{"id":4229,"date":"2023-09-20T18:03:55","date_gmt":"2023-09-20T09:03:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thankyouforthehorse.net\/?p=4229"},"modified":"2023-09-29T16:17:30","modified_gmt":"2023-09-29T07:17:30","slug":"plasmadancer-dark-nrg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thankyouforthehorse.net\/?p=4229","title":{"rendered":"PlasmaDancer &#8211; Dark NRG"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/El0bn9akfJs?si=ZfkfPkI3-h4ieadE\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Over the past year or so I&#8217;ve (as usual, to be honest) been listening to my own mixes if I&#8217;m in the mood for some NRG or freeform, and three in particular have had the most play &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/finrg-recordings\/finrg-podcast-006-plasmadancer\">the FINRG Podcast set<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/thank-you-for-the-horse\/plasmadancer-neon-lights-a-tribute-to-exemia\">my tribute to Exemia<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/thank-you-for-the-horse\/plasmadancer-tyfth-live-009-6th-february-2022\">the last twitch stream<\/a> from the start of last year. I took elements from each of these with the goal to raise <em>Dark NRG <\/em>a level or two above the pretty good <a href=\"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/thank-you-for-the-horse\/plasmadancer-hardcore-for-life\"><em>Hardcore for Life <\/em><\/a><em>, <\/em>an NRG set I&#8217;m quite happy with, but don&#8217;t listen to often.<\/p>\n<p>The other inspiration was Proteus&#8217; old NRG sets, so I aimed for a dark, industrial atmosphere in this one that looked to other genres for some of the tracks. Originally that meant me tinkering with tracks like Waldhaus&#8217; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Bq2xFVheEI8\"><em>Blood on Fire <\/em>remix<\/a>, but the challenge was finding something that matched the NRG atmosphere and added some heaviness at the right moments. That&#8217;s where the FINRG Podcast influence also comes in, as the second half of that set is still the blueprint for what my sets should sound like &#8211; dark, strange, and with some deeper psychedelic elements to them. With all those things in mind the set ended up using plenty of Proteus&#8217; own tracks, with one hard techno track as a transition and the deeper finale of <em>Louhi <\/em>and <em>Synchronicity. <\/em>I&#8217;m especially happy with the progression from the weighty opening Proteus sounds\u00a0 to the increase in pace with the NRG and then into the section that&#8217;s probably got most of a freeform feel &#8211; more on that in a minute.<\/p>\n<p>I still listen to the Exemia set often &#8211; it&#8217;s definitely one of my most inspired, with some of the best transitions I&#8217;ve ever managed. Here I tried to recreate the drive of the set, particularly in the way that transitions would avoid the &#8216;stop-start&#8217; style of introducing new tracks with a breakdown. It&#8217;s something I used to do too much but have tried to improve recently and am very happy with how it went for <em>Dark NRG<\/em>. <em>Gangstah <\/em>into <em>Knock Out <\/em>is one of my favourite examples, and it gets bonus points for smoothly using two tracks in different keys. The vocal samples work well together, and the extra power of <em>Knock Out <\/em>increases the pace and leads nicely into the freeformy-NRG part of the set. Another good one is <em>Rock N Rave <\/em>into <em>Heavy Fusion, <\/em>the final step into the freeformy-NRG section.<\/p>\n<p>Cyrez&#8217; <a href=\"https:\/\/cyrez.bandcamp.com\/album\/early-works\">recently released <em>Malicious <\/em><\/a>was a late addition, matching up perfectly with the tricky <em>Heavy Fusion<\/em>. The <em>Resurrection <\/em>remix had been floating around the same part of the tracklist during planning, so it made sense to add it here. <em>Tears Are Not Obedient <\/em>was another late selection &#8211; I had found another in-key escape route from <em>Resurrection<\/em>, but it took the atmosphere in a direction I didn&#8217;t like. I left the set alone for a while to think about it, and eventually came up with the\u00a0 simple-but-effective Gus and Jorg track as the answer. Truth be told I was running out of enthusiasm for the set by then, and repurposed an <em>In Praise of Shadows<\/em> mix to follow up. There could well be some better options out there, and it&#8217;s probably weakest part of the set to my ears. <em>Get Fire!\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<em>Louhi\u00a0<\/em>really work well together though, so maybe it&#8217;ll grow on me.<\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s the set &#8211; very pleased with it even if it didn&#8217;t justify a full year(!) of planning. It has some strong moments that I like going back to, and there were lots of unused transitions that&#8217;ll be appearing in the freeform-only mix that&#8217;s in the works these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the past year or so I&#8217;ve (as usual, to be honest) been listening to my own mixes if I&#8217;m in the mood for some NRG or freeform, and three in particular have had the most play &#8211; the FINRG Podcast set, my tribute to Exemia, and the last twitch stream from the start of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,5,4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finnish","category-japanese","category-mixes","category-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thankyouforthehorse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thankyouforthehorse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thankyouforthehorse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thankyouforthehorse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thankyouforthehorse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4229"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thankyouforthehorse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4233,"href":"https:\/\/www.thankyouforthehorse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4229\/revisions\/4233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thankyouforthehorse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thankyouforthehorse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thankyouforthehorse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}