Greetings everyone, and happy holidays! I am writing to provide another update about the Ektoplazm 2.0 crowdfunding campaign and redevelopment effort. If you haven’t already done so I encourage you to read the first update before proceeding.

First, the perks! A month ago I posted an update about the Ektoplazm postcard project. Everyone who claimed a postcard should have one by now—if not, please contact me and I will sort it out.

The t-shirts are another story—they have not yet been produced and shipped. This is ultimately my fault. Since I am no expert in t-shirt design—and since I wanted the design to be as awesome as possible—I delegated this task. Unfortunately I was not satisfied with the direction of the design and cancelled the deal a month into the process. I then tried working with another designer—and another. Neither worked out. Finally, I decided that I should just design the t-shirts myself. Given the late start, my relative lack of experience with this type of design, and my existing workload, it is taking much longer than I had hoped. I apologize for the long delay and will update all qualifying backers when the shirts are ready to be shipped. In the meantime, don’t worry; if you were due to receive a t-shirt you haven’t missed anything yet!

As for the “best of” compilation, it is almost ready to go. Looking back, it has been an incredible amount of work, sifting through ever release ever posted to distill the essence of Ektoplazm’s rich history and musical diversity. I actually began work on this project back in February—almost an entire spin around the sun! By now I can reveal that the compilation will include approximately 50 of the very best tracks released via Ektoplazm, several of which were fixed and remastered for this release. The “best of” compilation will be released to qualifying backers of the Ektoplazm crowdfunding campaign one month in advance of the public release here on Ektoplazm. I am hoping to be able to wrap this part of the project up in early January.

The remaining digital perks—beta access, artist accounts, and so on—will be available as development proceeds, though I can’t say when that might be. Previously I estimated that these perks might be available as early as November—with a public launch of the new site to follow in December 2012. Neither of these targets were met, obviously.

In hindsight, it was overly optimistic of me to expect that everything would fall into place in time to meet such ambitious targets. Ektoplazm 2.0 is a massive undertaking for a single individual—which is why I planned to partner up with another developer to ensure the project proceeded swiftly. After the crowdfunding campaign ended I received many generous offers of help, interviewed several potential partners by email, and eventually decided to take a chance and move across the country to start working on a trial basis with the most promising candidate. Unfortunately, this working arrangement fell through after about a month—leaving me where I began: working by myself to realize my vision of a better Ektoplazm. This isn’t as bad as it sounds—after all, I am confident in my ability to get the job done, and just as dedicated as ever—but it will take much longer than initially estimated. At this point I don’t want to throw out any more dates. I just want to get to work and share progress when I have more to report.

(Please note: I am still open to partnering up with someone on this project but I am not interested in working remotely. That being said, if you happen to be in Vancouver, Canada, let’s talk!)

On a brighter note, I am happy to report that Ektoplazm’s new content manager is up and running: welcome Soren Nordstrom to the family! He will be handling all release submissions, packaging, and processing in the new year. In the meantime I will be helping to clear the backlog in the coming weeks. While helping Soren get up to speed I have been struck by the sheer insanity of what goes on behind the scenes around here—the 40+ hour work weeks, the endless flow of emails, the innumerable exceptions and “gotchas” that accompany almost every release submission, the meticulously detailed packaging standards, and all the other maddening tasks that must be mastered to ensure the steady flow of music through the ether. Please show Soren patience and understanding; it really is a lot to ask of anyone to do what I have been doing all these years!

A reminder for all label and artist partners: please be sure to follow the distribution policy closely. This page will be updated anytime there are changes to the process. It is important to follow every step closely to ensure that we have what we need to keep the music flowing.

That’s about it for this update! As you can imagine I am not exactly thrilled with the setbacks the project has experienced in the last few months. Nevertheless, I remain committed to the project and look forward to making more progress in early 2013. If anything, the false starts and obstacles I have encountered have simply strengthened my resolve. I sincerely apologize to everyone who was expecting more by now and genuinely hope to impress you with what comes next.

