My first solo mix of the year might not be freeform, but I’m glad to finally get this one finished. What eventually became this set started about three years ago, went very much on the back burner during In Praise of Shadows, and then came to mind again a couple of months ago. It’s relatively short for a Goa set, but there are a few reasons for that and the whole process has been pretty educational from a set-construction point of view.

Having followed Suntrip’s take on the genre for many, many years, I later became slightly obsessed with the idea of far darker tracks that maintained the emotion and melodic complexity of old and new school Goa. A bit of research on Psynews showed I wasn’t the only one, but there wasn’t much that fitted the bill, with most sounding more like slightly melodic forest or dark psy.

That changed once I discovered Psy-H Project’s Dance of Distant Worlds, released on Global Sect in 2013 and followed by the beautiful The Mystery of Crystal Worlds. Psy-H Project absolutely nails what I was looking for, and I orginally had thoughts of an extremely dark set of Goa based around that sound. Sadly very few other artists were doing anything remotely similar – my early efforts at putting a set together turned into a structureless mish mash of styles that kept meandering into super melodic Goa almost by accident.

In despair I gave up on the set, but decided to have another try earlier this year after listening to a lot of Mindsphere and the very promising six-track preview of Global Sect’s new Terraformer. The idea started to come together of a smoothly progressing dark set combining Global Sect and E-Mantra, with Mindsphere’s melodies as brief interludes.

Second Coming was just the track I needed to start things off, especially once I realised Ka-Sol’s Blogz worked pretty nicely as a follow up. It was this combo that also suggested the idea of changing tack slightly and going for a Goa interpretation of ‘dark psychedelic’, and so after some hints in Blogz and Gaura Nitay I eventually decided on Moonwalker as part of a trippier finale. It’s a typically climactic Morphic Resonance track (not a fan of that oddly overlapping snare/kick though) that combines well with E-Mantra and brings some extra weirdness to the set’s atmosphere, leading into Hynotic Signal’s Psychotria Viridis.

Mindsphere’s Tears of Goddess ended up being the sole ‘tranquil’ track, and even that wasn’t intended to stick around for too long. Hopefully it does the trick as a relatively peaceful pause (that all-important contrast), before the ferocious acid of Last Encounter comes in over the vocal.

In theory I could have drawn out the darkness-into-psychedelia theme to make a longer set, but even this version ended up becoming a silly amount of work. Recent events have given me less time and energy for set-tinkering, so even if it’s far from perfect I’m happy enough for now to have had fun with this shorter experiment.

01. Psy-H Project – Second Coming [Global Sect]
02. Ka-Sol – Blogz [Suntrip Records]
03. Psy-H Project – Gaura Nitay [Global Sect]
04. Psy-H Project – Infernal Candyflip [Global Sect]
05. E-Mantra – War of the Hierophants [Suntrip Records]
06. Mindsphere – Tears of Goddess [Suntrip Records]
07. E-Mantra – Last Encounter [Suntrip Records]
08. Morphic Resonance – Moonwalker [Global Sect]
09. Hypnotic Signal – Psychotria Viridis (Original Mix) [Hado Records]