The results of the Ektoplazm Free Music Survey 2009 are in! Big thanks go out to the 385 visitors who responded to the call in the month of January. The survey had two main parts: one section for voting on the best release of the year and another section designed to gather some feedback about the Ektoplazm web site and netlabel. Here I present the results of the first section—the best free psytrance (and whatever else you find here) of 2009 as voted by Ektoplazm fans like you!

Best EPs

#5: PharaOm – Awakening Bodhisattva [Underground Alien Factory Records]
#4: Dissociactive – Underwater Lab [Sun Station]
#3: Amygdala – The Sprawl [Ektoplazm]
#2: Kino Oko – The Doggy Bag [Digital Diamonds]
#1: Anakoluth – Beyond Reach [Cronomi Records]

Honourable mentions: Mukti – Magick Mother, SoulCraft – Zen Spirit, Faradize – Darknight Castle, Kemonoid – Squishy Fish, and Hypnagog – Dreaming In Pieces.

Best Compilations

#5: Telepathik Nonsense [Wonk#Ay Records]
#4: Art From The Heart [Old Is Gold]
#3: Helicon Vedas [Helicon Sound System/Om Veda Records]
#2: Entities [Croatian Psytrance Community]
#1: Under The Moss [Forest Freaks]

Honourable mentions: Energies Around, Rest In Pieces, T.O.U.C.H. Samadhi 001, Entheos Audio Archive 3.0, and The Future Of Light.

Best Albums

#5: ManMadeMan – Children Of The Light [Ektoplazm]
#4: Disco Hooligans – Clear Skies [Ektoplazm]
#3: Jikkenteki – The Beginning Is At The End [Ektoplazm]
#2: Cybernetika – Atropos [Independent]
#1: SubConsciousMind – Intermezzo Extended [Ektoplazm]

Honourable mentions: Proton Kinoun – Apeiron, Xamanist – Initiation, Freeform Human – Arnika, New Age Hippies – Entrance, and Trebolactiko – Deep Channeling.

There you have it! 2009 was another fantastic year for free psytrance and I think it shows in the quality of releases listed above. Hopefully there are a few in the list above that you haven’t heard and now feel compelled to discover!

This is actually the first time I have surveyed visitors to assemble this list; if you have a look at the Best Free Psytrance of 2008 you can see that it consists of my own personal highlights. I would like to give credit to Volker at Digital Diamonds for introducing me to Google Forms, the system used to operate the survey. Basing this list on community input makes way more sense than filtering through everything myself!

I will have more results from the Ektoplazm Free Music Survey 2009 to post very soon. The next part will consist of your feedback, what styles you want to hear more or less of, media preferences, and some announcements about what sort of changes can be expected to the site this year (all based on your comments of course). Thanks again to everyone who participated and I hope 2010 is every bit as good (or even better) than last year’s bumper crop of awesome free music!

Is your favourite 2009 release listed here? Do you agree with the results?

The psytrance industry is a motley collection of small businesses that don’t always play well together; allegations of misconduct are commonplace in this scene. These petty disputes are frequently made public on big international forums like Isratrance, particularly when disgruntled artists, lacking any other method of recourse, decide to expose shady label owners for non-payment. Obviously the camaraderie experienced on the dance floor does not always extend to backroom business dealings in this subculture. Is it because so much of this business is conducted for small amounts of money over international borders? I can’t say for certain, but there seems to be no love lost between many of the major movers and shakers in this industry.

Case in point: this exchange found on the psychedelic.be forum. Here we have a discussion between Saikosounds and Psyshop, two of the largest (if not the largest) psytrance mail order shops. Both offer in-house distribution for labels (more Psyshop than Saikosounds, really) but there isn’t much of an exchange between them. This is compounded by the rivalry between Psyshop and Wirikuta, another European distributor that deals with Saikosounds. As a result, there are many titles that are available in one shop but not the other—a big pain in the ass for psytrance fans with broad interests. Do you suppose they might work it out amongst themselves to provide a better customer experience in this era of plummeting physical media sales? The answer can be found after the break. Continue reading the rest of this post »

All Stars Festival – Deco by Neuromantix

Welcome to the 2010 edition of Ektoplazm’s annual North American Festival Guide. Here you will find a listing of various outdoor gatherings at least somewhat associated with the psychedelic trance subculture in Canada and the United States. Many more festivals will be added to this list as details are announced!

