DoktorG

Super track with good production and lovely smooth and delicate synths. I don't know the track and I don't have time to help you search, but for what it is worth the style reminds me of Cass v Slide. Around the millenium Christopher Cutbush and Peter Martin were known as Cass v Slide and they did similar sounding melodic and gentle prog tracks and remixes; the style is similar.

I am not a fan of full on, and there's a lot of South African stuff I'm not really into, but both of these Shift tracks are good and my vinyl sounds fantastic - excellent recording, mastering and pressing with kicking bass. Shiva Space Tech didn't put out many vinyls, but the ones they did sound fabulous.

Super beat in this track; I'm not so keen on the melody that comes in at the 3 minute mark because it sounds nintendo plasticky, but otherwise this is a winner Astral Projection-style track and I appreciated the breathing sounds at the end - nice touch. It strikes me that mastering and pressing to vinyl in this era helped to make early Goa sound less like arcade games because all the sounds became a bit warmer, more organic, more delicate.

Xenomorph Netherverse 2024 Suntrip Records 1 Sinister Contours 9:17 2 Dying Sun (Sol Aeternus Mix) 8:03 3 War In Heaven 8:35 4 Negative Time (-L Di/-Dt Mix) 8:20 5 No Beginning No End 8:39 6 Nebula Of Souls 7:47 7 Subdimensional Anomaly 8:38 8 Abode Of The Damned 8:46 9 Netherverse 8:38 So Mark Petrick comes in 2024 with Netherverse, his fourth album and the one to accompany 2023's superb ep "Negative Time". Is it any cop? "Sinister Contours" telegraphs Petrick's self-evident intention: he is for sure following the left hand path. This means a heavily arpeggiated track with a threatening minor melody. There'll be no easy upliftment on this album; and no cheese! But isn't the whole gothic darkness thing quite cheesy? Well yeah, if we are talking Twilight movies with aristocratic pretty boy vampires who bling in the sunlight, or perhaps campy Tim Burton style goth-lite. But we are not talking that here. No easy joy, no happy endings, on this sinister path, but plenty of eerie and other disquieting feelings. A "Dying Sun (Sol Aeternus Mix)" is probably my favourite track on the album. Here we seem to be on a space ship on a quest for a new home and we dive deep into a black hole, or something like that, indicated by the "our sun is dying... we are dust" sample and another spaceship sample (Petrick is a master of the appropriate sample - he really tells stories with his samples, which are carefully chosen). We sense here how cosmic Xenomorph's vision for this album is. The production quality on this track has to be heard on a good hifi to fully appreciate it - mindblowing. EPIC! A+++ "War In Heaven" starts off with a simple four-note melody that summons up fairy tale horror, but at the half way mark the track shifts up a gear and achieves take off with sawing synths. The "war in heaven" sample states succintly Petrick's apparent philosophy that the tension between good and evil is the propulsive force that drives the universe. A dance floor monster! A+ "Negative Time" is from the accompanying ep of that name. Plenty of pretty tinkles and juddering synth melodies here make for a track that is almost progressive trance - a more mellow track than the ones that preceded it, quite blissed out and dreamy. A "No Beginning No End" is an ourobouros in both concept and in big swirling melodies. These melodies do seem like spiralling nebulae. At 3.15 it turns darker with some delightfully chewy bass 303 and then the spiralling begins again, growing out of the darkness. Another epic trancer with massive melodies. Petrick has worked hard on making these melodies as echoing and big in scale as possible. A "Nebula Of Souls" - I love this slightly more minimal track. It features mysterious vaporous synths at the start, which are utterly beautiful and uplifting in a creepy way. There's a whap-whap sound that continues throughout, giving propulsion; it builds to a grinding climax and then ends on moody cello - simply stunning. A+ "Subdimensional Anomaly" starts with twinkling synths (lots of those sounds on this album) and then builds towards twisting leads against a stumping beat. There's a lovely sense of calm and observation behind this track. A "Abode Of The Damned" is as dark as its title, beginning with a sample about a graveyard and its ghosts. There's a great climbing bass arpeggio that kicks things off and then we have minor key choirs so beloved of dungeon synth and black metal and used quite regularly on Cassandra's Nightmare. This track could easily have been from that first album. At the four minute mark the bass goes into double time and here comes the growly acid that slowly morphs into long pads. Yo party people, are you ready to chew your tongue off and lose your shit? I'd love to see what this track would do to a dancefloor. A+ "Netherverse" - the come down track. Vaporous spacey synth, twangy echoes, a slow beat, eventually builds to the expected long and melancholic pads. I'm a huge fan of sloa Goa, but this is not an especially outstanding example, coming across as an unfinished fragment, and is the least good track on the album for me. B So is it any cop? You betcha it is. What I particularly liked about this album is that Xenomorph has not stood still, unsurprisingly perhaps as so many years have passed. This is a unique lighter and more cosmic album in his discography. Terrifying, eerie, haunting, sinister, at moments, but also full of cosmic beauty, Xenomorph's vision achieves maturity here. It seems that his albums are all quite different, despite there being strong similarities (not least the superb production and sound quality of all of them). I characterise them like this: Cassandra's Nightmare 1998: cinematic horror trance Qlippoth 2003: spirit possession Demagoguery of the Obscurants 2007: the conspiracy album Netherverse 2024: cosmic darkness and light In this fourth album, it seems to me that Petrick goes scifi and reaches for the stars, seeing the dialectic between light and darkness, matter and antimatter, creation and destruction, as the cosmic turbine that powers all. His vision has become epic and fully realised by this point it seems to me in that it appreciates all, including the disgusting and repressed, and values all equally. A divinely balanced cosmic vision. Does such a vision appeal to you? It is a bit early in the year, but I have no doubt that this is already one of my records of the year. Actually, my only strong criticism of this album and the ep is the cover art - weak in both cases. Finally, I am inspired to look back over his oeuvre as the body of work that triggered an entire (sub-)genre: darkpsy. You could argue against this notion, pointing out the other great dark Goa albums that helped ignite darker psychedelic trance: Sandman's Witchcraft, Orichalcum and the Deviant Orichalcum and the Deviant, Cydonia Fear of a Red Planet, UX Ultimate Experience, and so on. This would be correct: all played their part. Nevertheless, nothing was nearly as dark and scary as Cassandra's Nightmare and it remains the keystone album. So Xenomorph's latest album deserves to be seen in this wider context as part of the genre that his first album kickstarted. Amazing what can come out of watching a few horror movies and being open-minded enough to meld trance with the gothic, industrial, and metal. ~*~