Until then, stay tuned for more great music while development continues behind the scenes!

I am happy to report that virtually all of the postcards from the Ektoplazm Metamorphosis campaign have been shipped! If you were expecting one but haven’t received anything yet please drop me a line. I have a few extras in case any get lost along the way.

This project was more of an undertaking than I had imagined it would be! In total I designed nearly 20 different postcard designs and wrote out, by hand, more than 150 different addresses and personalized messages. I realized—somewhat belatedly—that it would have been helpful to have a spreadsheet linking everyone’s online identities with their real names, for there are many people I know only from message forums and such. I apologize in advance if you were the recipient of a postcard that seemed impersonal despite our shared history. Hopefully everyone is happy with what they received.

I’ll be posting another batch of updates very soon so stay tuned… and thanks again for your support!

I am ecstatic to announce that the Ektoplazm crowdfunding campaign has reached its goal—and then some. Together we raised more than $30,000 to support the redevelopment and expansion of the site. I am filled with gratitude and appreciation for everyone who stepped in to contribute, share the link, and make this initiative a success. Thank you!

(If you’re not sure what this is about, please read the original announcement as well as the actual campaign home page.)

So, what happens next?

My first priority is to take care of all campaign contributors. I have sent an email around to ask everyone who qualified for a t-shirt or other physical perk to specify their desired size and confirm their address. Once this information is collected I will begin production and share some photos of the completed design. The postcards are already here and I will write out messages of appreciation by hand and send them in the coming weeks. I aim to have everything physical out the door by late September if at all possible. The digital perks—the “best of” compilation, beta access on the new site, artist accounts, and custom mixes, etc.—will take a little longer. If you have any questions or concerns please contact me. I have a mountain of email to get through but I am doing my very best to attend to all relevant inquiries.

I have already begun the process of compiling Ektoplazm’s “Greatest Trips”, a massive undertaking given the sheer amount of music I have posted over the years. I have yet to settle on the exact format—whether it will be released as a single package or in multiple volumes—but track selection is proceeding swiftly. It also looks as if this project will include a bunch of lost tracks that I have collected over the years—unreleased gems by Ekoplex, Mukti, Jikkenteki, and others. Delays may occur as I wait for authorization from rights owners. (Though I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to participate!) Campaign contributors will receive an advance copy of the final release; watch your inbox for the link in the coming months.

Development of the new site is already under way. Beta access and artist accounts will be offered as soon as possible, hopefully sometime in November. I am still aiming for a public launch of Ektoplazm 2.0 in late December. This target may be overly ambitious but I will be doing my best to meet it. The plan is to get something up and running sooner rather than later—and then iterate rapidly in response to feedback during the beta period.

In the meantime, expect more free music to flow as development begins in earnest. Since I will be transitioning to full-time development work my colleague Soren Nordstrom will be taking over content management duties. My guess is that fewer releases will be posted in the coming months but don’t worry—there will still be plenty to share before Ektoplazm 2.0 is formally launched.

For my label and artist partners: the existing distribution policy will be updated to reflect any changes made to the process of submitting a release. Moving forward, please pay close attention to Ektoplazm’s guidelines to ensure your releases conform to our requirements. Submitting a release will continue to be free… but if your submission contains errors I will be enforcing a small fee (10 to 20 EUR, sliding scale depending on your ability to pay). The most common errors: sending 24-bit WAV files (we only accept 16-bit/44.1kHz WAV files), missing or incorrect BPMs, spelling errors in track listings, copyright infringement in cover art (you must own the rights to your artwork), and the use of non-standard file sharing services (don’t make it hard for us to download your release). Read the distribution policy if you have any questions about the submission process—it’s all there.

One more reminder: email is the only reliable way to reach me; I can’t keep up with Facebook messages and never check other social networks such as SoundCloud. I don’t want it to seem like I am ignoring anyone but I have an enormous amount of work to do in the coming months—and I need to focus. I appreciate your patience and understanding!

Once again, thank you for this opportunity! I am truly honoured to be able to work on a full-time basis to take this project to the next level. If you’ve read the story so far you will know just how much this means to me—and the best is yet to come!

