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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.