acid-brain

Eating meat is healthy but so is eating plants, fruits and other sources of protein. In fact, numerous studies have shown that vegetarians live longer than meat eaters. So clearly eating meat is not required for a healthy lifestyle. Nietzsche would have laughed at the argument that if our animal brains tell us to eat animals, there must be something right about doing it. He would also mock the idea that because animals eat each other, then we should eat them too. Since when have we based our morality on animals? Last time I checked the animal kingdom is a dark place with rapes, suffering, mutilation and murder happening every minute. What makes us human is our ability to transcend the impulse of the herd and build greater things. We are intelligent reasoning beings, not beasts. Yes, it does. Let's take your argument about killing a person who can't feel pain: first, I agree that the ability to suffer is obviously not the only criterion otherwise it would be permissible to kill a person who can't feel pain. But think about this. We have brains that are capable of extremely complex simulations of experience, and we often think and worry about our future. If we believed that humans who do not experience pain were morally worthless, that would cause a significant number of people harm and worry; people would be terrified of becoming analgesic (insensitive to pain) because that would then make them targets of murder and exploitation. Clearly this is a ridiculous situation, and that is why we believe in the innate value of consciousness and experience. Even if somebody does not suffer, they are still a person worthy of rights because they are a thinking and sentient creature. Plants, on the other hand, have no brains or consciousness. They cannot worry about the future or suffer. Eating a plant does not make other plants terrified of being eaten. They may be notionally 'alive' like animals and humans, but their kind of life has virtually nothing to do with what we understand our human life to be. It is stupid to pretend that plants have 'life' like we do - plants do not experience 'life' in any way. Therefore comparing killing a human/animal to killing a plant is beyond ridiculous. Animals, on the other hand, are much closer to humans than to plants. They become anxious, protect their young, and have complex brains that as are capable as young children's. For instance pigs have been taught to play video games. It is a tragedy that we keep these intelligent creatures in narrow filthy cages, castrate them, and take away their young, before slaughtering them. It is tragic that this a common practice that most people in society pay to make happen. I haven't even started on the environmental impact of factory farming. Cowspiracy talks about that.

Amen to that. Every time someone goes to the supermarket to buy meat, they are paying to have an animal killed for them - they are creating demand for more animals to be farmed. And almost all animals these days come from factory farms where animals suffer extremely poor conditions. If you want to find out information about where the animals come from (and I think it is everybody's duty to know), then check out the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. Or watch Cowspiracy as Penzoline suggested above. We should know where our food comes from and how our food is treated, otherwise we are not making a conscious and informed choice. For me goa and psytrance is about exploring other states of consciousness and empathy with other beings on this Earth. Eating other beings and paying for them to suffer in tiny cages is totally incompatible with that. But that is not a realistic argument. We all live in abundant consumer cultures where there are many options for eating a healthy diet. None of us live in the woods or alone on an island. We have computers and supermarkets full of 1000s of foods. These days we can easily survive without victimising and exploiting animals. People only continue to eat meat because of tradition and taste. But in years to come people will realize that what we are doing today with animals is terrible. Future generations will be amazed at the scale and horror of the meat industry of today, and will be shocked that so many ordinary people supported it. In the words of Moby: “If you look at the course of western history you’ll see that we’re slowly granting basic rights to everyone. A long time ago only kings had rights. Then rights were extended to property-owning white men. Then all men. Then women. Then children. Then the mentally retarded. Now we’re agonizing over the extension of basic rights to homosexuals and animals. We need to finally accept that all sentient creatures are deserving of basic rights… I call upon you to be compassionate and treat others as you want to be treated. If you don’t want to be beaten, imprisoned, mutilated, killed or tortured then you shouldn’t condone such behavior towards anyone, be they human or not.”

MORPHEM! So underrated! Surprised this ingenious use of a famous sample hasn't been mentioned yet:

For me it's hard to choose between that and MFG's Why for best one ever!

Yeah, they are amazing when done right. MFG - Why is surely the best example. But even MFG weren't able to do it right on their Message album. And sometimes, you feel like there should be a chord change coming but it never happens! Like the artists missed a massive opportunity. In this track, the chord changes are everything: One more thing - I'm not sure that 'chord changes' are the right term for this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modulation_(music). But I don't care about definitions, we all know what we're talking about.

Oh, I thought he meant that if he wanted to listen to music without melodies, he would rather listen to Techno than Darkpsy. I'm in agreement there, psychedelic techno artists like Rrose and Orphx have incredible production values and are in the same psychedelic mindbending tradition that darker goa trance like MFG and Tandu is.