When I have more news to share I will be sure to post something here on the Ektoplazm blog or on Facebook. Stay tuned for more announcements about Ektoplazm’s grand transformation!

Ektoplazm needs your help! Please contribute to the Ektoplazm crowdfunding campaign before August 15th, 2012. I have assembled a small team of experts to help me transform Ektoplazm into a next-level music distribution platform for all forms of electronic music. With your support I intend to spend the next 4–6 months working hard behind the scenes to radically redesign the entire web site from top to bottom while remaining true to the free spirit that has made Ektoplazm what it is today.

I have shared many details about the project on the campaign drop page; read it and you will get an idea of what the future of Ektoplazm will look like. I also encourage you to catch up on the story so far with a beginner’s guide to Ektoplazm.

If you have any questions about the campaign please use the contact form or leave a comment below. I will make regular updates to address frequently asked questions as the campaign proceeds. To make a contribution toward Ektoplazm’s transformation simply follow this link and click “contribute now” (the big pink button on the right).

Thank you, as always, for your continued support! Ektoplazm wouldn’t be here today without the generous donations of an entire community of music lovers. I look forward to transforming the service into something truly extraordinary in the months ahead.

Welcome to Ektoplazm, the world’s #1 source of free and legal psytrance, techno, and downtempo music. I am the founder, commonly known as Basilisk, but you can call me Alexander. This post exists to introduce new visitors to the site—and to psytrance and electronic music in general. I will start with a brief explanation of what psytrance is, outline the history of Ektoplazm and my involvement in the scene, explore the question of why labels and artists choose to give their music away for free, and finish with a grand tour of a baker’s dozen of Ektoplazm’s finest releases—all yours to download in MP3, FLAC, or WAV format! (If you wish to skip straight to the music simply click here.)

To begin with, psytrance is a type of electronic dance music with its own distinct history and customs. Partly because of its unique origin on the beaches of Goa in the late 1980s, psytrance has developed in varying degrees of isolation from electronic music culture as a whole. This unusual situation fostered a great deal of creative experimentation; the music of psytrance culture is anything but homogeneous, encompassing a wide range of approaches from high-energy beats for the dance floor to chilled and relaxing sounds for deeper moments of contemplation and introspection. If you’ve never heard it before the best way to get a feel for the range and diversity of psytrance music is to explore the site and listen to whatever catches your ear.

My involvement in this culture began when I first encountered psytrance at a party in 1996. Not long afterwards I was browsing the web and discovered a web site offering illicit psytrance MP3 downloads. I was hooked by what I heard and rapidly became a devoted fan, record collector, and DJ. When I founded Ektoplazm in 2000 it followed that I would focus on my musical interests at the time, namely psytrance and several related styles of electronic music. Back then it was just a personal homepage for my activities in the local scene. Before long I decided to start a record label, naively settling on vinyl as my release medium of choice. My first (and only) release in 2002 was a total disaster but I learned a lot about the music industry in the process.

In the years that followed I became embroiled in the ongoing debate about file-sharing and music piracy. The Napster revolution had come and gone, forever changing how we consume music, but the recording industry was doing everything it could to resist progress. Apple launched the iTunes Store with major label support in 2003 but this didn’t do a lot of good for fans of an underground style like psytrance. Even if you actually wanted to pay money for digital media you were out of luck: there were no legal download shops offering a wide selection of psytrance releases (and perish the thought of being able to procure lossless/CD-quality audio files). Pirate sites had it all, of course.

