|
Ah yes. I still remember listening to the first Ashdown Trance during my journey home from Sonar festival back in 2013. You were playing much more psy back then, but weren't we all? Fast forward seven years and you've certainly slowed down a lot and ditched the dodgy Dune samples and alien crocodile SFX.
I didn't enjoy all of this, I have to say, but it starts and finishes strongly. The only fault with the opening is the very first transition. The Pole Folder tune is a beautiful mellow opener, and I opened my Falling Leaves set with it, but the two Hot TuneiK tunes that follow are quite heavy prog with thumping kick drums, and the shift is too sudden. I would have happily traded some later running time for 20-30 minutes building up from deep to get to this point.
That aside, everything up to Until The End is very well done - good tunes, beautiful flow. A very "trancey" programming style - a constant stream of melodic moments without many groovers - but that's your style and it works.
The middle part of the set is just too trancey for my tastes. Too histrionic, too dramatic, and the chunky prog thump of the opening two hours is replaced by dull rhythm sections. There are still sections I like, notably the run of tunes between Albion and The Future where you snap out of trance mode and start stealing tunes from my sets for a while. And obviously the Rez-esque Monojoke remix of Ultrafoxx into Bedrock's mix of Cowgirl (AKA: the biggest tune ever) with an Amazonia chaser would cause dancefloor pandemonium. But too much of this stuff is a strain of modern trance that I just find pointless - self-consciously dark and serious but still melodramatic and frankly not enough strong melodies. If I'm going to sit through all these breakdowns, at least write something good to go in them.
Just when I was worrying you'd gone completely off my radar, the final 90 minutes or so save the day in style. I never had much interest in Tale Of Us' remix of Café Del Mar when it came out, but it works well here as a template of how the previous hour of trance cloggers should be doing it: if you're going to do dark and dramatic trance, make sure you've got a genuinely bollock-tingling melody over the top. Straight after, Starglow is another beauty you've nicked from me, and then it's all aboard the 2012 nostalgia train!
What I like most about the closing run of bangers is how they almost all hail from that miniature epoch where stomping prog-psy and glowstick trance joyously interbred - a micro-scene I was intimately familiar with at the time. And yet, for some reason, almost all of these tunes are new to me. Lifetime is an archetypal Cosmithex weapon, yet I only remember playing Cylinder, the A-side from that release. I love Blue Planet Corp but managed to totally miss that Atmos remix. And I had Orkidea's album with the massively inferior cover of Hale Bopp, but I've never heard this brilliant remix from a couple of years later. And since we've over-played Solar Fields - Summer as a closer for about 8 years running now, it was a nice touch to finish on Landing Party instead.
I don't know what it is about this last hour, but I can picture it perfectly in a club. The stomping kick-drums, the acid, the heavy but euphoric vibes. Just that feeling of it being the last hour of the night, the club half empty, being absolutely knackered but still raving hard to the tunes with a snarl of approval affixed to your face because the music's so fucking up. Probably more than anything else I've listened to since Covid-19 ended club life as we know it, this last hour really made me miss going out.
So, not a perfect set, and I'm not going to listen to the whole thing again. But the good bits are as good as anything you've done.
___________________
Mixes:
> Back To Deep [Deep Trippy House]
> Terra Nova [Modern Progressive Trance]
> Rough & Ready [Modern Trance]
>A Different Energy [Good Modern Trance]
> The Edale Mix [Panoramic Beats]
|
