Review: Qattara - Abduction V02

Me, a week ago:

When I'm in a summery mood, there's only style of music worth hearing - early '90s progressive house!

As you can probably guess, the fine weather from last week continued, and despite owning absolutely loads of early '90s progressive house already, I simply had to have some more. The result was a second hand purchase of this, one of the few mid-90s prog compilations I don't already own. The same thing happens every summer - I get bored of re-listening to the same few trusty Sasha/Digweed/Dave Seaman mixes and convince myself that something more obscure and decidedly less classic is what I need.

Qattara were a short-lived and vaguely remembered trance duo, comprised of the vaguely remembered Alex Whitcombe and the decidedly more well known Andy Cato, who at this time was best known as progressive house producer Big C but went on to worldwide fame as part of Groove Armada. In all honesty, I have absolutely no idea how much these two DJ'd back in 1997, but they certainly weren't in the progressive elite. Consequently, this is one of those slightly odd '90s compilations that are put together by part-time DJs who were probably quite rough behind the decks, and find some... interesting routes between tracks on studio compilations.

Big C's mix on disc one is particularly strange. The tracklist lists Collapse - My Love as a "Link" rather than giving it a proper track number, and David Holmes' remix of Smokebelch is played twice, the second time listed as a "Reprise". I've never seen either of these terms used on a tracklist before, and to be perfectly honest it's extremely rare to hear a DJ play the same mix of the same track twice in the same set, especially at random points as it happens here. You occasionally see a DJ open and close a CD with the same track as a framing device, but the deployment here of Smokebelch seems to do nothing more than fit the tracks together harmonically.

The first six tracks of the set are all oldies that would have been extremely played out even by 1997 - classics don't come much bigger than Papua New Guinea, Chime and Energy Flash. (If you didn't immediately know the artists based on those track titles, consider yourself a newb and trudge shame-faced away to Discogs. Don't come back until you can tell me the difference between drum 'n bass and jungle.) From there, there's a cheesy ambient interlude courtesy of Collapse, then we move into some contemporary chunky progressive trancey-house, with lots of uplifting pianos and outdoorsy ethnic samples. Then it goes back into Smokebelch and gets funkier and more heads-down for most of the remainder.

Whitcombe's disc follows a similar pattern, and the weirdness here is less to do with unusual deployment and labelling of tracks and more to do with some mixing that is extremely rudimentary. There's another barrage of classics to open on, this time slightly more obscure. Now, old tracks are pretty tough to mix, and I've mixed the gorgeous Spooky rerub of Dr Atomic's Schudelfloss first-hand, but one thing you cannot excuse on a studio mix is key-clashes, especially from a DJ who also professes to be a musician. And yet the mix into Schudelfloss is just plain out of key. Okay, often you can get away with the bass being slightly out of key, but strings and pads almost always sound sour, and Schudelfloss opens with what should be a gorgeous nimbus of ethereal pad work, but in actuality sounds like a sharp downpour of acrid cow's piss, because it's all completely out of key.

Having fucked up the mix on one of my all-time favourite tracks, Whitcombe then bulldozes out of Visions Of Shiva's early '90s trance delicacy Perfect Day into Sasha's stomping remix of Horse - Careful, thus categorically ruining any flow he may have fashioned. From there he proceeds to build up a set of pretty well known progressive trance. Café Del Mar, Forbidden Fruit, Set In Stone, Hidden Sun Of Venus... all very standard for 1997. The closing stretch does reveal some rarities, which is why I bought this damn thing - I'd never heard the Outdare remix of Dum Dum's One Earth Beat before, and I actually like it almost as much as the First Life remix Sasha and Diggers used to cane. 7th Sense - Himalayan Dub is also a nice closer to an extremely uneven ride.

On the face of it, this compilation is a good mix of classics I already know and love, and some lesser known remixes and rarities, which should amount to a perfect, unchallenging sunny day listen. Sadly, some weird and duff mixing from Whitcombe and some bizarre programming from Cato turns it into a somewhat frustrating ride. To be perfectly honest, I don't even think this was mixed live on the decks - there are definite traces of editing and a few transitions that sound suspiciously digital. Either way, on a studio mix you should get the basics right - if you can't find a way between two tracks, don't just throw the crossfader and certainly don't clash the keys on your prettiest and best tracks. I know there's a relevant audience of about five people in the world for what I'm about to say next, but if you've seen this compilation before and thought about buying it... it's not really worth the £10 you'll pay second-hand. The tracks are good, but you'll already know most of them, and there's probably a Sasha set somewhere you haven't downloaded yet.

