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Artist: Total Eclipse Title: Violent Relaxation Label: Blue Room Released, Substance, Phonokol, Avatar Released: 24 June 1996 Style: Goa Trance, Goambient Tracklist 1.1 Virtual Terminal Energised 7:19 1.2 Area 51 7:36 1.3 The Furnace 9:01 1.4 Teknophobia 8:14 1.5 Chaotic Circus 7:46 1.6 Absolute Zero 7:43 1.7 Pulsar Glitch 7:41 1.8 Space Clinic 7:27 1.9 Blue Galaxie 8:19 2.1 Espanolizer 9:22 2.2 The Pendulum 9:33 2.3 Black Body Radiation 8:21 2.4 Diamond Ring Effect 10:01 2.5 Time Drops 7:31 2.6 51 Pegasus 8:12 2.7 Gravity Mirage 9:40 Total Eclipse used to be good, damn good in fact before he took the route that so many others took and diluted his music into something no longer worth buying. But back in 1996 when Goa was at it's peak (music wise) and Total Eclipse was still in ascendance he released this 2 disc masterpiece. Titled Violent Relaxation as the the first CD is trance whereas the second CD is more chilled. In this the last track of the first CD, Blue Galaxie, could be on the second disc as it is also a very chilled track but I guess Total Eclipse was going with the trend of finishing a Goa album that was fullon (not the genre) all the way through with a chilled number in order to bring the listener down. The first CD contains some classic tracks like Area 51, Absolute Zero and Space Clinic but all tracks ooze class, drip psychedlica and are driven by hypnotic rhythms and entrancing beats. Basically it is everything that epitomizes the era of Goa trance but doesn't have any gimmick that stands out, very few samples and all tracks are extremely consistent. In this way I can always pick up this album and play it and have it stay fresh. If you miss the old sound at the same time as having listened to your old albums too much then this disc is something you should definitely have a go at listening to. The second CD is what I usually listen to nowadays though, it is goa trance slowed down to comedown levels. I always liked the last track of many of the goa albums around this time and I remember wishing that more artists would release a full album in this style. I have played sets in chillout rooms that are purely based on the final tracks of these albums. CD2 is pure class, it has all the sounds that made Goa great but with much more gentle caressing beats to sooth the mind rather than rip it apart. My favourites here are the Pendulum for the first chillout track I heard with such great acidic but soft synths, Black Body Radiation for its lush bassline and Diamond Ring Effect for its intense melodies but like the first CD, all tracks are great and it's a wonderful album to listen to. For best results listen to both discs back to back. Have the first CD rip your head apart and then allow the second to massage it back to health. This album is a pure synergic album as the music sounds a hell of a lot better when you listen to it as a whole than if you skip through tracks. It is still very much available to buy, even the Blue Room version is not so expensive but the re-releases on Substance and Avatar are very reasonable. Get it not just for a piece of history but also for a great piece of music.

While I don't hold IFO as quite the best album ever I know what you mean. For me, the following releases are the best i have heard in the respective genres. New Age Enigma - Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi! 90s "Rave Comedown" Ambient Global Comunication - 76 14 Natural Ambient Ishq - Orchid Ethnic Jairamji - Kindred Spirits Dark Ambient Robert Rich & B. Lustmord - Stalker Melodic IDM Secede - Tryshasla World Shulman - Endless Rhythms of the Beatless Heart Chillout Solar Fields - Leaving Home Dub Techno Steve Hillage + Evan Marc - Dreamtime Submersible Space Ambient Tetsu Inoue - Ambiant Otaku Drone Ambient The Winterhouse - Sanctuary It's all very subjective I know, you can find my views on these albums here

One of the worst movies I have ever seen. My GF usually hates Sci-Fi but for some reason she really wanted to see this, I went along after telling her she will hate it and it'll put her off good Sci-Fif movies. I was proved right in a far too convincing manner. The camera work is awful, why they need to have both the "real" footage alongside the movie footage with 2 people saying the same thing at the same time is beyond me. It is not clever just fucking annoying. At one point they had the screen split in 4, a usual 2 way spilt showing inside and outside a house but decided they should do it with the "real" and movie footage too. Worst scene in movie history for me. Also the "real" footage is so fake, why would you need to different actresses to play the role of one real person and still expect people to believe it's real. Stupid stupid film makers. Add on to that the plot is incredibly weak and the truths incredibly lame. The aliens at one point posses the body of one of the characters and speaks to the people. The say "We are......" and the end of that sentence is the most obvious thing you can think of. The whole movie is a bad adaptation of Erich von Däniken insightful books but the movie fails on every level. This is number 3 in my all time worst movies list.

Total Eclipse - Violent Relaxation

Nice one, cheers!

Are you this artist or just take the name as a nickname?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yPBTCD8ZZE&feature=related

I like this album a lot. Very serene How is this one in comparison?

My Top 10 Chillout tracks 1. Solar Fields - Staring Into The Nothingness http-~~-//www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S7pfGun0QI 2. Carbon Based Lifeforms - Init http-~~-//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-Od4Bff8MM 3. Asura - Regenesis 4. David Abrgel - Liquid 5. Kaya Project - Dust Devil (Liquid Stranger's "Cortex Vortex" Mix) 6. Enichkin - Visions 7. Kaya Project - Calico Stomp (Gaudi Rmx) 8. Solar Fields - Unite 9. Electrypnose - A Wasp At The Fairies 10. Androcell - Night Sorceress So far of course, I haven't heard that much unfortunately

Nice threadromancy Draeke Happy New Year

Chillout 1. Carbon Based Lifeforms - Interloper 2. David Abrgel - Reverse Universe 3. Enichkin's Guide To Musical Dimensions Of Space And Time 4. Kaya Project - Desert Phase 5. Electrypnose - Sweet Sadness Ambient 1. Solar Fields - Altered: Second Movements 2. The Winterhouse - Sanctuary 3. Nunc Stans - We Leave Without Speaking 4. The Circular Ruins - Invisible Cities 5. Ishq - Sama

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.