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Anyone who’s been to the Full Moon Party in Koh Phangan, Thailand knows the score – psytrance all night long, baby. For backpackers fueled by shroom shakes or other illicit ingestibles, there’s no better music to pump up the party with. While psytrance is more ubiquitous in places like the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Germany (they love David Hasselhoff AND Goa trance!), it’s starting to make more Western inroads – see Juno Reactor tracks in the Matrix family of flicks and GMS, another Israeli act, who had four tracks featured in Man On Fire, the Denzel Washington-starring revenge thriller from last year. Since then, I’ve also had the pleasure of interviewing Erez Eizen, one half of Israel’s Infected Mushroom, another psytrance act that’s blowing up right now. But whether any of these acts would be toasting their successes right now without the advent of Astral Projection is doubtful. Pioneers in the genre, AP’s Lior Perlmutter and Avi Nissim celebrate a decade of influence on the aptly titled Ten, a collection of their biggest tunes. And paying homage to those classics with remixes is the next generation of psytrance music makers including, amongst others, Space Cat’s acidic rework of “Power Gen,” Melicia, Bizarre Contact, Star X, Deedra and Dynamic’s remix of “Dancing Galaxy” with samples riffing on Frank Herbert’s Dune. More mainstream trance don John ‘00’ Fleming even serves up a remix of his own on “Mahadeva.” Raw, infectious, hard and trippy, Astral Projection’s Ten is a testament to why psytrance continues to grow in global popularity. www.astral-projection.com-- review by Yuri Wuensch
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