I guess in my posts of outstanding trance artists, Joe Garrett  aka “Temple One” was mentioned often enough and there are only a few people out there, whose releases contain such a consistent quality as the ones from Joe.

ButI want to recommend the works of Simon Patterson as well whose tracks are always a pure pleasure to listen to. There are not many DJs out there that create such interesting tracks that consist of floating, heavy beats, progressive elements combined with very melodic breaks and main themes – all of these mixed perfectly and never boring.

You can listen to a lot of tunes (in full length) on his Myspace page. Note especially “Always” – one of the best trance releases last year, “Thump” and the  new track “Miss you” which contains a very nice piano theme.

This was a very good year for trance music. Tons of good releases out there. Germany with its passion for minimal techno (that’s all they obviously only know here)  still widely ignores Trance although some of the big names in Trance dared to come over here and did gigs. So, there is hope.

To create a Top 10 of Trance songs is not very easy due to the abovementioned high number of quality tunes. Anyways, here are my personal favorites :

10. Ankhen & Adrian – Intuition (Sunny Lax Remix)

9. Super8 & Tab feat. Alyna – Delusion (Original Mix)

8. Ramsterdam – Ramsterdam (Jorn van Deynhoven Mix)

7. Paul van Dyk – Nothing but you (Super8 & Tab Remix)

6. Dan Stone  – Fahrenheit (Original Mix)

5. Bartlett & Dyor – Floating beyond (Lange Remix)

4. Temple One – Sahara Nights (Original Mix)

3. Simon Patterson – Always (Original Mix)

2. Oceanlab – I am what I am (Lange Remix)

1. Ferry Tayle & Static Blue – L’Acrobat (Andy Blueman Remix)

At the moment Audiojelly is giving away 50 selected tracks for free if you purchase tracks worth at least 5 euros. Since some tunes were anyways already in the waiting line to be bought by me, I used this offer. So, these are the fresh new trance anthems that I got. Quite an international mix:

From Great Britain – Temple One: Sahara Nights (Original Mix). This was finally a success for Joe at Trance Around the World since it became the webvote winner and being even played again a few times after that.

From The Netherlands – RAM: Ramsterdam (Jorn van Deynhoven Mix). The track was in Audiojelly’s charts for a long time. Fantastic break.

From the USA – Redstar – Stronger than time (Intro Mix). A little bit older track from Redstar. I got notice of it when they played it at Trance.FM

From Romania – Anhken & Adrian: Intuition (Sunny Lax Remix). I admit I didn’t really like the newer productions of Hungarian trance artist Sunny Lax. He changed his style quite a bit. This here is a very good remix though.

Here are some highly recommendable new trance tracks:

Simon Patterson – Always (Original Mix).

Already the previously released “thump” was a very decent tune, it was mixed well and had a surprisingly melodic break. “Always” tops it easily though. It belongs to my favorite tracks of 09 so far. Everything fits in this tune.

Thomas Coastline – Love victims (Temple One Remix)

Again, Joe Garrett aka Temple One makes a fantastic remix elevating an already very interesting original track to a hymn.

Paul van Dyk – Forbidden fruit (Giuseppe Ottavani Remix)

There are a few gems on the remix album containing Paul’s classic tunes. This one, “forbidden fruit” was always one of my favorite tracks from PvD. Giuseppe successfully kept the best parts of the track, made it faster and sound even better than the original version.

Paul van Dyk – Nothing but you (Super8 & Tab Remix)

Anjunabeats residents and Finnish DJs Super8 and DJ Tab did a fantastic job here.

Phillip Alpha – Sudden Changes (Original Mix)

At the Anjunabeats forum there was a big discussion about how similar this track sounds compared with Daniek Kandi’s tracks who coproduced this. So what? Yes, sure, it was influenced by him but it has it’s own style as well.

