About psyreviews

psyreviews was an independent music review site dedicated to psychedelic trance, covering releases from 2001 to 2015. This archive preserves those reviews, recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The Archive

Reviews were published across three eras of the site: an early newsletter format, a Joomla-based site, and a long-running WordPress installation. The archive contains over 1,100 reviews spanning more than a decade of psychedelic trance music.

History

In early 2001, I was living and working in Southampton in England, a city I'd sort of fallen into living in after uni finished, working a job I'd sort of fallen into, and spending whatever disposable income I had on psytrance. My job had given me this new-fangled thing called 'the internet' both at my work desk and at home, and largely unsupervised I thought to myself: could I use the internet to get record labels to send music to me for free?

I had no idea how any of it worked but having seen a callout for, and then been overlooked for, a gig as head psytrance reviewer for the UK's Wax magazine (at the time, the only dance publication that seriously covered psychedelic trance, though Muzik covered it sporadically, and Mixmag did by accident when Oakenfold or John 00 Fleming would drift toward the wiggle and fractals), I figured that labels would send you promo records and CDs if you asked them nicely, and if you had an outlet where your reviews appeared.

I contacted some magazines and asked them if they'd take reviews if I sent them. The American magazine DJ Times carried a couple of my very first reviews, it was hilarious to see my reviews of a Tip release and (if memory serves) a Battle Of The Future Buddhas single mixed in reviews of with Destiny's Child and Jennifer Lopez remix 12"s, and even more hilarious that I had to spend over a tenner in the Southampton Virgin Megastore just to buy a copy of the magazine.

I sort of gave up on contacting printed outlets, and started looking around online to see if there were any destinations on the web that might take my reviews. Turned out there were, and having exposure on now-defunct sites like No Attitude Just Music, spaced.co.uk, dance-music-reviews.com and web-beat.com opened things up to contact labels en masse and present myself as the guy who understood this internet thingy and could get word out about their releases. I did a lot of this contacting while at work, on company time and using company equipment, which I realise is bad form but after a quarter of a century I hope I'll be excused by some unwritten statute of limitations where blagging and slacking are concerned.

I can't quite remember how this next bit happened, but before I knew it I was receiving nice hauls of vinyl and CDs each week, and doing a sort of syndication of reviews being published here and there. The problem was, not every review would get published everywhere; online might be free of the physical constraints of ink and column inches, but there are still limits and I pity the poor webbie whose job it was to publish stuff I sent to them in the knowledge that, probably, nobody was going to read. So, armed with a copy of Outlook Express and some BTinternet free web space, I started emailing reviews out to anyone that would ask.

Somewhere along the line, the wonderful T0b from Amsterdam set me up with a mail list server, which I barely understood, but which I realised could handle the email distribution which relieved me from needing to paste a load of email addresses into the bcc field on an email program. I'm pretty sure my workflow was create an email, send it, save the email as html, then throw it on the website as an archive. I built the website in Frontpage Express using something like Ulead Studio for the images, it was all deliciously low-tech and as I thought it was funny to do stupid things like have bright yellow text on a lurid yellow background (because, y'know, all web writing should take its design cue from early Tip album covers), it was also an absolute accessibility nightmare (or would have been if accessibilty was a thing back then.)

The equally wonderful Mick Chaos from Chaos Unlimited then caught wind of what I was doing, and added my btinternet site as an embedded frame in Chaos Unlimited's site, which I expect would have been the highest-traffic psytrance website at the time. Another lovely person from Chaos called James set me up with a domain that DJ Jaimz helped me understand the meaning of, and psyreviews.com was born -- still on a horrible colour scheme, but at this point with about 3,000 subscribers mostly all referred by Chaos Unlimited, psyreviews was a "thing".

As the years rolled on, psyreviews continued. It's probably incorrect to say that I issued reviews every week, but I know I issued reviews most weeks. My workflow in the early days was getting up early on a Sunday (early to a 26 year old being like 9:30am), making a pot of coffee, and working through about eight releases at a time. I absolutely loved it, all of it: I loved the ritual, I loved the promo onesheets I'd get sent that made me feel a little bit special, I loved knowing I was among the first people to hear new music. I remember thinking, in around 1999 that psychedelic trance is amazing when you first hear a track, but when you're familiar with the changes and the sounds, it loses a bit of lustre and that what I'd really love would be a constant stream of always-new, always-fresh, always-exciting music. Hard to think that in today's era of instant gratification in music (and indeed in any field of entertainment) the idea of a stream of new sounds would be the stuff of science fiction but still, I managed to fashion a crude version of it, even if it was reliant on the postal service where later we'd just plug our ears into the internet and press play.

One thing that was wonderful about this time is that you had psytrance getting bigger (while other dance music genres were getting smaller), and the internet was becoming something everyone had access to. Forums like Oztrance, Australiens, Isratrance, Psynews and PsyForum gave people a chance to talk and network during the week, then they'd see each other at parties and network during the weekend. And then the cycle continues. I have no doubt that it was this twin-dimension progressive networking that led to the psytrance scene turning into the global phenomenon it became in the early 2000s, and being an "internet-thing", psyreviews was along for the ride. I would usually cross-post my reviews on forums, which gave me an excuse to hang out on forums, and in doing so I met people from all over the world.

It's no exaggeration to say that psyreviews changed my life. Through reviewing music, I met people from all over the world, including people from Australia who would be my informal welcome committee when I made the trip from the UK to the heat of the Australian summer at the start of 2004 for the Rainbow Serpent festival. Through Oztrance.com and its moderator Dale, I met literally hundreds of people and experienced the finest party culture in the world, and felt at home in a wider social culture that felt somehow like it understood me in a way that my native UK didn't. As well as all the friends I ended up meeting along the way, I met my wife with whom I count myself hugely fortunate to enjoy an extemely happy family life, living in a great city in a great country that I'd have had no cause to visit had it not been for that silly little experiment to see if I could find a way of getting music for free.

The experiences I had because of psyreviews have been nothing short of amazing. I found myself on stage with Simon Posford at a huge event in Australia, and at a tiny event in Cornwall; Dr Alex Patterson of The Orb told me to f*ck off; I was given, and then slept through, a set at the first Glade festival; and I got to see parts of the world that, had I never put pen to paper and handwrite those first reviews, might have stayed distant strangers for all that time.

This Version of the Site

The last version of Psyreviews, running on Wordpress (which was hosted for free for over a decade by the very kind JJ) went dark in the first half of 2026. I don't think anyone noticed.

In July 2026, with some Claude credit to burn I pointed some agents at the Wayback Machine to programmatically pull content from the various versions of the site, then to reassemble it here. (I've been a supporter of archive.org for many years so I don't feel too much of a jerk using their API.) Claude built this site, and also built a python script to pull cover images from discogs. There will be mistakes, but my goal is to keep this site hosted and backed-up as an archive.

Contact

Say hello: damion@psyreviews.org

I'm unlikely to want to review any trance music.