Dolmot

It's right there in the description. Young people don't read any more, I guess.

Well, we have a grand total of 82 people hospitalised and 22 in intensive care in the whole country. Even at that point the recommendation is "don't come if you can still breathe, just stay home and try to recover by yourself". So, not very surprising that people who come to ER cannot breathe. There's quite a bit of selection bias there. However, things are definitely going titsup in Italy. That I won't deny.

Have you seen Hero (2002) and does it count as a fairy tale?

Sounds familiar. I'm doing R&D. I have all my gear in here and enough room for another office-like setup. In a sense, there are even fewer distractions now. Of course, some daily routines like commuting and lunches have changed, but the work itself isn't that different. Most of it happens digitally anyway. I guess we have it really easy. All hobbies and events involving physical presence have been cancelled. To be frank, I'm almost relieved right now. A forced short break from everything can be healthy if you've been doing too many different things, but after several months it probably starts to get infuriating and/or depressing. We just had the annual meeting of one club (now arranged online). The unsurprising key conclusion was that we're basically screwed with the rent if everything remains closed and consequently there's no income from monthly usage fees and such. This obviously applies to many companies, clubs and individuals. Event organisers can also be truly SOL if they're acting responsibly and cancelling the event, while the venue still argues that there's no categorical ban and therefore no refund for anything. For a couple of semi-coincidental reasons, I'm mainly eating old dry goods from a cupboard which couldn't even hold any new hoarding. There's time for all-day slow cooking if I'm in the mood for that. The contrast between the tranquility here and the apocalypse reported by shit tabloid media is striking. Now I should have plenty of time to listen to music and to reorganise my old stuff. My brain just hasn't fully adjusted to this new, weird situation. It probably happens over time, though, because right now it looks like the minimum span of this remote working will be one month. Could be more, who knows. We'll see.

That's just incredibly shitty luck. I've had a couple of events and trips cancelled too but thanks to sheer luck, procrastination and finally caution, I hadn't paid a penny for them yet. Right now there's just the sudden, eerie emptiness in my schedules for the whole spring and maybe summer. (OK, also a thing or two with investments but let's not discuss that.) It's totally fine and natural to feel frustrated (to put it very mildly). However, I'd also suggest not blaming anyone too much. Yes, poor decisions have been made here and there, but right now we don't have that many really good ones available either, because things are going pear shaped in general. Some agencies and hotels have been generous with their rescheduling options so I can simply hope that at least something can be recouped that way. If you ever get a second chance, let's see what we can do.

I investigated the matter in this topic! (Mainly concentrating on release titles and descriptions which can be dated.)

Is there a moon in your window?

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.

Kind of! I think the track started circulating in 2009 - 2010 as "Chomolungma". At some point it was called "Chomolungma (Aiana)" and it was available on SoundCloud. Then it evolved quite heavily and was first released on Goa Beach Volume 22 CD in 2014 (I think), then in the Collected Downtempo digital release in 2016. But that released version is quite different from the minimalistic, bass-driven promo, hence my question regarding the "original version". If they consider the later Aiana incarnation the definitive version then so be it, but I still prefer the more mystical one and I was a bit disappointed when it didn't make it on the albums.

Kind of! I know! Tell me! Of course! I have it! Correct! To be honest, I didn't even know! But then again, I'm a music collector. Tell me! Actually, not yet! Well, no, but tell me anyway! Cool! My wallet weeps even without that but cool anyway! In fact, I listened to a good chunk of it today at work. Here we go again, I guess! But has anyone released the original version of Chomolungma yet? It moves people around, even if they're sitting!

Originals or re-releases? Where? Separately? How much?

Lost and found. That was enlightening. Let's see if part 2 answers some unanswered questions!

Whee, that's a long time! I clearly remember browsing TRiP for tips in the 90s, supported by the fairly decent school internet and the not-so-decent dial-up at home. The transition to goatrance.free.fr happened when I was moving around myself so I probably almost missed it. Where were the "what is goa trance" and travel articles first released? Those were the very short wikipedia of the genre/culture back then. Also quite fascinating that Filteria was among the first reviewers in 2000. For some reason I only created an account on Psynews in 2009, although I was definitely browsing regularly for years. Nothing important enough to add? I think the discussion was also a bit...noisy back then. Of course, the music changed too over the years. There were times when I didn't find it interesting enough to follow that closely, but there have also been some very positive developments. You can still spot interesting pieces of...psy news here. And all kinds of randomness. Thanks, everyone.

Indeed. I think I downloaded it almost brand new from...Audiogalaxy? Soulseek? Anyway, that was also the time when I started to get quite disillusioned with the direction psytrance was taking, thus I was buying a lot of house instead. That set was possibly the place where I learnt about Jeff Bennett and started collecting his releases. I still have those. We were spinning those and a lot of similar sound at the club room back then. Good stuff, good times. And yes, I still have that ancient mp3 copy of the set too and it's somewhere on the playlist. Very smooth and non-distracting music for getting some work done. Right now I'm not listening to anything, but I've been browsing a lot of old and new disco releases recently. About time to place another order, I think...

I don't know either but hey, thanks for bringing that up and happy new year 2002!