Dolmot

I don't have any other versions for comparison, but it sounds (and looks) very gentle to me. Especially the last two tracks are normalised to a few isolated peaks with most of the signal only reaching about 0.9. In a typical modern release, those peaks would be the first thing to go to squeeze out an extra dB already before the actual compression kicks in. However, the whole production style here is quite airy and dynamic with sharp kicks and effects instead of seismic bass and three overlapping broadband supersynths, which contributes a lot to the overall sound. In short, already the source material makes a good starting point for enjoyable listening, and it hasn't been screwed up by excessive processing either. I'm happy with it.

The wavelength of 1 kHz would actually be 34 cm. If either of the paths changes by 17 cm (which, coincidentally, is about the head width), you already get inverse phase. No DSP, apart from using headphones, can prevent listeners from moving at least 17 cm around. Fortunately, at high frequencies the head itself produces a decent acoustic mask, thus you'll hear both signals separately to a sufficient extent if the sources are located roughly L/R. However, the wavelength of e.g. 50 Hz is 6.8 m, and head masking will be minimal so the waves do mix heavily. That kind of frequencies should be kept in a roughly matching phase so that at least the "sweet spot" listeners (including most people at home) will get the correct response. It's already a Shakta album and a track...

Let's see... Astral Projection released a new album, sort of. It's still so popular to be "the only guy who doesn't like AP" that about 80% of users seem to belong to the special snowflake group. All neogoa sounds exactly the same as long as you define neogoa only to cover the stuff that sounds exactly the same. Mastering is bad. Israel's post is crap. Font selection is difficult. Actual discussion is so last decade. Nowadays we just paste YouTube videos instead. There are people who like CDs and people who like digital. There's still a lot of PUI (posting under the influence). I think that's about it. Welcome back.

You know...this sounds like a 90s release. And I don't mean The Trademark Sound of any of the top ten classic acts we've managed to distill after two decades of careful analysis. It's more like visiting a record store in 1996, picking some French compilation because it has a neat mushroom on its cover, going home and hitting play. To me this is pretty much what you typically got that way. It's something you could spin at any moment of a rave party, which is simply a rave party and nothing more elaborate than that. It's energetic, it's direct, it's not overproduced, and it shouldn't be overanalysed. Sometimes things can be kept simple.

Not to be confused with The Thrillseekers, a fairly well-known trance act?

I think it goes hand in hand with maintaining certain profile and/or quality. There are labels who release (a lot) more frequently but there's a downside...

Writing a paper for a looming deadline...and I was just told that I'm expected to contribute to another too. Meanwhile, most of the main authors (and the guys who primarily get paid for this) have left for well-deserved holidays. I think there may be something wrong with this picture. Fortunately the weather has been crap for the whole summer and remains so for at least one more week, thus I'm not missing much by staying inside and saving my own vacation days for some later time.

This is where I asked and this is what I eventually bought...although most of it seems to comprise various kinds of downtempo and not even wholly 2015. Maybe I'll browse the free release side next whenever I finally manage to get rid of the last work deadlines.

About 30 times longer than an average HD...

This one?

But who spelled it "definately"?

Doof - Let's Turn On (R&R) Lectro Spektral Daze - Voyage in Your Mind Etnica in Dub Another Fine Day - A Good Place to Be Don Peyote - Blue Lotus Raja Ram's Pipe Dreams 1

Last year most practical information was still "TBA" when the festival had already started.

Shall we discuss hip hop...especially the early era when the whole point was to spin existing drum breaks while rapping on them. In the 80s the scene wasn't that concerned about crediting or clearing its samples. For example, I have one amusing compilation of tracks sampled for Eric B & Rakim's classic album Paid in Full (1987). It's a triple CD with a total of 44 tracks. Not bad, compressing all that to one ten-track, 45 min album. (It's a neat triple CD, by the way, going through loads of classic funk, soul, disco and whatnot. Some serious crate digging was involved in that album's production.) Then suddenly in 1991 there was a court case where it was ruled that "sampling without permission can qualify as copyright infringement". Bummer. It's often said that pretty much none of the classic albums could have been written under current legislation, considering the shoestring budgets those 80s guys had. (See the same article.) Nowadays you can get in trouble for sampling just one second of copyrighted material (which, in turn, can cover almost all recoded music in existence). But the point is that sometimes extensive mixing of existing stuff starts to count as a form of art by itself.