It took ages for this track to be released. I remember first listening to L’acrobat by Ferry Tayle & Static Blue in some of the Trance Around the World shows a long while ago and since then a whole community of enthusiastic fans of this song waited for it to be available at the shops. Now it is out and it is certainly one of the best trance releases in a long while, including one of the best breaks in trance history. Enhanced Recordings is getting better and better in catching up concerning the quality of their releases compared with the Anjunabeats label.

For many of us Trance listeners, Chicane used to be the fundamental artist who not only was one of the creators of this style but whose music, especially his first albums still belong to the best ever released in the electronic music genre. Sadly, Chicane changed his style radically, a lot of releases were basically pretty ordinary  pop music pieces that fit perfectly as background music in grocery stores. Now, there is hope. A remix of an old Sigur Ros song named “Poppiholla”  sounds just fantastic as you can discover when going to Chicane’s home page. The track starts right away.

Germany is a desert concerning trance music. It is hardly ever played at clubs, parties and at radio stations. Electro and Minimal rule this country while Trance is big in wide parts of the world like Scandinavia, Eastern Europe or Great Britain. As a result there are not many DJs or labels from Germany that release good quality trance tracks. Tracks in my last “shopping bag” cause hope at my side though that something is changing.

While Paul van Dyk (from Berlin) is not really producing any pure trance tracks anymore – his new releases could be seen as pop music in my view, his label Vandit Records improves by releasing more and more decent trance tracks. Newest example is “Who’s in charge” by Polish DJ Adam Kancerski.

Probably one of the best German trance releases in recent times is the Ferrin & Low Remix of “Deep Impact” by Discodyne.

Good examples that show that there might be coming much more good trance tracks from this country? I hope so.

European premiere of the documentation “It might get loud” at the Berlinale. After a short introduction by director Davis Guggenheim and The Edge, guitarist of U2, we watch a journey through the history of electronic guitar music looking at the works of three famous and influential guitarists: Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin), The Edge (U2) and Jack White (The White Stripes).  They meet for an exchange of thoughts about their play and their influences. Old footage of their early works in former groups is shown, the audience laughs. The musicians show us their important places where music was produced. Animations follow, a lot of excerpts from live concerts and – you probably saw it coming – a jamming session of the guitarists. While the sound technician at the Friedrichstadtpalast probably thought a movie with such a title has to be played really loud everything else about the movie is likable, it is funny, entertaining, gives a deep insight into the question why these people became musicians and guitarists especially and there is a lot of  good music being played in the movie. So, go and see it.

I admit that I was a big fan of New Wave and Italo Disco centuries ago when it was big here in Europe. Recent releases from especially Australian bands sound very similar to the stuff, that was released back then. I name it “Australian retro” but I would bet there is already another label out for it. If you liked Italo Disco too you should for instance have a listen to Cut Copy from Melbourne. You’ll find all the old vocoder/synthesizer sounds that were used way back then when Italo Disco was big.

There were times when I looked back at what was released on the trance sector throughout the year and I came to the conclusion, that for me there weren’t that many “extraordinary” tracks out there to be mentioned in a “Best of” list. So the list contained only 3 or 5 really classy tunes. 08 was certainly different. It started very slowly, I remember long time gaps in which I hardly bought anything, but the 2nd half repaired a lot having some major releases and effecting a Top 10 list of my favorite trance tunes. So, here they are:

10: Andy Duguid – Wasted (Original Mix)

9: Lemon & Einar K – Anticipation (Original Mix)

8: Kandi & Neumann – Let go (Original Mix)

7: David Newsum: Sand Dune (Original Mix)

6: Master & Nickson – Out there, 5th dimension (Daniel Kandi’s Bangin’ Mix)

5: John Askew – Fade to black (Original Mix)

4: Ata – Blue skies (Temple One Remix)

3: Anjunabeats – Volume One (7skies & Static Blue Remix)

2: Temple One – World Beyond (Original Mix)

1: Redstar – Rush (Karl G Remix)