The job of a DJ is to take individual tunes out of the collective whirlpool, data flow, and create an information chain-reaction-statement out of it. And when the artists hear their music reinterpreted in a mix, their tunes take on a life of their own. One tune can have magnificent bearing and influence upon the direction of a…
After playing four festivals this season—Sacred Earth, Entheos, Eclipse, and All Stars—I am gearing up for my fifth and final open air event of the season: Harvest. Barring any unforeseen changes to the schedule I will be playing the closing set at the psytrance stage, a perfect time for the techno/psytrance crossover style that I have been so into this…
This set was recorded live at Eclipse 2009, a psytrance festival held at the Bonnet Rouge campground in Ste-Thérèse-de-la-Gatineau, Québec. My time slot was 9pm to 11pm on Friday, the opening night. Since people were just arriving I opted to play a deep and driving blend of techno and progressive psytrance to warm up the crowd and get everyone excited…
I return again to share a 25 recommendations from the progressive side of psytrance–where the genre bleeds into cutting edge techno. “Progressive” is a word with several meanings; it describes a specific sound as well as an approach to writing music. Truly progressive music must integrate new ideas and influences to remain viable. Consequently, there is little in the way…
Auxiliary Magazine is an alternative fashion, music, and lifestyle publication based in the United States. Back in March both Ekoplex and I were interviewed by Digitalgeist (Alex Kourelis) for an article entitled “My Label is the Internet,” a feature on netlabels. You can find the finished article on page 27 of the April 2009 issue. Additionally, Auxiliary…
The activity of making and listening to music involves in something that is never merely personal. In this sense, music is like a language; when we ‘speak’ or ‘listen’ in musical language, we participate in a signifying system that is communally shared and defined, something that is larger than our own use of it and that we enter…
This set was recorded live at Darkrave vs Panic, a special one-off event held on the 2009 May long weekend in Toronto, Canada. My mission was to showcase the hard and nasty side of psychedelic trance often referred to as “darkpsy”, a style that was not often heard on Toronto dance floors. I try to ease it up near the…
In a recent article entitled Too Much Free, marketing guru Seth Godin suggests that “free by itself is no longer enough to guarantee much of anything”. Godin distinguishes between “breakthrough free”, which is interesting precisely because it hasn’t been done before, and “sample-this free”, which leads to diminishing returns for content providers as people are increasingly inundated with free…
The future of the music industry is a hotly debated subject, as just about anyone knows. Fingertips weighs in with a critical commentary of some of the more popular alternatives regularly lauded in the blogosphere, taking the time to skewer the “free music” model (not having to pay for recorded music), the “access” model (free or paid…
Andrew Dubber has an interesting new post on who to send promos to, an issue that many labels and artists struggle with these days. Dubber likens the traditional model to a lottery, whereby promos are sent out to prominent gatekeepers of taste (reviewers, radio hosts, and so on) in the hopes that someone will actually crack the cellophane and…