recursion loop

Guys, what do you think about the bass here? https://soundcloud.com/recursion-loop/soul-of-the-machine Poor? Ok? Decent?

So this futureprog is not even very good for dancing. What it is good for then?

Listened to Break the Silence and Galactic Prophecy. Both have nice parts and some parts which sound somehow messed up. The bass in Break the Silence sounds slightly off tune (check the filter envelope? it may influence the pitch). Anyway, nice efforts in Lamat/Ephedrix style, I love this kind of full-on. If you work more on the structure of your tracks and melodies, your next tracks may be really good.

Yeah, that's a proper fullon track, great job! Maybe a bit generic but really well executed. Groovy, trippy and reasonably melodic. Love it.

Well, that's interesting. Melodious and eerie at the same time. Good production, though I'd prefer if it had less of these risers, buildups and beat stops for the sake of more consistent flow, but that's my presonal taste. Great movie btw. I was pretty drunk when watching it but I remember it had proper creepy atmosphere.

Dance music probably doesn't. But I don't think about psytrance or progressive trance as strictly dance music. Actually I'm not much into dancing. I listen to psy at home, in my office or elsewhere where I can put my headphones on. I also prefer melodic tracks, but I love when music has many layers, deep atmosphere, various sound mutations and strange sounds (well, even if they are not strange anymore). What may seem a 4 bar loop put on repeat when you listen to it in passing may contain lots of tiny details and subtle changes that can make it very interesting when you listen to it closely. This is why I listen specifically to psytrance and psychill, good melodies as such may be found elsewhere. Also tracks for dancing and tracks for home listening may need different structure, when I have a 9 minute long track I expect it will tell a story, will have tension, anticipation and climax, or maybe few of them. If it needs a 2-minute long beatless intro to fully unfold then yes, it needs that intro. Obviously you are looking for something different in music and that's totally fine ofc. My only concern is that the general trend in progressive seems to be that it is moving from music being good for home listening to music strictly for dancing, adapted to general public and devoid of what makes psytrance interesting for me (progressive psy --> futureprog). Same thing happened to full-on years back.

Yeah, I'm referring to this specific subspecies of electronic music with big basses, simple melodies, chopped pop vocal samples (or now it may be mantras or tribal chants because it is "psy" and "spiritual") and the compulsory white noise risers each 8 bars. It may have some elements of trance, house, dubstep, electro, now psytrance as well but in fact it is a self-contained genre which has nothing to do with any of these. I guess it is more successfull at dancefloors because it attracts casual people who just want to dance, hang out and have a good time. Therefore many of the former trance and psytrance artists are jumping on the EDM bandwagon and adapting their music like that "Long intros? Nah, people wouldn't dance to them. Lush pads, trippy textures, deep atmospheres? Screw that, people need fat bass and a simple tune to sing along. Ok, let's also drop some squelch and a Tibetan chant sample here, maybe some of the psytrance fans will still buy into this". Actually I was listening to various electronic music, not only psytrance, for more than 10 years already, and even have made and released few tracks myself so at least I understand how these weird electronic sounds are made. But I'm still finding sounds, melodies and production tricks in various tracks that amaze me every now and then, but not in the EDM area. Not that I'm a genre purist, I agree that EDM serves its own purpose and has its own place but this is not what I will ever listen to on my own. And after all you've said about the electronic music saturation and that what used to be weird and exotic is not exciting anymore (with which I agree to an extent), it's a bit puzzling that you are finding something valuable in tracks that sound like superficial recycling of the most cliched sounds and tricks, but well, whatever floats your boat.

Swooshes, breaks etc are good when used with taste and fit the musical context but not when the whole track consists of them. That E-Clip track I've posted has a lot going on, various textures, melodies, layers, but the most improtant thing is the track sructure - it slowly evolves, embraces you and sucks you in. There are lot of changes along the way but they all are interconnected somehow, the track as a whole tells a story. This is what I call progressive. That Berg track is just a bunch of unrelated melodies, samples, risers and snare rolls thrown over the beat. Tracks like that may be nice for jumping along and pumping fists in the air but they don't contain anything of what I'm looking for in psytrance and especially in the progressive subgenre. Is thiks that's a form of EDM rather than psytrance.

I noted that whenever there is a subgenre having "future" in its name, it always turns out to be utter crap. Futurebass, future house, future gar(b)age, now futureprog. What bothers me the most is that this "futureprog" seems to have totally replaced proper progressive psy. Tracks like this are nowhere to be found in last two years of so. Even when there are tracks with nice sounds/melodies/atmospheres they are mostly ruined by overcompressed basslines and endless buildups, breaks, risers, swooshes and other EDMish nonsence, which is by nature totally incompatible with progressive sound.

Sounds interesting, you may be inventing some new form of psytrance. Actually it is hard to understand what your problem is. What is the "basic layer sound"? You mean kick/bass or smth else?

If anything, i have no probems with this If you need to find something specific in Russian torrents I may try to help.

