Can't Have Enough (Remix) by Hennes & Cold

Kai Winter (the Cold in Hennes & Cold) was a very prolific trance artist, known not only for his work as Hennes & Cold, but also has half of the duo of Derb, and also as Kan Cold.  There's quite a bit of scattered other stuff out there as well under a number of different names, but those are the most prolific aliases used, and the three that have had a Works compilation released in relatively recent years.  I actually heard of Hennes & Cold first from their remix work before I heard any of their original work—DJ Choci and The Geezer's "It's Beyond Control" and even more, Titchy Bitch and The Fallen Angel's "Retribution."  Both are on the list to eventually be featured, but as I explored Hennes & Cold, I came to really appreciate their original work too.  They've got a lot of really good songs, and are just really talented artists, producers and DJs.

This is a good one; not one that I'd necessarily have picked to highlight their absolute best work, but it came up in the random selector from the tracks that I've thought were good enough to be featured in the random selection.

Given how many Hennes & Cold tracks I have on that list, it was inevitable that they would come up sooner rather than later, and will probably feature again shortly (then again, I haven't had an A*S*Y*S song come up yet, and I'm sure I have more of their tracks than any other single artist.  I'm sure they'll be up soon, though.)

Not this track, but Hennes & Cold are also credited with being one of the very first hardstyle artists, mostly because they seem to have invented the reverse bass effect—although they use it on a track that is straightforward hard trance.  Combined with the pitch shifting and other exaggerated kicks, like on Warmduscher's "10 Kleine Bassdrums" and you've basically got Early Hardstyle coming out of hardtrance without any particular sharp break.

Loco (Black Mix) by DJ Scot Project & A*S*Y*S

Ultra prolific artist (and especially remixer) joins forces with fellow German and pretty prolific himself Frank Ellrich, using his best known alias, A*S*Y*S to release this one-off track.

Project is Frank Zenker, and like I said, he's fairly prolific as an artist, but especially prolific as a remixer, and his remix style almost defined hardtrance, at least after the millennial rollover.  Frank Ellrich, on the other hand, works under more nom de plumes, and although he does a fair bit of remixing too, he's more of an artist, I think.  His best-known work is as A*S*Y*S, but the best known work of A*S*Y*S is when it was a duo; with Kai Franz (Kai Tracid).  Franz later split and went and did more of his own thing (including getting into running a yoga fitness center for a few years, apparently—but he was also extremely prolific under a variety of names throughout the 90s and 00s—and Ellrich retained the name, but he released stuff under his own name too.

Arguably this isn't really hardtrance, and some newer A*S*Y*S stuff is veering into hardstyle and subground, and other more "derived" electronic music genres.  I'd actually call this particular song probably a subground song, actually.

But I don't really get into overly proscriptive genre splitting, as I've said many times here before, of course.  And my "hardtrance" collection does include some "regular" or progressive trance here and there, some early hardstyle, some trancy subground, and various acid trance and even acid techno songs.  I think the genre splitting in EDM is out of control.  Most of this stuff doesn't justify being called a different "genre" really.  Sure, it can sound a little bit different.  But Def Leppard sounds different from Motley Crue.  Is anyone really going to say that they're different genres of music, as opposed to two bands that have their own approach to the same genre?

Right?

 

The Messiah (Resurrection Mix) by Tommy Pulse

By 2009, when Tommy Pulse released this, hardtrance was certainly a fading expression of EDM.  Curiously, Discogs calls this release both hardtrance and hardstyle, although I'm not quite sure why, because it's clearly the former, and stretching it big time to call it the latter.

"Tommy" (stage name of Dutch DJ Bastiaan Tichelaar, about as Dutch a name as I've ever seen) has been around for quite a while, using a variety of aliases.  Under the Tommy Pulse name I'll eventually be posting quite a few more, no doubt, because I have a lot on my list (including many versions of "The Answer" which was the In Qontrol anthem of 2005, I've also got multiple versions of, for instance, "No Alternative" by RBA, which is Bas and a few of his early friends, although it's in many ways a remake of "Kernkraft 400" by Zombie Nation (which was itself a remake of an old Commodore 64 video games' theme, "Lazy Jones."

