Back catalogue: Uplifting Trance

Review: Everything about this one from the title to the art work screams trance. The music matches up too with TALLA 2XLC's 'Bliss' offering the sort of turbo charged techno drums and richly emotional, over the top synth work that will get hands in the air that any big main room will devour. On the flip, things get ramped up even further with big walls of synth texture all topped over with rushes of trance energy on 'No Fate.' This is a potent two tracker that comes on nice limited translucent vinyl.

Review: Riviera's early momentum continues here with a punchy four-tracker from six on-point artists. Lewis Taylor kicks off with 'Non Stop' which is a straight up and funky peak time then pumper with bright chords and plenty of fun in the atmosphere, Cult keeps the energy high with 'Total Kill' and X Coast & DJ RaDa then offer the acid-laced and turbocharged bass stomps of 'Come Together.' LIL NASSTY then flips the script with some sleazy trap beats with menacing bars and futuristic synth patterns on 'Get It Up So' and DJ Pacifier shuts down with some high-speed ghetto-tech in the form of the relentless 'Fried Again.'

Review: Moustache Records has long ploughed a synth-heavy, retro-futurist furrow in which 21st century producers showcase their love of muscular, body-shaking styles of the 1980s, most frequently Italo-disco and Hi-NRG. The playfully named Trending Topic fit neatly into this blueprint, with this debut EP framing them as lovers of Bobby Orlando style Hi-NRG, the camper end of Italo-disco and the formative years of Euro-dance. This approach is best exemplified by lead cut 'Terpentine', where colossal synth riffs and lead lines climb above a thickset sequenced bassline and snappy drum machine beats. That is given a slightly harder and more pulsating tweak courtesy of Machinegewhr, before our heroes return with two more tracks: the Hi-NRG-goes-trance style 'Our Adventure Begins' and the on-the-dancefloor-at-Heaven-in-1986 flex of 'Mowing The Lawn'.

Review: BOY Records reissue an early example of legit new beat robo-trance, Time Modem's 'Welcome To The 90s'. The German duo of Joachim and Ulrich Wilhelm first dropped this deathly cold, wan emotion-stripper under the ZYX Music subsidiary shortly following 'The Time Of The Gathering', their debut EP. 'Welcome To The 90s' proves it: most of the cultural collective mind who experienced the transition into the last decade of the Millennium knew ahead of time that this would be the decade that defined dance music. Just one look at the waveform of this future-gothic grinder - as thin as a too-savoured fishbone sucked dry - reflects the loss of affect that was to be expected of this new bionic-sonic era. We hear a faint robotic voice over the title track's tannoy, speaking on themes of deterioration, futility and renunciation; it glides above the track's unpassable early stab lines and end-stop stomps. 'Intensive Worlds', meanwhile, extends the Gregorian voxsynth to underlie a rather flat, detached description of a future Frankfurt street scene, narrated by a female interloper. A historic slab of wax, reproduced for a new age.

Review: Electric Ballroom proudly introduces Tommahawk, a rising force from Germany's next generation of peak-progressive house producers. 'Unfolding' lends a heart-in-mouth pre-drop choir motif to an antecedent stab centrepiece, whose vestiges linger long after the refrain tapers off. Label head Thomas Schumacher remixes the track in airier and floatier tones, meanwhile, creating an abiding minimal progressive ballast to contrast the A-side's intense eschatology.

Review: Fantastic Planet (which is also the name of a great 1972 sci-fi flick) is back with a powerful new collection, Survival Mode, which goes way beyond music and is in fact dedicated to the fight for freedom in Georgia. It draws on a diverse lineup of visionary artists who serve up sounds that embody resilience and resistance and call upon the instinct to persevere when all other options are gone. For those in Georgia fighting oppression, it's about unyielding determination to defy silencing forces, and the power of that translates into the music. All four cuts are cutting-edge techno sounds with jungle breaks, empowering spoken word slogans and beats that give you the energy to stand tall.