really fantastic album. I thought at first that it might be a guilty pleasure that I would quickly tire of but this was not the case at all, after about 50 listens I can actually say that I love this album even more than when I first heard it. The energy it exudes is wonderful to behold and even though it is mid tempo verging on chillout and most likely designed for home listening I can still imagine dancefloors kicking off to this music. The key here is the synths, the synth work is brilliant and it has me anticipating when they will come in and even rewinding tracks to listen to them again and again. The best tracks are Changes featuring Adam Madar, Ariel Feldman (production) and Hagar Klein (vocals) which starts off as a fairly cheesy song but by the time the synths come in it has me tripping seratonin out of my eyeballs and dribbling acid from my ears. The title Track is also an excellent track, I could describe it as I would Changes except without that it starts off as a cheesy song. It is everything that is great in the last track but amplified threefold. My Favourite track though is Liquid which is just five minutes of pure joy that I find myself playing three or four times when I play the album. The only downside to the album for me is that it is not quite 50 minutes but I suppose that is the norm for cheesy pop albums: a category which this is undoubtedly a part of. I don't want anyone to get me wrong as my usual taste in music is more serious difficult to digest music: this album is cheesy pop in the extreme but it has done what very few cheesy pop albums do and that is to perform cheese well, unadulterated and for its own sake. This album is my guilty pleasure of the year and remains pretty high in my top list of albums in 2010.

Artist: Solar Fields Title: Altered: Second Movements Label: Ultimae Released: 26 July 2010 Style: Ambient, Downbeat Tracklist 1 Insolate (9:15) 2 eMotion Of Circles (7:23) 3 Rediscover (9:45) 4 Closing The Sky (6:34) 5 Our Blue Stones (6:23) 6 Universal Dust (6:25) 7 Bngl.w (7:20) 8 Feel (8:42) 9 Changing Patterns (4:10) 10 Staring Into The Nothingness (7:30) 11 A Breeze Through Life (5:42) This is the perfect example of what a remix album should sound like. The first time I heard this album I didn't hear much of the original tracks in these reworkings of them. I heard the siganture stuttering bassline from Sol in the opening track Isolate and that was about it. However on further listening and comparisons I can hear the elements from each track but played so differently that I am often left wondering: Is this a remix album? Of course this is a remix album of Solar Fields last labum Movements but the blurb stating that this is so much more (something of which I was very skeptical of at the time of purchasing) turned out to be 100% true. Over the last few years I have become more of an ambient head than a lover of downbeat and psychill. Whilst I used to listen to Psychill about 65% to ambient's 35% it has probably reversed recently and now Extended is in my CD player more often than Leaving Home & I feel that Altered is a lot better than Movements. I loved movements it moved me a lot and I loved playing it over and over again even when I played live I would often include a healthy dose from that album. Altered though goes one step further for me and I just cannot stop listening to this album. I have had it about 6 months now and must have listened to it a hundred times. It is everything you'd expect from Solar Fields: powerful, emotional and very classy. For some it might not be as easily accessible as Movements but for others I think it will be more of a grower. I liked it a lot when I first listened to it but I loved it more and more as I listened to it again and again. In such a great album it is hard to have a standout but Solar Fields is nothing if not consistent and his albums usually have one track that stands out among the crowd of giants. In the album it is Staring Into The Nothingness which has a real cinematic edge to it, it is deep, it is emotional, it is epic. I don't often use the word epic but I would say it about this track. My favourite track this year so far on one of my favourite albums of 2010.

I don't think Timelapse In Mercury was ever intended as an Ishq album. The album in fact has no artist titled as so was just credited to Ishq at discogs. Matt Hillier said though the the Ishq moniker was only for his music of the specific style we can hear on Orchid and now on Sama. I guess though with some collaborations he has given the title Ishq so people know it's him but I will still only think of this and Orchid (and Fluid Earth) as Ishq.

Artist: Ishq Title: Sama Label: Electronic Soundscapes Records Released: 10 September 2010 Style: Natural Ambient Tracklist 1 Intro (1:44) 2 Sama (10:00) 3 Vidya (9:22) 4 Energeia (4:01) 5 Elysian (7:11) 6 Urasvati (15:42) 7 Persia (6:47) 8 Path (3:14) 9 Mandala (12:13) How long have we been waiting for a new Ishq album? I mean Timelapse in Mercury was never intended as an Ishq album as it was in a completely different style and it just got labeled as Ishq as Matt Hillier never gave it an artist name. Similarly with the Ishq collaborations About Time with Pan Electric and Voice From Home with Steve Brand, they weren't Ishq albums like Orchid, they didn't have the Ishq feel that we know and love: that natural feeling, very organic with every element in harmony with each other as well as the listener. 9 years, it has been 9 years since Orchid was released on Dakini records and it has been 9 years without another album of that signature Ishq sound. With the Ishq moniker being bandied about so often in the interim but without actually having an album it became almost unbearable. It was only the strength of Orchid (& Fluid Earth on CD2) that made the wait somewhat bearable as I could always go back to that album and listen to it as if it was fresh. Being one of the most timeless albums I own helped a lot there. So with such huge expectations, how did the difficult second album hold up. I must say that it holds up very well against my expectations. It lacks the groundbreaking "Wow" factor of Orchid as it is similar in style to the album I have listened to countless times before but it is very good. The quality is very high, the tracks have not been rushed and you can feel the love and the attention to detail in them. The style is soft organice ambient with enough beats to give it rhythm and not just be floaty soundscapes with a tagline that says create your own adventure. This music would work well as background music, deep engrossing music or even enjoyable music for when not so esoteric loving people visit your home. The sounds of nature: weather, rivers, trees rustling etc mix excellently with more ethereal sounds giving an atmosphere like walking through a forest on a warm spring afternoon as the sun wanes in the sky and the shadows are long. The unreal inhabitants are out of sight now but you can feel them waking up and the energy of the place is charged with an unreal wonder. Meditate in an empty forest at the start of summer, make sure that you won't be disturbed and sit with this on good headphones. The experience feels like this album has been designed for it. It is naturally spiritual: like it has stumbled upon spirituality rather than having set out to achieve it. It's not as good as Orchid but then again not much is, it is however a highly enjoyable second album which will rank in my favourites come the end of the year.

Cheers! I will most likely be ordering this too

I already have both those albums That is in my wishlist. How does it compare to other Suns Of Arqa? I like them but their releases are hit and miss for me.

Will definitely be checking this out. His last album might not have been as good as his debut but it was still a good listen

But Asura varies the beats in his tracks I am liking this album, not every track is as good as I hoped but regenesis is one of the best tracks I have heard this year

But with no set limit the future possibilities are infinite, however with a limited release no matter what happens in the future the label has made a commitment to never release any more copies ever in the life of the universe. The reason why they use limited edition, I always thought it was because too many buyers procrastinate buying something so the profits don't come for a release in any decent amount of time. 2 CDs sold a week is not every retailers dream. So if they assume that a CD will only sell around 1000 copies anyway, why not put it as a limited edition, then the fans will mostly try and buy it quickly before it's too late. This way they can recoup the money on the release fairly quickly and have the funds for another release.

The new Androcell is a must have. I want that pretty soon. Just wondering what else to order with it