Bas & Ram

I've been putting together these hard dance megamixes for a few years now; mostly hard trance songs from 2000-2010 or so, but also including some newer hard trance, a fair bit of hardstyle, especially early hardstyle, and a smattering of hard house, tech trance, acid, and other harder-sounding EDM tracks. But classic hard trance is really the core of the project. Curiously, one of my early favorite hard trance artists was Bas & Ram, but by the time I was putting these megamixes together, they'd kinda fallen out of my gaze and I had forgotten about them. Not entirely; I have a few of their tracks here and there, but there were always a bunch of tracks that I'd liked that I'd forgotten and not even "uptempoed" and put in my 150 bpm folder. Bas & Ram stuff isn't really all that available in general either; its not on Spotify, Youtube, any of the other streaming services, nor is it for sale at places like beatport or junodownload. Of course, "not on Youtube" means not officially available on Youtube. Bootleg vinyl rips and uploads aren't terribly hard to find of most of their stuff. And Bas (by himself) has some new stuff; he seems to have gotten back into the game. (Actually, there seems to be a lot of that going around. Maybe there's a minor boom in retro hard dance stuff happening right now.)

However, I'm now questioning whether Bas & Ram were really as good as I thought that they were. Their output wasn't as high as I thought, and much of it is collaborating with producers like Ralph Novell or others. The "Chimps & Pimps" record was produced by Gareth "Dark By Design" West. Another track that I liked a lot but had kind of forgotten was their song "The Bells" which is really a remake of Quench's "Dream" except without the sample of someone saying "dream" with lots of echo effect layered on it. I mean, OK, OK, lots of talented producers do remakes or covers or bootleg remixes (I'm not actually sure what exactly the difference is between all of those; they kind of blur together.) And of the remakes/remixes of that song, I think "The Bells" is probably the best one (Miss Shiva has some good ones too.)

My old copy, which I had to rip from Youtube to mp3 because I could get it any other way, had a lot of ambient vinyl noise and scratchiness (I really don't understand vinyl snobs. This is ridiculous.) so I was looking for a better copy, and I found the one by ConnecteD, who does a good job of providing Youtube videos of otherwise difficult to find or older songs from the classic hard trance era. (I still had to use the noise reduction tool to clean up some ambient vinyl scratchiness.) However, in the comments to that video, Rainer K, another (albeit newer) hard trance artist claimed that the track was ghost-produced by Dark by Design!

This is really weird, because usually discogs will give an "uncredited" credit once that kind of thing is known, so I guess this isn't well known. However, Rainer K is in a position to know; he works with these guys, probably knows them personally, etc. Plus, "The Bells" has some iconic Dark By Design sounds in it; it really sounds like a Dark By Design remix of "Dreams." Makes me wonder what exactly the Bas & Ram contribution was. Don't get me wrong; I'm sure it was something significant or it wouldn't have been credited to them, but I wonder. It seems like most of their work requires some kind of collaboration after all.

After all this, you'd think I'd post a link to that song, but actually, while seeing if I could verify any of this, I stumbled across Dark By Design's soundcloud page and found this great 2022 rework of Zombie Nation's "Kernkraft 400."

Dark By Design also did a remix a number of years ago of R.B.A.'s "No Alternative" which is, transparently, a remake of "Kernkraft 400". They're not really done in the same style, so they're interesting to listen to back to back.