antic604

There are three things for me here: - warm vs. cold sound - it's a matter of control and at the same time of the randomness given by instruments: in old days a lot of parameters - oscillators, envelopes, filters, resonance, etc. - were controlled by voltage, which was analog and wasn't ideally precise, you had musical keyboard keys that responded to velocity and strength of touch, you had knobs that wouldn't be perfectly transmitting the twists; you had mixers, effects and even cables that'd introduce additional noise - all this contributed to the sound being fuzzy ("warm"), with tiny fluctuations and random changes on a micro-level and the notes would sound ever so slightly different every time. This stands in contrast to the very digital, infinitely precise world of today's VST plugins; - sequencing - in the old days, synthesizers and DAWs would only allow you to store basic information about your tune, usually based on MIDI format, which covered broad but still pretty limited range of information; as a result, the synth/computer usually was only generating overall "shape" of the tune (which notes and tracks play when, etc.) and while recording for the CD / DAT tape the artists needed to tweak the individual parameters - faders, filters, effects, routing, etc. - manually. This was leading to music sounding more like live performance, with more unpredictability, soul and "happy mistakes". Contrast it with today, where you usually "dump" tracks to perfect and written-in-stone WAV files as soon as they sound good enough, copy & paste various segments over the time-line, put some highly controlled (i.e. the filter envelopes drawn by mouse) effects on top and there you go. - musical education - this one I'm not sure about, but my gut feeling tells me it is the true - because the point of entry is so much lower today, i.e. anyone can pirate Ableton Live and VST plugins and publish their stuff on Soundcloud or Bandcamp, most people releasing music lack any musical knowledge and their creations are influenced mostly by what they hear around, trying to copy what they like (and are able to). Hence the huge uniformity in sound, resulting in very few artists actually standing out with their own, unique style. As a result of those three factors today's music sounds more cold, precise and technically perfect but more often than not pretty straightforward, without soul, randomness and playfulness. Electronic music - IMO - doesn't need to be clinically clean and robotic to sound otherworldly or alien, quite the opposite actually. On the other hand new tech opens infinite possibilities, as evidenced by huge variety of ambient / chill / IDM music. /rant off So, to answer the original question - no, "cold" in itself isn't inherently good or bad. Like anything else, it should be used as a tool to express artist's ideas, thoughts or feelings.

Ok, that's awesome - you have my full support (& some of my money)

Now you really got my imagination going... "Lu.ci-ana"-like ambient CD / track from Kris would be amazing!

Thanks, fair enough. The reason I ask is because most of tracks on "Lazarus Rising" are pretty long and therefore there's only 7 of them, while "A Realm of New Dawn" is supposed to have 10 tracks, out of which 5 are from Lazarus, which would leave little space on CD for 5 new tracks. Sorry for being so inquisitive about this, but I loved "Lazarus Rising" and I'm starving for any and all info on the upcoming release

Great! Can you at least share which tracks from "Lazarus Rising" will be featured on there? And will they be the exact same versions or edits / remixes?

What an incredible album! If you liked what Lunar Dawn did for goa-trance - i.e. introduced Slavic / Balkan / Eastern European ethnic sound - you'll love this one, as it's doing the same for chill / down-tempo!

Those f***ing artists! The music would be so much better without them

@Rich, any update on planned release window for "A Realm of New Dawn" ...and whether or not it will include "Lazarus Rising" as a 2nd CD?

Such an awesome idea! Just please make sure that the mastering is right - MoTU is notoriously the lowest volume track on the original "Ultimate Experience", the re-mastered "Ultimate Experience Reloaded" released by Ektoplazm as well as recent "Audissey: Live & Beyond", probably because it was originally mixed with more headroom than the rest and it's difficult to compress it to higher volume without original stems? If necessary, please consider giving the M-Run and MR remixes more headroom / making them more quiet, so that the EP sounds consistent

Awesome!

(couldn't find that one in better quality yet)

Tracklist: 01. Imba - Imbaba & 303 Trancers 02. Imba - Hidden Paradise 03. Imba - Cosmos In Her Eyes 04. Imba - First Encounter 05. Imba - Blacklight Beings 06. Imba - Creature Of Heaven 07. Imba & Ephedra - Digital Non-Sense 08. Lydia DeLay - After All (Imba Remix) 09. Imba - Rising Sun Samples: https://www.suntriprecords.com/release/cat/SUNCD44/ Cover:

Looks to good to be true, actually. Fingers crossed it happens

Thanks, will do that!

Sorry, they sound *to me* very similar, just like all psy-trance sounds the same to my wife and kids...

Warsaw, Poland

@all, Never really bothered to check this out - prog usually bores me to death - but the hype here got me interested. Any other recent(-ish) albums in similar vein that you hold in high regard? EDIT: just checked some more recent Iboga releases - Ticon, Ace Ventura, Vini Vici, Sideform - and they do sound the same & boring to me. Only Tripswitch stands out (very positively!) which is surprising after it was labelled "Dance" by Psyshop...

Not strictly "psytrance" anymore, but I love where Mindex is going in his latest releases - like a mix between Tipper and Seb Taylor's Hibernation:

What a marvellous release! I'm only on track #3, but this is right up my alley - slow(ish), deep, dark, acidic, hypnotic. It's just as if (early 2000-s) Flying Rhino, Blueroom or TIP were back, when they started flirting with more leftfield influences from drum'n'bass, industrial, straight-up techno, house.

Ooo, I LOVE the cover - so different for a Suntrip release, with some very gentle influences from Pleiadians' I.F.O. Are the samples available anywhere else? Can't use Arabesque's player at work

Suntrip / Matsuri goodies! This is the kind of 'digital' I really like

I found the album pleasing - just like other Ra's releases. It's this kind of floating, dreamy, ethereal goa, that's best taken in while doing nothing ...because otherwise it will pass along unnoticed. It's not overly energetic and what it lacks IMO is more dramatism: key changes, contrast, more varied structure across songs, taking the already good ideas one (or several...) step(s) further... Some tracks got this right - last 3rd of "Predator (Remix)" with its dark, interweaving acid lines slowly creeping in or the throbbing, dynamic but at the same time melancholic "Touch a Star" - but for the most part they just drift along, creating pleasant but ultimately forgettable sounscapes... There's no spine-tingling excitement and no adrenaline rush that artists like Mindsphere, Artifact303 or Crossing Mind can induce - it's sort of "just there": sounding nice, warm and fuzzy, which might as well be it's purpose and advantage. That is even further emphasised by adequate mastering: meaty, wide and expansive; allowing that warmth & fuzziness to permeate through. Rating: 3.5 / 5

Oh, makes sense

For a brief second I was sure that's a pack of condoms...

Midimilliz, Yumade, 3.Turn, Biot - very nice!!! But, do you really listen to those compilations? Some of them look really cheesy, but them I'm more of an *albums* guy myself, so there's that...