At this point the labels and distributors of the psytrance scene could have joined forces to innovate and offer something better than free to combat rampant piracy and weakening sales. Instead, they took a cue from the major labels and sunk most of their effort into shaming potential customers with an anti-piracy campaign. Their dubious choice of slogans: “copy kills your music” (and no, I am not making this up). When a few emerging services began to offer legal psytrance MP3s they were always priced above the average per-unit cost of a song sold on physical media (e.g. the cost of the CD divided by the number of songs on it). This struck me as particularly insane: charging more than the cost of a CD for a lossy version of the music it contains? The selection in these shops was quite limited as well, though it wasn’t necessarily the fault of the shop itself. I suspect that a lot of label owners felt as if digital downloads would eat into their CD sales. They were probably right to be concerned—but their failure to adapt to changing listener habits did nothing to address piracy. Guilt trips and expensive, poorly-stocked MP3 shops appeared to be the extent of the underground establishment’s response.

I observed another issue, one that is somewhat specific to smaller musical subcultures: as sales figures dwindled labels were becoming increasingly risk-averse. Unconventional artists and newcomers were having a tough time getting their music released—and there was no way to reach listeners except through established distribution channels. No one paid much attention to anything else. The labels, then, were the gatekeepers—and they strongly preferred trendy, marketable music from known names. Meanwhile, many old-timers were griping about the creative bankruptcy of newer psytrance releases. This situation struck me as being antithetical to psytrance culture itself—after all, this culture values the unconventional and elevates “thinking outside the box” to a virtue. Unconventional artists were always welcome to start their own labels—and many did—but the distributors were not always helpful. Since the market was contracting every additional release forced existing label partners to accept a smaller slice of the pie. For a lot of artists the choice began to look like this: conformity or obscurity.

After digesting countless books and articles about free culture I relaunched Ektoplazm in 2006 with the intention of promoting free music licensed under the Creative Commons as a viable alternative to the traditional music distribution system in the psytrance scene. I meant to agitate for change, lead by example, and disrupt the status quo. I aimed to provide artists with another choice beyond conformity or obscurity: massive exposure, artistic freedom, and good karma. At first there wasn’t much of a response to the concept; no one—not even the free labels and artists—took free music seriously in those early days. “You get what you pay for” was a common refrain. To address this sentiment I became a tireless advocate for higher quality standards in free music. My vision: free releases every bit as good as what could be bought in stores. This called for high-resolution album artwork, lossless/CD-quality audio files, and proper mastering. Gradually this vision became a reality as more and more labels and artists came on board with the concept. Nowadays there are many examples of free albums that rival the quality of their commercial counterparts.

Ektoplazm fulfilled its primary mission to legitimize and popularize the distribution of free music in the psytrance scene sometime in 2010. Since then I’ve focused on adding more and more releases to the site to keep up with surging demand for new music—and for access to the platform. By now (summer 2012) Ektoplazm has served more than 6.7 million full releases and 30–35 million tracks to millions of listeners all around the planet. This is rather impressive given that Ektoplazm has catered to such an obscure niche market. To put this in perspective, Bandcamp, the most comparable distribution service for independent musicians of any genre, claims to have served up 34 million downloads to date. How can this be? I attribute the success of Ektoplazm to a number of things:

• Ektoplazm is a curated resource. I pick and choose what I post on the site. It isn’t like YouTube where just anyone can upload music. I have a rather stringent process for demos and release submissions. I can’t promise that every release will appeal to every listener—but I can promise that the releases on the site will tend to meet a minimum quality standard.
• Ektoplazm is committed to artistic expression. Commercial labels have to play it safe and keep an eye on the bottom line but I consider it my duty to take a chance on weird and unusual releases. This is the other side of “free”: not only are you welcome to download the music free of charge (gratis) but I also do my best to remove restrictions on artistic expression (libre). This benefits artists as well as music lovers everywhere.
• Ektoplazm connects independent labels and artists with a massive audience. This is not just a happy accident; the site was designed to take advantage of the power of digital distribution. With no registration necessary the barriers to access have been lowered and individual releases are primed to go viral. Ektoplazm regularly facilitates 5,000–10,000 (or more) downloads per release. How does this stack up against the other options? Assuming Beatport, the largest commercial portal for electronic music downloads, has 1 million tracks in its catalog and 80 million sales. That’s about 80 sales per track, each earning less than a dollar. If an artist is keen to earn some cash for their work (and not everyone is) they might be better off giving their music away if it leads to even one paid booking. How about other free offerings? Bandcamp allocates 200 free downloads per account per month. Ektoplazm presently has no such limit thanks to Dreamhost (referral link; sign up for hosting and Ektoplazm will get a small kickback).
• Ektoplazm is fanatical about lossless quality audio and kick-ass metadata. Why should we take a step back from the quality standards set in the 1980s? Bizarrely enough, some commercial shops still refuse to offer lossless/CD-quality downloads. The shops that do often impose frivolous “WAV handling fees” (I’m looking at you, Beatport). Here at Ektoplazm you have a choice between WAV, which is still useful for burning direct to CD, and FLAC, a newer, more compressed (yet still lossless) format that allows embedded metadata such as album artwork and track information. And that’s another thing—buy a song from one of the commercial shops and you’ll be stuck downloading some horribly-named file (e.g. “92809_The_Muddy_Morning_Hymn_Original_Mix.wav”) lacking any kind of useful metadata. Ektoplazm does it right: simple, standardized file names with all the obvious metadata embedded alongside album artwork and BPMs (for the DJs out there).
• Ektoplazm feels good. Independent labels and artists share music here because they want to. Music lovers enjoy guilt-free downloads. Everyone wins!

