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Psytrance Guide

psytranceguide.com

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Re: Psytrance Guide

#201

Post by dzolob »

panagathon wrote: post #101
dzolob wrote: post #37

Oh, boy. This post sent me way back in time, and I just realized psyshop closed its doors in 2021. It used to be my catalog for 0day psy mp3 to hunt in dc++ channels, where I used to hang for days, waiting for a slot to open. I think I still have some of those releases, and I sure was able to get a good chunk of Psytopia catalog. Dimension 5, Astral Projection, Infected Mushroom, Analog Pussy, Blue Planet Corporation…

I love Mystery of the Yeti. What a great couple of albums. Surprised no Shpongle on the lists

Hallucinogen/Shpongle/AnyPosford is always top, along with Astral Projection and other household names, but at this time (I’m talking 99-04+, when I was knee deep) there where plenty of efforts by so many people that somehow ended as cds and were sold on psyshop [0]. Some acts got to release two or three records in one year, all full of original songs and an hour+ long.

Around that time, I became aware of 0day mp3 “scene”, and for some reason I became obsessed with getting all my psy/goa from scene releases. My day went back like this: check for weekly new releases on psyshop; monitor mp3 scene releases log dumps leaks on sites like mp3kings and others, and once the record was released, go hang on dc++ psyside, psyhub and other psy hubs and hit the search until someone appeared with the files. Then you could queue the files and idle until it got spread sufficiently or some “connected” user or admin was kind enough to grant you a slot.

My method worked so well that I started getting requests from top users and admins to grant slots to get the latest stuff. I guess xkcd describes it better [1].

Some of the acts that got my attention or i can remember are:

* Blue Planet Corporation * Phoney Orphans * Ticon * Son Kite * Flying Buddhas * Penta * Minilogue * Shiva Chandra * Shiva Shidappu * Astrix * Vibrasphere * Green nuns of the revolution * GMS * Talamasca * Total Eclipse * Astralasia * Cosma

…and I could keep goin.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200929135452/https://www.psysh...

[1] https://xkcd.com/1095/

Re: Psytrance Guide

#202

Post by Workaccount2 »

RRRA wrote: post #157
0xEF wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a new-comer to the genres, myself, despite my age. For some reason the D&B/trances/technos scene never clicked with me back in my metal days, but it fills a gap that needed filling in my life now. That said, there's plenty of great modern artists, too...however, some amazing stuff was happening back in the day that I missed out on, and it is a treat to discover that now.

Simon Posford enters the chat

My top artist of all music artists.

Everything that dude touched turned to gold. I've never found another artist who made music as unique and complex as him. Listening to Shpongle, its basically impossible to place the time period its from. It's totally unique music in it's own category.

Re: Psytrance Guide

#204

Post by macNchz »

Jedd wrote: post #86
macNchz wrote: post #11

I’ve enjoyed listening to psychedelic electronic music while programming since discovering Shpongle twenty years ago. I feel like it helps my brain get into the right mode somehow. I’m not familiar with the definitions of a lot of these sub-taxonomies but interested in listening to them! I have a coding playlist I’ve put together over the years that is more towards the psybient/chillout end but includes some trance a…

Thanks for sharing that playlist. Happily a fair few of those come up with the little green heart - a very encouraging sign. Reviewing the playlist highlighted that Spotify, for some reason, no longer has Smoked Glass and Chrome (Blumenkraft) available, or at least it's not available in AU / for me. The rest of the album remains available, but that track is just spectacularly good. I bought the album off bandcamp age…

Yeah several of the tracks are unavailable to me in the US. It’s one of my least favorite things about the move towards streaming music generally–the ability to listen to music I love being subject to the whims of business people and lawyers’ disagreements.

I still have a large digital library of “owned” music (the core of this playlist I think dates back to files purchased from the iTunes Music Store the first year it launched in 2003), but the convenience of streaming has gotten me out of the habit of maintaining it.

Re: Psytrance Guide

#205

Post by macNchz »

dzolob wrote: post #39
macNchz wrote: post #11

I’ve enjoyed listening to psychedelic electronic music while programming since discovering Shpongle twenty years ago. I feel like it helps my brain get into the right mode somehow. I’m not familiar with the definitions of a lot of these sub-taxonomies but interested in listening to them! I have a coding playlist I’ve put together over the years that is more towards the psybient/chillout end but includes some trance a…

Try Hallucinogen’s In Dub, and In Dub Live. I once saw Simon in a massive rave as Hallucinogen from 4am to 8am and Shpongle from 12pm to 3pm. Those Gamma Goblins still travel trough my spine.