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.  No doubt some "No Alternative" will come up in its own due time in the randomization.  As will "Kernkraft 400" for that matter.

You Better Run (Dance Mix) by Dark A.T.8.

Dark A.T.8. is one of the very early projects of DJ Wag, before he took on that specific name.  He often worked with various partners (his most famous being with Martin Roth (Y.O.M.C.) and Mike Staab (where the duo used many names, but the most famous is Yakooza.)

This one goes all the way back to 1994, although an even earlier Dark A.T.8. song clocks in at 1992, showing that indeed hardtrance existed almost as long ago as the advent of trance period (although I don't know that the label as specifically used, or at least widely so that long ago.  Of course, according to Discogs, you never know for sure what labels some of those songs will get.  Just because DJ Wag is a hardtrance artist doesn't mean that 1992's "Was Guckst Du Lan" won't be called techno.  Because it is.)

I picked up, from Amazon, Techno Classics 1990-2010 which is really a big "greatest hits" DJ Wag mp3 collection (65 mp3 files).  Oddly, some of them are not very good quality files—I had to clean up some skips in one using cut and pastes of a few beats from nearby, for instance, I had to remove obvious hiss and pops from others. 

It also has some weird alternate remix and artist names from how these songs were originally released, which has made figuring out exactly what I've got kind of odd sometimes.  I find often that I do have these songs, under a different name (sometimes this is obvious, like when I have the DJ Scot Project remix of Nightclub's "French Kiss" but here it says that's by Yakooza.  Which are the exact same two people as Nightclub, so that's no big deal... but again, I've already got two mixes of the Nightclub song.  I'm pretty sure that one of them is the same mix, but that the other one is one that I didn't already have.  Still need to investigate.

And that was one of the more obvious ones.

Flight 643 by Tiesto

Arguably this isn't hardtrance.  Discogs calls the original mix simply trance, while it calls the original release (with its four versions) a combination of progressive trance and tech trance.

I heard it first as part of a bootleg mashup, though, with Randy Katana's "Play It Louder", which is also (arguably) not hardtrance, but since it samples very prominently the acid bass line from the Pump Panel Reconstruction of New Order's "Confusion" it is certainly acid trance.  And at some point, progressive trance, hardtrance, acid trance, and tech trance are all fairly hard to tell apart, and the dividing line between them isn't very easy to define.

In my collection of "hardtrance" I readily admit a fairly decent number of acid techno, acid trance, early hardstyle, and tech trance and even some of the harder ends of regular trance as all "on topic" for the collection, so Tiesto's "Flight 643" easily makes the cut.

Tiesto is often called, of course, the "father of EDM" which is certainly overstating things.  What he is is an EDM DJ who managed, better than just about any of his colleagues, to go mainstream, get mainstream attention, and become a producer and remixer for mainstream musicians.  This may be related to the so-called "selling out" of trance generally, although often that is billed very specifically to Robert Miles' song "Children"

But regardless of whether or not you think trance sold-out, became ridiculously cheesy and formulaic or not, well, this is a good song.  I do tend to think that mainstream trance did become rather predictable and boring, but the stuff that kept getting harder was still awesome for many years to come.

Sweet Lies by DJ Cyglas

DJ Cyglas is a Bavarian DJ who doesn't really seem to have any biographical information out there other than that he's Bavarian, worked in some clubs, etc.

In other words, he's almost completely anonymous.  2003's "Sweet Lies" actually appears to be near the end of his career.

It's billed as a collaboration with Edge Riders, whoever they are, but this is his only credit, so he's even more of a cypher than Cyglas is.

Terminator by Wragg and Log:One

It's always nice to see when these hardtrance artists don't take themselves too seriously.  It's a real danger in a genre that's known for being very hard, very dark, and very German (well, sometimes.  I do admit that some of my favorite hardtrance is north Italian, Swiss, Dutch, or even British too.  Both DJ Wragg and Log:One are British, I believe.  They have English names, anyway.  I suppose they could be kiwis or Aussies or even Americans, but I can't seem to get good bios on them from discogs.)  Anytime someone makes a dance song out of the theme song from a movie, it can't be too serious.