The wonderful thing about working on this project is that I don’t have to simply talk about the music—you can hear it yourself! To start you off on the right track I’ve selected thirteen releases reflecting the creative and stylistic diversity of Ektoplazm’s offerings from 2006–2012. I’ve also written a short blurb about each release, sometimes about the style and other times about its historic importance. Most of the releases featured here are crowd favourites chosen by Ektoplazm’s visitors in one of our year-end polls but I slipped a few of my own personal favourites into the mix to spice things up. Flash is required for streaming previews; click on the big arrow beneath each release blurb to listen to the release while you browse. Click on the album artwork to find out more about each release—and to leave comments of your own. Direct download links are also available in the text below.

Globular – A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

I am opening this list with one of the most accessible and all-round awesome releases I have had the pleasure of promoting here on Ektoplazm. Globular is a hugely talented chap from Bristol, U.K., who writes deep dubby downtempo influenced by the likes of Shpongle and Ott, some of the biggest names in electronic music. This isn’t psytrance in the conventional sense; this is “psychedelic dub” or simply psy dub, a creative offshoot that traces its origins back to the mid-1990s. Download, crank the bass, and let these lovely tunes sprawl across your stereo for awhile—I’m betting you’ll enjoy the experience.

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Electrocado – The Hass Effect

This album from the land down under is a creative mish-mash of influences reflecting the electronic music zeitgeist of 2011. Built on a backbone of progressive psytrance, it features a healthy amount of cross-genre experimentation, integrating glitch and electro into the mix of styles. The resulting style is accessible, fun, and hugely popular with Ektoplazm’s visitors; The Hass Effect was voted the #1 album of 2011 in last year’s site-wide poll. Take a bite of this avocado sandwich and you’ll hear for yourself what the commotion is all about. For more like this I’d suggest taking a gander at the discographies of the Electrocado duo, Mr. Bill and Ryanosaurus, both of whom have a strong following for their solo efforts.

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Etnoscope – Way Over Deadline

Tribal progressive trance at its finest! Sweden’s Etnoscope is a big name from way back; the group was founded in 2000 and made a huge splash with their massive debut album Drums From The Dawn Of Time on Son Kite’s infamous Digital Structures imprint in 2003. Work on a follow-up album continued for years but the album never materialized; the psytrance industry had, along with the major labels, gone into decline, and the the nascent album only narrowly avoided being chopped up into little bits for release on various compilations. With the help of Panzar Produktionz the album received the release it deserves: whole and uncut. In acknowledgement of the awesomeness of this release it was voted the #2 album of 2010 by Ektoplazm visitors.