I can't help but comment on the cover art. A cartoon banger on chitty bang bang? What looks like a giant sausage is tied to the roof of a VW Beetle. And then a gaggle of aliens and freaks watching some Victorian gentleman wrapped in a saddhu's cloak presenting a chalkboard lecture next to a supposedly Hindu temple on "No karma, just physics"? But physics is karma; Newton's third law "action and reaction are equal and opposite" is as concise a statement of the law of karma as any. I thought hey maybe I'm being uncharitable so I took a brief listen to the first track - I'm afraid I didn't last more than about 15 seconds. Wtf that is some hilarious cover art and it seems the contents are equally dire🤣

Psychoid "Manic Organic" Koyote Records 2000

I listened to Codex last night on vinyl - I love this album and it is the one closest to the first, as I said. Brian Eno? The golden era for this artist is 1978 to 1984. Anything from then is great. My personal favourites include "Ambient 1: Music for Airports", "Ambient 4: On Land", "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", "Fourth World: Possible Musics", "Apollo" and "Pearl". However, he's been having an Indian summer of sorts in more recent years, and some of these releases like "The Equatorial Stars", "Small Craft on a Milk Sea", "The Ship", and "Foreverandevernomore" are good too. I highly recommend O Yuki Conjugate, especially Equator. Have fun listening...

All good; I will listen to Flux again. As you say it is a departure and I wouldn't really compare it to Shpongle in that it is mostly a fully ambient album - I just thought it was quite limp compared to Klaus Schulze, or Tangerine Dream, or Brian Eno, or Lustmord, or O Yuki Conjugate, or other ambient greats. All the Shpongle albums are excellent and Nothing Lasts might be the most obviously psychedelic of them all. I liked Codex VI because it is dubby and a bit darker and reminds me of Are you Shpongled?, which is still my favourite and the one I listen to most. I've also listened a lot to Ineffable Mysteries; I'm not sure why.

Thanks for alerting us to this. Lots of brief, flippant answers in this interview. Simon is a proper humble human, so of course he's hypercritical of his own work. Also, he has genuinely moved on from the Hallucinogen days so it is faintly embarrassing juvenilia for him. Ironically, however, for me "Flux and Contemplation" is by far his weakest work yet. I couldn't even bring myself to buy it, and I was really keen to do so until I heard it. Similarly, Underworld's "Second Toughest in the Infants" and Leftfield's "Leftism" and "Rhythm & Stealth" are classics, but since then...

Ooo the speculation is tantalising...

Thanks for those replies. "Vinyl-only" would be more grammatically correct to indicate tracks released only on vinyl before, but hey the Twisted copywriter might not be either the most grammatical or the most correct writer ever 😉 It seems we will just have to wait and see in the absence of more specific information. Everyone seems to have loved the album remasters, so hopefully this will be just as good. Now could we please have a vinyl release of "In Dub" and "In Dub (Live)"! ~*~

The press release for the Hallucinogen singles box set states: "You won’t want to miss this phenomenal collectors’ edition, which will include the only vinyl pressings of some obscure Hallucinogen masterpieces alongside familiar favourites, all beautifully remastered and in gorgeous sound on 180g vinyl!". I'm curious as to exactly what tracks never before released on vinyl it will contain - does anyone know? ~*~

Back cover of 3xlp Transdimensional signed by Nik Wenham and Kerry Palmer.

If you listen to Hawkwind and Ozric Tentacles, then those vibes are clear in the intensity, the loong progressions, and spacey elements in Transdimensional. Goa didn't come from nowhere... I also love Second Phaze by the way, not to mention RA, but these have less of those prog/space rock aspects.

Loving the home made "decor" - reminds me of the diy parties we threw... I'm just wondering what track had guitar on it? Perhaps it was just played live? This is not an entirely arbitrary question - D5 had their roots in psychedelic space rock (think Hawkwind, Ozric Tentacles etc that morphed into Planet Dog and the crusty festival tradition in the UK). This is perhaps especially apparent on the brilliant and highly desirable 12"s that came out on Intastella Records around the time of Transdimensional. If you listen to tracks like "Transfix" and "Trans Xpress" this space rock and prog rock influence is clear, though it is there in the epic aspect of all their tracks. ~*~