acid being

Very nice. Give me 15 years and hopefully I'll be churning out sounds like that too! I like Casper as well. It's tricky working out what exactly makes that spooky feel. Well, if you insist! Please bear in mind the following were just learning exercises - in fact my very first goes at trying to write layered harmonies. They're actually made in Milkytracker using 8-bit samples from the late 90s. Once I'm comfortable writing the layers I'll move onto a DAW. This is the arrangement I was originally talking about: https://mega.nz/file/JWMCELpL#D8BqIcbF6woCBahO1LIzc5MuyOHoAvf398LwkZjzXMk It's theoretically dissonant when the synth rises in pitch from about 00:25 because it gets within a semitone of the croaky acid line but as I said it doesn't really sound noticeable. When you replace all the instruments with a piano sample, you can hear it clearly though (at the same time sounding like an almost totally different piece of music - I wasn't trying to write neo-classical! ): https://mega.nz/file/sOU20CrB#Cwe9hwUsHsIWUtNk9L9CCje2-jdw97B6Pz7FbD9UE4s You can hear the dissonance clearly at about 00:35 and 00:43. Finally, for a bit of fun, below is my very first attempt at writing layers and I developed it quite a bit further, though the percussion is unfinished, it needs reverb, more effects, more everything...: acid being - Phrygian Beginnings I'd really appreciate any feedback, good or bad, on this early concept. I'd be interested if anyone likes how those layers fit together or if I should try something different next time. The 8-bit instrument samples were borrowed from tracker files which were by Matrix Cubed (Mantis) Copyright Ra'anan de Jong 1997 and Symbiote - Phantasmagoria Copyright Samuel Cote 1997. I intend to replace these with my own sounds if I develop my ideas into tracks. The 16-bit piano sample is by Berklee recorded for Richard Boulanger for use in the One Laptop per Child music library. See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples for details. It's released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Just listened to Darshan - Awakening and on the second track, Sun Probe, from about 4:40 it really sounds to me like there's a bassline shifting pitch to follow the acid lead, though it all blends together so well it's hard to be 100% sure. Either way, it's a way to add a bit of interest to a track and surprises are good to have in this kind of music.

I raised them by less than an octave, adjusting to keep them in the scale. I guess I can just adjust a couple of notes a bit more to fit the other parts that are playing. I'm more confident about it now, so thanks for your help. In all honesty the clashing notes only play for a fraction of a second and I can't really hear any dischord. I think it helps that the acid lines aren't "pure" tones. I'm just a perfectionist!

Thanks. All the notes are in the right key. It's just at this point in the track I'm playing a fixed bassline / acid lines and then playing two different versions of a synth arpeggio I wrote over the top. The second version of the arpeggio is supposed to be the same pattern but higher pitched. At the higher pitch I then end up with an E and F playing at the same time a few times (and in the same octave) because it's clashing with the fixed acid lines and bassline. Maybe I'm overthinking it but this is one of my first few goes at a layered harmony so I want to get the basics right.

In my teens I tried to make sort of techno tracks but they were incredibly primitive because I didn't understand music theory. I've just started to have another go at making music, aiming for something that is at least loosely overlapping the goa trance or psytrance genres. I doubt it will ever sound professional but it's for fun. I'm using the Phrygian Dominant scale. For a few parts of the tracks I'm using chord progressions (Strictly speaking they're arpeggios with a second note played alongside). Anyway on the track I'm currently working on I made an extra pattern with all the chords shifted up around 4 semitones (Altering a couple of the chords to keep them in Phrygian Dominant). I've got some acid lines playing at the same time as this and now on the new pattern a few notes of the arpeggios are only 1 semitone away from the notes in the acid lines, so it's dissonant. I can think of three different ways of dealing with this dissonance: 1. Leave it there. I'm not very comfortable with this because it will just sound like I've made a mistake. 2. Shift the arpeggios around or change the chords to match the acid lines. 3. Shift the pitch of the acid lines up at that point in the track, or otherwise change them so they stay in harmony with the new chords. I've read some people saying that normally at least the bassline stays rooted in a Goa trance track and other people saying a lot of tracks don't even use chord progressions at all, but I still want to use them. Basically my question is what's the norm in Goa trance, 1, 2 or 3? (I get that I have the creative freedom to try any of them to just see what sounds best, but on the other hand I don't have the best musical ear and I just want to get an idea for how this is commonly dealt with in the genre.)