Great album–there are two tracks on that playlist from it!

Re: Psytrance Guide

#206

Post by mlyle »

stavros wrote: post #113
duped wrote: post #72

Something not said explicitly but to me, is the characteristic sound of psy-x is the synth bass line. It's a very simple sound that you can make in any subtractive synth - you start with a single saw, add a lowpass filter, and instead of using the amplitude envelope to control the dynamics or "pluck" of the sound you modulate the cutoff of the filter by an envelope with a very short attack, quick decay, and low or ze…

Ah yes, of course.

So, in English:

A sawtooth is a wave that looks like the blade of a saw. It is pretty close to sinusoidal, so it sounds somewhat like a single tone, but there is some distortion and harmonics; not nearly as much as you'd get from a square wave, though.

A synthesizer has an envelope generator, to model how real instruments increase in volume, keep a steady volume while active, and then decay. The envelope is usually multiplied by the underlying waveform, like a sawtooth, to give it these characteristics.

If you have a musical keyboard, pressing a key chooses the frequency of the sawtooth, and the moment that the key is pressed and released trigger the envelope generator and choose its shape.

For the psytrace bass line-- instead of the envelope generator being multiplied by the signal (and controlling its amplitude directly), instead it is used to sweep a filter. How much of the distortion and harmonics you hear from the sawtooth changes over the course of the note and gives the bassline its distinctive sound.

Re: Psytrance Guide

#207

Post by stavros »

specproc wrote: post #198
stavros wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, but I can still joke about how I didn't understand anything from a comment on something I have no experience with.

My comment also in jest. It's this sort of stuff that makes it so good. Nothing like eavesdropping on a highly technical conversation in an esoteric field. Love it.

Sorry, maybe my comment didn't come across appropriately: I agree with you, I loved that comment, I was just joking about how over my head it went!

Re: Psytrance Guide

#208

Post by Workaccount2 »

apt-get wrote: post #103

As other people have said, it's a shame that so much of psytrance relegates itself to being "electronic dance music", playing off the same clichés and subdividing itself so much such that the most minute production details are catalogued. While you could reasonably say that about any electronic genre, Psytrance really ups the level of having any given median track sounding indistinguishable. Yeah, the sound design ex…

Great list, thanks

Re: Psytrance Guide

#209

Post by eequah9L »

0xEF wrote: post #144
globalise83 wrote: post #116

Having grown up with psytrance, I find that 25 years later the modern stuff just sounds like a cheap, low-effort pastiche of what psytrance used to be. And... I just became my Dad.

I'm a new-comer to the genres, myself, despite my age. For some reason the D&B/trances/technos scene never clicked with me back in my metal days, but it fills a gap that needed filling in my life now. That said, there's plenty of great modern artists, too...however, some amazing stuff was happening back in the day that I missed out on, and it is a treat to discover that now.

FWIW even in my metal days I recognized that the kind of (mostly black) metal that I enjoyed was fairly close to some of my brother's techno that I happened liking. All those droning guitars, layers of synth and screeching vocals are, experience-wise, quite similar to a deep techno DJ set. A music to work to, rather than to analyze -- I guess that's the value I find in it.

Also, I don't listen to hardcore / horror core techno much, but I find it striking how the artists adopt the imagery and themes that I would traditionally associate with metal: horrors, monsters, final battles for future of humanity, etc.

Re: Psytrance Guide

#210

Post by macNchz »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #174
aliasxneo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of H.U.V.A Network and Carbon Based Lifeforms. I'm mainly a trance lover, but when I get tired of it, these are the two I switch over to and start expanding from.

> I see a lot of H.U.V.A Network and Carbon Based Lifeforms. This [0] is more psyambient, isn't? I hate typecasting into genres, but I always saw that as the more chill-side of that version of EDM whereas psytrance was more like Alwoods [1], E-Mantra or Capsula etc... I spent many HDDs streaming SomaFM and got to listen to a ton of it, but there was a notable difference when those tracks drop in not just tempo/BPM an…

Definitely more of psy chill/ambient than trance. I tend to like moving between psytrance and psybient–too many hours of trance alone makes me feel like my brain is vibrating inside my skull!
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