Hard dance

So... I have a folder on my hard drive where I keep my best of hard dance.  I initially started keeping when I started collecting hard trance, and occasionally I'd add stuff to my phone's memory card because it was good enough to keep, but it didn't really fit here.  It's mostly hard trance, but includes some acid techno and acid house here and there, a bit of (non-hard) trance, and some hardstyle, especially early hardstyle that fits more with hard trance.  And a bit of hard house is in there too, although not much.

It's not exactly the "best of" because it's not exclusive enough for that, but it's also not everything that I have in EDM or even hard dance music. Most of the hardstyle that I got before I really started getting into hard trance is not in this folder, for instance (although I did retroactively add a few early hardstyle tracks.) But if I put the whole thing in Window Media Player and hit shuffle, I find that I have 2,149 tracks and 259 hours worth of it.  I could literally play this for 11 days straight, 24 hours a day, and not play the same track twice.

The challenge, of course, is that I got so much music so fast that I really haven't listened to a lot of it yet very much.  Some of it I've only heard once, and thought—yeah, that's worth grabbing—so I did, stuck it in the folder, and by luck or whatever, haven't managed to come back to it yet.  Which is kind of unfortunate.  I keep telling myself that I don't need anything else when I'm in the situation, and that I'm in danger of becoming addicted to the acquisition of new music, without actually caring about it after I get it.  But every time I tell myself that I don't need anything else, I end up becoming aware of something that I desperately decide that I do need.

Anyway, check out one of my other blogs, Synthpop80s for a sampling of this stuff.  I initially created that blog to highlight 80s new wave (especially the synthpop stuff, obviously) but I eventually stopped caring about the decade and added synthpop and futurepop that was more current.  Then, I ended up expanding into synthwave, and finally the EDM stuff that I spend most of my time listening to now.  In fact, I now have a tab of a Google Sheet that has listed all of the tracks in my folder mentioned above, and I have it randomly select a song from it, and I'll write it up, find a youtube or dailymotion link, and put it out there for you to listen to.  Sometimes you can't find a decent youtube video of a song; either the quality is terrible, or it's truncated, or it just isn't available at all.  If it's the latter, I'll usually skip it and do another track instead, but otherwise I'll give you at least a sample of it.

This isn't the most recent posting there (or even any posting there yet) but it happens to be the track I'm listening to literally at this very moment while I'm typing this up.