Listen to that crazy acid line in there too.  It perhaps shouldn't be surprising that it's the Brits who are adding the most acid to their trance, although Germans like Frank Ellrich and Kai Franz have done it a lot too.

Untitled by Warmduscher vs Derb

Tracid Traxx released the phenomenal EP Vol.  1, which has three untitled tracks on it, all of which are collaborations between two artists on the label.  This one came up randomly; as you might guess based on the artists, it's probably the most acid of the three.  It also happens to be my least favorite, although that's less an indictment of this song and more an endorsement of the others.  Kan Cold vs. Kai Tracid and A*S*Y*S vs Hennes & Cold are just phenomenal hardtrance songs.

It may be worth noting that Kai Winter (i.e., the "Cold" in Hennes & Cold and Kan Cold—and also a founding member of Derb) is involved in all three songs.  He's a talented and prolific guy, but because he split his work between various aliases, he maybe doesn't quite get the same level of recognition that someone like DJ Scot Project does.  Not that Zenker didn't also use aliases (to a lesser extent) too.

Anyway, from EP Vol. 1 (sadly, no follow-up ever seemed to come about, and it only ever got a German vinyl release.  It really needs a digital remastering beyond this YouTube release.

Global Anthem (Original Mix) by Sa.Vee.Oh

One of the quite early hardtrance sounds I picked up (when I really started paying attention to hardtrance as a genre, that is—I'd had a number of songs for years before I really paid attention to it as a discrete genre from acid trance or classic trance) was by Tankis & Savietto (it was the Lost in Case mix of "Octopus") and it's still one of the better tracks in the oeuvre, I think. I heard it in an old Qlimax setlist—I think it was Dana from 2001.) The second half of that duo is Max Savietto, who not only released stuff as Tankis & Savietto, Max Savietto, and Sa.Vee.Oh.  The last is an interesting name (which also sometimes wreaks havoc with my filename conventions, depending on which computer I'm working on and which version of Windows it uses) and as such, he's got some real winners.  Hard stuff that's also melodic and interesting.  There's a lot of activity in the northern Italy region—along with Savietto, we've got Luca Antolini and much of the very early Saifam group of artists.  Most of them seem to have migrated to hardstyle fairly early on from hard trance, but there's still some really great stuff that's unqualifiably hardtrance rather than hardstyle. (It's worth pointing out that the dividing line between hardtrance and a lot of early hardstyle stuff is pretty fuzzy and hard to determine exactly.  A lot of commentators consider the Hennes & Cold hardtrance song "First Step" to be the first hardstyle song because it has a very clear reverse bass and seems to be the first song that did so.  Others consider the Warmduscher song "10 Kleine Bassdrums" one of the first hardstyle songs because of the pitched kickdrums that were sampled repeatedly by hardstyle artists.)

What I consider "on topic" for "hardtrance" does include, by my admittedly somewhat loosey goosey definition a bit of early hardstyle and a bit of acid that's trending towards acid trance—and for the most part, I consider complete acid trance to be a subset of hardtrance altogether (by this specifically I mean stuff like A*S*Y*S and Kai Tracid in particular.)

Anyway, it's interesting to see the development here.  "Global Anthem" appears to only have had an Italian release, so in many ways, it's echoing the exact same conditions that led to italo-disco releases nearly two decades earlier.  Not that this sounds anything like italo-disco, of course.  This is a very hard dance song.

French Kiss (DJ Scot Project Remix) by Nightclub

There are few names that loom over hardtrance like DJ Scot Project.  He is to hardtrance what Depeche Mode is to synthpop—the guy who really made the genre his, to some degree.  Alias of German producer/artist Frenk Zenker, he did do a lot of his own work, but in many respects, what he's best known as is as a remixer who took all kinds of songs, applied his trademarked formula of build-up, break, build back up, bigger break, soaring synths, massive riffs and then slow fade out, etc to them.  Many of the songs he remixed are songs that he made into hits personally.