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Ekoplex – Creatures Of The Forest

My friend Ekoplex (Ray Vincent) is one of the most successful artists to ever grace the pages of Ektoplazm. He’s been at it for a long time—longer than any other artist, in fact! I’ve been posting Ray’s music on Ektoplazm since 2002 or so, back when I hosted a few MP3 samples of his early work. Ekoplex’s sound has come a long way since then. In 2008 he burst onto the world stage with his magnificent debut album Journey Of The Turtle, the first big release from the in-house Ektoplazm record label, which has now been downloaded an astounding 46,000 times! Since then Ekoplex has polished and refined his organic brand of full-on morning psytrance, culminating with the release of Creatures Of The Forest which was later voted the #3 album of 2010. The story continues with Discovering The Ancient, a tribal downtempo epic released in 2012.

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SubConsciousMind – Intermezzo Extended

SubConsciousMind is an independent Swiss artist whose sophomore effort was voted the #1 album of 2009. His style is an emotive mix of modern full-on psytrance and old school Goa trance with a highly personal touch. This is music straight from the heart: nostalgic and even melancholic at times, but also uplifting, energetic, and life-affirming. To this day it remains one of the most eminently listenable albums in my collection.

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Dimensional Gateway

Neogoa began as a web portal dedicated to modern or “new school” Goa trance, an ongoing revival of the classic 1990s style using new production techniques and an emphasis on cosmic sounds and exotic melodic scales. This compilation, the first from the newly born Neogoa netlabel, gathers some of the rising stars of this vibrant movement. Label founder Richpa’s focus on quality bore fruit: Dimensional Gateway was named the best compilation of 2010 by Ektoplazm’s visitors. If you enjoy this taste of new school Goa trance be sure to check out the sequel, Dimensional Gateway 2.

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Jikkenteki – Flights Of Infinity

Jikkenteki is another old friend of mine from the very early days of Ektoplazm. His story was hugely influential on my thinking when I first got into free music distribution. Jikkenteki followed a somewhat standard course for an independent musician in the mid-2000s: he worked hard to develop an original style, sent demos to many labels, and was met with rejection time and again. The issue was simply that Jikkenteki’s style was too original; risk-averse label owners weren’t interested in taking a chance on new artists, particularly not when their music failed to conform to an existing formula with proven marketability. As a music lover I was outraged—isn’t psytrance all about brazen creative experimentation and breaking the rules? Jikkenteki did his best to work within the traditional distribution system by founding his own independent label, PAR-2 Productions, but did not manage to sell many CDs. Eventually he ported his entire discography to Ektoplazm and released Flights Of Infinity, an absolute gem of an album and a stellar example of psytrance at its most inventive and expressive. We later collaborated on his final album, The Beginning Is At The End, a haunting album that brought his time in the psytrance world to a conclusion.

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Cybernetika – The Scythe Of Orion

Cybernetika is an enigmatic and reclusive German producer with a long history of releasing science fiction-influenced music for free via hobbyist forums. I lobbied hard to have his independently released album Neural Network Expansion added to the site in early 2007 and went on to host Nanospheric (2008) and Atropos (2009), an experimental fusion of psytrance and drum ‘n bass. For his next pure psytrance album, The Scythe Of Orion, I offered some help with professional mastering and design, and in 2010 the album was released to widespread acclaim, earning the best album of the year award in our annual visitor survey. Evidently I am not alone in considering it to be a masterpiece of modern psytrance! What makes this album so irresistible? Cybernetika has a way with storytelling: his music manifests thoughts and images in the mind of the listener exactly as good psychedelic (“mind-manifesting”) music should. Not only that, but he really captures the mood of hard sci-fi, with its ritualistic descriptions of far future events, galaxy-spanning empires, lost relics of vanished alien civilizations, man–machine hybrids, and the vast, inhuman emptiness of interstellar space.

