sneila

The more reissues the better!

POLL PROBLEMS -- SEEMS LIKE FORUM GLITCH, MARS PLEASE MAKE A POLL.

OK guys, here is the big question. BTW I think we should ignore the couple goa releases on Twisted and just skip to 2000-2001++. If you like you can just compare them for chillout releases. Personally I easily vote Ultimae, since I consider Ott the only decent thing on Twisted Records.

Well I don't think Encens is top 10 at all, or even mentionable, I was just listening to them while I was posting and thinking of how much better they were than Koxbox, and from 1995 too. You mean in Shpongle? EXAMPLES? I'll admit DMT (Instrumental) is good (the only one I like from them), and Dorset Perception doesn't wander, but unfortunately it sounds like a spanish children's ballad or something. BTW a possible answer is that I'm just not intelligent enough to recognize the patterns. But I don't think this is too likely.

Within a wider sphere, pop music is most highly praised; within the psytrance sphere, artists like Hallucinogen are most highly praised. One thing I know for certain is that being widely praised in the modern era doesn't say much for the credibility of anyone or anything. That said, Hallucinogen with his Twisted album was pretty important for goa trance, though he kind of got lucky with his hit LSD since there were tens of other artists at the same time starting to make goa trance music. After that I think he slipped and produced more crap than good material (why not? 3/4 of the other artists all did the same, IM anyone?). Ian Ion was better pre-Koxbox.. maybe.... That, or the guys he worked with on those other projects were better. His Gringo Locomotion is nothing special. Koxbox is OK, but I think it's just hyped up more than anything else. The other names you mentioned I have no respect for at all, least of all Raja Ram. He painted logos and played the flute while MWNN and Doof and Hallucinogen made the music behind the best TIP tracks. His flute playing has never done anything good for the tracks, either. Maybe his "jazz" influence was the worst thing for goa trance and downtempo.

TRACK SELECTION AND ARRANGEMENT ARE MOST IMPORTANT IN A MIX, THEN MIXING SKILLS. OK the best mix I've heard so far is DJ Skywarp - 604 from 2003. Share some mixes if you think they are amazing, which probably excludes your personal mixes.

I tried to get some useful response from you guys but it seems you can only try to justify yourself or say I'm wrong, rather than discuss why we differ.

Classical Mushroom is major suck. The Gathering is OK, best tracks Psycho and Montoya in my opinion. B.P.Empire was also OK, largely thanks to Never Ever Land being so great.

I believed you till the last line, but now I realize this whole post must be a joke or you just stupid, because you have a blatantly wrong conception of atmospheric. I was talking about neither actually. What I meant is a small change can change the entire track and give it a whole new appearance, so a LARGE CHANGE IS NOT NECESSARY, and in specific a track that is just 1 large change after another (I'm now talking about Shpongle and Koxbox) shows a lack of skill in making those small changes. In fact the "building" of a track is achieved by introducing small changes (most of the track stays the same as it has been earlier, but stuff is added or removed). What happens when it's only large changes, or way too many of them, is nothing really: the music ends is pointless and never builds up to anything interesting. Because listening to 5 layers of sound playing and then a new 5 layers, over and over, is not very interesting and tends to sound like monkeys at the mixers. I want to listen to 5, then 10, then 15, etc. I want to marvel at how they were all worked in together.

I'm not talking about the ways Shpongle uses the synth, but the way they mix their tracks. They just skip along always changing the direction and never looking back, so in the end the track never really went anywhere at all. (Think of the track in a visual depiction like a graph.) It's like if I started whistling all sorts of melodies, and just went from 1 to the next continually with rarely ever looking back. Does this require skill? No, I can do easily do this "on the spot", because you only need to remember what you did for the last 10 seconds to link something new, not the whole 10 minutes. It takes more skill to overlap your sounds and build on them and make something grow out of them than to abandon them at every turn and use new ones instead. I've seen lots of people compare Entheogenic to Shpongle, which I think is stupid. While Entheogenic changes a lot (speaking on first 2 albums) so he might appear at first like Shpongle, he comes back to most of the earlier sounds and integrates them and builds on them throughout the track. Entheogenic is 100x superior to Shpongle in my opinion.

Live is best album, Psykadelia contains best track (Flirt Filter), and the others are mixed quality. Ra is the worst album maybe, but I don't know about all the "compilation" albums.

