Hard Trance 1999
Jennifer Downey
Here is the latest edition of my long-running Eurotrash mix series, dedicated to the best of 90's European (and a little UK) hard trance and hard acid. This edition is a little bit more sedate than some of the others, starting at 135 bpm and ending at 150 bpm, but it's still packed full of absolutely killer tracks, both classic and obscure. As ever, this is mixed completely on vinyl. Enjoy!Check out the other mixes in the series: -vintage-europeanRead about the mix: -presents-eurotrash-8-old-skool-european-hard-trance/Mixed in Berlin, May 2022100% Vinyl(95:32, 218 MB, 320 KBPS MP3)Tracklisting:01. Roughage - Katoomba (Sydney Live Mix) [Time Unlimited]02. Watchman - Watchman's Theme [Phuture Wax]03. Razor's Edge - The Zoo (Dark Dub '95) [Metropolitan Music]04. Superspy - Sumo V2 [Noom]05. Junk Project - Volume III [Block Busters]06. X-Frame - Scream [Crystal]07. Return of the Native - Persuosion [Tripomatic]08. Optimus - Confessions [Noom]09. Canyon - Purple Phaze [Hook]10. Tom Wax & Jan Jacarta - Wormhole [Tetsuo]11. DJ Scot Project - W (That Sound) [Overdose]12. Electric Fruit Orchestra - Nexus 6 [Dropout]13. Hark - Omega (Pulsedriver Remix) [Nothing]14. D-Sigual - Back Order [Tracid Traxx]15. Dee Rex - Soilent Green [Lunatec]16. Albion - This Is For (Clubmix) [Time Unlimited]17. Hoschi - The Tribe [Overdrive]18. Equator - Secret Silence (Aquaplex Remix) [Drizzly]19. M-Zone - Pulsator Sawrater [Teach Yourself Techno]20. The Combat Force - Combat Assault (Dawn Raid Mix) [Triebhafte]21. Solar Quest - Acid Air Raid (Silent Breed Remix) [Tracid Traxx]22. Cores - Ice Rain [Noom]23. Mirage - Keoma [Technogold]24. Third Man - Planet Hunters [Hook]25. The Secret - Gorgeous (Orgasm Mix) [Logic]
The right balance of hard and soft - the right dose of darkness and light - the right dose of crazy acid sounds, nice melodies and cool sounds - and the right speed to dance.......you met my taste in music to 100 %.....?????????
Euphoria is a series of dance music compilations that debuted on the Telstar Records label in early 1999.[1] During the first year, Euphoria focused primarily on trance music until mid-2000 when Euphoria released the first chill-out album in the series and the first hard house album in late 2000.[2] Euphoria was later spun off into a number of associated club nights around the UK, Ibiza and Cyprus. Over the course of three years, in excess of 500 tour dates were chalked up with tour DJs such as Adam White, Robert Van Ryn, Simon Webdale and Darren James.The compilations included box sets usually priced at around 20.00. The Euphoria albums were of high quality and still are highly collectible and the earlier versions are somewhat rare.
Frequent DJs and/or producers who have mixed albums include Dave Pearce, Matt Darey, Lisa Lashes, John '00' Fleming, Adam White, The Tidy Boys, Jay Burnett, Red Jerry and Andy Whitby.[citation needed]
Since the debut release, the Euphoria brand has showcased other genres in electronic dance music including hard house, hard dance, progressive and psy-trance as well as releasing some (thus far) "one offs" that cover old skool, funky house, hardcore and the ever-popular "mash up".
Although focusing mostly on "Best of" compilations in recent years under various guises, the Euphoria brand went "back to its roots" in mid-2008 with its first release of new (all encompassing) trance music in 3 years as opposed to the subgenre releases. Summer Euphoria was also the first digital-only release under the Euphoria brand.
With no new releases for nearly 18 months, Ministry of Sound released Euphoria 2011 in September of that year. This was a new direction for the Euphoria brand in that the album contained the latest dance music including the recent fusion of dance beats with R&B.
Telstar also launched the Breakdown (its full name being The Very Best of Euphoric Dance Breakdown) series in 1999, the same year as the inaugural Euphoria album, and this brand also went to Ministry of Sound following the folding of Telstar. Breakdown too focused on electronic dance music, but was never focused on trance music in particular, focusing on a wide range of subgenres of dance music, including non-electronic genres such as a disco edition. The series was computer mixed, but did not list a DJ on its cover, but instead in its liner notes. In the book The Complete Book of the British Charts: Singles and Albums, the Breakdown series is erroneously listed as being part of the Euphoria series.