Faeries & Fools – May 22/23 (Crystal Creek, B.C.)
Gaudi, Adham Shaikh

Lightning In A Bottle – May 28/29/30/31 (California)

Alchemy – May 30/April 1/2 (California)
Procs, Aphid Moon, Progress

Sacred Earth – June 4/5/6 (Wisconsin)
SouthWild, Parus, Progress, Shapestatic, Annunaki

Orb – June 10/11/12/13 (New York)

Gemini – June 11/12/13 (California)
OOOD, Ajja, Chromatone, Mubali, Aerosis, Enertopia, Ekoplex

Entheos – June 18/19/20/21 (B.C.)

Om Reunion Project – June ? (Ontario)

Red Marines – June 18/19/20 (California)

Desiderata – June 23/24/25/26/27 (New York)

Astral Harvest – July 1/2/3/4 (Driftpile Valley, Alberta)

Shaman Tales – July 2/3/4/5 (Ontario)

Sacred Seed – July 9/10/11 (Cherokee Farms, Georgia)

Motion Notion – July 15/16/17/18/19 (Drayton Valley, Alberta)

Eclipse – July 23/24/25/26 (Quebec)

OpenMind – August 5/6/7/8 (Quebec)

Shambhala – August 4/5/6/7/8 (B.C.)

Worldbridge – August 6/7/8 (Cherokee Farms, Georgia)

(TBA) – August 13/14/15 (Pacific Northwest)

DICA – August 20/21 (B.C.)

Burning Man – August 31 to September 7 (The Playa)

El Hal – September 3/4/5/6 (Quebec)

Harvest – Late September (Ontario)

This is version 1.1.

Festivals in bold featured Ektoplazm, Drumlore, or Omnitropic live acts and DJs. Interested in booking Basilisk, Ekoplex, Clone, Aerodrömme, Akhentek, Farbo, Neto, or Neuromantix (a Toronto-based psychedelic arts collective; deco pictured above) for your event? Contact us soon as dates are filling up!

Festivals with a strike through the name have been cancelled or seem dodgy (based on previous event reviews) and should be treated with caution.

Consult last year’s guide for more festival links if you’d like to get ahead of the game or watch the following web sites for more festival announcements: AtlPsy, Saint Jean Basstiste, Brainfest, Psytribe, Space Gathering, T.O.U.C.H. Samadhi, Another World, Symbiosis, Beheshto, and Venus. Apparently Gaian Mind is not taking place this year, nor is Natura by the looks of it.

Tips and info welcome. Leave a comment below or use the contact form.

What is your favourite North American psytrance festival and why?

I rely on a lot of different applications and utilities to keep this web site running and the free music flowing. Here I have compiled a list of some of the more important software that I use to publish music and maintain this web site. This list is for my reference as much as yours; I will be referring back to this post whenever I am travelling and wish to update the site remotely. Anyone reading could do the same—although I will need to make another post detailing my work-flow to properly convey knowledge of how I prepare releases for publication. For now, here is the raw list of (mostly freeware) tools that I use to keep Ektoplazm alive (in alphabetical order):