Genre: '90s Progressive
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 6/10

Review: Petar Dundov - Ideas From The Pond

It's official - I'm now so trendy I'm reviewing albums that aren't even released yet. Petar Dundov's terribly titled album Ideas From The Pond (I sure hope that sounds more poetic in Croatian) is available to stream at the moment on Resident Advisor. No, I won't link to Resident Advisor. They're like my arch-enemies. Go search yourself, it's not hard. Or just buy the album, if you're reading this review in one of the infinite number of points of time that aren't the week I wrote it. It's good enough to buy blind, trust me. Go on. Trust me. No? Okay, I'll explain a bit more, while you begin illegally torrenting it.

Petar Dundov is a Croation melodic techno artist who has apparently been a major figure in the Croatian dance music scene since the country came into existence in 1994. The verdict on this album is basically "trance for people who don't like trance", which is generally a good description. I think most people in the dance scene actually like the idea of trance, as in the idealised conception of melodic, ultra-repetitive electronic space music. There have been plenty of pseudo-trance recreations in the past decade or so, most notably the whole "neo trance" thing, and now the increased tendency for arp-y melodic Detroit techno stuff coming out of labels like Tresor. The dance music community, even the bearded, scarfed, immacuately-tasteful part of it, wants trance back. They still play Sasha's Xpander occasionally and sigh deeply. They want to be tranced. What puts them off is the polluted, desecrated corpse of a genre that is the real trance scene, 90% horrific Euro-cheddar excess and emotionally stunted, E-blunted druggies and teenagers. It turns out the Dundov actually used to produce trance back in the early '90s when it was actually trance-inducing, and he knows how to use the sharp end of an arpeggio or two. Clearly he is a man to take the hipsters to outer space.

Ideas From The Pond is a techno record, not a trance one, but like a lot of melodic techno it's clearly been influenced by trance. Dundov's music is generally extremely melodic and spaced out, but on this album he takes it to another level. All of these tracks go on for fucking years, and the incremental development of musical ideas is as hypnotic as it gets. This is perhaps the ultimate example of everything potentially limiting about dance music production - fixed tempo, constant beat, loop-dominated composition, extreme repetition - being stretched and pushed into something genuinely and compellingly deep and interesting.

This isn't the album for you if you like your music to be rapid and ever-changing and poppy. Then again, this probably isn't the blog for you, full stop. I can understand that some people might see this as strictly background music, or a particularly complex strain of ambient. I certainly couldn't imagine myself dancing to it, or playing it at a house party. But then, I never get to put my music on at parties. People don't want to hear weird trippy electronic shit at house parties, for some baffling reason. But if, like me, you like music where you can put it on loud on the headphones and just lay back and space the fuck out, then you should get on this album. It might just go down as one of the finest albums of 2012. I still think the title is shit, though.

Genre: Melodic techno.
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 9/10

Review: Yum Yum - The Remixes

It's been remarkably warm and sunny this past weekend, and even though none of the trees have leaves yet I'm in a distinctly summery mood. And when I'm in a summery mood, there's only style of music worth hearing - early '90s progressive house! There was something about the early '90s dance scene - perhaps the copious amounts of drugs involved - that encouraged everyone to go nuts on themes of tribalism, spirituality, nature and the great outdoors, and this translated to loads of tracks with widescreen summery vibes and samples of whale song/chanting/ethnic flutes. I, quite frankly, love all that shit, despite not being in any other way a hippy. Okay, I listen to a lot of psy-trance. And I like to go for long walks outdoors. But I'm not a fucking hippy, okay?

Now, having said all of this, Yum Yum are a terrible example because they don't really have any ethnic samples or hippy vibes at all, at least not on this compilation of their remixes made between 1995-1997 (such a smooth journalistic technique, I know). I'd like to think their name refers to some tribe of Amazonian natives or something, but all Google can tell me is that Yum Yum is the name for a variety of cheap-ass foodstuffs or South-East Asian brothel-slang for a blowjob, neither of which are very friends-of-the-earth. I guess hippies go on backpack tours and might find themselves in a Thai brothel...

Despite a general lack of hippy rainforest vibes, this compilation still contains a fair amount of summery vibes. Some of that might just be down to me associating '90s acid lines, pads and stutter-edited vocals with summer simply because I always play this kind of stuff in summer, but there's just enough of a semantic thread running through the track titles to me to cling perilously to my bullshit proposition. Sacred Cycles, Tribal, Majick, Thundergod, The Vision... there's unarguably some sort of possible theme of spirituality here. You can almost feel the warm glow of the healing crystals.

Okay, okay. To an outside observer, this might sound like a fairly average collection of somewhat dated mid-'90s progressive house, filled with stereotypical synths and arrangements. And that outside observer might well be correct. But this is pretty much my pet style. It's the style I have the most love for and the least critical distance from, being pretty much the soundtrack of every beautiful sunny day of the last six or seven years of my life. And I reckon that, even setting aside my terrible biases, the remix of Sacred Cycles and also of Keoki's Majick are still excellent examples of hypnotic, trancey-edged progressive house. Most of the other tracks would be good filler or build-up pieces if you were playing a retro-themed prog set, but frankly there's a very small number of DJs in the world who'd be inclined to do that.

