The goa mix [1] is 20 years old. I was more ska/jazz/CMJ at the time but this mix was my gateway into the world of electronica. It was a seed that didn’t really sprout for another decade but that fact left me in a place where I could follow the trajectory backward and also launch fully into where various scenes were going.
Trance is, ultimately, okay for me. My preferences run more IDM/cliq-hop/whatever-the-hell box you want to use to contain Richard James. I also like more chill/ambient noise stuff. The goa mix is at the edge of where I want to be in terms of what I’d call a ‘clubby’ feel. It’s also beautifully flawed in a way that a derivative DJ would never allow. BPM is all over the place. Key changes are sometimes abrupt. Yet every transition feels organic and as a whole it stands up against anything put out today.
And if you want to hear it without the commentary (because, frankly, Mr. Oakenfold sounds a bit addled throughout) you can grab that here [2].
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01nkgbd
[2] https://soundcloud.com/pauloakenfold/paul-oakenfold-radio-1-1
We were in the right place for 4 years if you liked beats/Electronica/clubmix. I’d swear it was the same song all night long in some of those European dance clubs.
This is awesome.
Yeah, the trance/dance/club scene certainly had its genesis in places like the Metropol. Nothing was technically new with Oakenfold’s goa mix but it was the selections, looping, and transitions that made it a continuous narrative, which, again, is nothing new–concept albums have been a thing since at least the late 60s.
I think one reason this particular mix is celebrated over other things going at the time is that it filled a two hour slot on BBC Radio 1 as one continuous mix with the only interruptions being mandatory station ids dropped over the top.
Someone made a cassette copy of a cassette copy of a recording off the radio for me back when I was hanging out at this industrial/electronica bar in Lincoln in the middle 90s. I listened to it for the first time on my old-ass Walkman with new-ass headphones while tripping nuggets and knew I had to have more.
I didn’t become obsessive about electronica until I started writing code. For me it is the perfect distraction for my monkey mind while I concentrate on what I’m coding. That’s when I really went past cheesy trance mixes and dove into Aphex Twin, Autechre, Venetian Snares, and the like. It also helped that I had an overnight DJ slot on a community radio station at the time so could play with this stuff in a free-form format myself.
Fuck, that’s some Manswer Syndrome gibberish if ever I’ve written any.