As I've dug deeper and deeper into early Qlimax style music, I've been drawn a bit out of hardstyle and into it's evolutionary "father"—hard trance. This isn't to say that I don't still love hardstyle, of course; it's kind of an exaggerated version of what I like about hard trance—the ridiculously exaggerated and pitched and distorted heavy kicks, the strange electronic screeches and wails, the heavy, reverberated bass-line (which is so distorted in hardstyle, that it's "reversed"—although hard trance did this first too.) It is, however, that I really like some of the best of the preceding (and overlapping) scene. Where hardstyle was (at least for a long time) heavily associated with northern Italy and the Netherlands, hard trance seems to be much more heavily focused on Germany.
Anyway, I'd already been a fan of a lot of the hard trance guys that I got into because they were also associated with acid, and created acid trance; guys like Frank Ellrich and Kai Tracid, who jointly formed A*S*Y*S; a group that I've been following and slowly picking up their tracks for more than five years now (although most of them were old even then.) That's really my vector into hard dance music; that and the trance that I listened to (but didn't really follow) back in the late 90s and early 00s. And even then, I didn't realize how much some of my favorite tracks had acid influences heavily built into them—L'Âge Synthétique's "Je Suis Electrique" for instance, is basically an acid trance track, and I loved it before I actually knew that that crazy, squelchy 303 bassline was what defined acid. So, when I "discovered" acid and realized that I'd been listening to a fair bit of it already anyway, I got a bit deeper into the world of hard trance. But I still missed most of the big names, I think.
Sure, I was pretty big into Kai Tracid, and I was aware that he was clearly a bit more on the trance side than the acid side, although he dabbled in both and in the concept of mixing the two together. And the scene is certainly defined by a lot of "one hit wonders"; or rather, by DJs who release a song or two on vinyl, do it again a few more times, but then kind of disappear again. There aren't a lot of highly prolific artists, sadly. L'Âge Synthétique, for example, released only 5 vinyl records ever over the course of about five years. Some of them had a b-side, but often the b-side was just another version of the same track. The entire output of L'Âge Synthétique (who was really just one guy, and who admittedly released some other tracks under other pseudonyms) would therefore be enough to make up... one LP, maybe?
As I was digging into hard trance, I was finding a similar situation; I've got a few tracks by Derb, or DJ Darkzone, or DJ Combo, or Brooklyn Bounce, or R.B.A. Ohne Ende Geil, or Titchy Bitch and the Fallen Angel, or a few others.
But I started seeing a few names a lot more; either because they were included in lots of set lists, or because they remixed tons of other guys' work, or often both. I'm still trying to uncover how much of that there is to be had; I've got loads of Cosmic Gate songs, and Hennes & Cold, and I'm starting to explore the Warp Brothers, etc.
One name that I really saw a lot was DJ Scot Project. Curiously, as I dug into him, though, I find that I don't love very many of his actual tracks a lot. I've gone ahead and found a few; X and A and Y and O (yes, he did use a strange naming convention) but the majority of his output had a weird housey and funky diva vibe to it that I dislike quite a bit. But he also seems to have remixed almost everyone. He remixed a bunch of Arome songs. In fact, Arome is another one of those guys who I wish would put out an album, like Hennes & Cold's Works, which just collected everything (including their songs as remixed by someone else) on a single collection. He's got 7 songs released on vinyl, and they all have two versions (with the exception of "Hands Up!" which had a few alternate UK releases, so it actually has four different versions.) For every single one of them, one version is a DJ Scot Project remix.
Of course, if you dig around a little bit on discogs, you'll find quickly enough that DJ Scot Project is a nom de plume of Frank Zenker. And... that Arome is another one-man "band" and that the one man of Arome is none other than... Frank Zenker. So, the Scot Project remix of an Arome song is Frank Zenker remixing one of his own songs using two different pseudonyms. A little weird? Maybe.
Anyway, it's funny that I'm not all that into DJ Scot Project, but I think the entire output of Arome is absolutely fantastic—with the exception of one version of one song that I can't find anywhere. Everything else you can at least hear on YouTube. But if they're the same person, why does one pseudonym really succeed for me and the other not so much? I dunno. It's not like they are really mining different territory, I don't think. Maybe Scot Project is more eurodancy, a little, with black diva vocals (or at least brief samples thereof) being more prominent, whereas Arome is more pure trance and more actual European (it always seemed odd to me that eurodance by definition tends to feature non-Europeans, but that's the kind of silly virtue-signaling that I've learned to get over over the years.
So, anyway—if you look at my collection (and wishlist) of hard trance, what you'll see is that there's a lot of guys who are just there with a track or two, but then there's big groups of Arome, A*S*Y*S, Cosmic Gate, Hennes & Cold, Kai Tracid, and a growing section of the Warp Brothers. Not suggesting that these are truly "the big guys" in the industry, but they're the big guys in my growing collection.
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