Good call. That beautiful track definitely has more of a Southeast Asian flavour, but that's interesting too, because goa so rarely ventures into that territory. I tried writing some Chinese goa melodies last night and I couldn't do it. You can't use the Pentatonic scale like most Chinese music because it sounds way too positive and bright and lacks the tense half-tones that goa needs. I just ended up writing melodies that sounded Indian. Props to artists who can pull it off.

I collected all the albums up to 2007 but then stopped listening to the label as I thought the quality of the early stuff was top-notch but was starting to decrease a little. What are the best few albums that I've missed since then?

Nobody could do those crazy metallic sounds and arrangements like Ofer. Also has a massive kick and not much bassline, unlike most goa/psy.

Filipe also pointed me towards his Uchiwa and Gankyil aliases. And I don't know, but I feel that even certain old-school goa has some Chinese-sounding melodies. Like the section from 4:40 onwards in MFG - Hypnotized. At the very least, it has some of that mixed in the Oriental vibe. So, does anybody have any more suggestions? Surely there must be some more?

Most goa trance is based on Indian-sounding melodies. Artists like Ra have played around with melodies and tones that evoke Egypt. Recently I have become very interested in tracks with Chinese themes and melodies. It's hard really to put into words what distinguishes a Chinese-influenced goa trance track. When you hear it, you know it. For instance: Astrancer - Dzog Chen has such a Chinese sound! The melodies are delicate, mysterious, and elegant rather than powerful and crazy psychedelic. Lost Buddha - Untold Stories album (and some of his other work, especially under the Chynacid moniker ) Parts of the Moon Tribe - Moon Child album (but I should make clear that I am not interested in music purely because it was made by [Taiwanese] Chinese people, but because of the sound) I know that there's more but that's all I can think of from the top of my head. I want to hear more of this vibe! Please post your recommendations.

Wow, thanks for pointing me in this direction. I never enjoyed the oldschool goa stuff of Hux Flux, but thought that his Soundcloud page was great - 'How the mighty have risen' ... at least for me!

I listened to the title track ( ) and it was absolutely dreadful. A travesty when you compare it to a track like Tandu's Alien Pump from back in the day.

5.33 Alienapia - Magic Magnification

Orchid is one of my top albums. I had this incredible moment in Wales whilst listening to Cyandragonfly, and that music will be forever linked with the experience. Extremely relaxing...

Agree about Etnica in particular. Also, Oforia. His newer music isn't that bad, but Pigs in Space was so good, that is was still a terrible fall.

Haha, I have the same problem. Although most websites recommend gradual changes, I find that the best way to get back into gear is to do it all in one go; I stay awake an entire day, keeping myself up through doing some super-stimulating activity, like computer gaming. Then I go to sleep a few hours before the time that I plan to sleep in my new schedule. So in your case, you would wake up at 4PM, then stay up for a whole 24 period until about 5PM the following day. You will be so tired that you should be able to immediately sleep. Then you will have a long ~12 hour sleep, and should wake up at 5AM the next morning like you need to. You might need to use a combination of caffeine/naps/alarms to get the balance right, but it should work!

Simon Posford said somewhere that he was unlikely to release Hallucinogen 3 since people's perceptions of it would be affected too much by their expectations, based on the old classic albums. No matter what he makes, people would be likely to compare it unfavourably with LSD. We can definitely see this in the case of Shpongle too, with multiple users comparing Shpongle's newest albums unfavourably with AYS? and Tales of the Inexpressible. Artists like Posford hate feeling constrained by this expectation, and want to have creative freedom, which is one of the reasons why he and other electronic artists work under so many different names and side-projects. Still, I'm interested to hear what you think of the 'trajectory' of Shpongle's output. I don't think many people would claim that an artist should release material similar to their old stuff - we have no right to limit an artist's expression - and yet everywhere there is the unspoken assumption that Shpongle are drifting away from the brilliance of their early output, and that this is bad, and that we want more Tales of the Inexpressible etc. Lots of others oppose this pessimistic view, and claim that Shpongle's new material is different, but equal, and maybe more fun/danceable or whatever. Shpongle are a good project to focus these questions on, because they're so original and somehow so personal to their listeners that everybody feels like they should be able to have a say about what it means to them to be 'Shpongled'. Answer honestly please, ie. don't just say 'different but equal' because you'd like to believe that, even when you really feel that the standard of Shpongle's music has slipped from the mindblowing transcendence that it started from. Just interested to hear other's thoughts on this whole issue.

