Mix of the Week 19/12: Cyan @ Wild Horses 2018
The Wild Horses 2018 Facebook page describes the festival as “a 3 day electronic music event with a ride that can happen only as a wild collective,” and with DJ Cyan’s set released publically on Soundcloud, that is plain to see. The frantic pace of these sets means the listener needs the stamina and endurance of a stallion to make it out the other side. DJ Cyan’s set is a non-stop gallop of heavy psytrance beats, embodying the genre while opening itself up to some experimentation.
If you’ve never listened to psytrance before, it is a sub-genre of EDM that sounds straight out of a science fiction movie. This isn’t the soft melodic score of an arthouse drama, however, but the fast-paced soundtrack to an adrenaline fuelled action romp. The heavy and hard beat is quick and relentless, clocking in at over 140 beats per minute, with dark electronica sounds layered over the top to create menacingly atmospheric melodies. From the moment the beat starts and hushes the soft ambient introduction, it’s clear that Cyan’s set is an adrenaline fuelled psytrance romp. The breakneck tempo is steady for the full hour, allowing Cyan to experinment with the ‘psychedelic’ in psytrance. There are no vocals, instruments or traditional ‘tracks’. Instead this set is a collection of electronic revs, mixed together to never break the listeners trance. Example of the songs used include Anarkick’s ‘Eat the Mushroom’, Metrix’ ‘Alien Dinner’ and Antithesis’ ‘Killers of Reality’. Melodically, Cyan uses the layers of sweeping synths to bounce over the soundscape, echoing out over the audience. Sometimes these affects are calm, like a slow distant siren, and other times they are aggressive, like a rampaging robot. It is strange, but deeply engaging.
