Planet BEN - Trippy Future Garden

[DeathPosture]

Here i am wanting to ask a few things about "test + trippy future garden".

 

are the tracks excactly the same as on the original?

 

why are they arranged in a different order?

 

is the booklet from TFG included?

378880[/snapback]

Well, I have both the original + Test, so I guess I can answer that...

 

Yeah, the tracks are just like on the original CD... I have no idea why they are 'almost' reversed... Oh, and the booklet from TFG is not included!

 

Here's a short review I wrote years ago:

Ahh... Another one of those timeless classics that I'm sure we all hold dear... This was released back in 1996 on now defunct German label Polytox.

 

In keeping with the Polytox quality level, this is a MAGICAL album and it never ceases to amaze me...

 

It took me a couple of years to track down a copy, but it was worth the wait, as this is packed with pure psychedelic jewels.

 

My fav'e are the wonderful opener Welcome To The Future and the huuuuuge classic Ant Invasion... But the rest is wonderful too... Too bad Planet BEN tossed the 'dots' and turned minimal... What he's doing now is not even close to being half as good as this... But then again, perhaps it's just me being a grumpy old nostalgic trancer... 9/10

 

/DP

[qa2pir]

Thanks DP! I'm gonna buy the album.

[esu]

Good review! Love this album so much.

 

Test isn't fullon. Abit clubby, technoish at times. Most tracks around 138-142bpm. It's not a bad album but ofcourse very far from Trippy future garden.

[qa2pir]

So now I've listened to it all. I find all tracks trippy, but "Screwdriver" and "Scotty's Name" don't pack the punch and clarity of the others, which are top notch. This music is based on heavy usage of layered percussion and trippiness, repeating itself constantly without ever repeating, constantly morphing into something new. However, my words don't do this classic any justice, so just buy this and listen! Spectacular.

 

Favorites: Questionmark, Ant Invasion, Trippy Future Garden

[Fuse]

creepy insects crawling from evrywhere,

no dance floor killers but an absolute must for psychedelic lovers I say

[Time_Trap]

exactly

[Taika-Kim]

This is real TRANCE music... I love every track. This has the same kind of relentless numbing doof like some old X-Dream stuff. Truly an ageless release!

[qa2pir]

My relation to this album has changed a bit... Now i think it's melodic content is rather poor, i mean, listen to "Questionmark" and then "Scotty's Name". They use the same scale and a very similar melody. I also think it's very depressive music, which isn't bad per se, but it sounds like he tried to make uplifting goa melodies but ended up with some dark, trippy tracks.

 

However, these comments are mostly regarding tracks 1,2 & 4. Those are just not necessary. The other 3 tracks could have been released separately as an album since they complement each other well.

[JISNEGRO]

Great Album 9.5/10

[Yathabhuta]

one of its kind. haven´t and probably will not ever hear anything like this!

 

Haha played at a houseclub in stockholm couple o months ago. Mostly weird Baluns-tracks, but for the finish I couldn´t hold myself...the result were Questionmark:)

 

The "boring" housepeople went Goa-mad!

[Kryll]

Just noticed... according to.. http://www.discogs.com/viewimages?what=R&obid=143228

..Welcome to the future is from 1991 ?!! Waaaaay ahead of it's time I must say

if u compare it with some early frankfurt sounds from that period it's not that way ahead imo

 

but that doesn't mean it isn't a masterpiece ofcourse

[Goa-Head]

[EDIT:nil]

[Basilisk]

My review:

http://www.ektoplazm.com/reviews/planet-be...-future-garden/

[Jeller]

great album!

psy to the bone

[Isao]

Just got this album a few days ago.. and i can't believe those tracks were made from '91 to '94.

It sounds sooooo much better than anything i have heard to this date, a lot more trippy and psychedelic than the other great classics i own.

 

Amazing album, a must have for any psytrance lover (still very cheap to buy if you don't make the same mistake as i've done.. get the album "Test" which contains the same tracks on the second CD).

[XpandoZ]

I have yet to hear a pad as godly and wide sounding as the one in the title track (around 9.48 if I'm right)

 

Get's me every time

[rino]

Together with Identified Flying Object and Family Of Light by Pleiadians, Prana's Geomantik and Tandu's Multimoods, Planet B.E.N.'s Trippy Future Garden firmly stands as one of the five centre crown jewels of the royal crown, if psy trance was ever to be a metaphor of one...

 

Plain and simple, whenever you feel that creativity and ideas have evaporated from the scene, hope is not lost as this album is turgid with originality. Razor sharp sounds slice through thick and opulent bass lines, while well crafted and slowly introduced eruptions of melodic segments are often patiently held back in favor of skilfully modulated sonic particles. Somehow it all menages to fall into place perfectly. I cannot explain it. I never could. It sounds as though you're given seventy minutes time to catch golden coins falling from the sky, but you've only got two fists to clutch all you can - my point being: there's much more here than the feet can move to, the necks snap to and the minds trip to.

 

A very forward thinking release, not so much because of the fact that some tracks date as early back as 1991, but because often it relies more on wide and atmospheric soundscapes, which are obtained by combining and intertwining various layers, synth stabs and/or effects ranging in size and loudness, thus creating unpredictable directions which the tracks pursue, only emphasizing the voyage factor here. Basically, he dodges the often formulaic old school formula of forging a single grand hook and driving the listener in a state of trance by repeating it over and over again. Yet the hooks are here - all over actually, but there is so much going on you won't notice them as much as on 90% of old school releases. Just listen to the last two tracks: by the time the leads are introduced, I'm already playing a game of death pool somewhere near the Earth's core... Awesome album!

