Gus Sarcoffa

Guess I'm too late but for the record I completely forgot Cosmosis. For some reason I thought Transcendance was a 2004 release. Anyway, my actual top 5 is: 1. Shpongle 2. Voice of Cod 3. Cosmosis 4. Derango 5. Mushy Mystery Sorry Bilbo! Moderator's note: this list replaces the one from page 9, post 161.

1) Shpongle 2) Voice of Cod 3) Derango 4) Mushy Mystery 5) Broken Toy And now, with the time remaining to me, allow me to express a whole bunch of useless opinions in the fine tradition of psynews forum threads. First: of course these "best of" threads are worthwhile. Supporting argument 1: lots of forumistas of their own free will participate in them. Worthwhile in the context of a web forum is pretty much defined as "that which participants find worth their time." Supporting argument 2: what is a community without a) a common set of values that bind members together ("mmm, psychedelic...") and an ever-ramifying set of differentiations of taste to provide frisson ("Shpongle is The Suck!" "No way dude, they are The Ruliest!"). Supporting argument 3 (ad hominem flavor): please don't tell me you are the kind of person to walk into a fun party and start criticizing everyone for the banality of their conversation. You know damn well you are not. You'd never be invited back if you were, and it would be nothing but Friends reruns for you every Saturday night until you're old and sad. So, why do that on a web forum? You charge in demanding of everyone that they Justify Their Behavior, but where is your justification? Oops. Second: as others have mentioned, it's really awkward to make a single best-of list. There are at least 3 different kinds of music commonly discussed here, and the case can easily be made that it's more than 3 depending on how anal one wants to get about one's subgenres. To put it mildly, Shpongle and Derango don't have a whole lot in common. This begs the eternal question of just what exactly is psytrance, anyway? On a very mundane level, I struggle with this whenever I try to sort my CDs. I used to mix all of "dance" together, then I separated it into "dance" and "psy" and now I'm thinking about going to a scheme such as "trance and house"/"breaks"/"goa"/"psy"/"prog psy"/"psybient". These distinctions are obviously arbitrary and there are going to be outliers and misfits no matter how you break it down. Why is it that we discuss Shpongle on this forum but not Nick Warren or Steve Bug or Crystal Method? Thanks for reading, Gus Moderator's note: list modified by user at page 11, post 205

That's funny. I looove that sample! It gets me off every time. Ah well, to each his own. I completely agree with you about Ott though. His stuff is awesome.

No need to apologize. You are entitled to your opinion. But I'm curious - if you don't like samples in music how can you be a fan of goa and psytrance? Samples are everywhere in this style of music. Cheers, Gus

Agreed. I wasn't sure at first if I thought it lived up to the first two (btw, am I the only person who likes Tales better than Are You Shpongled?). But as I've listened to it more I've come to feel it is the best of the three. The entire album is one piece of music. It seems kind of pointless to analyze the individual tracks. But what's striking about Shpongle is that they have so many great musical ideas, they don't have to milk each one. Typically, a pop music composer will take a melody and repeat it again and again throughout a song. After you've listened to the song a couple times that melody is lodged in your brain and you'll know quite quickly if you like the tune or not (but then almost as quickly you may become tired of it due to overexposure). On Nothing Lasts there are fantastic ideas all over the place - ideas so good that lesser artists would build a whole song around them. And yet you hear them once or twice and then the music morphs into another space. So it takes longer to form that familiarity with the music - this may be why so many Shpongle fans at first were unsure how they felt about this release. There's certainly been more than enough hype written about Shpongle but just for the record I'll add my bit: I believe Simon Posford is a genius. I see him on the same level as innovators like Jimi Hendrix and Duke Ellington. Only time will tell of course but already you see the tremendous influence he exerts over the whole field of electronic music. I'm sorry there won't be any more Shpongle records but at least we can look forward to many more years of productive output from Mr. P. (btw, no I don't think Nothing Lasts is "perfect." There's a really cheesy electric-guitar-style pentatonic synth lick toward the end that I could do without. But it only repeats 5 times ) Gus