Tracid Traxxx EP Vol. 1

I wonder sometimes if my acquisitiveness of new music isn't a type of psychological addiction.  I get so excited about getting new tracks (new to me; let me clarify) that I often barely enjoy the tracks that I just got.  But I keep doing it.  I can't seem to stop.

I've had a lot of fun exploring the whole hardtrance movement, especially the Continental hardtrance movement (which mostly, but not entirely, means the German hardtrance movement.)

Anyway, even before I discovered hardstyle, and before I'd really dived into hardtrance, and was mostly just familiar with trance as a generic label, and was more a fan of some acid, I'd been familiar with the Tracid Traxxx label because they carried some guys like A*S*Y*S, Kai Tracid, Derb, Warmduscher and Hennes & Cold.  I had a ton of tracks of the first, a several tracks of the second, a few tracks of the third, and remixes by the last two.  Since diving into hardtrance, I've added a few A*S*Y*S and Kai Tracid tracks to my collection, and a few Warmduscher tracks, and loads of Hennes & Cold tracks—in fact, their entire Works compilation.

However, the Works compilation doesn't have their remixes and some of their collaborations, and Kai Winter (the Cold of Hennes & Cold; he also produced under the nom de plume of Kan Cold) did a fair bit of stuff solo (he's also one of two member of Derb, as it happens.  And there are Works compilations for Kan Cold's catalog as well as Derb's.  But all three of them are missing the compilations listed below.)

So, I only recently discovered the title EP; a four track little thing.  Well, technically it's four tracks, but the 2 minute label intro doesn't really count, so it's really got three songs on it, none of which has a title.  They are known, it appears, by the artist name attached to the track, and all three of them are collaborations between Tracid Traxxx artists, all of which were on the list given above.  These tracks are pretty much amazing, so I thought I'd give you YouTube links to all three of them: A*S*Y*S vs. Hennes & Cold, Warmduscher vs. Derb, and Kai Tracid vs. Kan Cold.  All of them are hardtrance and/or acid trance, which means that relative to hardstyle, the kicks aren't so prominent and crazy, reverse bass might happen here and there but isn't a requirement, there's no pitch-shifting to create crazy kicks on the post-break riff, and they are much more likely to have soaring synthline melodies and squelchy 303 acid lines, if you want to call them that.  And they tend to be extremely long...

But wonderful.



The interesting thing about them is, however, how much they all overlap anyway.  A*S*Y*S is Frank Ellrich and Kai Franz, or at least it was in 2004 when this came out (Franz later left the group and Ellrich continued with the name on his own. But most of their well-known output was already out by then.)  Hennes & Cold was Michael Hennes and Kai Winter.  Kai Tracid is Kai Franz.  Kan Cold is Kai Winter.  And Derb is Kai Winter and Boris Hafner.  Warmduscher is just Warmduscher (real name Thilo Markwort.)  So, Kai Winter was involved in all three of these tracks, although under three different names, and Kai Franz was involved with two them (also under different names) as well as being the owner of the record label.

Between these guys on the Tracid Traxxx label and Frank Zenker (and his various stage names, most famously Scot Project), it's no wonder that the Germans kind of became known as the leaders of the hardtrance movement, even though there were some significant artists working out of the UK, the Netherlands and northern Italy as well (the Saifam group were mostly doing hardtrance before they started doing hardstyle.)

There are other artists and labels (and regions) that are getting somewhat slighted in this analysis, but that isn't meant to be a bad thing; yeah, yeah—I'm certainly aware of the British later hard trance, and even the earlier stuff; Jay Walker is even often considered a British Scot Project.  And I don't mean to slight DJ Wag, or Cosmic Gate, or Max Savietto, or any of the other many artists out there, but the ones I mentioned seem to have risen to a level of prominence based on prolific output and some real famous tracks that makes them just a bit more visible.  And they're good enough to not choke when in the spotlight.