I have to agree that the statement of mine that you quoted was something of a caricature of full-on. I guess to talk of how bad 'full-on' is at least partially mistaken - it's like talking about how bad the 'Catholic Church', or 'Barack Obama' are. Sure, these things have serious problems, but there's also positive sides to them if you look hard enough. And I admit that lots of full-on is jammed full of effects and interesting structures, however... I was going to compare Boris Blenn's later releases with his earlier goa stuff to try to demonstrate how even established and skilled full-on musicians produced very simple tracks, but then I remembered that early Electric Universe stuff wasn't exactly the most complicated goa around either, so Blenn wouldn't make the best example. The truth is though, that once you've got your phat kick and bassline down, there isn't that much sonic space to add layers onto. This at once limits the amount of complexity that you can get compared to goa. In addition, previous full-on tracks have already tried just about every permutation of breaks and build-ups that you could imagine, so for me, making a full-on track just feels like assembling elements that other artists have already employed (if you can point me towards some full-on tracks that do really original things, I'd love to hear them). As Earwall points out, Goa has much fewer rules, and far more diversity. I'm still amazed by goa when I find tracks that seem to completely transcend all the elements that I had heard before, and I can spend all day listening to this assortment. Full-on... well I get bored of nonstop energy very quickly.

This is really starting to bug me too. What is distinctive about the sample is the way that the liquid acid bass is so prominent. One artist that I can think of with a similar sound to that is Radiotrance... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJI9A-dE0y0 Anyone else struck by the similarities? Also not all the tracks on this release are on youtube, can somebody with the release check it out? http://www.discogs.com/Radiotrance-Полёт-Нормальный/master/235974 On second thoughts it seems unlikely. Loads of people could have made this release... Sideffect never said if he'd checked out the entire list of Vinyl-only goa tracks - there's a good chance that it's there.

Melodies. We love goa trance for the melodies. The melodies that carry you away, that modulate and send shivers up your spine. For us, the bassline is a powerful element of the goa track, but mainly a vehicle to deliver the melodies. Full-on minimised the melodies that were a core of the genre to us, and introduced a sound that stayed far too similar across tracks. Gone was the diversity of goa trance, the eastern sounds, the crazy, building melodies, and everything gave way to a bland bassline, delay feedback loop buildups (in every track). What's worse is that full-on psytrance started to get played at the parties that would have played goa before, driving a far more intelligent genre virtually extinct on the party circuit. Plus full-on frequently got really cheesy. It's too easy to slam down a psytrance bassline, a Terence McKenna/Anne Clark sample and some whoosy noises and ridiculously overstated breaks, and there you've got yourself a popular full-on psytrance track. But listen to the complexity of old Pleiadians or Hallucinogen; full-on just doesn't compare. If I listen to psytrance, it tends to be forest-psy (Derango, for instance), since that is one genre that often retained the complexity and psychedelic-ness of goa, always pushing the envelope, without becoming boring. Rather than including half-assed melodies like a lot of full-on, forest psy often forgoes melodies altogether and replaces them with a bunch of weird incidental noises, which can sometimes be more interesting than the best goa melodies when they're done well.

Nice one. I agree with Veracohr; there's a lot of things that I'd like to edit in this track - I think some of the melodies don't sound quite right. But overall, a great journey.

I agree, psybient is a difficult genre to produce. Ultimately the music is so diverse that there really aren't any obvious tips or guides that will help you, other than listening to lots of psybient music and playing round with a good synth like Sylenth1 until you get something that sounds like your favourite artists. Still, I'll share what I can: Just set your sequencer to 80bpm or something, write notes in Phyrgian dominant, get hold of a pack of world/ethnic samples for inspiration, play around with a 303 and soft pads and pay a lot of attention to spacial effects and soundscapes. Psybient usually relies on quite an intricate bassline, so that might be a place to start. Another thing is that you want to heavily EQ and cut most of your sounds, so that nothing sounds too 'big' and so that you can layer more of them together. In psybient you usually have a lot of incidental, short sounds, so work on these and write melodies that fit into the groove last. I think if you start off trying to mimic Carbon Based Lifeforms or HUVA Network you're not going to have much luck. I'd listen repeatedly to a great free album like Turlitava, where it will be easier to mentally deconstruct the sounds so that you can recreate the layers on your computer. The Ultimae artists are so many years ahead of us, and often use analogue synths, and it's not clear how to copy their techniques. Sounding better than an artist like Aes Dana could be your end goal, but it will take many years to get there.

Hi Goa Travellers, glad that you liked it. I started being careful with my use of choruses, delays and equalizers, and adding oscillators to most of my synthesizers so that they would move around the aural sphere. I spend a lot of time in Ableton's session view trying to make sure that all the sounds work well together.

Psybient