Inner Circle

Following on from the stonnkingly good Lime Light compilation, Inner Circle takes a different slant, looking at moodier progressive and offering up some pretty unique sounds in the process. Beat Bizarre’s Corrosive Juices (Shaman remix) is a very tasty tune indeed, with a balanced and expansive sound that sits perfectly on your ears. Its sublime escalation is a sheer delight and by the time it’s peaking, the circular feedback that comes in is the perfect accompaniment. Class. POTS’  Pole Position Club is a great little beast, sounding like a minimal track being played over Ed Rush. A deep and rumbling dinosaur-noise is tucked away underneath a clean and skittish technoid topend. Great to see, incidentally, some sounds from that end of drum n bass infiltrating the psy sound; albeit on the fringes for the moment. Parrket’s Science In My Mind is a fucking belter as well, deeply psychedelic progressive that comes from nowhere but leads everywhere. The way it falls in and builds up is simply outstanding, and the array of reverb-heavy sounds in the background is something you will want to tell your grandchildren about. Bloody hell. Kalimax’s Demons is more in fullon territory, the 140bpm sounding a little hectic. But it’s very well produced, and a damn clever tune. Sounding like a ballsier protoculture without the keychanges, it drops out into a great triphop breakdown, before coming back in with theperfect run. The energy here is just incredible; it’s the feeling psytrance used to have. Likewise Prosect’s Sonified, a truly classic track with everything in the right place. Housey roots pick up into a well-developed peak, with the sounds coming at you in all directions. Fucking great stuff. NASA’s Sloppy Noodle is a gnarly, twisty, mushroom soup type track, heavy on the atmosphere and with deep, bonky-nodding production. Human Blue’s come up with something quite surprising with Screwdriver which, as the name suggests, is a bit of an industrial thumper with a hangover. It wouldn’t be out of place on a Boshke album, this. Etnoscope’s Fast Licking is possibly the best tune on the album. I’m not sure whether it’s house music made the psytrance way, or the other way around; whatever, the finished product is one of the most engaging, hypnotic tracks I can remember. The sound is just incredible, I mean.. fark. It’s got such a rare quality to it, it just opens your eyes up that little bit more and changes the way you think about trance music. How’s that. Finally there’s No Time from Tegma, though I swear it’s not them. In a good way. This is gnarly darkstuff and I was half thinking that the latest Doof records release had been accidentally morphed with this album at the mastering plant. Anyway – it’s a good tune. Overall this is a decent album, and there’s definitely nothing else quite like it around. It doesn’t have either the focus or the classic quality of Lime Light, but it’s a very confident step in a new direction.