The Ayahuaska Experience

I must admit I had to bite my tongue on this one. Any album proffering neo-neo-neo-fullon trance under the guise of being a soundtrack to a trip generally gets flung at next door’s cat on principle. Doubly so upon learning that it’s compiled by DJ Ayawaska (sic) – where DJ Nurofen would be a better name, even DJ Immodium – and right before we start, we’re left to assume that this bloke is a wise, barefoot sage who’s going to dose us with foul-tasting psychedelics and send us off into the multiverse via a selection of cracking new music. The reality is more or less the standard roster doing more or less the standard thing.

Etic vs DJ Ayawaska’s The Ayahuaska Experience is laid back, inoffensive psytrance. It’s tight, the melodies are kept under-wraps, it doesn’t go too over the top, and what it does it does pretty well. Electro Sun’s Death Wish takes that fullon stopstart to the next level, giving one no more than three seconds (or something) of consistent doofdoof with which to get one’s stomp on. The sounds are nice, and while there’s a couple of new tricks there are far more old ones. Acidline, keychange, breakdown, swirly melody, climax. It doesn’t quite make me wish I was dead, but its not far off. Double Impact’s On & On has that stuttered isra-sound going on, and there’s a nice drop into a good infected-y main riff. Unfortunately they then stick a tediously euro high-end chime that just makes it sound limp – totally devoid of energy.

System Nipel’s Bicycle Race is another melodic flurry that sounds like it was put together in an afternoon. Nothing wrong with what it does, nothing wrong with what it is – it’s just all been done before, and been done much better before. Make. It. Stop. The Misted Muppet’s The Missing Sun is simply dreadful. I cant believe it – Misted used to be one of the most exciting trance projects around, with a real energy behind their clever melodies and ballsy attitude. This is very poor indeed: a big melody (first on synth guitar, then on synth piano) gives way to a plethora of presets, then there’s a huge breakdown, then there’s a big drop into… into… well, into nothing really. There’s a suggestion of their old energy but this sounds like that mate of yours who likes to mix vastly different genres together, dropping Bruce Hornsby & The Range over Infected Mushroom.

And then onto Pozza from Bubble. My favourite tune on the album – not because it’s good, but because it’s incredibly shit. Last Thursday I was listening to this on the ipod, and I almost prolapsed at how awful it is. Yer standard fullon bassline drops into a bastard-boring four-chord pattern, before picking up a cringeworthy topend melody that sounds like it was played on a shit keyboard by your ten-year-old niece. From here it then goes back where it started, drops pathetically into something resembling a breakdown, before that downs-syndrome-melody comes back again, joined by some more tunesmithery from the special bus, before it collapses into a cliché-ridden mess of sit, puss, and herpes. (As a sideline, when I got to where I was going last Thursday, I plugged into the stereo and played this track as an illustration of how bad psytrance is now. Words can never do justice to how much I hate this track.)

Opposite8’s Game Boy is a goodun, however – tight as ya like, understated and with a nice sense of impending about it. Acidlines take it up and down well, there’s minimal reliance on high-end melody and hardly a cliché to be seen. Loud’s Machines is a stab at that messy electro sort of sound, and wit works fairly well up to the bit where, you guessed it, the main melody comes in. It’s not entirely generic, but you get the feeling it’s trying its best. An interesting track that gets sucked into a boring one. Finally Brain Damage’s No Gravity is a pretty decent morningy track to bring things down to ground-level, albeit in more of a limp than a gentle way. All in all, this is a pretty shocking album.

The production, the clarity, the vibe is all pretty much what you’d expect. But for fuck’s sake, why does this have to be tied in with Ayahuasca when there’s nothing even remotely related going on. At best, this should be called The Medoicre Ecstasy Pill You Bought Off That Dodgy-Looking Bloke Who’s Nowhere To Be Seen Now Experience. Patchy.