freak51

Bitchin'. Get it. "Suddenly I saw myself ... like from above, coming down ... and I started to float, into this tunnel, towards this light ... and it was the most beautiful light I ever saw ...". I get recollection-goosebumps just typing in the sample. Not much going on above 1000 hertz, but Darshan OWNS the lower half of the spectrum. So many different colours of dark. I've just rekindled my interest; I'm going to play it again right now.

Ehh. Great cover art, especially the outrageously happy interior work. Ordinary music though - I couldn't justify buying it. To me this is as the difference as between art and clip-art. This record is nice clip-art: the sounds and forms are old hat, though at least he's recycled the best of the genre. Oh yeah, one more thing, e-NOUGH with the samples a'ready.

Hey Chaffi, read the credits on Space Cat and you'll see Simon Posford sprayed all over it. Spookier to me is listening to Shpongle and then listening to Classical Mushroom; sounds like a tribute album. BUT on to the point, which is Twisted. This was my first-ever trance CD, and it, no word of a lie, changed my life. The path I carved through about $3000 in sound toy purchases and God knows how many thousands of dollars in CD purchases [and still going strong] definitely begins _here_. This record will always be a special place for me. If I hadn't heard this I might still be listening to bloody Jesus Jones. If you have only one disc ... well get X-Dream "Our Own Happiness". But if you have two, make this the second.

Nice. What robots would listen to on their off hours. Good crisp execution, never too many sounds at once. One of the best releases of 1998 IMHO.

*** If you like this record, PLEASE DON'T READ ANY MORE OF THIS COMMENT. I don't want to ruin it for you. *** I can't shake the thought as I listen to this that it could be a movie soundtrack. I don't like the orchestral backgrounds this bunch uses. Once I realized this I stopped liking the record. I wish I could go back there, because I really liked it then. Especially the tricks at the end of Animal People, where they pitch-bend the melody in the foreground, pressing the mind into the brainpan.

Yummmmmmmmmmm. Was reading somewhere else that some guy had loosened the bolts of his ski rack by playing this cd in his car. Not lightweight, not for the faint of heart. Very bassy but if you must play in the Dark, this is the disc. Oh yeah, sounds way better over a big system: not for the computer / sound card / headphone combination.

Am I the only one who's blown away by X-Wave? Those freaked-out alien cow noises and the X-Dreamy bass-line [no surprise, it's Rough And Rush]. Otherwise there are some decent tracks and some filler. But if you don't have X-Wave, Other Line and Last Feeling you'll want this record. And I hate every other disc CS has ever produced with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns.

Yah. The original Trance/Dub effort, and one of the few I've heard that really works. Still sounds absolutely fabulous when so much from 1997 sounds like kiddie candy or confused mismanaged expeditions into desperate terrain. I thought that the Saafi Bros had broken up? Or did you, a_ozi, mean Gab's Lab or Gab's Gift?

I'll have to give it a few more spins as PPP above suggests, because of the two releases called Intergalactic this past year, I'm liking Santana's more. OK, tracks 1 And 5 are killers. But I still don't really get "Just Say No", I mean, haven't we moved beyond advocating drugs? I thought everyone just did their pleasure-poison now and there was no political big defensive deal about it.

Get it if you can find it, if only for the history lesson on how the few made gorgeous music with such limited technology [admittedly, better than the 1980s but I can hardly believe this record is almost as old as the Web].

Ehh. I didn't like this one nearly as much as Vacuum. Since I very much still enjoy Vacuum [esp. Atomic Children], I really tried to get into this one too. Can't seem to do it.

I listened to this disc for the very first time to accompany my very first acid trip. So no matter what else, this record will hold a special place for me. As marsaud points out above, most tracks don't have any kind of staying power, and are a bit lightweight, but a few are standouts. Hypnotica, End of Space and The Test are 'real close' to being excellent. The cheesy 2 minutes after the sample in End of Space MUST GO AWAY, other wise a stellar effort. Hypnotica is nice and lightweight, like old 1995ish X-Dream. If he'd woven some of the synth lines from the beginning and middle of The Test through the latter part of the track it'd be in goosebump territory. Hmmmm - maybe I wouldn't bother buying this disc, but I bet his next one will be phenomenal.

OK it's been a month and this disc keeps getting better and better. Possibly the most intelligent psy-trance I've ever heard. How the Hell did Tristan make such noises?

The bomb. No psy-trance stable is complete without this horse. When you don't really know what you want to play, put this record on and you'll wonder why you bothered with anything else.

I didn't at all like the first disc until tracks 7 and 8. The second disc is lovely though. Worth borrowing from a friend, but not really worth the obscene $40 I paid for it.

Close to five years old, but has held up far better than most comps of the era. Even though it's a comp, it holds up as an album end-to-end. Trippy fractal art for which I always have a soft spot. Worth buying.

After reading all the reviews and hearing the last track on the Space Mantra / Ganesh Propaganda comp, I expected more of a fusion between psychedelia and baroque, with some nice harpsichord themes to tie them together. This record has moments, and it's probably worth it just for the twisted cover art. But overall I don't see this getting much rotation in my disc players. Maybe I shouldn't reduce trance to a formula, BUT I think it needs more high hat. It's not as though they don't know how to drop bass [Psycho, Over Mode, that tasty 40-second bit in the Montoya Remix], it's just that on this record they seem to take too long to get to full throttle for long and don't maintain it for long enough. Just when you're starting to get to enjoy it they take the flavour away again, like laying an over-made-up suburban princess in the bed she grew up in. Go ahead, get sweaty dammit! Your parents AREN'T HOME. Still, nice psychedelia when it happens. 7/10.

Not bad, but not a keeper. Rip a few tracks and sell it back. Waaaay too much bass in the production; requires about $2500 of stereo to make it sound at all decent.

Very, very solidly planted in the upper atmosphere. This is my cup of tea. Gorgeous voice effects. A bit samey sounding towards the end, but not annoyingly so. Yummy laconic housey voice in Pathfinder. It could be about 5 BPM faster, but that's a niggling quibbly detail. Get it.

Ehh. In 1997 I thought it Cured the Scrofula. But now it sounds kind of dated. A good head trip but not really danceable and sounds kind of chaotic yet samey after about 30 minutes.

I don't get it. Every comp in the last few months has an Atmos track on it. Why? It all sounds like the same lazy, perfunctory production to me. Not enough energy, too repetetive, no clear direction ... like Gabriel LeMar's less cool younger brother with no appreciation or understanding of how to write trance. I keep going back and listening to more of it after reading shimmering, glistening praise in reviews, and can't help wondering if there's some kind of Secret Frequency Range that everyone else hears and I'm missing. Not my cup of tea.

Plenty of twisted psychedelia, but all this stuff has been done before. Get it if you haven't bought many other psy-trance records in the last few years; otherwise, listen to them instead. So Deep is the best track, IMHO, but I wouldn't play it unless the crowd had never likely heard decent trance before. The word I'm looking for here is "derivative". Not bad, just not new.

Reflection, X-Star and Uplifting take me to the Other Place. Worth the price for these three tracks alone.

All of the above reviews. The tracks I liked at first, now I'm not so keen on. The ones that grated my nerves at first have grown on me.

Lots and lots of data here. Best for the couch, not really for dancing - even though it has all the elemnents of stonkin' danceable trance. Good High Weirdness in the sounds he's created. Trippy.