Unusually, the last installment of the Telstar years, Deeper Shades of Euphoria (volume 2) was a co-release with Virgin Records/EMI, who had been rival labels with Telstar in the past. It has been suggested Virgin and EMI helped support the album as Telstar entered closure.
Trance music is a form of dance music characterised by an emphasis on synthesized melodies and house style electronic 4/4 beats. Trance tracks are usually based around heavily quantized melodies, with a hypnotic and often repetitive feel (hence the name). Common sounds heard in trance are arpeggiated and gated synth riffs and sweeping pads, with the few real instruments limited usually to piano, strings and acoustic guitar, if used at all. Often large, amounts of delay and reverb are used, adding to the emotional, uplifting quality of the genre.
The first forms of trance music emerged in the early 1990s as the dance revolution gripped the UK and mainland Europe. House music had already taken hold, and techno had also become popular in Europe by this time. Most of the dance music being produced at the start of the decade was sampler-based; sampling technology was relatively new at the time, and had become affordable enough for it to be mainstream. By the middle of the decade, however, dance pioneers were looking to take their sounds in a new direction; this led to the reappearance of the synthesizer which, despite being heavily used in the early 1980s new romantic and electro boom, had been rather overlooked since the sample-based dance music revolution of the mid to late 1980s.
Two particularly influential synthesizers did continue to play a part in early house music - Roland's TB-303 Bassline and TR-909 drum machine. Misuse of the TB-303 formed the basis of acid house, originating in America and becoming popular in the UK between 1987 and 1990, while the TR-909 formed the basis of the vast majority of house music rhythms by the 1990s. While house eventually moved away from TR-909 based rhythms by incorporating sampled drum loops and breakbeats, trance music retained the TR-909 sounds which continued to be popular right through until the 2000s. Acid house featured many of the characteristics of trance, but was was a more minimal genre with a focus on the sound of a repeating, distorted TB-303 riff rather than the melody created by the TB-303 itself. This may have been partly due to the TB-303 only featuring a single octave keybord (although options to increase or decrease the octave range were available), which had to be programmed rather than played. By 1990, acid house had been superseded by more melodic forms of house and techno, with piano house becoming popular and stab-driven techno melodies starting to feature in early rave music.
Against this backdrop, some early tracks were released which proved influential in the future development of trance. Future Sound of London released Papua New Guinea in 1991 - essentially a breakbeat techno track but featuring uplifting atmospheric pad sounds rather than the rave stabs or piano riff samples common at the time. Hardfloor, a German techno group, released Hardtrance Acperience in 1992 - a piercing acid house cut but with a greater focus on melody than traditional acid house. This sound was taken even further on their 1994 tracks Into The Nature and Fish and Chips. Jam and Spoon, also from Germany, released Stella in 1992 and remixed Age Of Love the same year, which are widely regarded as the first trance tracks. In 1993, a track called Dreams was released by Quench, becoming an underground club hit which also received airplay on Pete Tong's UK Radio 1 show during December 1993. This was a very early example of a trance track combining atmospheric pads, and the filtered saw-wave synthesizer riffs more commonplace by the end of the decade - indeed, Lost Tribe's Gamemaster from 1998 features a riff based on Dreams. One giveaway that Dreams is an earlier production is that the cutoff filter sweep occurs quickly across the synth riff rather than gradually building up, as on later trance tracks. More typical of the proto-trance sound around at that time is the vocal mix of Celebrate by Miro; the filter sweeps are not yet present, but Celebrate does feature an infectious, repeated lead riff over gradually building synth pads and a bassline which changes key, techniques employed by trance producers in later years to create the trademark hypnotic feel of the genre.
While piano house, jungle and garage dominated British clubs in the mid-1990s, trance music continued to develop in continental Europe, particularly in Germany. Early trance featured many elements from European techno and commercial European rave music from the era, such as the Mark'Oh track Tears Don't Lie (1995), began to take on the stuttering, gated synthesizer chords later associated with trance. Gradually, this sound diverged as a genre in its own right, and underground trance steered away from the toytown-style major key riffs while retaining its melody-driven feel. Italian producer Robert Miles released Children in 1995, featuring classical style piano and strings alongside the gated trance pads and helping to start a subgenre known as "dream house". In the UK, meanwhile, some house and techno producers began to pick up on the trance sound and incorporated it into their tracks, for example JX with You Belong To Me (1995) - the No Respect remix being a good example of an early UK trance sound. This style became known as Nu-NRG and became faster and harder, taking on elements such as Roland Alpha Juno 2 "hoover" synthesizer noises and off-beat bass stabs, eventually morphing into UK hard house.
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