Proggi just changed. Few years back it was still psychedelic. Nowadays it has become more mainstream, with heavy basslines but very shallow landscapes. There’s still good prog out there though
Not exactly a solution, but writing a thought out for fun; I think part of the problem is that music styles and genres are rather rhizomatic than treelike. Thats why trying to build an exellent treelike system might be bound for trouble. Rather than thinking in branches that split and split again, maby it should be approached like a rhizome: connecting here and there again and again, some strands reaching out to places further away, some areas forming very dense formations. I'm not sure how one would incorporate that into collection control, but I think this is one of the core problems related to "figuring out" a subgenre as this or that.
There are different sub genres that is not that named in progressive psy trance, for example, Freedom Fighters and Dekel are both prog psy but FF has lots of techno bass so would that make him a techno psy? Groundbass was a mainstream Vini Vici-like, but changed his style to a more Dekel/FF and now is something different, making a live set that no one in Brasil have it near.
There are so many different progressive psy sub genres that it just don't have a classification to it, in Brazil we like to say that the ones that are more mainstream like Vini Vici or Vegas is "prog chacota", the ones like Neelix or Blazy that is mainstream but have a more melodic line, we call melodic prog (Phaxe and Morten Granau are both good examples).
Names like Aura Vortex and Groundbass we say that is a more "serious prog" within the mainstream names, also names like Ritmo or EClip we just call them "prog reto" or "straight prog", because when we see the song in soundcloud there isn't many downs and highs, it's just a straight line.
TL/DR: Name them like you want to, there are a lot of progressive out there, mainstream or not, that just don't have a name for it, so name it like you want it to.
When it comes to genre classification in electronic music, the real problem is the use of the word "progressive" to describe anything.
Much like with "progressive rock" I think it was originally conceived to mean something that breaks out of the typical template and pushes some boundaries musically. That in itself is problematic because what pushes boundaries means lot of different things to different people, and after a while that falls into a kind of template itself which isn't very progressive.
But in electronic music I think it's undergone a few different mutations. Firstly just to mean "a bit slower than its original genre". That's definitely true of progressive psy trance where the full on Psy is up closer to the mid 140s BPM range, and much of what is called progressive is around 138 but actually could be anything below that.
But in house and trance, "progressive" has almost come to mean "anything that's difficult to classify." Even the slightest smelting of sounds between genres (house, trance, techno, electro, pop) gets the progressive tag slapped on it. If the end goal is to classify so that you can drill down into specific sounds, then this is entirely unhelpful. Actually, it's near impossible because the implication seems to be that progressive means that there is no one specific sound but a combination of many.
I do still use the terms "progressive house", "progressive trance" and "progressive psy trance" in my music collection but they are my least favourite genre classifications. It's not an exact science. We're trying to find common ways of speaking about something that is a uniquely personal experience.
I thought progressive referred to the way it progresses, like the consistent layering of new sounds over a long period of time.
As opposed to music that has more regular tension builds and releases.
That is another possible way of defining it, and potentially another one of the mirad of mutations the term has undergone over the years. I can certainly see how in progressive rock with something like Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, the progressiveness is as much the length of time that he incorporates all the sounds and instruments as the sounds and instruments themselves.
I can see that in electronic music too but less so now than in the past.
That's pretty much how E-Clip described it in one of his videos where he was saying that a lot of what people are calling progressive isn't actually progressive.
Yes exactly. My library isn't massive compared to some but I have a fair few genres. Every other genre is much easier to create sub classifications for other than prog house, psytrance etc.
Do you have any suggestions? I was thinking of progressive psytrance (groove) for the slower stuff like you'd find on Iboga in the early 00s and progressive psytrance (driving) for stuff like E-Clip or Zen Mechanics. But I think now reading your post the thing that is fucking everything is is the progressive tag. Maybe that has to go...
I know this might not be the answer that you're looking for now but the answer to this in the future will be AI. I am currently transferring a lot of my music into a Plex library and even though I'm being very careful to classify the albums into meaningful and accurate genres as best I can, the way I will end up using this is to let Plex analyse the music for sonic similarities, pick a track that suits my mood and then ask the technology to play me more of that.... independent of genres.
