Search the Community

Koxbox The Scanner Zer01 Music Tracklist: 1. The Scanner 2. Tropical 3. Spinning Far Away 4. We're Not Who We Think We Are 5. Color Rain 6. Little Grays 7. Sky Candy 8. Bubble Frog 9. Inside Outside Twenty years after the debut of Forever After, Koxbox has delivered another masterwork. The Scanner is sort of difficult to define by contemporary standards because it is so Koxbox-ian and albums rarely get this psychedelic or weird in psytrance anymore. Stylistically, let's say it's full-on if a more modern term is required to fit this thing in a neat little box. But to be most accurate this album is vintage psytrance, of an era where the lines were not so clearly defined, where an artist very much wrote their own rules on what their music meant or what sort of odd-shaped box it should be fit into. This album is very much on par with their early classics (Forever After and Dragon Tales) but I'll pick this one as a favorite because it is not limited in the least by the scope of the technology used to make it. Those two early albums sound pretty dated by today's standards and if you've listened to those and wondered at what it would sound like through today's music-making abilities, well, here it is! (And by no means am I suggesting this is a goa work like Forever After because it isn't. This is good old-fashioned psytrance with that good old-fashioned psytrance spirit. Even that awesome cover art screams old-school!) I'm hesitant to pick a favorite because that sort of honor will probably change quite often with an album this diverse in artistic vision. The title track, "Tropical" and "Bubble Frog" are odd little mind-fucks. "Spinning Far Away," "Little Grays" and "Inside Outside" are awesome groovers with great layers of Koxbox oddness, the sort of sharp numbers that could get a dancefloor bouncing along while achieving an identical effect on the at-home listener. My favorite, though, at least for now, is "We're Not Who We Think We Are," which is immediately awesome with full-on groove, dripping psychedelic effects and thick melodies that make the track instantly memorable. The Scanner sounds like it could be a remaster, a crisp-sounding awesome artist album of ridiculously well-made and imagined psytrance, the type to be found only during the 1990s. This sounds like something from a vault where some kind-hearted soul decided to polish up the original DATs so they would sound nice and crisp for today's technology. The fact that this is 2015 producing is just simply awesome. In a too-long line of old-school legends who have forgotten their signature sounds and dumbed things down for a wider appeal (look no further than Hux Flux' Circle Sine Sound from earlier this year) it's pretty damn cool to have one of those legends who remembers and is willing to make psytrance just like it used to be. Koxbox Music