Walkabout

The mixed metaphors, they burn (my eyes)! Anyway, this album rips it up: http://www.discogs.com/Various-Tales-From-The-Forest/release/85156

In the spirit of 'everything old is new again', I thought I'd dust off this odd little mix, the first one I did that I really liked. There's a bit of a story behind this. In the mid-2000s I was an aspiring psytrance DJ, and spun at a couple of obscure parties in Southern California (nothing you've heard of, I'm sure). At that time everyone was going in either a full on or dark psy direction, but my heart was still stuck on the music of the 1990s; the 'Goa revival' hadn't really kicked off yet and I was the only person in my circle that still played this kind of music. Without much to go on, and with the kindness of a promoter who let me open the aforementioned parties, I started to travel my own strange path... a few bedroom mixes were made, on pretty cheesy equipment: Denons, a Gemini mixer, and a hardware sampler which I'd use to drop in suggestive things from sci-fi, anime and B movies. What I knew about beat mixing at that time can be summed up in two words: jack and shit. And Jack left town. So you will hear some rhythmically awkward transitions here and there. But! What I was starting to do was match themes and sounds to make the tracks talk to each other and tell a story together. You can hear it (I hope) in the call-and-response between different drum lines, chants and melodic voices. It's rough, but it has heart IMHO. In the last several years I barely attended any trance parties at all, and subsequently my interest in mixing dried up. But I never stopped being a fan, and recently the resurgence of interest in older sounds and styles has brought me out of the woodwork and convinced me to start practicing again. I'm enjoying the process of re-learning. That's enough of my diary. Give it a shot, see what you think. http://soundcloud.com/earwall/taking-the-waters-old-mix Tracks: The Overlords - The 7th Stage Cwithe - Memory Foam Poly61 - Out Here We Aren't Shiva Chandra - Machine Planet Taruna - Biosphere Terra Gaia Medicine Drum - Katakali Shakta - Shakti/Shakta Blue Planet Corporation - Generator UV13 - Psionic Nimboid Membrane The Antidote - Sunrise Ozric Tentacles - Sunhair (System 7 Remix)

Haven't heard that comp, but based on your description you might like the Surrender To The Vibe series. http://www.discogs.com/Various-Surrender-To-The-Vibe-3/release/63694 Also, check out the Strong Sun Moon comp and Kay Nakayama: Effect. http://www.discogs.com/Various-Strong-Sun-Moon/release/235708 http://www.discogs.com/Kay-Nakayama-Effect/release/881893

First of all: these are really interesting mixes. More hip hop style, cut and slice mixing than trance. Second: I have been going over these with a fine tooth comb trying to identify everything (I could just ask Ray, but where's the fun in that ). Any music historians want to give it a shot? http://soundcloud.com/genkigroove/goa-vibe-87 Sandy Marton - White Storm In The Jungle Fun fact: if you look in the oxford medical dictionary under 'infectious bassline', this track starts to play at you. Here is Sandy Marton confused about which beach to be in. Also, he's apparently Godzilla. Jean Michael Jarre - Zoolookologie Koto - Jabdah So yeah I'll just leave this here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7bKx0-shPI (unknown cut n'paste) 15:27-22:10 ??? Laserdance - Humanoid Invasion 29:25 - 30:02 ??? 30:03 - 34:09 ??? Krush - House Arrest Another gloriously silly video: Mark Shreeve - Legion 43:00 - 47:32 Uhh, this music kind of sucks. 47:33 - Check it out, he stopped mixing because it sucks. 47:35 - 53:20 ??? Ironic Remark: Rebirth Of An Anti-Christ (instrumental version) 1:00:06 - 1:00:30 ??? Dr. Calculus - Dream Machine Laser Cowboys - Radioactivity (from the Ukraine) 1:09:14 - 1:09:24 ??? Here's the second one... is your body ready? http://soundcloud.com/genkigroove/goa-vibe-89 Some beatless mix of KLF - What Time Is Love Oh Well - Oh Well Airplane Crashers - White Rabbit Fatal Attraction - Music To Be Murdered By I Start Counting - 17 Pens 25:15 - 29:10 ??? The Maxx - Your Highness 34:57 - 38:47 ??? Robotiko Rejekto - Umsturtz Jetzt Screaming Trees - Iron Guru, one of the zillion different mixes of this track 50:54 - 55:06 ??? Tribantura - Getting Hurt Or Killed 59:47 - 1:04:32 ??? Mr. Horse - Crisis Situation New Beat Express - I Love You & I Hate You 1:11:08 - 1:15:00 ??? 1:15:01 - 1:19:18 ??? Bomb The Bass - Big Bear (the break in the middle sounds like another track, can't ID) 1:24:50 - 1:30:47 ??? 1:30:48 - 1:31:20 another weird outro Apart from one or two less than stellar tracks, I really do love this music. When the school quarter's over and I'm free I'll upload an old school mix of my own... for now, this helps distract me from impending papers of doom. =P