Well no it's not about complexity. I love a lot of the Pleiadians and Toi Doi tracks, which I consider some of the more complex goa trance. Here is some problems I identified after listening to some Koxbox and Shpongle: 1) They have boring synths: Electronic music relies heavily on having interesting synths thrown in there to make tracks or artists unique from one the rest. Koxbox sounds almost like I'm listening to standard, default sounds with no personality or uniqueness to them. 2) They don't use pads: Koxbox's music sounds minimalistic, as Padmapani said, because they don't use enough pads. They have no ambience or atmosphere in their tracks. 3) Main problem: their arrangement is not intelligent: Personally, I always listen to an entire track focusing on what changes. In fact, as I listen my main focus is always on whatever parts are changing, and viewing those in relation to all the other parts, always remembering what happened in the previous minutes of the track. So I expect a track to build or tell some story somehow, otherwise it's pointless. To me Shpongle completely fails here, along with the others: usually their tracks will just change randomly into something else with no sense behind it. Instruments come in and out, and then there's a stupid flute playing, but it never builds towards anything or works together to improve the track, it's just pointlessly wasting time. It's too RANDOM for me. It sounds like the track is an experiment of monkeys randomly playing with the mixer. It is not INTELLIGENT music (I think IDM is a misnomer since most IDM music lacks intelligent arrangement, which is the opposite of random arrangement). Anyways, complexity is not the issue. There's nothing I love more than to hear extra layers of sound added in, deeper and deeper, AS LONG AS those sounds are added in an intelligent way and help build the track. The smallest sounds added can change the entire track in a positive way. Also, as was already said, these artists are NOT very complex in terms of the number of sounds played at once. It takes a lot of talent to overlap numerous sounds at once and make them sound good together. That's what most goa trance and downtempo music is. On the other hand, it takes a lot less talent to throw things without order, or things that simply don't enhance each other or the track altogether. That's my current beliefs on it anyways, I'd like to hear someone else's who disagrees. What do you listen for in the music? What part of these artists do you find most appealing, that other artists aren't as good at? Etc.

I must get it off my conscience and admit that I don't really like Koxbox. The only track I can think of that stands out from them is the Point Of No Return Ionizer Remix. I admit their CDS releases are OK, but I don't think I've ever managed to listen to "Forever After" or "Dragon Tales" all the way through without losing focus/interest, despite many attempts. I can say the same thing for Shpongle and Mayko in the downtempo zone. I've seriously tried listening to these 3 artists many times because they are so popular, but they have never grown on me. Some other artists like Hallucinogen are a mixed bag, some tracks excellent some I can't stand. I realize that lots of you love these artists above all. I also realize there are some others that agree with me on these artists, so I'd like to understand why this division exists amongst some of us. I'd like to explain my reasoning behind not liking Koxbox, but it would be hard for me to explain since I should have studied music psychology. So I will just say I don't find their tracks very rhythmic, melodic, hypnotic, or distinguished from one another. In essence I find them more like a psychedelic blur of standard sounds (as opposed to unique or interesting) that doesn't have many intelligent patterns or designs behind it. I consider groups like Encens a lot better and equally psychedelic, just to give you a comparison. I only want to explain my reasoning, not say it's better or worse than anyone else's. I'm curious what your reasonings are, because this surely is important in understanding it. There's no need to flame or argue which is better, I only find it interesting how we enjoy the same "genres" of music yet can be so divided on specific releases.

I agree that Flirt Filter is his best track, but Live is his best album. They're both about equally as rare. Orion 2 really sucks. The other tracks are all good. The production here is fine and it doesn't sound dated at all really, other than maybe the types of synths used.

Is there a sure way to detect a bootleg? At what point does it no longer matter it's a bootleg? When the CD and artwork can no longer be distinguished? Here's the CRCs of the first 5 tracks of an older copy of Live (gaps appended, nulls not included in CRCs). B2E4A3A6 B614FDEB 77BD0BD4 BA3B3CF6 2D21E35F I happen to know and trust Kroo isn't making bootlegs (though I have no idea where he got the CD from), but I'm a bit skeptical about the eBay seller. I ordered Andromede from him, so we'll see.

Other than the 2 Ultimae CDs there's not much good so far this year. Yagya, if you like extremely slow ambient music. Chilling Cuts Vol 4 compilation is nice.

"If you're not interested in buying or trading the item(s) in the thread, then don't post." So what one are you interested in buying visine? Joseph and I already went in on Asia 2001-Live together using a secretive alias, so we have the right to discuss it here. YOU on the other hand seem to just be trolling and spamming where you don't belong, and it's getting on my nerves.

Just my 2 cents but I think he was trying to help potential buyers rather than trying to help the seller. Would it be better if he posted something like: "OMG THIS IS SOOOOO RARE HOLY SHITTT I'LL BUY IT FOR $500 SO I CAN RESELL IT FOR $800 IF NOBODY ELSE WANTS IT!!1!"?

I practice this every day. When listening to music on my iPod that's not overly exciting I'll try to eavesdrop on conversations through my noise blocking earphones.

How much for Syb Unity Nettwork Experience - The Space Puppy CD?

There's no rules against making harmless comments, you don't own the internet because you started the thread. You also have the power to ignore posts that you aren't interested in.

It is true though, I've seen a ton of Live CDs for sale lately.

I couldn't really care less about your character development and fast moving plot, I'm not reading for cheap entertainment. I'd rather read books with artistic merit. I also prefer older books because they have more interesting things to say to me. They were written by more interesting people. Nowadays most books seem to be written by average idiots and the content reflects that.

It had a few interesting things to say, but most of the book seemed to have some cryptic meanings (I'm giving the author the benefit of the doubt here) and I couldn't be bothered looking for analyses or trying to decipher it myself, since I wasn't overly impressed with the book to start with.

I only re-read books that I didn't fully understand or stand to gain something in particular by reading them again. In general the same goes for watching movies multiple times, unless I'm watching it with others. So the only books I've ever read multiple times are Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, which is a very short read, and 4 of Nietzsche's better books, which are a much longer read but require multiple readings to understand anything. If I was ever going to read a fictional story again it would probably be Don Quixote, since I marveled at the beautiful writing style all the way through and it was an interesting plot with lots of details. Unfortunately I'll probably never take another 6 months to read it again.