firebreath

At this year's FullMoon festival, I heard a great retro goa-progressive track with a vocal sample "psychedelic performance" in it. So far, search engines did not return any useful results. I think it was close to the end of D Joana's DJ set...

Marko Fürstenberg... check some of his netlabel releases: - Gesamtlaufzeit http://www.thinner.cc/pages/releases/releases_detail.php?id=thn047 - Classics http://www.thinner.cc/pages/releases/releases_detail.php?id=thn078 - Inaxa Stream http://www.archive.org/details/ratc002

Probably, it's Manifold, released two years ago: http://www.ultimae.com/en/e-releases/218/index.html

Excellent album! Reminds me a lot of Yagya's beautiful tech-dub soundscape masterpiece "Rhythm of Snow" that was released back in 2001. Also recommended listening of you are into that kind of music: Marko Fürstenberg, check out some of his free releases at www.thinnerism.com

The above-mentioned promo video says Jan 25, 2008.

Great stuff! My fav track is "Life Change". Slow but kicks heavily!

Looks like Ticon have almost finished their new album "2 am". Three tracks can be previewed at www.myspace.com/ticonmusic Sounds like a solid follow-up to zero six after. Looking forward...!

Previews (generous 2 minutes per song!) are now available directly on Vibasphere's home page. Enjoy!

Vibrasphere played a live set yesterday in Berlin... quite a lot of it was new, unreleased stuff with some of it being subtle, just-above-ambient stuff and some being real progressive monsters. My overall impression was that they have made yet another evolutionary step with their trademark sound. Not totally different from Archipelago (if it ain't broke, don't fix it!) but with fresh new ideas. This was the best live set I have seen this year so far and I expect the new album to be a truly outstanding one.

Iboga an Digital Structures, my favourite labels, have become rather silent in the recent months. I love their artist albums in particular, more than the compilations. It would be very sad to see them disappear...

One Track: El Audio - Keyboard Cowboys! I had the melody in my head since the Antaris Festival 2001 but neither knew the name of the track nor the name of the artist, the only thing I knew was that it is for me the one really representative track for the good old times when I got infected with the Goa virus between 2000 and 2001, when there was still the raw original sound and not that ugly full-on stereotype. Recently, I dug through some old DJ mixes while cleaning up my hard disk and suddenly found that track again and just heard something with "cowboys". Pyshop's search function is very powerful, there is really only one track with "cowboys" in it and that was the one from El Audio. The CD is sold out since long time but I could get the track through www.musicdock.net. Ok, the Spirit Zone Best of 100 compilation package with 3 CDs in it (Goa/Prog/Chill) is also an excellent sample. Add Astral Projection also although that was before myself becoming really interested in Goa trance music.

New good&free stuff from the Finnish label Elixiria: Just go here and follow the "Download here" link. Use the .cue file to split the one-part mp3 into individual songs.

Iboga's next release in the pipeline is Yuli Fershtat's new album "Learning=Change", published under the artist name "Perfect Stranger". Yuli has been recently working together with Iboga on 2 compilations (Set:4 and Hibernation) and is also known as BLT (Hom Mega Rec.). Really long and useful samples (Psyshop's 45 seconds are way too short) can be found directly at Iboga. My first impression from the samples: beautiful, melodic, crossover psy-gressive morning stuff. Also looking forward to Ace Ventura's album...

The samples do sound quite interesting but the album is, as far as I could find out, only available through www.archambault.ca and this company does not ship outside of North America. Looks as they are not wanting to enter worldwide distribution

This is quite a surprising and refreshing compilation with powerful techno/trance crossover stuff. Unfortunately, the X-Dream Remix of Juno Reactor's Angel&Men is way too short, ending after just 5 mins, that feels like an interruptus... Besides this, my favourites are Kloq Music and the Koxbox Geomancer, both with a straightforward structure and lots of raw power.

Vibrasphere is going to release the "Landmark" EP in Feb. 06 and the "Archipelago" album and EP in March 06 on the Digital Structures label. Sorry, no previews yet. Let's hope it is again a beautiful melodic progressive trance classic... for me, those rare but delicious releases from DS have never been a disappointment. Click here for the news from DS.

Last Saturday, I was at a live performace of Marko Fürstenberg, one of Thinner's leading artists. Although he had some minor problems with real-time sound processing on his computer, it was still a great experience. His style is deeply hypnotic and atmospheric and could be called approximately tech-dub. In spite of the term "dub", his music is mostly very danceable, although he also has produced wonderful ambient stuff. When you go to www.thinnerism.com, check out particularly for the albums THN047 and THN078. When I have some time left, I will post a review here... Anyway, the discovery of the Thinner netlabel gave me a revolutionary insight into what is possible with minimalistic electronic music. It was a real revelation...

Antic, the full-on stereotype does not even come as far as to "emotional clipping", it already chokes at acoustic clipping before reaching those regions in my brain that are responsible for understanding music. Just try to view a full-on track as a waveform on the screen, and you will see a sausage-like structure, that's why we call it "Israel-Wurst" here. So don't misunderstand me - I am far from comparing Jaia's album to cheesy fullon-or-whatever-stuff, my points are to be taken more subtly... for example, Ticon just stopped right before they ran into over-production. That's why their album works so well and Jaia's has to be treated more carefully when used for the dance floor. But anyway, it still stands far out of the crowd, no doubt about this :-)

Right from the beginning, I had the impression that Jaias album was "over-produced", which is not untypical for releases from Digital Structures. In the attempt to be overly innovative (for example, the "gates"), the musical concept became harder to understand. The same effect happened with the emotions, Jaia used a bit too much of them (see for example "orchestra") resulting in some sort of "emotional clipping" that spoils the flow. These criticisms aside, Jaias album still bears a beautiful summer sound and remains a favourite in my collection. May be, Jaia next time understands that sometimes, less is more!

You can listen to two samples on the web site of the label Metropolis Records.

Great!!! This album's gonna take the elevators, shopping malls, grocery stores and waiting rooms by the storm! Muzak ruleZ!

I just downloaded my copy yesterday at kompakt-mp3.net and the general impression is very positive, although about two tracks give me a strange chocolate-with-mustard-like feeling. The other ones however work very very well, with "8. Der Judaskuss des Sonnentaus" as my personal favourite. By the way, minimalistic stuff of this kind is also available free of charge on some net labels. The best one I have discovered so far is Thinnerism with more than 110 releases (including the autoplate sub label), ranging from ambient and dub to minimal techno. The nice flash animations used as album covers support the impression that the label has put quite a lot of love and devotion into its music.

I found it at Amazon.de

Strange... the cover design shown in Psyshop's "coming soon" list looks quite different...

Thanks for the nice review. Yes, Idea FX is great, a good companion to Boshke's Chronika Chapter 2 (also released this year)! By the way, Idea FX is also promoted and distributed by Boshke Beats and the great cover art is from Boshke's Inga Burina . Very innovative and powerful stuff!