Blair Thaumic

I agree but the converse is also true. X-Dream are great and all but (for example) Pan - "Murphy" is also still a psytrance track, y'know? Rolling basslines are one way to do psytrance, but I don't think they're the only way.

Yes, the gender change was confirmed on this thread: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10154758257670274&id=47716165273 My condolences.

Does anyone know how to contact Jim Wood (Esion God)? Along with Si Wilcox he made amazing acid/goa tracks back in the day. Like this one: I know there's more music from them than was released... I have an old issue of Dream Creation with a review of a "promo album" that never came out. But that's where the trail goes cold. Any leads?

I hear a lot of MFG in The Gathering, particularly Virtual Voyage and Over Mode. And a lot of the "rise and fall" of their tracks is quite similar to X-dream. Anyway, it's not a secret that they started by imitating other goa producers. Erez told me that when they made The Gathering, he tried to, and I quote, "make one track like Etnica, one like Posford, Transwave, X-Dream." Maybe you feel that they failed in interesting ways. IMHO what they did was to take the "nighttime" sound that Ofer, Avi, MFG ect. had been doing for a couple of years and make it more poppy and accessible to a wider audience. It wasn't too aggressive, it wasn't too fluffy, it had catchy melodies and hooks and "hands in the air" moments to make the dancers go wild. Their first three albums were goa-trance lite. From there persistence (I remember them playing in a friend's backyard when the party proper got busted), the accessibility of their music, and probably a lot of luck+great promotion made them so popular.

I'll teach your mother to suck eggs! It's amazing how angry people get about music on this board.

Related: http://dangerousminds.net/comments/classic_rock_conspiracy_theory_weird_scenes_inside_the_canyon

Jadedness is for the young.

I hope Loving Spirit can get a proper re-release someday. And Closed Sektor. Two great tracks that didn't make it onto the Out Of Focus album.

That was the first thing I thought of. My condolences to his family.

About unreleased music. Labels make mistakes. There's an unreleased Koxbox track that's in my top ten of all time. It's worth correcting these missed opportunities. It's also worth resurrecting tracks and styles that were unpopular at the time to see what developments they might have led to. That's one way out of the soulless cloned goa trap. About repetition. Yes, too many artists follow the letter and not the spirit of goa trance. Standardization is part of the problem; when everyone has the same Nord or Virus as their go-to synth, I don't care how creative the individual artists are, there is going to be a loss of variety. Diversity of expression and of expressive tools is required. I don't think that music styles need to "evolve" or change drastically in order to stay dynamic. Music in general hasn't changed much since the 1980s. Detroit techno is much the same as it always was and still great music is released in that genre every year, because the artists have integrity and write from the heart. Same with Goa. The Goa scene hasn't been around for all that long. It doesn't need to change into or be replaced by anything so much as it needs to mature, be more confident in itself, and be less trend obsessed.

FWIW, your track with Somnesia is really really good. Maybe hit them over the head with a book of audio engineering next time?

That's too bad. Musically, this is one of my favorite albums of the last few years.

Listening to this now on Youtube @ 720p. Apart from two or three tracks sounding a little unbalanced (I think Phant Om X was the worst offender) I don't hear anything wrong. Should I expect the same from the CD? Bad mastering or no (and I'm not sure I'd call it bad) I do like the slightly rougher sound this one has.

They're popular in IDM too, for some reason. Maybe I should make our first release cassette/digital?

Nothing against Ufomatka, but at this point I'd just like to hear new Sandman.

Listening to the Global Goa Party mixes confirmed something for me... as much as I love 1997 and all of its AAA releases, my heart belongs to the organic, crystalline, and thoroughly alien sounds of 1996.

Mittelstandskinder Ohne Strom Doc Von Ooze Battle Of The Future Buddhas Blind Apple Rogers And Jim Jim The Dog Boy

Celaripo doesn't write anything like Filipe, though. No txtspk.

Germinating Seeds Of Doda, Blacklight, Metal Spark/Siblant, Cwithe/Acidlab, Synchro, Cosmoon, and GMS were the "Amsterdam sound", from what I remember; loosely defined as a funkier and more organic take on Goa trance. I really liked it at the time and wish it had picked up a little more momentum than it did.

Look Dad, I'm a farmer!

Check out these guys: http://www.discogs.com/artist/1281-Psychick-Warriors-Ov-Gaia Mostly unmelodic but very hypnotizing trance.

You can make trance music without melodies, but is Kollage really trance? I'd call it freeform psychedelic dance music. Oh well, tomato, tamato.

Some recent discoveries:

Are you looking for key changes, or just melodies in general? There's a ton of melodic Goa out there, some of it less tuneful than others of course Also some very melodic psytrance. Here, compare and contrast. Melodic psytrance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ebkvYBMk2Q New school melodic Goa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5gbk2SVYis

I really like the melodies in these: For something a bit more recent, you could try Kiriyama or Stereofeld.