#2497 Shpongle - Are You Shpongled?

Goa trance week, bonus round!

A lot of the best-regarded albums from this scene have this feeling of being beamed from space - of existing without the need for the filthy hands of man. But Shpongle's opus feels packed with effort, with ambition, with a kitchen sink blitz to blow your mind with every sound imaginable. At times the it's wildly successful, with a better album flow than most; and those last three tracks are truly alien, often terrifying.

But there's a failure to connect somehow. Is it that awful name, somehow worse than the likes of Dimension 5 and Paradise Connection? I can't imagine talking to someone who says they're a huge Shpongle fan without assuming that I'm about to have a really boring conversation -- the Dave Mathews Band of synths, the Humphreys McGee of beats. Or maybe it's just that production weight of it all, overflowing with throat singing and chopped robot vocals and shimmering endlessnesses piled like 2x4s, the album shouting in your face ARE YOU TRIPPING OUT OR WHAT 3/5

#2492 Ubar Tmar - Fusion

Goa week pt 6!

A happier, goofier, dancier, weirder, woolier, more experimental, more sci-fi sample-packed take on trance -- just fuckit lets go for it. My ramshackle notes say things like:
 - colorful _moves_ instead of slow shifts
 - harder edged switch-flips
 - delightfully skittery!
 - actual guitars! flashes of rockism
 - playful squelches, organic energy again and again
 - nice momentum heading into the last song, this does not end with the whimper so many of these albums seem to

The kind of album that leaves you grasping for summary points, and golly don't I love that, getting back to the true, wriggly spirit of acid arpeggiation. Aside: man, for all the focus on experience, these Goa trance albums fucking suck at album-scale pacing, almost every one just dropping you off at the bus stop mid-trip. Dicks.

I'm not sure this is actually the best of the lot, but its the one I'm most intrigued to return to 4/5

#2491 Pleiadians - IFO

Goa week pt 5!

Held up as the greatest goa/trance/electronic/music album of all time in certain circles, this certainly fucking goes for it. More outer space journey than most, more for easy chair journeys than dancing maybe. It comes for your shit, big beats and doubledup synths and a blitz of subtle layers to overwhelm and overcome. Inventive, squirrely, with its own jittery energy, well-herded sounds that pick the details of their motions themselves. Far more live, more ungraspable than the rest

I was exhausted by the end, but I've been spending 48 hours burning off homebuying stress listening to nonstap trance, so who'm I to judge. An undeniable keeper 4/5

#2490 Paradise Connection - Paradise Connection

Goa week pt. 4: this time you can feel the structure showing through a bit much. The gates, the bandpasses, the slow shifts in the beats. It's built for dancing, more so than most, and it feels by the book somehow, as clumsily under-artful as its cover art (even by the tacky "hey! computer graphics!" standards of the 90's). I dig this style, and it gets by, but you can do better 3/5

#2489 Dimension 5 - Transdimensional

More so than most from Goa week, this is shameless about bringing the big four unts unts unts unts, hitting you right_in_the_center_of_the_chest over and over again. Even if you're not programming in python at a million wpm, even if you don't know what that means, you will - you'll feel it.

It's a bold-move pickup artist, and if it doesn't work you'll roll your eyes at its synthetic, cloying maneuvers in the dark, its tacky scifi samples, its stereotypical tranciness. But if it gets its hooks in, shit, I don't know -- there's an upside to all that boldness. Once you take your sneer off, this shit taps into your soul, and then you're rolling 4/5

#2488 X-Dream - Our Own Happiness

Goa Trance pt 2.

Effective at trance, but...disorienting, like a trip where I wish I hadn't, where I'm in a little over my head and I want to get off. Admirable effect! It's a heady piece of music, undercutting you with offcenter tones and subtly suffocating production, but man I was kinda glad when it was over 3/5

#2487 Astal Projection - Dancing Galaxy

Goa Trance week!

Man this shit is good work music. It took over my life briefly and entirely; so packed with understated minor-key emotional manipulations and subconscious attitude retunings.

First up, a good middle ground starting point: sci-fi samples, unts unts thumps, proggy progressions, heady ambitions, but all in moderation. It's hooky as shit, super well balanced, ridiculously enjoyable electronic music perfectly aligned with your body's frequencies. A great place to start, in retrospect, and for all you just embarking 4/5