[abasio]

Artist: Planet B.E.N.

Title: Trippy Future Garden

Label: Polytox Records

Released: 23 September 1996

Style: Goa Trance

 

Tracklist

 

1 Welcome To The Future (10:31)

2 Screwdriver (7:25)

3 Questionmark (9:30)

4 Scotty's Name (9:01)

5 Ant Invasion (12:24)

6 Trippy Future Garden (21:57)

 

Planet BEN, German composer Be swchufddrju was quite the big name in the Psy scene in the mid to late nineties thanks mainly to his debut album Trippy Future Garden. I didn't get to here it when it was first released, I didn't even here about it until around the turn of the millenium. I read a lot of reviews of it around then that praised it so much that I knewe I must have it. But alas it was nowhere to be found. I managed to track it down in a German shop in 2002 and I was excited to say the least. Here I was with a seminal album. 5 tracks of imagined bliss including a 21 minute symphony of psy at the end and all I had to do was push play...

 

Bitterly disappointed are not the words. This was probably my first experience with excessively high expectations. On the first listen I couldn't focus, I was too bored andas it went on my resentment at having searched so hard for this album grew and grew and the music seemed to get worse as it went on. It is so repetitve and the cheesy sample in Questionmark left me ready to heave. Even the last track in which I had imagined myself getting lost didn't do anything for me. I left it on my shelf and didn't listen to it again. When I moved to Japan it got put in a big box with all the other CDs I was leaving behind. 5 years in Japan and I couldn't listen to it.

 

Fast forward a few years to December 2008. I flew back to England to visit my parents up there in the North. I was reunited with old CD collection including almost complete Dragonfly and Flying Rhino catalogues but for some reason I was drawn to Planet BEN - Future Trippy Garden. I put it in my father's stereo, pressed play and was taken on a deep space voyage through nebulae, hyperspace and trippy alternate dimensions. This time I had basically no preconceptions, no hype and my previous listens had been forgotten, so I could appreciate it in its purest form.

 

The thing about this album is that it is repetitive with its more obvious parts and the variation comes in subtle ways. Slight key changes, the inclusion of an extra layer of melody among the many that were already there, background noises that are almost undetectable to the casual listener and atmosphere. When I first listened to this I was a party goer listening to an intelligent album at home. I had yet to get into ambient and thought of anything slower than 120bpm as ambient. I had no real idea of an album creating an atmosphere that can take you on a journey without the aid of psychoactive substances.

 

The main selling point of this album (available now as a re-release) is the atmosphere created. Sure it is a trance album that can work well on the dancefloor but it is also a great home listening album with a lot of subtlety and ambience. I never gave it the chance but I reckon this would be a perfect after party album, not straight away when people are still arriving and getting comfortable but once everyone is settled but still "up" then this would be perfect. It is insanely trippy, can take you on a beautiful ride through different spaces in our multiverse and you can really lose yourself in it.

 

So, don't do what I did and expect something like Dragonfly's releases at the time with a lot of catchy hooks, chord changes and trance rolls building energy to smash it up on a dancefloor. Instead imagine a precursor to progressive psy that tends to be more repetitive and subtle. Mix those too and you have Planet BEN - Future Trippy Garden. Repetitve but varied, minimal but maximal, trancey and ambient, danceable and intelligent. It is a great album and one that I regret missing out on due to unjustifiable expectations, wrong mood/setting and probably wrong age. This, apart from the cheesy sample in Questionmark, is very mature and maybe as a young man I was unable to appreciate its brilliance. Maybe at that time it needed drugs but now I have grown I can appreciate it without the need for such things. Now I can understand that it is a real masterpiece.

[Manuser]

OH MY ... fuck I'm drunk! 1st track = masterpiece!!! listening to track 2 right now

[Trance2MoveU]

Artist: Planet B.E.N.

Title: Trippy Future Garden

Label: Polytox Records

Date: September, 1996

 

1 Welcome To The Future (10:31)
2 Screwdriver (7:25)
3 Questionmark (9:30)
4 Scotty's Name (9:01)
5 Ant Invasion (12:24)
6 Trippy Future Garden (21:57)

 

 

 

Universally hailed as one of the greatest releases of psychedelic goa trance ever it still doesn't get the attention it deserves. It's not sexy and floating like Pleiadians or Transwave. Spiraling melodies found in Dimension 5 and Etnica are noticeably absent here. This is chunky goa trance with nooks and crannies. Psychedelic to its core and the depth is amazing. Picture Artifakt and X-Dream spending a three day music bender in an abandoned asylum and not resurfacing until they finished the epic Welcome to the Future. It's dark and bad ass. Listen to the attitude on Questionmark as it growls. Heavy handed this one is ready to play the knockout game and you're the victim. The balls on this thing are enormous.

 

Ant Invasion takes a few minutes to amass its swarming horde, but when it does prepare to be overrun with layers of bus sized alien ants. You can definitely hear the techno influence on this one. Which brings us to the final track on this opus. A 22 minute foray into acre of mechanized future gardens where machines are harvested for the upcoming Earth invasion. The ambient middle is there to underscore how vast the killing fields have become.

 

This is easily the crown jewel of Planet B.E.N. production. He has never equaled this blisteringly great album. It is mindblowing psychedelic goa trance that I would easily punch your grandma for.

 

Mdk

Edited June 25, 2019 by Trance2MoveU