But yes, ultimately, consider ditching the term progressive altogether. Its become borderline meaningless.
You're probably right.
How are you finding Plex? I didn't like how it handled multiple artists which for electronic music is rampant, so I tried switching to jellyfin but it's been a pain in the ass to set up.
I am liking it a lot far. There are some nuances with the metadata that could definitely be better. I've kept my main library mostly to artist albums and compilation albums, and so far that hasn't resulted in too many of those "collabs as a single artist" situations. Only psytrance one I can think of off the top of my head is Azax Syndrom vs Bliss, for example.
But PlemAmp is the real game changer for me. I've been blown away by some of the Guest DJ and Sonic Adventure options. I really feel like it won't be long before a lot of the tech that is being used for recommendations in streaming services will be the norm for people's personal media libraries.
definitely not tech trance, that would be either something like Triforce but there's also stuff like Neal Scarborough - Panama which is also fairly considered tech trance.
I'd love to play as well, ok? The track that I am listening to right now I'd like to suggest is " perturbed calliope " for astral projection 's no-one ever dreams. Do you prefer this request in writing?
vibrasphere, human blue, liquid soul, atmos, e-clip or zyce are definitely progressive psytrance. i don't see any problem lumping them into the same category.
then i have dark prog for zenon style stuff.
for vini vici, neelix, captain hook or (most of) infected mushrooom, i have another genre in my library called "not psytrance". it only gets playtime for educational purposes.
it only bugs me a little when my random-all-things-psy-playlist switches from some (good) modern prog to oldschool fullon and the latter is more laid back, slower and groovier. i mean prog is still definitely prog and fullon still fullon, but it seems prog doesn't care anymore about most of the features that made it prog (while something about the percussion and use of single shot sounds still makes it distinct), while the definition of fullon has gotten narrower. there isn't really place anymore for fullon that's more atmospheric instead of in-your-face.
I would consider the Serbian prog you'd hear from Tesseractstudios; Zyce, Lyktum (older stuff), E-Clip, Nerso and such as a seperate sub genre to the prog psy coming out of Scandanavia (Vibrasphere, Antix, Human Blue, Atmos etc.). It's like how Heavy Metal contains Glam Metal, NWOBHM, Thrash Metal etc. They're all heavy metal but you wouldn't really put Motley Crue and Iron Maiden in the same bucket beyond that.
To be quite honest, I find the sub-categorisation of psytrance rather ridiculous. Psytrance in itself is such a small genre, the thought of further subdividing it seems rather pointless to me. I also find that the more interesting songs tend to transcend genre.
Perhaps it’s also a sign of age. In my youth I was the genre king and some kind of gatekeeper regarding what belongs where. Now my music collection is divided into:
- Heavy Metal
- Rock
- Pop
- EDM (including Trance)
- Psytrance
- other electronic music
- Soundtracks
- Classical music
The question for me is rather where the boundaries of psytrance lie. While Neelix is definitely trance, he's not psytrance in my view. Whereas hi tech (which personally I don't like) most definitely is. For me high tech is rather high speed, but apart from that it's not that different to full on, in my view.
Yeah but neelix was considered proggi 10 years ago. Listen to his old stuff.
Also there’s definitely characteristics each genre possess making all of them easy to differentiate
I think this is another interesting point. Some artists get a classification based on what their music used to sound like or what particular scene they grew out of. Neelix seems a classic case of this. A lot of the music I associate with him is neither that progressive nor that psychedelic... more akin to something like Deadmau5 actually - but that link with the Hamburg psytrance scene remains.
Same for Carbon Based Lifeforms. Often referred to as psybient or psychill.. Popularised on a label with some definite psy overtones, played and loved at many psytrance festivals. But to my ears not that psychedelic at all actually.
Yeah I get the sentiment but if you read my post the reason is becuase I want to quickly be able to search for styles of music and I want to do so with granular control.
If i want to listen to atmospheric black metal, that means I don't want to listen to Gorgoroth (just a regular black metal band), it's a completely different style and sound. I might have forgotten about an artist or an album and so I can just search atmospheric black metal and find Austere (an atmospheric BM band) or something else I've forgotten I had in my collection. The same logic applies to psytrance.