Actually there is only so much you can do with analogue synths based on simple waveforms and basic LP/HP/BP filters (no matter how awesome they sound, their sonic range is still limited) and small mixers. Late 90 was the time when digital synths like Access Virus and Nordlead became poplular which offered more waveforms, more filters, frequency modulation and stuff like that, then DAWs were invented I believe this to some extent influenced the transition from goa driven by TB-303 to psytrance where the new possibilities of the new gear were heavily used. Today we can do everynthing within the computer and there are plugins which do that late 80's/early 90's analogue thing quite well and also all the "modern" FM and wavetable and whatever else kind of stuff. But I think people who are into goa have some image in their heads what goa should sound like and they try to follow some patterns in writing tracks and making sounds in order to stay true to goa or something like that. So while in 90's people tried to push the boundaries of their limited setups today the producres try to artificially limit themselves in order not to step outside of the "niche". This all is merely a speculation, I was never specifically focused on goa though I think I've heard large part of the most important newschool releases. It's just when I hear most of the new stuff I often think "why they are trying to sound like all the new technologies invented after year 2000 are not available to them?"

Ask this dude. His is MAKING this stuff on his smartphone.

I love the first one in this series way more. TBH this one was mostly a dissapointment, there are some good tracks to be found here but overall it is far less melodious, more beat-focused and overall much more predicatble and generic. Basically all genre cliches are here, if someone wants to confrim his/her point of view that progressive is boring copy-paste music this VA may serve as an evidence. Anyway I quite like dystopian atmosphere in the Egorythmia's take on New World Order and these gentle melodic bits in Sunset Blues.

There are many albums which make me think "wow, great" at the first listen and then I forget that they exist. This is not one of them. I think this is a perfect progressive album becuase the tracks do the most improtant thing progressive is supposed to do - they, well ... progress. I mean what we have here is not just a bunch of unrelated melodies, sounds and samples randomly thrown over the beat (like it often happens with "progressive") but carefully executed musical progressions which start subtly and then completely suck you in. Basically every track has something to offer, either a deep, warm melody or a detailed sonic landscape, or both. Only the second track doesn't sit well with me for some reason, but that's not because it is worse than the others. For what I know the Ticon guys are oldschool hardware synth users and this manifests itself, all the synth sounds here are very warm, deep and detailed.

Curious why the tracklisting in the review doesn't quite correspond to Discogs. One of my favourite trackis from here, Infinty - Submotion, is thus left out. Overall except for a couple of offbeat tracks and a pretty lame Requiem for a Dream remix, very solid compilation. Infinity, E-Clip, Flegma, Nerso and the other Tesseract guys were in very good shape back then.

Lovely track. Great production as usual. This time you added some "fluffy" melodic bits which I really like. If you don't mind me asking, what are you using for bass? Sounds very tight and clean.

Think about getting a MIDI controller with decent abount of knobs and sliders. You may map them to the controllers of your plugins which may encourage some new ways to tweak them. I wouldn't actually recommend real hardware synths because inegrating them into software workflow may be a sort of PITA. I'm not a pro artist but from my experience a decent MIDI controller combined with a DAW and a small set of plugins which you know like the back of your hand is the best solution to get tracks actually finished. Though I own only one hardware synth, Access Virus which I treat it as yet another plugin in my DAW (and frankly I'm using it much less than native plugins these days).

Yeah, stuff like that is pretty rare. I recon you had to go through shitloads of releases to find the tracks for these your mixes. To me it takes the best parts from full-on (the melodies, though not overusing them) and from psytrance (the trippy sounds and psychedelic atmosphere). Actually I don't mind highly melodic euphoric full-on when it is really well made, which is also hard to find now. Indeed, it either sounds too cheesy or suffers from poor, amateurish production (or both). It seems that psytrance as a whole (at least the 140+ bpm kinds of it) is going into darker and noisier direction in last few years.

Agree that the bass should be louder/fatter. Also the leads/stabs/farts/voice samples etc should be better balanced, some of them sound louder than they should be, some others are way too quiet. The synths and melodies are very nice. Also the track structure is fine to me, I don't think this track calls for buildups and peaks, it flows nicely and there are no boring or unnecessary parts. Good job, liked and followed )

This thread goes into a recursion loop Actually I found these two your mixes on youtube the other week and liked them very much. After that I decided to learn more about "morning psytrance", in paricular I made this thread.

If you are expecting pure goa then this album is not going to deliver. If you are expecting Dacru style full-on then it's decent though not great. I like the overall sound and atmosphere but dislike most of the the melodies. 3rd and 4th tracks are way too happy/sunny/whatever, they almost top Talamaska. Other tracks stick too much to generic eastern goaish melody formula, too predictable and boring. The last track has some nice craziness in it, almost like Infected Mushroom.Not sure if I actually like it but it sounds much less generic than the rest of the album. Btw, "dosvidanya" is "good bye" in Russian.

I understand that "morning" may refer to what DJs play at morning and also to music having ligher, euphoric tones, which may be not the same thing. I'm more interested in the latter. Now I'm browsing various full-on compilations released around 2004-2006, it seems that it was the time when melodic/morning full-on was at its peak before it degraded into mindless clubby nonsence. I found many tracks I like, similar to early Protoculture and Mr. Peculiar though they sound a bit dated production-wise. I'd love to hear more recent take on this sound with modern clear big sound and multilayered production.

It's unbelievable that you are making all this stuff on your phone and especially that you are doing it that fast (how much time do you spend on a track on the average?). Your style should be very appealing to people who love banging, highly energetic goa but on the other hand what I've heard from you sounds a bit too homohenous, I think you could try some new approaches in melodies and sounds to make your output more varied (I mean both variation between tracks and within tracks). Anyway, great production skills.

Yeah, I know Circadians and Refractions, great stuff. What I've hear from Space Cat sounds more like Astrix, Electro Sun and similar, doesn't quite fit here. Anyway I'm actually interested in more recent stuff (2012 and so on).