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.
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