I can't really recommend this album unless you're really into the sound Sasha and Digweed were smashing around 1995-1997, but if you ask me, you should be really into that style because it was brilliant. I, frankly, have a shelf full of this stuff. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to burn some incense.

Genre: Progressive house
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

Review: 01-N - Raison D'Etre

I reviewed 01-N and his silly, un-Googleable name, not too long ago, so I'm not going to go through the introductory waffle again. Japanese, psy-trance, ridiculous, un-Googleable name, very good. You got it? Anyway, he's back with a new album, and bugger me if Raison D'Etre isn't his best effort yet. This kind of remarkable, consistent quality from a psy-trance artist is almost totally unprecedented. In fact, this guy might well be the best thing in trance today. It blows my mind that he only has about 300 listeners on Last.fm and nobody in the psy scene seems to be aware of him. Why could this possibly be? Oh yes, it's the ridiculous un-fucking-searchable artist name.

Raison D'Etre plays out much like the last album - eight tracks of slamming, good-fun psy-trance and one surprisingly good downtempo dubby-breaksy track to close on. Once again there's remarkably little in the way of typical psy clichés and an unusual ear for rich, hook-laden melodic content. You might think that all this qualifies as "much of the same" and therefore diminishing returns, but this particular flavour of psychedelic tranciness is pretty much unheard of, and so 01-N can continue churning out samey-sounding albums for some time yet before I get bored of it. What makes this one better than the last one is quite simply the strength of the individual tunes. The ridiculously titled opener Magnetoencephalography (seriously man, do you want anyone to be able to search for your music?) is a banger, and the uplifting Euro-trance tinged Casimir Effect is so rave it makes me want to chew my bottom lip off even when I'm sat in my living room eating scones and taking quiet tea. Once again though, what impresses the most is the sheer consistency of the tracks - almost every single one is extremely strong and never short of ideas. I cannot stress enough just how rare this is in psy trance. It's really fucking rare, okay?

This is a short review simply because I've already reviewed this guy quite recently and this album isn't different enough to justify another full-blown review. I'd be having a massive headache right now if I were a real music journalist, grasping for some convoluted verbiage in a desperate bid to say the exact same shit twice but in a different way. Thank God I'm not, eh?

Genre: Psy-trance
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 9/10

Review: Vince Watson - Every Soul Needs A Guide

I was feeling a little blue this evening. I can't say exactly why, in case the secret police are reading this blog and are looking for the slightest excuse to kick my door down and silence my subversive transmissions. Let's just say I went to a psy-trance rave on Saturday, it's now Wednesday, and somewhere along the line all the happy juices in my head mysteriously vanished. Anyway, searching desperately for some way to restore a semblence of chemical balance to my brain, I resorted to gorging on an entire 125g bar of milk chocolate. By the end I felt a little sickly, somewhat excessive, like a sugar-crazed Tony Montana, but actually quite a lot happier than at the start. Little did I know at the time that I was engaging in a perfect, confectionary-based metaphor for listening to Vince Watson's new album.

Vince Watson may have the outer appearance of a bald Scotsman, but underneath that dour carapace beats the soulful heart of a black Detroit techno-jazzman. He is one of my favourite techno producers, mainly because he loves to use melody, and as a funkless whiteboy I can't get my head around techno that doesn't come with a tune. His best productions combine hard-edged Detroit sweaty-warehouse-strobes with an ear for euphoric, feel-good melodies, a combination that amounts to a more credible, Theo Parrish-friendly approximation of good trance music. Even when he's not going for the dancefloor jugular, his skills on the little black keys mean that his tunes are always eminently listenable.

Every Soul Needs A Guide is, to my knowledge, his fifth proper album and like a lot of his albums takes a more loungey and jazzy direction than the EP and singles. This is probably his most opulent work yet, resplendent in jazzy keys, double basses and cymbals. Almost every single second of the album is crammed full of feel-good melodic loveliness. After 80 minutes or so, it does start to become a little much. Occasionally there are stripped-down ambient interludes, that are probably the best tracks, simply because the modicum of restraint employed stops things from being overcooked. Without them, the album would be a pummelling, sense-numbing barrage of feel-good Detroit vibeyness.

This is where the chocolate analogy comes in. Chocolate is nice, it tastes good and almost everyone likes it, but consume too much in one go and you might come to regret your decision. Playing this album all the way through would cheer up the most miserable bastard, simply because it's easier to relent and go "Okay, okay, I'll fucking smile!" than maintain that stoney grimace of existential futility any longer. But unless you're feeling a particularly strong case of the mid-week blues, you probably don't want to be so violently uplifted. I personally wish Vince would have toned this one down a little bit. As good as it is, and as impressive and well-produced as all the music sounds, it just leaves me feeling a tiny bit queasy by the end.

Genre: Jazzy techno
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 7/10