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Heh, "this old chestnut". I have many thoughts regarding the matter and I don't know how to turn them into a coherent story so I'll just list some random points: 1) First, there is the principle called Sturgeon's Law, often summarised as "ninety percent of everything is crap". I won't start dissecting the full details of Sturgeon's original statement nor its later interpretations. Anyway, I think the principle essentially says that when there are quality differences and personal preferences, only so many pieces can be "very good" or "like things should be". There are boatloads of music. Even that "very good" 10% (or a smaller fraction) can be so huge that our ears cannot take any more. Therefore we can pick the best, use it as the measuring stick, and rule the rest as "crap", even though in reality the "normal" level is somewhere within that 90% and we're just getting really picky. 2) The corpus of released goa/psy has been accumulating for decades. That makes things even worse regarding the "top 10 versus the rest" comparison. A lot of totally half-arsed stuff from the earlier decades has already been forgot for good. More or less consciously, we end up comparing the very best of those past years to the average level of recent releases. That comparison cannot end well. 3) Also, after thousands of full releases, it's getting more and more difficult to produce something truly original that we still categorise as goa. Either the release "sounds like X, Y and Z" or it doesn't quite fit into the genre. Imagine a hazy blob on the genre map that we label as goa. It consists of dots, which are releases. When the amount of dots increases, it's getting difficult to find any totally blank regions among the existing stuff. You end up either close to something that already exists or too far away from the centre. 4) There is also the phenomenon called sophomore slump. It's quite generic in nature, but it can be understood as "the second attempt being worse". In personal effort like producing music, it can mean that the first try manages to capture the raw power of what you really want to express. Then you kind of run out of steam. Even though the next one may be more polished, it cannot reach the same level of inspiration and originality. Another way to view it is that if you, as a listener, fall deeply in love with some specific approach, it's just inevitable that anything that differs from it has a high chance of being less appealing simply because it doesn't hit that sweet spot. But repeating the same-ish formula would feel like copy-paste or repetition so you cannot really win there. Coming up with something fresh and appealing is possible but really hard. "Easier said than done." And the artists out there cannot really read your deepest desires, nor are they under any obligation to fulfill them. If you're getting picky, it's your task to do the "crate digging" to find your personal gems, even though it may be a tedious task. 5) Also, nobody here is getting younger. There's just something special about the age when you first discover awesome music, visit your first parties and festivals, get drunk/high/laid and so on. As Constrictor put it, you cannot "recapture the magic that once was". When you grow older, you start to observe plenty of recurring patterns - things that get re-invented every ten years or whatever. Each iteration may be slightly different, but it cannot have the same impact as the first encounter with the subject. Just accept the fact that you're getting old and hard to impress, but every day someone else out there is discovering this genre for the first time and thinks that everything is awesome. Same music, different view. I'm definitely getting old and drowned under other commitments. I cannot do the same amount of crate digging as I used to. But I do remember that already back then when I had the time and energy, it was common to load 500 tracks to a preview playlist and ultimately pick just one or two of those as keepers. More than 90% was "crap", nothing new there. If you cannot do those 500 track marathons any more and you've already found enough good stuff to last a lifetime, just cherish those, but don't get too bitter about modern times. I still do discover very good stuff, occasionally. Most releases cannot meet the crazy expectations, but someone out there still enjoys them so they deserve to exist. Nice recommendations by Manuser, by the way. I've been blasting Proxeeus, for example, at work several times like it was 1995.

Hey, After a long time finally a new album and as always the whole thing with new sci-fi stories. This Album is a mixtour into Psy/Goa Trance to Psy-DnB. You can buy or Stream on my Bandcamp and Spotify. Hope you like! cheerz Bandcamp: https://mellowsonic.bandcamp.com/album/transcending-consciousness

Automatically does it for me, but then I just posted a youtube link elsewhere that didn't auto embed. (Do you see the grey box at the bottom of that screenshot)