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Under The Moss Vol. 2

Darkpsy and forest music are two of the most popular styles of psytrance on Ektoplazm—and also two of the most challenging for new listeners. The distinction between darkpsy and forest music is subtle. Generally speaking, darkpsy is harder and more aggressive and often concerned with very dark and sinister themes (hence the name) whereas forest music, which often sounds superficially similar or even indistinguishable to the untrained ear, is in fact more involved in organic and biological themes, and will tend to sound more enchanting with time. To ease beginners into such an acquired taste I’ve selected this excellent release by Forest Freaks, a Lithuanian collective, which exhibits a wide variety of approaches to night-time psychedelia without sliding too far into the darkness. For more in this vein check out DoHm – Swampology, Schizoid Bears – Bearsky Dreams, the Voices Of The Trees compilation, the original Under The Moss, and Cycle Of Secrets. Trust me: there is a lot more to explore once you begin to appreciate the dark side of psytrance! This guide contains few examples of the more extreme forms of psytrance; I don’t want to scare anyone off!

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Radioactive.Cake – Subatomic Disco

Robert Hundt is a machine. Apart from operating Glitchy.Tonic.Records, an acclaimed label responsible for numerous high-quality releases over the years, he is also the man behind the unconventional Radioactive.Cake and Zeitgeist projects, both of which explore different aspects of experimental progressive psytrance. This particular album, the #2 album of 2011, is a minimalistic monster loaded with chewy grooves and mental atmospheres. This particular style is heavily influenced by the pioneering work of Sensient and Zenon Records—hence why you will sometimes see the term Zenonesque bandied about when describing releases like this one. To be honest, this is one of those cases where yours truly got involved in popularizing a name for a style that had previously aggravated my attempt at neatly organizing the music of Ektoplazm, though not without controversy (some people are very opposed to my cavalier attitude toward assigning styles around here). I feel as if I am justified, however: Zenonesque isn’t exactly techtrance, which is generally more cold and mechanical, nor is it straight-up progressive, which often carries connotations of lighter and more airy productions. No, it is somewhere in between—and it has something original going on, that curious emphasis on jazz and funk influences. Confused yet? Just give it a listen and you’ll hear! If you’d like more in this vein I encourage you to rifle through the Glitchy.Tonic.Records discography; it’s loaded with thrillers like this.

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Deto & Gleam – Archives

A captivating work of moody, futuristic techno music from Hungary. Released in 2010 on the Digital Diamonds advanced audio netlabel, one of Ektoplazm’s oldest and most reliable partners, this “space age fairy tale” is filled with subtle details that reward patient and attentive listening. This is not an album that gives up its secrets easily, nor is it designed for prime time dance floors. Instead, the rich panoramic atmospheres and emotional nuances create an immersive and enchanting listening experience that is great on headphones and excellent for coding and other background tasks. Be sure to pick up Kisses & Tears, a companion piece released earlier in 2010, which contains a stunning 24-minute epic.

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ManMadeMan – Free To Listen

This guide would not be complete without the free album that started it all! ManMadeMan, a legendary project formed in 1994, are rightfully considered to be some of the original pioneers of psytrance music. In 2007 they independently released Free To Listen on their own web site and I jumped at the chance to help cross-promote. This was the first major free release from a veteran act in the psytrance scene—and it was, musically speaking, an unusually creative album that the group might have had some trouble releasing through traditional distribution channels. So, what have we here? An extremely diverse journey through many different styles of psytrance and downtempo. ManMadeMan went on to release a second free album with Ektoplazm, Children Of The Light, in 2010. Give it a try; this is history!

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Hinkstep – Sunrise From The Treetops

The journey concludes with another dazzling downtempo album, the remarkable debut of Hinkstep, a talented musician from Sweden. I was completely unfamiliar with his music before a long-time fan and supporter passed on his contact info. When I first heard the demo for this album I knew it was something special—but it took some time before I realized just how special it is. Much like Globular’s debut, this album is loaded with psy dub bass lines, but with a very different approach. The use of real-world instrumentation and vocals sets it apart from other releases in this style. Try it out; I hope you fall in love.

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That about wraps it up! If you have any general questions about the site please refer to the help page. For more recommendations check out the best of Ektoplazm (as voted by visitors like you) for 2011, 2010, 2009. For the veterans out there: did I miss any of the essentials? Feel free to make additional recommendations in the comments.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the music!