Laurent track. Pretty catchy and unusual synthpop. Pete Shelley from 1989. This sounds like hard techno to me. I wanted to post Yello's "Domingo" but couldn't find it. Such a damn crazy track for 85.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY26xcUFamw

Lately I've become interested in the dance music played in Goa before trance proper came to exist, roughly early eighties to the beginning of the nineties. Gil has namechecked some artists on occasion; recently Laurent dropped a bunch of names on another forum, and some people posted mixes in the old style. What I've heard has been extremely intriguing, somewhere between the fringes of pop music and what I'd recognize as trance. I know that a lot of the old music was edited/extended for Goa parties, and not necessarily as cool in its 'uncut' form, but there are some jewels out there... I'll post a few proto-trance tracks that caught my attention and hopefully others will do the same. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1QvdhD9l78

Funny, Delta 9 and Bad Data are two of my three favorites (the other being Ms. Frankenstein). I think this sounds clean, crisp, and still very up to date, but that's just my flawed ear. One of my favorite productions; the only thing that KILLS me is the apparent recording error on Delta 9 (seriously, is everyone else's copy this fucked, because I heard the same thing on Youtube) that ruins a good 20-30 seconds of the track. Feels bad man.

Every once in a while I hear a tune that has a really sad feeling to it. I don't know why, but this feeling makes my day... something about it is just perfect for those late night listening sessions, or after hours of dancing. I'm talking about things like: Juno Reactor: Rotorblade (really heart tugging strings) Morphem: Nothing Left (super sad melody), My Plan (sad flute), Love Is An Ocean Dimension 5: Antidote (another ;_; flute) Blue Planet Corporation: Midian, Lubianta, Crystal, Cyclothymic. Most BPC is like this really... Cyclothymic in particular must be the saddest trance song I've ever heard. Spectral: Celtic Alchemy What're some other sadpsy tracks? Let's get a little emo here.

Not a 'best of' but a cross section of a scene I like. Apologies for the video spam, I got carried away. I came to goa through ambient and intelligent techno, so I'm looking for something more than stomping madness in the music. What those old German producers did was give their tracks space to breathe and avoid putting in too many unnecessary layers... sometimes they were melodic, sometimes more minimal, but they always told a sort of story and had a purpose to what they were doing. I could also mention Juno Reactor, Deviant Electronics and TIP as groups that told stories with their music. A lot of new artists make tracks with a ton of different sounds that don't 'hook' the listener, or that aren't arranged with natural rises and falls. Their 9-10 minute tracks could be 5-6 minutes and you wouldn't miss anything. Structure and hooks are really important if you want to make music that people will remember. I like busy melodic goa too, but the focus should be on quality over quantity of sounds.

