Last Friday DJ X Lab 4 was playing at FURY (Helsinki), and here are some highlights from his set. Looks like it was another excellent one - not sure I’ll ever get tired of hearing the new version of Requiem..but does anyone know what the last track is from 6.10?

All these YouTube videos are a bit tough for the site to handle, so click below for Proteus’ set - well worth checking out as always.

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A bit quiet this week, so here’s some info on an unusual event that I’ll be going to if I can find the time from somewhere. 合奏みだれ天国 roughly translates as ‘Disordered concert heaven’, and so as you might guess it’s a pretty eclectic lineup. Aural Vampire are one of the bands, but the main reason I’ll be trying to make it is to catch the guest Live PA from Swedish chip musician Covox. If you haven’t heard his stuff before, it ranges from very danceable tunes to melancholy ballad-style affairs - all with glorious Game Boy chip sounds. Below are a couple of examples - first his relentlessly happy Summer Fruit Dance Party, followed by his remix of Japanese artist Blasterhead’s classic Killbots.

Carbon Based - Ancestor by FINRG Recordings

A few of the FINRG releases I mentioned last week are starting to arrive now, as well as the slightly (!) delayed Ancestor, from Carbon Based. It’s still a great track and mixes quite easily into a lot of different tunes, so it should be a useful one for the DJs out there.

Other tunes include a new (I think) drum and bass/breakbeat tune from The Sauna Boys and a couple of unreleased Pain on Creation edits. The Fatal Error edit of Lush is an interesting one - it’s 180bpm (instead of the original 170), but is missing the ‘main’ melody from the breakdown onwards. The crazy synths sound amazing at this faster bpm though…

As usual, the FINRG SoundCloud is the place to find these tracks.

There haven’t been too many tracks added lately, but following up from Phaedra here’s another killer from three of Hybridize’s finest. Epyx, Cyrez and Fea’s untitled track became an absolute anthem when I played at Hell’s Gate, and was the opening tune for my first ever set there. Believe it or not I had it pitched up to about 172bpm, and I’ll never forget the reaction of the crowd when the kick came in…of course the hard trance style melodies sound great at the original 160, too.

Cyrez came up with a ‘Hell’s Gate edit’ especially for the first event, but this newer version has a few extra bits and pieces in the main breakdown. If anyone was at the FINRG 512 event, it was part of the Hybridize set - that’s the quality of tune we have here. Extra massive thanks go to Epyx, Cyrez and Fea - hope everyone enjoys it.

Download here

Substanced - Crank Cleopatra by FINRG Recordings

Jiipez has already mentioned this in the previous post, but just in case people miss it (the download count is still quite low) Crank Cleopatra is now available via FINRG. You probably heard it yesterday on YouTube, so download from the FINRG SoundCloud right away. Also, Happy Birthday to Substanced!

For everyone who was wondering about Substanced’s new Crank Cleopatra - here it is! I love the intro, and the Substanced-style melody after the breakdown really grabs you, classic stuff. When I played it at the last NRGetic Romancer, even people who had just walked in couldn’t help dancing away…

There’ll probably be some more videos from Muon coming before too long (courtesy of SHINOSAN), but thanks again to Eirik for this one, taken near the beginning of my set. First is one of Betwixt & Between’s older tracks, Liberation, followed by Alek Szahala’s Invitation.

Radiation by Alchemiist

A quick shout for Alchemiist’s newest track, the first freeform tune for a while after all his recent Hard NRG. Radiation’s opening and the first piano melody remind me of Epyx & Cyrez, but then it goes off in a different direction - Alchemiist’s nasty synths are really sounding good these days, and that hyper melody after the (very nice) breakdown sounds a bit different to almost everything else out there at the moment…check it out at the top of this post.

Recently I changed my mind about a couple of the next tracks to go up on TYFTH, but hopefully this one is worth the wait! Phaedra appeared in Twisted Freq’s Darkest Halloween Tale mix a couple of years ago, but hasn’t really been heard of since. Shame, as it’s a very twisted/dark freeform track of the type we don’t see enough of these days, but still with that Betwixt feel to it. It’s definitely worthy of getting into a few more DJ sets from now on.

Download here, but it’ll be going in the Tracks section too, of course.

As usual, huge thanks go to Betwixt & Between for permission to put this one online.

The latest in the Crush on Hardcore series has been in the works for a while, and now there’s just a month or two more until release. This time the DJs are Cube::Hard, Shanty and a final FINRG set from JNKS/Swoosh and Rx/Carbon Based. The other big news is that there will be a physical version released in small numbers too (for free), as well as a follow-up CD of full tracks called Sequel of the V…also for free.

Inside this post is the promotional text from the COH crew, including the full tracklists. Watch out for some nice new tunes from FINRG in the final set…

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