https://beatspace-suntrip.bandcamp.com/album/songs-from-a-forgotten-memory Just listened to this album again but for the first time with good headphones, eyes closed and not too much background noise around ...and h-o-oly crap this is good! The effects they use on some of those sounds and melodies, it's sometimes like the musical elements are being painted onto little 3D objects which are then floating around in space - and I say this stone cold sober (well, maybe a bit tired and semi-fasting)! I totally missed how great this is before when I hadn't listened to it properly. Another thing I've noticed with different albums within the psy genres is how dramatically your mood and the setting can alter your appreciation of it. There have been some albums I just haven't "got" for years and then I listen to them again in a different context and suddenly love them. I was in a dark mood this evening and this hit the spot. It's awesome.

I like it, very high quality, but they've made so much music it will take some time to find the bits I like best. Alone was a good track. I couldn't find a whole album with female vocals. OK some of his stuff sounds excellent. I was loving Echoes of the Thalassic Deep. More space ambient than metal. I enjoyed listening to it. They're talented but to me it sounds more folky (don't know if that's the right word) than the stuff I would normally like. I like it OK as chillout background music (though doesn't have the gloomy atmosphere I had in mind). It reminds me a bit of Avrigus. Blutengel - The Princess, yeah I like this. I'll definitely check out more of their stuff (not really explored synth-pop stuff very much before). Ladytron, too poppy for me I think. Night Club are pretty cool as well, thanks for the suggestion. Closterkeller is awesome metal! She's got a great voice. Will definitely be listening to more of that. Thanks for all the suggestions everyone.

Sorry guys I've been really busy! Yes, I agree she sounds surprisingly similar to Aleah, and she has a lovely voice. OK, none of these sound like Aleah, but I did some searches for doom metal with female vocals and these are the ones that stood out: Avrigus - The Secret Kingdom: Sort of ambient / electronic doom metal. I liked it although it sounds a bit like video game music at times. Her vocals are more sort of choral / classical. It has a medieval feel. Promethean Misery: Worth a listen though it didn't appeal to me as much. Quite heavy on the piano from what I can remember. Avatarium - The Girl With The Raven Mask: Not normally my type of thing but I found it strangely catchy. The music and her style of singing (Nothing like Aleah!) has a sort of 70s psychedelic rock flavor.

It's kind of scary just how good these bots are getting.

It's awesome to find someone to talk to about this, thanks man. I've been looking too but it's harder for me because I only really like the more ambient kinds of metal and it's a genre I've hardly bothered to explore at all (Anette Olzon is the only suggestion I found so far but I haven't had time to listen to any of her stuff at all yet). No idea if you'll feel the same or if anyone else here agrees, but my other favorite female vocalist is Toni Halliday. I don't know if it counts as metal really, but check out the album: Curve - Gift. Her vocals on Hung Up are amazing. It sounds dark and really trippy. It sounds like layers of 303s, but it could be some really ingenious guitar effects. The track has a lot in common with Leftfield - Original which she also sang beautifully on. The only other music I've found so far with similar feelings to the above gets classed as trip hop. A couple of tracks on Crustation - Bloom aren't too bad. Definitely let me know if you find anything yourself though.

Good advice. At the same time we have to understand that we're (pretty much) all part of the system that's messing up the world. We can try and do what little we can to reduce our own impact. But feeling bad about it all is pointless when it's not motivating us to do better. Thanks for the extra recommendations.

Small world! I'd been meaning to write a post here in memory of Aleah "Jewel" Stanbridge so I really loved to find out that some other psy fans were equally enchanted by her beautiful vocals and also discovered, and enjoyed, Hour of the Nightingale. It doesn't surprise me that the album appeals to other fans of psytrance. It's incredible and really gets under my skin, which is all the more impressive given I don't generally count myself as a rock fan. Especially the title track which I never want to end. I absolutely adore Aleah's mystical vocals on Binah - Crescent Suns as well, one of the very best vocalists in all of psy.

