oh trust me, if you’re in a hitech party you’ll love it 
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Another streaming/algorithm problem in my opinion. You can be as creative as you want. If your music doesn’t sound like the ones in a popular playlist, you have absolutely no chance. Sure you can upload to SoundCloud or whatever and keep trying to get some listeners. But it’s just going to be painfully slow if it happens at all.
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don’t think this applies to psytrance honestly, in general I think this is one of the least streamed genres out there, it’s mostly party music, not many people listen to this stuff at home for leisure on their phones or tvs, the landscape of parties changed a lot in 25 years and it’s gravitating towards “standardization” for a quite some time now
I agree it’s not really a very popular genre. I am sure you know more than I do because I don’t really listen to this kind of music too. But here’s a Beatport playlist. I find most of these tracks (at least the snippets) very similar. Among the top 20, I think Number 7 and 18 are a little bit different. The others sound similar to me. Now I imagine if someone used totally different stabs, plucks, bass etc. , it’s probably going to be very hard to be released and be placed in a playlist like this.
that playlist is the definition of what’s wrong with psytrance today, this is exactly the crap gets played over and over in the big parties, because most of the people coming to these events are not coming for the love of music but for “epic party”, maybe there are 1-2 decent tracks in there but that’s pretty much the state of the music…
the fact it’s labeled as psytrance is insulting to me, but yeah, the masses love this stuff.
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Or buy tickets
Digging that Skizologic track. Nice modern goa vibes with deep passages.
Familiar with Psychovsky…. He definitely has his own sound which is the whole point.
I have a wall of psy cds from about 96-2006… even in that time there was a homogenisation of the sound after MP3’s and copying cds neutered many labels ability to take risks… either full on, progressive, forest or electro-house tendencies dominated. At that point I started finding more trippy and fresh sounds in the techno and minimal scene. Of course that ended up eating itself same as any genre, but there is still gold out there and I enjoy digging for it.
For psychedelia nowadays, I find it in the less obvious places amongst deep house, quirky breaks and the occasional hypnotic techno track. This one maybe a bit deep and introspective for a psy floor, but the atmosphere is all there:
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oh for sure, non-standard techno has evolved a lot there’s so much deep stuff out there, I really enjoy some Opal label artists like Ketev, Manse, Kentaro Hayashi, very deep sounds, unique rhytms, unique sounds, there’s not much surprises left in the 4/4 realm honestly, sure you can find sometimes a great sound design but honestly most of it is like “yeah, sure, heard that one before.”
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Psytrance moved from something like an underground genre with small parties somewhere in nature to a big audience with some of the biggest music related festivals all over the world. With that it had to please way more ears than before.
It happed to lots of techno genres tho.
But there are still some awesome artists out there, doing more than a drop every 16 bars.
But I am also an old guy, and it’s quite common that people tend to like music from their „youth“ more than modern stuff. So it might be that it’s just me who didn’t more with changes
Hey everyone, thank you for sharing your feedback and many new artists I hadn’t heard of yet. Sorry for the late reply, I was in silence for a week just working in the studio and was completely off social media, forums etc… The discussion on YouTube had also been quite intense and I hope it helps move the needle a little towards more experimentation and innovation. I am happy a lot of acts got shared here and on YouTube that are doing very interesting music and I hope this helps promote them.
Watching the intro and first couple of tracks pulled out, the analysis is bit like saying “yeah, listen to these really old best of the very very very best artists from back in the day when I was DJing and raving. No one sounds as good as this any more” (Posford, X-Dream, Total Eclipse ffs)
If you adjust the time window It’s like saying “no one sounds as good as Floyd or Led Zepellin, have you noticed that?”
I remember some Goa CD from back in 1997 “Goa trance died on this day”.
It’s dead Jim, but not as we know it.
Here it is …
- This hype did not last long and once the attention had died down so did the music sales, resulting in the failure of record labels, promotion networks and also some artists. This “commercial death of Goa trance” was marked musically by Matsuri Productions in 1997 with the release of the compilation Let it RIP. On the back sleeve of the album at the bottom of the notes, R.I.P : Mother Theresa, Princess Diana, William Burroughs & Goa Trance was written.
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While it’s never been my favorite genre, I have enjoyed some of it. I actually like the techier variety (check out Techgnosis label).
As to the question, I think genres go through cycles of varying aesthetic trends still within the genre rather than more variety steadily as time goes on. So right now you’re probably noticing the current trends. I’m sure they’ll shift at some point, and that’s where you’ll get your variety back.
Then you have to sift through the various eras to get a mixture. 
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I remember the feeling described in the video where a particular DJ takes you on a journey and it’s a unique journey that is different to the DJ before and the one after.
That does not happen so often any more, but for sure it does happen.
Some reasons might be e.g. willingness to stay up all day and night, through sunrise (not getting any younger here) or the quality of the fizzy pop. Age and expectation also have a huge influence.
After > 25 years of listening to any genre, it’s gonna sound a bit stale.
Take Shpongle as an example (not trance, but an example of an artist in that sphere). The newer stuff is good. Really good, expertly produced. But still, nothing is quite as good as the first two albums. It will never be ‘that good’ again. The first album is indelibly etched in to my mind in a certain way, and it is almost impossible to dislodge that … feeling.
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Psytrance is born in Goa, that’s why it was called Goa Trance before.
Music played was everything psychedelic with a beat: ebm, industrial, synthpop, electro, trance, tribal, hardcore, house…
Today Psytrance is the total opposite.
No more external influences, its a closed genre (more easy for marketing) where the only progress is division by creating more subgenres.
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Kinda suprised no-one has posted this video (from 2013!). I haven’t really listened to much psytrance since the late 90’s (I’m old), but it doesn’t sound like the scene has moved on much from when from this video came out:
I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing for people that like that sound because it works at the parties they like going to, tho.
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I find that video is the definition of irony, posted by LOUD who’s doing exactly what they posted about. triplets, drops, dub delays, it’s like watching a self-burn.
Reiter’s solo project is cool though, I’d say it’s way more techno and slower bpm but still cool music.
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Yeah, a classic video! I love half- and triple-beats tho. And they were there already when it still was called Goa trance.
The point I can relate the moste are the missing intros and those constant breaks every few bars that break the flow.
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I heard this track today from Randomer, a producer I’ve always associated with techno. It sounds like a techno-psy trance hybrid to me.
thanks, I hate it 
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