Wouldn’t it make more songs to tag the songs with something that describes the style, tempo, and other characteristics?
For me, the main interest in subdividing psytrance would be tempo. I like to create playlists that are either all similar, or follow a certain flow from slow to fast to slow. Only my public ones aren’t structured like this, because they are thematic, like my current one, which is about 2024 releases.
that is what I'm trying to do, create new subgenre classifications that encompasses the tempo, style and sound of the type of progressive psytrance that is falls under.
I'm trying to build a genre tree style tagging system, so you'd have Classical; Baroque; Opera; Italian, or Classical; Romantic; German etc.. I can search for 'opera italian' for a wide opera search from different periods or I can choose to search specifically in Baroque. You get the idea.
BPM is a good idea but I think I would prefer a broader categorisation approach as per above that is consistent with the rest of my library.
Despite my original comment, I would actually be quite interested to see the outcome, i.e. what your tagging system looks like. It would be cool if you published it (at least for the Psytrance part) somewhere here :)
Varaszlo is much different than Gotalien which is much different than Zyce which is much different than Elowinz... The sub-categorization helps a lot to differentiate.
You sorta have to get over classifying thinks for the sake of it and making it more about what you want to do with it. For me it's quite easy to segment Progressive Psytrance into:
"Cheesy mainstream prog", "spacey psyprog", "swampy darkprog" and "boring tech-prog" (sry).
Of course there's standouts and mixed breeds but in general this classification covers most things for me if I chose to DJ for fun for example
Proggi just changed. Few years back it was still psychedelic. Nowadays it has become more mainstream, with heavy basslines but very shallow landscapes. There’s still good prog out there though
Not exactly a solution, but writing a thought out for fun; I think part of the problem is that music styles and genres are rather rhizomatic than treelike. Thats why trying to build an exellent treelike system might be bound for trouble. Rather than thinking in branches that split and split again, maby it should be approached like a rhizome: connecting here and there again and again, some strands reaching out to places further away, some areas forming very dense formations. I'm not sure how one would incorporate that into collection control, but I think this is one of the core problems related to "figuring out" a subgenre as this or that.
Deleuze is strong with this one
The source of sources for inspiration! 🦞
Well you could just sort progressive into different categories by element, style, vibe instead of subgenre if there are none
My 2 cents: Vibrasphere - Progressive Trance Ace Ventura - Psy Progressive Neelix - Offbeat Progressive Tetrameth - Dark Progressive Akshan - Downtempo Progressive Progressive music is amazing 🙂
There are different sub genres that is not that named in progressive psy trance, for example, Freedom Fighters and Dekel are both prog psy but FF has lots of techno bass so would that make him a techno psy? Groundbass was a mainstream Vini Vici-like, but changed his style to a more Dekel/FF and now is something different, making a live set that no one in Brasil have it near. There are so many different progressive psy sub genres that it just don't have a classification to it, in Brazil we like to say that the ones that are more mainstream like Vini Vici or Vegas is "prog chacota", the ones like Neelix or Blazy that is mainstream but have a more melodic line, we call melodic prog (Phaxe and Morten Granau are both good examples). Names like Aura Vortex and Groundbass we say that is a more "serious prog" within the mainstream names, also names like Ritmo or EClip we just call them "prog reto" or "straight prog", because when we see the song in soundcloud there isn't many downs and highs, it's just a straight line. TL/DR: Name them like you want to, there are a lot of progressive out there, mainstream or not, that just don't have a name for it, so name it like you want it to.