Hey hope I'm not too late to join in this discussion. I can only contribute to the "echo chamber bullsh*t" (or I hope it's more of a deep connection between like-minded souls. Or is that like-souled minds? ) by saying I've also been feeling anxiety, stress and a bit of gloom over the past year - I mean, have you seen the state of the world lately? Those things do tend to make me post less on forums and then when I do post people rarely find the motivation to have much of a discussion with me anymore. Probably for the same kind of reasons. It's OK though, I won't give up posting or reading the forums. I've been meaning to start a thread here discussing underrated Goa for a few months. I'll try and make the effort to write it soon. In terms of the music I had a great year (a great 2 or 3 years in fact) but it's not mainly been from discovering newly released music so much as catching up and filling in the gaps on many years of amazing Goa trance that I totally missed out on the first time around (due to limited funds and limited knowledge of what was out there). Delights like RA (Man, I'm longing for another album), Elysium and MFG. As for new music Ott - Heads is one of the only new albums I can immediately think of that I heard last year. It was OK, good music, but I prefer the style of his earlier stuff. The year before, Artifact303 - From The Stars was good but I found the previous album had more memorable samples and melodies in it that it could use more of next time. I'd need to give both those albums more listens to really make up my mind though. Thanks for all your other suggestions of new music (+1 million for Indoor - wow!). I've got a lot to catch up on again, and that's great!

I agree that project is gone for good, which is a pity for us. I wonder if it's partly that moniker scaring off potential listeners, hence making up the name Shpongle and the puns in the track titles. The casual observer may not associate Shpongle with psychedelia. Mixing in other musical styles meant they could sell to fans of other genres like ambient and world music. It makes sense from a commercial perspective even if it's a bit disappointing to us old time goa fans. It's interesting that years ago when the Twisted Music website had a forum, someone created a poll asking who wanted a new Hallucinogen album after apparently saying to Simon there was demand for it and he would find 1000 people interested. He wrote that Simon agreed he'd do it if the poll got 1000 votes. It got to just over 400. Eventually the forum was taken off the website and I don't really blame Simon for that because there weren't many people on there, mostly old timers I think, and some of them were really being too critical of his new work which isn't great when he needs to promote it. Here it is, it was in 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20120402144231/http://www.twistedmusic.com/forums/viewthread/4082/ I notice now on the Twisted website they've even removed the Hallucinogen bio and pasted the Shpongle one over it. At one point I seem to remember Simon posting that he didn't really get time to do solo work as he was enjoying working with Raja Ram. However during the pandemic lockdown he recorded Flux and Contemplation which gives a taste of what his current solo work sounds like. He used his own name rather than Hallucinogen but it hardly matters. As I said, I like it.

Interesting stuff, this. There are other theories that could support consciousness carrying on, even if they're right about the universe ending up in heat death / Big Freeze. Look up Boltzmann brains. The idea is that if the universe remains in existence for eternity then eventually random quantum fluctuations in the vacuum of space will spontaneously create a thinking brain. I don't think many physicists believe in the theory but it does illustrate that eternity is long enough for all sorts of really strange things to possibly start happening, so maybe our current understanding of the universe will cease to apply. Roger Penrose also came up with a model where (as I understand it) a new universe is born from each heat death, called Conformal cyclic cosmology or CCC.

I wish him well. His mental health is more important. As you said, if he can afford now to make music for the love of it with a reduced need to make money from it, so much the better, I think. I enjoyed Flux and Contemplation, by the way.

Hope it's OK to wake old threads up here. I was a lurker when I read this one. I'd classify this track more as experimental / noise than psytrance but LSD Nikon by Jam & Spoon has distorted jazz or blues samples throughout along with a camera shutter sound and some weird stereo effects.

It's very hard to pick only one and it's always going to be difficult to quantify talent and weigh that above favouritism - the appreciation of music is always fairly subjective (which makes it weird that within a genre there's often so much agreement on who's best). Back in the day I'd have said Posford without question. Hallucinogen was pretty much my introduction to psytrance (I know some classify it as Goa trance. Really his work almost made its own genre). More recently I too have been highly impressed with the works of Christer Borge-Lunde (RA, Dimension 5, etc.) and he just seems to get better and better. Shift from Unearthly is now one of my all-time favorite tracks - exquisitely layered with an amazing memorable melody and barking 303 notes. For the most talented recent artist I have to mention Rita Raga. She's also hugely underrated. Her Mystic Melodies album is a lovely mixture of mellow downtempo and intense fullon remixes. She sings beautifully on her tracks often with deeply inspiring lyrics and she plays multiple instruments as well.