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…
In Trance is an obscure early Goa trance album by Israeli pioneers Guy Sebbag and Gal Carmy. Although Carmy has few other credits to his name, Sebbag regularly collaborated with Israeli heavyweights Har-El Prussky, Yan-Iv Haviv, Avi Nissim, and Lior Perlmutter (better known as Astral Projection). Despite these associations this particular album is often overlooked, possibly…
Lucky People Center is an obscure Swedish media collective active throughout the 1990s. They are perhaps most known for their film International (presently available for viewing on YouTube), but they also made several interesting audio-only releases in a variety of styles. This particular album is an eclectic jumble, meandering from chill out and ambient techno to progressive house…
This is an obscure compilation of remixes for Soft Ballet, a Japanese electro pop band by some of the finest names in IDM, electro, and downbeat techno. Autechre, Carl Craig, Plaid, and Global Communication appear here with intriguing and unusual interpretations of the original source material, but I’d like to highlight Greg Hunter’s ambiguously-credited…