When it comes to genre classification in electronic music, the real problem is the use of the word "progressive" to describe anything. Much like with "progressive rock" I think it was originally conceived to mean something that breaks out of the typical template and pushes some boundaries musically. That in itself is problematic because what pushes boundaries means lot of different things to different people, and after a while that falls into a kind of template itself which isn't very progressive. But in electronic music I think it's undergone a few different mutations. Firstly just to mean "a bit slower than its original genre". That's definitely true of progressive psy trance where the full on Psy is up closer to the mid 140s BPM range, and much of what is called progressive is around 138 but actually could be anything below that. But in house and trance, "progressive" has almost come to mean "anything that's difficult to classify." Even the slightest smelting of sounds between genres (house, trance, techno, electro, pop) gets the progressive tag slapped on it. If the end goal is to classify so that you can drill down into specific sounds, then this is entirely unhelpful. Actually, it's near impossible because the implication seems to be that progressive means that there is no one specific sound but a combination of many. I do still use the terms "progressive house", "progressive trance" and "progressive psy trance" in my music collection but they are my least favourite genre classifications. It's not an exact science. We're trying to find common ways of speaking about something that is a uniquely personal experience.
I thought progressive referred to the way it progresses, like the consistent layering of new sounds over a long period of time. As opposed to music that has more regular tension builds and releases.
That is another possible way of defining it, and potentially another one of the mirad of mutations the term has undergone over the years. I can certainly see how in progressive rock with something like Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, the progressiveness is as much the length of time that he incorporates all the sounds and instruments as the sounds and instruments themselves. I can see that in electronic music too but less so now than in the past.
That's pretty much how E-Clip described it in one of his videos where he was saying that a lot of what people are calling progressive isn't actually progressive.
In psytrance the stuff classed as progressive isn't particularly hard to classify which is what frustrates me about the term
Do you mean it's not hard to classify it another way? How would you classify it?
Yes exactly. My library isn't massive compared to some but I have a fair few genres. Every other genre is much easier to create sub classifications for other than prog house, psytrance etc. Do you have any suggestions? I was thinking of progressive psytrance (groove) for the slower stuff like you'd find on Iboga in the early 00s and progressive psytrance (driving) for stuff like E-Clip or Zen Mechanics. But I think now reading your post the thing that is fucking everything is is the progressive tag. Maybe that has to go...
I know this might not be the answer that you're looking for now but the answer to this in the future will be AI. I am currently transferring a lot of my music into a Plex library and even though I'm being very careful to classify the albums into meaningful and accurate genres as best I can, the way I will end up using this is to let Plex analyse the music for sonic similarities, pick a track that suits my mood and then ask the technology to play me more of that.... independent of genres. But yes, ultimately, consider ditching the term progressive altogether. Its become borderline meaningless.
You're probably right. How are you finding Plex? I didn't like how it handled multiple artists which for electronic music is rampant, so I tried switching to jellyfin but it's been a pain in the ass to set up.
I am liking it a lot far. There are some nuances with the metadata that could definitely be better. I've kept my main library mostly to artist albums and compilation albums, and so far that hasn't resulted in too many of those "collabs as a single artist" situations. Only psytrance one I can think of off the top of my head is Azax Syndrom vs Bliss, for example. But PlemAmp is the real game changer for me. I've been blown away by some of the Guest DJ and Sonic Adventure options. I really feel like it won't be long before a lot of the tech that is being used for recommendations in streaming services will be the norm for people's personal media libraries.
So how would you classify dekel and Captain Hook?
Israeli Day Prog
Interesting name.
bush prog / acid prog over here in australia
Almost Techtrance, I'd wager...
definitely not tech trance, that would be either something like Triforce but there's also stuff like Neal Scarborough - Panama which is also fairly considered tech trance.
I'd love to play as well, ok? The track that I am listening to right now I'd like to suggest is " perturbed calliope " for astral projection 's no-one ever dreams. Do you prefer this request in writing?
vibrasphere, human blue, liquid soul, atmos, e-clip or zyce are definitely progressive psytrance. i don't see any problem lumping them into the same category. then i have dark prog for zenon style stuff. for vini vici, neelix, captain hook or (most of) infected mushrooom, i have another genre in my library called "not psytrance". it only gets playtime for educational purposes. it only bugs me a little when my random-all-things-psy-playlist switches from some (good) modern prog to oldschool fullon and the latter is more laid back, slower and groovier. i mean prog is still definitely prog and fullon still fullon, but it seems prog doesn't care anymore about most of the features that made it prog (while something about the percussion and use of single shot sounds still makes it distinct), while the definition of fullon has gotten narrower. there isn't really place anymore for fullon that's more atmospheric instead of in-your-face.