• 7 Zip – for compressing and decompressing release packages and other goodies. I also suggest looking into WinRAR but it’s not totally free.
• Audacity – a cross-platform sound editor and recorder similar to Sound Forge. I use this for simple audio editing—for instance, correcting bad mastering jobs that leave sounds hanging at the end of a file, processing live recordings, etc. You can also find a lot of free VSTs on the net to add missing features (i.e. a better compressor) but it already has most of the basics covered.
• AVG – free virus scanner. It’s a bit of a resource hog but a necessary evil when you are moving files around the net.
• Exact Audio Copy (EAC) – a “perfect” audio ripper; use it to rip your CD collection to archival-quality digital media. Also features some highly useful audio processing tools for WAV comparison and lossless audio quality checks. Look up a guide to get the most out of this great program.
• FileZilla – a simple FTP client for transferring large files and keeping the web server updated.
• Firefox – my web browser of choice. Load it up with a few essential add-ons: Adblock Plus, Canadian English Dictionary, Delicious Bookmarks, Download Statusbar, Echofon (in-browser Twitter client; it isn’t great but I don’t know of anything better right now), Firebug (development tools), and Flashblock.
• Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) – absolutely essential for anyone working with FLAC, the best lossless audio standard around. Grab a GUI interface and start crunching your collection today! (Why is FLAC better than WAV? It’s smaller, taggable, and retains 100% of the quality.)
• GIMP – a freeware graphics editing suite. Much like Audacity, it isn’t nearly as hassle-free to use as its commercial equivalent (Photoshop in this case) but it is still useful for quick image editing on the go.
• MediaMonkey – general purpose media library with some decent tagging and conversion capabilities. This is one of the weak links in my toolkit; this program does way too much for what I want to use it for (just tagging and conversion) but I haven’t found anything better.
• Medieval CUE Splitter – use this tool to split large audio tracks that come with a CUE file. It doesn’t create CUE files though (I still use a text editor for that as I haven’t found anything more reliable and less complicated).
• Mixmeister BPM Analyzer – the quickest and most accurate BPM analyzer I have ever used; just drag and drop MP3s and it automatically writes BPMs to the ID3 tags. I’d love to have this functionality rolled into one of these other tools but the additional processing step is worth it at present.
• Notepad++ – all-purpose text editor. Edit code, documents, whatever. It suffers from feature creep but all the extras are fairly easy to ignore.
• Oscar’s File Renamer – simple and powerful search and replace functionality permits mass renaming of files (to capitalize, remove underscores, or change “rmx” to “remix” for example). Very useful for DJs looking to nearly organize their digital media collection.
• PuTTY – a freeware Telnet/SSH client; very useful for fiddling around with the web server.
• Rapid Evolution 2 – a brilliant cross-platform (Java-based) DJing tool. Although primarily used by harmonic mixing DJs to analyze tracks for key and BPM it also doubles as a music library for use in set planning and performance. The key analysis is generally quite accurate if you set things up right but it is always wise to verify findings with the built-in piano. BPM analysis is time-consuming and not always accurate (which is why I use the Mixmeister BPM Analyzer to handle this step. After importing into RE2 you can easily format the BPM to one decimal place to clean things up.)
• RazorLAME – a front-end interface for LAME, the industry-standard command line MP3 encoder. It is old software but it still works well enough. Standard quality for presentation on Ektoplazm is full stereo at 320kbps (CBR); no need to muck around with VBR in this era of virtually infinite hard drive capacity.
• VSO Image Resizer – a shell enhancement to quickly resize images. I use this to create the “folder.jpg” files that come with every new release.
• Winamp – still my audio player of choice after all these years! Load up on pretty skins at DeviantArt. Also useful: a working Audioscrobbler plugin (for sending data to last.fm).

Some of these programs aren’t exactly “freeware” in the technical definition of the term but all are free to download and use. There is a heavy bias toward the Windows platform as this is what I am accustomed to but I would love to assemble a similar list for working on the Mac. I tried that last summer but kept running into gaps—areas where I couldn’t find an equivalent free application—most notably in terms of FLAC support.

There are also a few programs on the list that I would love to phase out in favour of something better. In most of those cases I simply haven’t found anything that works nearly as well as the program I find somewhat disagreeable. Tagging is the big one; I’d like to use something more automated than MediaMonkey but everything I’ve tried hasn’t worked for one reason or another. I am also missing a good freeware CD burner on the list (as I have been using Nero at home for some time) and haven’t done the research to figure that one out. If anyone has any suggestions please feel free to leave a comment! I also plan to update this list as my toolkit changes.

Portable versions of many of the programs listed above can be downloaded from Portable Apps for use on the go—just load up a USB key and run or pack a Dropbox account with what you need. I also recommend looking into Google Apps. It’s better to keep some applications in the cloud!

Photo credit: Robert S. Donovan.

Digital Diamonds recently reached 100,000 downloads! To mark the occasion Volker has this to share about the past, present, and future of Digital Diamonds:

After nearly 3 years since the foundation in 2006, German based Techno and Techtrance label Digital Diamonds reaches the mark of more than 100.000 Downloads.

Label founders Adam and Volker are really glad about the huge acceptance of their concept and philosophy which is basically a result of the great work of the artists who release their unique music for cost-free download on Digital Diamonds. Kino Oko, Opsy, Fuzzion, Alic, Tapwatr, Nuclear Ramjet, Thompson & Kuhl and Hiroshi Oki are only a few who make Digital Diamonds diversified and massive as it is.

For the end of the year the label founders announce two fresh powerful releases. One by Float from Serbia who is well known for his music on Plusquam, Headstick and Iboga. The other one is from Deto & Gleam, a new project from Hungarian producers Péter Takács and Mark Bokay who just released their first EPs on Horns And Hoofs Entertainment and Halu Beats. And in the beginning of 2010 we await the Vol. 2 of “Digital Family” compilation. The first “Digital Family” V.A. evolved to the most downloaded release of the Digital Diamonds catalogue.

Digital Diamonds’ success is build up by the amazing support of a huge network consisting of music portals like Ektoplazm, Rowolo, Foem, friendly labels such as Soundmute, Nachtstrom Schallplatten, Antiritmo, Boshke Beats and finally a big crowd of fans spreading and listening the releases all around the globe.

Congratulations to everyone involved! The entire Digital Diamonds discography is available for free download here at Ektoplazm.