Some of my favorite artists wear their influences on their sleeves. I hear a lot of new beat in Har-El's music, and he's still a favorite of mine. I do think artists need to listen to more than other goa trance artists. Maybe to the music that influenced those artists. Some of you might find this interesting. When I was a dumb kid without much knowledge of the psy scene IM came to my friend's record shop (in 2000) and I got a chance to talk to them. They explicitly said that on the first album, they set out to make tracks in the style of their favorite artists... a track like Posford, a track like Etnica, a track like Transwave, and I forget the other examples. Classical Mushroom was where they felt they were finding their legs as artists, and they planned to do something radically different again on the third album. Well, we know how it turned out. I dislike the hype around IM and the way that most Americans associate their music with psy-trance now (because of marketing) but I don't really hate their music. They were young guys, not much older than me, with production talent who were given a big opportunity. The industrial sound, Tim Schuldt and Atomic Records were big in 1999 and they rode that wave with their harder take on old goa... right place in the right time! And they stole their name from a no longer producing Punk band in Israel, but that's neither here nor there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_u-TRcpvd8

The old school German sound, 93-02. Organic, futuristic, hypnotic, emotional. All layers of sound carefully chosen, carefully arranged, nothing wasted. Music made with love. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb7jX04Vr6Q

Dug into the local music emporium like a mad one today. I found a lot of things on clearance, too much to name but the best were Orichalcum, Somaton and Eat Static vinyls for 50 cents each and several Front Line Assembly remix EPs for $1 each. Oh and the turntable is nice too

If you can bend his ear again, ask about the possibility of buying WAV copies. Huge Deviant Electronics/Solar Systems fan here, but I buy to spin, and I wouldn't be interested in paying for mp3/aac.

Up: Tamlin - Spectrogram (2008) Musica Discordia (2006) Squaremeat - Wave Soup (2000) Spectral - Diffuse (2000) Acid Rockers - Mind Set (2000) Four Carry Nuts - Mechanical Age (2004) Masa - Why? (2006) Funf D - No Promises (2002) Electric Universe - Divine Design (2000) Jaia - Fiction (2005) Down: Ozric Tentacles - The Yum Yum Tree (2009) Ozric Tentacles - The Hidden Step (2000) Aes Dana - Memory Shell (2005) Solar Fields - Reflective Frequencies (2001) Ras Al Ghul - Sonic Yonic (2000) Androcell - Emotivision (2004) Blowfish - Puffed Up (2003) Deviant Electronics - Blunt Instruments (2000) Mac Mavis - Gate Finder (2003) Surrender To The Vibe 3 (2001)

That Noise Unit album is banging, thanks for reminding me. I used to love FLA and collect their music obsessively, but most of it hasn't aged well to my ears. I do still listen to Millennium and Hard Wired occasionally though. Forgot to mention, it doesn't have to be 4/4. There's a sick breakbeat tune, 'Vacuum Tubes', on the Headscan album that rocks like nothing I've heard before... Any others?

Inland Empire. This film actually broke my mind a little: I watched it in a theatre, stone sober, and for days afterward I wasn't quite sure if I had gone out and seen a movie called 'Inland Empire' or if I had gone on some kind of vacation from consensus reality and imagined the whole thing. Four years later and I can tell the difference... I think? Allegro non Troppo and Light Years are two very very strange animated movies. I saw them when I was a little kid in the eighties, and again just recently, and they're still just as strange. Playtime, by the great Jacques Tati. More satirical than psychedelic, but if you're in the right frame of mind it can be very trippy. Brazil, The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys and Dr. Parnassus are all great mind candy films by Terry Gilliam. Liquid Sky is a classic of no-budget, strange art films. Has a somewhat TG/Cabs influenced soundtrack, and if you pay attention you can hear a few psy-samples in it. The Holy Mountain is one of the great surrealist movies, and was clearly influenced by the sixties drug culture. The Big Empty, super obscure American comedy film. One of those 'free spirits do weird shit in the Mojave desert' movies that indie filmmakers make every so often. It's subtle, but this is actually one of the most brain twisting movies I've seen, especially the ending.

Most of ECT's catalog here:

I is new. Ish. I posted a little bit a few years ago but nothing that I particularly remember. Anyway, I'm a wannabe DJ, record nerd and (hopeful) college graduate in the next year. I don't get out much, and have a serious case of Belgian envy after hearing how much old-school goa is played there; hence, Psynews, where I can watch other people have fun and hate on them.