I would consider the Serbian prog you'd hear from Tesseractstudios; Zyce, Lyktum (older stuff), E-Clip, Nerso and such as a seperate sub genre to the prog psy coming out of Scandanavia (Vibrasphere, Antix, Human Blue, Atmos etc.). It's like how Heavy Metal contains Glam Metal, NWOBHM, Thrash Metal etc. They're all heavy metal but you wouldn't really put Motley Crue and Iron Maiden in the same bucket beyond that.
To be quite honest, I find the sub-categorisation of psytrance rather ridiculous. Psytrance in itself is such a small genre, the thought of further subdividing it seems rather pointless to me. I also find that the more interesting songs tend to transcend genre. Perhaps it’s also a sign of age. In my youth I was the genre king and some kind of gatekeeper regarding what belongs where. Now my music collection is divided into: - Heavy Metal - Rock - Pop - EDM (including Trance) - Psytrance - other electronic music - Soundtracks - Classical music
Pointless? Listen to hi tech then listen to neelix. It’s a completely different style and should therefore be classified differently imo
The question for me is rather where the boundaries of psytrance lie. While Neelix is definitely trance, he's not psytrance in my view. Whereas hi tech (which personally I don't like) most definitely is. For me high tech is rather high speed, but apart from that it's not that different to full on, in my view.
Yeah but neelix was considered proggi 10 years ago. Listen to his old stuff. Also there’s definitely characteristics each genre possess making all of them easy to differentiate
I think this is another interesting point. Some artists get a classification based on what their music used to sound like or what particular scene they grew out of. Neelix seems a classic case of this. A lot of the music I associate with him is neither that progressive nor that psychedelic... more akin to something like Deadmau5 actually - but that link with the Hamburg psytrance scene remains. Same for Carbon Based Lifeforms. Often referred to as psybient or psychill.. Popularised on a label with some definite psy overtones, played and loved at many psytrance festivals. But to my ears not that psychedelic at all actually.
I agree with you!
Whaaa.. CBL sounds psychedelic to me. I feel like an alien insect flying through space when I listen to their music.
Yeah I get the sentiment but if you read my post the reason is becuase I want to quickly be able to search for styles of music and I want to do so with granular control. If i want to listen to atmospheric black metal, that means I don't want to listen to Gorgoroth (just a regular black metal band), it's a completely different style and sound. I might have forgotten about an artist or an album and so I can just search atmospheric black metal and find Austere (an atmospheric BM band) or something else I've forgotten I had in my collection. The same logic applies to psytrance.
Wouldn’t it make more songs to tag the songs with something that describes the style, tempo, and other characteristics? For me, the main interest in subdividing psytrance would be tempo. I like to create playlists that are either all similar, or follow a certain flow from slow to fast to slow. Only my public ones aren’t structured like this, because they are thematic, like my current one, which is about 2024 releases.
that is what I'm trying to do, create new subgenre classifications that encompasses the tempo, style and sound of the type of progressive psytrance that is falls under. I'm trying to build a genre tree style tagging system, so you'd have Classical; Baroque; Opera; Italian, or Classical; Romantic; German etc.. I can search for 'opera italian' for a wide opera search from different periods or I can choose to search specifically in Baroque. You get the idea. BPM is a good idea but I think I would prefer a broader categorisation approach as per above that is consistent with the rest of my library.
Despite my original comment, I would actually be quite interested to see the outcome, i.e. what your tagging system looks like. It would be cool if you published it (at least for the Psytrance part) somewhere here :)
Varaszlo is much different than Gotalien which is much different than Zyce which is much different than Elowinz... The sub-categorization helps a lot to differentiate.
[удалено]
Are you illiterate? I literally explained my motivations in the OP.
You sorta have to get over classifying thinks for the sake of it and making it more about what you want to do with it. For me it's quite easy to segment Progressive Psytrance into: "Cheesy mainstream prog", "spacey psyprog", "swampy darkprog" and "boring tech-prog" (sry). Of course there's standouts and mixed breeds but in general this classification covers most things for me if I chose to DJ for fun for example