Thursday, April 11, 2019

Living Harmony [Alternate Mix] by Mental Miracle

Mental Miracle is actually a two-person north Italian duo who used tons of alternate names and aliases, although most of them are definitely in the hard dance styles and sit kinda on the line between hard trance and early Italian hardstyle.  (They do have a few more housey variations too, though.)  They'll pop up over time over and over and over again, often under different names like Skam, Schwarzende, DJ Kubrik, Omega Nine, Aikon, Darksucker, Tronik and more.  Much more, actually, although I think those names have the most tracks that are likely to come up.

It's curious that the north Italians are the ones who were most likely to straddle the line between hard trance and early hardstyle.  If you read the history of hardstyle on some place like Wikipedia, for instance, you don't get the impression that hard trance was a major influence; you get the distinct impression, in fact, that it came out of the gabber or Dutch hardcore scene.  There really is a lot of variation in various regions: hard trance in the UK came out of the acid scene and has a hybrid hard house sound to it, quite often.  Hard trance in Germany and the Netherlands and the rest of the Germanic countries seems intersect very little with hardstyle, and if it intersects with anything at all (which it often doesn't) crossing into hardstyle is usually a late occurring phenomena (although it does happen late, especially after hardstyle was quite well established.)  In the Italian early hardstyle scene is where it is almost indistinguishable from hard trance, quite often.

And more recently that's true too; if you look at newer hard trance artists, like Costa Pantazis, NG Rezonance, Noizy Boy, DJ W, etc. they describe themselves as hard dance artists on discogs, and their styles tend to be primarily hard trance, but heavily influenced and hybridized with hardstyle, hard house, hard techno, acid, tech trance, etc.  But the Italians were the first to make hard trance and hardstyle merge in a fuzzy spectrum.

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