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.