It's easier to see the impact of a seminal event when time has passed and the dust has settled. In the psytrance genre, the release of X-Dream's "Radio" album in 1998 was such an event. With its dark cyber-futurist aesthetic and tight, techno-flavoured structures, "Radio" was a milestone release that now stands out as one of the most influential records in the genre's history, alongside such classics as Juno Reactor's "Transmissions" and Hallucinogen's "Twisted". It also caused a veritable paradigm shift in the genre; you simply can't overestimate the significance of this album when it comes to the development of psytrance post-1998. By eschewing the layered, riff-driven sound that was prevalent at the time of its release, X-Dream paved the way for a new, minimal and techno-inspired style that was quickly adopted by their colleagues. Consequently, almost the entire psytrance world rapidly spiraled downwards into a dark, murky and utterly monotonous vortex of migraine-inducing minimalism, with everyone and their pets constructing their tracks around a pounding kick drum pattern and that “dugga-dugga-dugga” bassline. Making a track of this sort doesn’t necessarily require much creativity, so it was perhaps inevitable that this U-turn would lead to a severe deterioration in quality. Where trance parties used to be what its protagonists likes to call a “journey”, with every track being played standing out as a composition in its own right, going to these events suddenly became a rather enduring experience, with an endless stream of similar-sounding, nondescript music coming out of the speakers.
That's not to say that no good music has come out of the dark/minimal psytrance style. Yet for every good record released by talented artists such as Hux Flux and Process, there’s a mountain of merely adequate stuff (Logic Bomb springs to mind), and an even more overwhelming amount of output with no discernible musical merit whatsoever (almost the entire Hadshot roster). This makes the task of tracking down the good stuff so formidable that one often thinks: why bother? And one side effect of this resignation is that you risk dismissing quality records because you fail to inspect them closely enough. When I received a promo of the first Spirallianz album "Blast Food" back in 2000, I assumed that it was along the same lines as the gobsmackingly awful music of some of their Spirit Zone label mates such as Tarsis or Shiva Chandra, so I just skipped through it without really giving it a close listen, and then passed it on to someone else. Big mistake. See, Spirallianz are one of the very few acts in the psytrance ghetto who have the potential to create truly blistering music within the very narrow framework provided by the hard/minimal formula. One of “Blast Food”s biggest strengths was the rhythm section: the beats simply kicked ass, and revealed that these guys know a thing or two about techno (Arne Schaffhausen reputedly spices up his DJ sets with electro from the likes of Two Lone Swordsmen). And they have a keen ear for atmospheres as well – the music isn’t the kind of one-dimensional beat fest marathons that their genre-mates produce by the truckload. In short, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Arne and Wayan are friends and protegés of X-Dream – a friendship that has resulted in a fruitful collaboration between X-Dream's Markus Maichel and the Spirallianz guys in the excellent Delta project (their "Send In... Send Back" album was one of my favorite albums of 2002, and it was miles better than the first Delta long player, the patchy, if occasionally brilliant "Scizoeffective” from 1999).
Spirallianz also go by the name of Midimiliz, and the first Midimiliz album "Antistat" was released the same year as "Blast Food". Where "Blast Food" was the dark, industrial-sounding record, "Antistat" was its dirty, funked-up twin brother, with a somewhat looser, clubbier feel. But there's no fine line separating the two projects from each other, and it doesn't seem that the producers are too tied up in that division themselves either (when I saw them perform live in 2001, they were billed as Spirallianz, yet they were wearing Midimiliz T-shirts). Anyway, the two of them have been busy of late; in addition to the aforementioned Delta album, we’ve had Spirallianz' "Silver Edition" vinyl-only series and recent “Steropark” album, a Midimiliz single that marked the transfer of that project from German D. Drum Records to the newly founded Spanish imprint Boshke Beats, and finally this new Midimiliz album, released almost in tandem with the new Spirallianz long player. And this prolificacy seems to have hampered creativity somewhat. There were moments of inspired brilliance on “Stereopark”, sure, but the two best tracks were taken from the “Silver Edition” series, and altogether the album was a rather over-polished and inconsistent affair that was no match for its predecessor. It also showed worrying signs of trying to adjust to the recent wave of “progressive” psytrance (a style so lame it should be banished by law), as some of the edge of their earlier work was missing in favor of a more mild-tempered approach. “Passages” is an equally inconsistent release. Like “Stereopark”, it opens with some inferior cuts: the first three tracks are run-of-the-mill material that simply doesn’t cut the mustard, frustratingly incorporating the same kind of anemic pleasantness that weighed down the less rewarding tunes on the new Spirallianz LP. After this less than promising start, it luckily gets more interesting, and from track 4 onwards, this is pretty solid stuff, with “No Exit” and “Aeromode” in particular pushing all the right buttons. It’ll make ya dance, no doubt about that. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that “Passages” is a pretty workmanlike effort, with most of the tracks following a similar blueprint and failing to raise the kind of enthusiasm that its predecessor did. Where “Antistat” was fresh and unconventional, “Passages” in parts sounds painfully formulaic, employing sounds and ideas that have become very familiar by now. And sadly, they save the worst for last: The closing “Stars”, with its dreadful use of Louis Armstrong samples, is the turkey in this set.
Another thought that stroke me while listening to this album was how far some of the psytrance artists have removed themselves from the origins of this genre; this is a techno record more than anything else, yet probably too digital in its grooves and, paradoxically, too maximalist in its outlook to be embraced by the techno scene. It’s kinda funny (to me, at least) that music like this is being played in huge outdoor festivals when it would feel more appropriate in a dusty cellar in the middle of the Ruhr area. But since the psytrance culture is such a specialist scene, which is noticed by hardly anyone on the outside, it’s getting increasingly unlikely that any of the acts associated with it will blast themselves out of their relative obscurity and become recognized by a larger audience. Midimiliz could be a good candidate if they delivered the goods promised by some of their earlier releases, but “Passages” is too half-baked to impress the unconverted. If they were less preoccupied with serving the needs of the many mindless psytrance DJ’s out there (who are pretty much the only ones buying the music anyway, as yer average psytrance-head prefers to download it on the net and spend his money on drugs instead), Arne and Wayan could become the next boomin’ act in electronic music. But it won’t be with this record. Mediocre.
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