Nice! Yeah, I was a raver kid in the late 90’s to mid 00’s. I finally dropped out of the “club” scene around 2010 when I met my current wife. She wasn’t big on the culture and I was a bit burned out as well. Now that I’m beginning my mid-life crisis, I really want to hit up a good warehouse rave and see just how much things have changed.
I was pretty similar trance fell off my radar about 2005ish
Still liked listening to house music in clubs and bars on nights out but if it was just listening to music on my iPod or whatever it’d be indie. The all night raves at places like gatecrasher and creamfields changed to gigs and festivals like Leeds fest around that time
I always wished I could have gone to Gatecrasher or Creamfields. I collected a lot of the “Ministry of Sound” compilation records along with live sets from there.
I was more into the piano house back in the day that kind of birthed rave/break/hardcore, so some of those tracks are right up my alley.
I wasn’t a big fan of trance but I was into psytrance and Goa and coincidentally I’m driving a backup car that only has a tape deck and one of my tapes has a collection of that. Just listen to it a half hour ago while doing errands.
There’s a tale of two songs on my mix, both from the mid-90s but absolutely timeless:
Shakta’s discography isn’t as consistent or storied as Man With No Name, but the track Neuromancer is probably one of the best of its time, of the genre of Goa/Psy-trance, and I would consider it one of the songs that can represent the best of EDM in general.
And his next track is from Man With No Name, someone who has a consistently high quality discography. Someone that you can consider one of the defining artists of EDM. On my mixtape I only have Moment of Truth but there are so many awesome songs from him.
This really brings me back. I used to listen to a lot of Psy Trance, especially late at night whilst under the influence of substances. I called it “mind tunnel” music back then.
WinAmp had a visualizer called MilkDrop and I used to put it on a projector and project it onto the ceiling and just listen to Goa/Psy mixes while laying down.