Weird...I was just considering adding this to my latest order last weekend. Eventually I didn't. The samples just didn't sound right this time either. Maybe I'll try streaming a bit more at some point. That's really slow growth if it ever happens...

SUNCD{36,37,LE05}

If have an uneasy feeling listening to the samples. There's something disturbing in here. Although it could also be Afgin watching me from the ad banner.

Not very steep. I don't believe you.

Shall we play "spot the Ultimae row"?

The death of CDs (and books and DVDs) also means that people are dumping loads of their old furniture. You can try checking your physical and virtual second-hand marketplaces. That's where I started when trying to bring some order to my previous chaos. However, it can be quite difficult to find a single, large enough solution or matching pieces second-hand. I didn't want yet another mish-mash of mismatched bits when planning this thing from the scratch. Although I tried to give the local suppliers a chance, everything there was tiny, inconvenient and/or expensive, so the evil Swede it was. Currently my CDs are in Bestå shelves. The 60x20x38 cm (WxDxH) basic unit is about 20e with one separating horizontal shelf. At least earlier there was also a 120cm wide double version. One 56x15 cm slot (two of them in the small unit) holds about 50 CDs with not much space wasted. There's a bit of extra height, which comes in handy for oversized boxes and cases. The units are small enough to be moved around easily, and you can stack a few on the floor or on top of other (sturdy enough) furniture like in my configuration. (As you can see, there are currently some extra rows held by bookends, and piles of incoming/outgoing stuff. I should sort everything again and maybe buy an extra unit whenever I manage to start my holidays. Assorted lower priority CDs are piled in the canvas boxes.) Of course, the instructions state that you should screw everything to the walls. However, unless you have very unruly pets or family members, it's hard to get killed by a falling 38cm high shelf in the floor configuration. I don't claim that this would be the best solution, but it was reasonably affordable, simple and well available.

Well, personally I wouldn't have spotted a tiniest bit of psytrance in that particular track unless someone told me. It's so far from the centroid of this genre that we could debate whether it even belongs there. Anyway, the legend has that many members of the early goa community were Israeli soldies who wanted to take a total break from the rough life of war, politics and religious conflict in the Middle East. That was achieved with a combination of physical distance, slow life, recreational drugs and cosmic music. The hippie scene in general had similar goals. For that purpose, eight minutes of trance works better than two minutes of punk. You could argue that a major point of the genre is avoiding boring or stressful everyday matters and replacing them with something more vague or universal. Come to think of it, you don't hear much politics in any kind of rave parties. Typically the most mundane message you can spot there is "love is totally great, right?" or "I hope this party doesn't get busted". Other genres take care of the particulars of that tragic reationship with Annie and how much the current government sucks. Party-goers prefer happy thoughts and distant concepts, where you can fill in the details yourself or just ignore it all and keep dancing. But you can't control the content of any genre. Sometimes they get totally diverse over time. For example, many people think of reggae as "that laid-back beach party music", but in reality it has covered jolly ditties, slavery, the judgement day, gang fights, gun lyrics, slackness, heavyweight dub and how the singer's car is crap. Eventually all sorts of variants turn up when the base version is getting too repetitive. The audience decides whether there's any real demand for them.

Looks good. I think I already have most of the vinyls but it's definitely convenient to have their digital equivalents too. The live part should be a must-have even for everyone with the original release. Just out of interest, is there a reason for the original album being disc 2? Typically re-releases and expanded editions start with the original title and then pad it with extra content. Obviously this is just a matter of choice and anyone can reorder the discs (or playlist) as they wish. I'm just curious about the motivation. Slightly related, have you already decided the exact title of this release?

Ah, 2004...when gamers complained that publishers only care about the graphics...

There's a presentation/gameplay video of upcoming Doom from E3. It has action. The community reaction seems cautiously positive. Do I have to tell you that it has some violent bits too?

Annoyed? Sure. Calling it a scam? Maybe not. After all, I had received about three orders before with no problems whatsoever.