Twisted sent seismic shockwaves throughout the scene when it was released on Dragonfly Records, and its many-layered lysergic soundscapes continue to dazzle and bewilder listeners today. Although Simon Posford’s timeless debut album is renowned for being one of the darker examples of Goa trance circa 1995 there are many moments of sheer unadulterated euphoria, often in the midst of…
Last Train to Lhasa is perhaps the most ambitious album in Banco de Gaia’s extensive discography. The original release was a double-CD, but there are many other versions floating around, including the definitive 20th Anniversary Edition released on four discs in 2015. So what have we here? Ambient techno meets world music, essentially. It is very much in…
Numinous Island is a collaboration between ambient techno and trance producer Susumu Yokota and psychedelic trance pioneer Ray Castle, one of the original DJs at the beach parties of Goa in the late 1980s. Produced in Tokyo in the summer of 1994 (a studio session that also yielded the Sonic Sufi album Sacramental), this album contains 20…
This post introduces my Essential Selections project, a sprawling series of lists of music I enthusiastically recommend, or at least find interesting and noteworthy. The scope of the project is quite broad: it spans the entire history of underground electronic music from the late 1980s to present and includes any sort of music I might play under the name…
Ben Watkins’ second album as Juno Reactor is a collaborative extravaganza drawing upon the burgeoning talents of Paul Jackson (Genetic/Voodoo People), Stephane Holweck (of Total Eclipse), Mike Maguire, Johann Bley, and Jens Waldebäck (Cwithe). The album is named for the final sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and most tracks are anchored by…
Despite being listed as an “EP” or “mini album”, Transwave’s debut on Step 2 House Records clocks in at 63 minutes in length, more than enough time to demonstrate the raw talent of French producers Frédéric Holyszewski (later known as Deedrah) and Christof Drouillet (Absolum). Most of these tunes sound rough around the edges; the production…
Desideratum is a mammoth 2CD album released under the name Synaesthesia. Behind this project is the prolific Canadian duo Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber, better known as Front Line Assembly and Delerium. It is similar in style to Embody, also released in 1995, but has a slightly different range and temperament. Here the producers continue their…
The second edition of Trust In Trance is an important milestone in Israeli trance history. Although billed as a compilation featuring four separate acts, this release was the work of three producers: Lior Perlmutter, Avi Nissim, and Yan-Iv Haviv (with a guest appearance by DJ Jörg Kessler on the eternal Mahadeva). In their shifting permutations as…
The debut compilation from TIP Records captures the essence of Goa trance in all its shimmering, hallucinogenic glory, at its moment of stylistic genesis. No formal name appears on the release but initial test pressings described it as the “Yellow LP”. Nowadays we generally call it TIP Yellow or the Yellow Compilation, as it was the first of many…
This curious album unites the skillful audio manipulations of Mind Over Rhythm (Alan C. Hill and Dave Hill, presumably brothers), who provide roughly two-thirds of the material, with several contributions by IDM legends Plaid. The style is firmly rooted in the British tradition of warm, analog techno experimentations, focusing more on regular beat patterns than the abstract…