Padmapani

i wouldn't call it good old protoculture. this is more progressive than fullon and a bit more commerical (not in the negative/cheesy sense, but it's sorta inoffensive, appealing to a broader crowd) a than his first two albums. if course it still definitly has his signature sound and is high quality easy-going psytrance. approved. not the music that shoots you into space in the middle of the night, but the kind that puts a smile on your face before you decide to leave the dancefloor and go to bed after an exhausting night. my favourites up to now are gaia, the vertical mode remi and jungle rocket. but up to now the best shadow chronicles track imho is still another earth.

i thought we wanted not to get into that topic. tbh i don't care if it's mixed live or in the studio. if it sounds good it's good i agree. fullon and esp. progressive are a lot easier to mix than goa trance (newschool goa often is most of the time even worse than oldschool. on my own adventures with virtual dj i can make an halfway ok (djing is not my speciality) oldschool set but i've never been able to make a smooth transition both to and from a filteria track). so the reasons are not valid anymore for most subgenres but the tradition of not focusing on good mixing continues. of course the flow should be there, but that can also be achieved without fancy or perfectly seamless transition but also with a good track selection. and i don't give a fuck about unreleaseds. i want good music, not necessarily music that no one has heard before. there is so much psy released these days that it's a rare and pleasant occurrance when i actually know the track played in a set. and i do try to keep up with new music from different subgenres.

i've seen james monro play at ozora. and i've also met people there who were really excited for his set. boom shankar is another one who's pretty popular around these parts (and who sometimes plays at ozora). and of course we have anoebis. howeve i agree with the notion that djs and artists should not be the main point of attention at parties, but rather situated behind the speakers. psytrance shouldn't need any sort of star cult, let the music speak for itself. that's one thing where i've always prefered how things are handled in the freetekno scene as compared to psytrance. i think the main point is that dj sets are often, as you say, less consistent and not so great compared to live sets. so in most cases i'd rather have the latter if a have a choice. i vividly remember when i saw talamasca the only time (when zodiac was still fresh). his live was perfectly on point, but his dj set was an utter cheese fest. as ap has said there are always some local guys you know are good djs and others you know to avoid (mostly because they'll always play at least some ultra-commercial tracks even if it does fit neither to the mood of the party nor any of the other music played there). bad transitions are something that sort of has tradition in the psy scene, starting with people like goa gil who "mixed" simply by pressing stop/play on dat players back then (no vinyl in hot goa). partly also because goa trance is notoriously difficult to mix. the tracks are produced in a way that they can stand on their own and don't have dj friendly intros or outros at all. personally, i don't need supter sophisticated transitions at all. as long as the track selection is good and the transitions aren't total crap, i'm happy.

i bet you're not playing into the limiter of your volkswagen nor is your car a converted pedestrian underpass with especially atrocious acoustics. i really have no idea why djs choose to go into the red so much (it doesn't even get louder at that point). i tried to simulate the horrible sound of a particular party at home and iirc had to push the limiter more than 20db as well as choose completely wrong settings and an extra bass boost in the eq before the limiter to get it into the territory of what i was hearing there.

full quality version: realy nice bassline. but that melody at 2:30! thanks for posting this. still i prefer this bassline: deep, warm and flowing.

the basslines of u-recken are surely not as snappy and puchy as those from spirit architect, djantrix or the like (which are also an acquired taste for us old folks ;) ), but i'm still loving those of neural mantra and his frequent flyers remix.

it surely does depend on sound systems and the technicians. at balkan goa fanatics i was quite surprised how good everything sounded compared to other locations. on most systems it's easier to make other psy sound good, but some clubs even manage to make astrix sound like a shitty amateur production. he's definitely talented. when i heard his first tracks in 2017 i wondered why he wasn't on suntrip even if the album is more suited for home listening it's still fine. the chances to experience goa trance on the dancefloor are far in between anyways. it's the same thing as with e-mantra and mindsphere. imho too much of a good thing is still a good thing. even if just a few spectacular tracks would of course be better than a whole album with >50% tracks you can't tell apart if you haven't already listened to the album ten times or so. but i do understand it somewhat. once you've found a way that works for making a track that's guaranteed to be good, it's hard to throw that overboard and start fresh with a new approach.

it also sounds fine on monitors over here but i get what you're saying. it seems as if the kick is the only element not fighting for space. most of the time it has a relatively pronounced click and it has the whole sub for itself while the bassline sort of blends into the leads.

this is often the case for newschool goa with its multitude of layers. it sounds fine at home on monitors or good headphones, but at clubs where sound systems aren't perfect it quickly turns into mush and you don't even notice the melodies anymore. often kick and bass get lost too. i remember a party where it took me listening halfway through a track, then only at the break with less things playing i could make out it was actually one of my favourite tracks (i don't remember which one, it was either something by khetzal or ra). the same thing happened again with mindsphere at the same party. when you finally recognise the track you can fill in the blanks in your mind, but when you cannot (or don't know the track) it's just one big mess. even when i saw filteria at ozora (they really don't have a bad sound system there, far from it) a similar thing happened. many melodies got lost and kick and bass sounded very weak compared to the sets before and after.

i've not yet given it the attention it deserves. all i can say right now is that sand of time is a stellar track. probably my favourite track released on suntrip since earthcall.

over here, some people leave trash behind while others collect more trash than their own. coupled with a few dedicated people from the organisation, it is pretty clean at psy festivals overall. and certainly much cleaner than at other kinds of festivals.

great track. but overlooked, probably because it was not released on any of the "normal" goa labels. @topic nice, hard hitting fullon with a few melodies that remind more more of old logic bomb than the new logic bomb album does.

if you're also interested in throwing illegal underground parties in the woods, we could definitely use more of these here. i can offer an established, but small anough to be very familiar, scene, nice crowd, ok djs, european average drug laws, nice natural settings and the police are very reasonable as long they don't find out where the parties take place

probably a new one. afair he wrote somwhere in the psyproduction reddit that he's working on new goa trance. from the samples skarma sounds nice and triquetra average. but with ypsilon 5, median project and mindsphere also on there it's probably going to be as good as most global sect comps. i know excitement looks different. it seems we just got used to getting a steady stream of good (but not spectacular) releases from global sect. the days where there was so little goa released that every single album created hype even before anyone had the chance to hear any of it are thankfully over

exactly. i don't think we've had as much goa in the top ten before. thanks for compiling the list aspartic!