Nightclub themselves are another alias for the same two guys who make up Yakooza, which includes Misar/Kernkraft and DJ Wag, basically.  They were certainly no strangers to successful hardtrance themselves (especially DJ Wag who has a very prolific career as both a musician and a remixer himself).

Curiously, since yesterday's song sampled a Josh Wink House/Techno song, this one is kind of a remake of a different one.  (Maybe I should look into Josh Wink a little more.  But I honestly am not a huge fan of the late 90s British electronic music scene with the exception of some of the acid stuff here and there.)

We Will Survive (D.O.N.S. Remix) by the Warp Brothers

As I've spent the last several months really digging deeply into the well of late 90s and 00s hard trance, acid, acid trance, early hardstyle, and other related styles, I've come to understand that some of what I've written in the past about those genres is flat out wrong, although not necessarily in a consequential sense.  Anyway, I've come up with a massive nearly 600 track playlist of the "best" of that stuff; I've specifically excluded some versions of some songs that are good, but aren't quite the right style (too classic trance, for instance) or some that are good enough for me to put on my phone but not on the Best Of list, etc.  (The list is actually, currently 574 tracks long, but I've got another 39 tracks in "raw" format that once I listen to them, clean up any pops or other objectionable parts, and whatnot, might make the cut.  I personally think that most of them will end up doing so, so I'll be a little over 600 when I quit.)

It's unusual that I've migrated so heavily into this stuff lately—first it was hardstyle, which I like a lot, and synthwave (some of which I still like, although I've cleaned up my list of a lot of it that didn't age well after I had it for a while) but the hardtrance and acid trance and early hardstyle stuff is likely to be my favorite of the EDM music.  It's got a classic sound, but it's also very hard, with pounding kicks.  While I really like EDM that's so hard that it melts off your face and kicks your butt so hard that you're pooping out pieces of its shoes for weeks to come, more derived hardstyle can tend to almost sound like a parody of itself sometimes.  Hardtrance, on the other hand, has rises and drops, soaring synthlines, and still has that pounding bassline and kicks.  Heck, often it even has a reverse bass line or a squelchy 303 acid bass line

Because I don't use this blog very much, and I don't really know what to do with it, but my "main" blog was having too much of its content taken up by discussions on hardtrance and hardstyle, I thought I'd migrate over here.  It's a bit of a departure from the synthpop 80s core of what I originally was intending to blog about, but what the heck, right?  As a fan of synthpop and industrial dance music during the 80s, it's hardly surprising that I'd become a fan harder EDM, which is at least in some ways, an evolved version of the latter.

Anyway, because I've got loads of songs, I decided to sort them and put up what came up out of a randomly generated list.  The first hardtrance song to come up as such is the Warp Brothers "We Will Survive (D.O.N.S. Remix)" from 2000.

I'll note that Wikipedia suggests that hard trance started in the mid 90s, peaked in the late 90s and was on the decline throughout the 00s.  This doesn't actually seem to be true; most of the stuff I've been tracking down is a post 90s phenomena, and some of the most iconic hardtrance (like DJ Scot Project, for instance, or Derb, or Hennes & Cold, etc.) all came out after the millennial rollover.  Anyway, the Warp Brothers are two funny looking German guys, who dabble in a lot of related genres; hard house, hard trance, acid trance, etc. They also tend to sample from other songs; their two biggest hits are "We Will Survive" which samples Josh Wink's "Higher State of Consciousness" and "Phatt Bass" which samples the Pump Panel Reconstruction of New Order's "Confusion."

"We Will Survive" also samples some vocal about fighting aliens, although it's a bit trimmed in this version, so they don't actually mention the aliens per se.  But in the "Long Breaks" version, you can hear the full vocal.

It's curious to note that D.O.N.S. was another project founded by one of the founders of the Warp Brothers, so this remix is, essentially, the remix of one of the two Warp "Brothers" himself.