Madagascar

There is something genuinely alien about the textural palette Simon Berry assembled here — steel-toned melodic percussion that sits outside the usual synthesizer vocabulary of trance, rhythmic elements that feel borrowed from entirely other musical ecosystems, a general atmosphere of organic strangeness that the island's name perfectly conjures. Madagascar as a geographical reality is one of the most biologically distinct places on earth, an island that evolved in isolation until it became something unlike anywhere else, and the music operates on the same logic: familiar enough in its progressive structure, but populated with sounds you cannot quite locate or name. The tempo is unhurried, the groove slightly more elastic than the rigid four-four of harder trance, allowing space for the exotic melodic figures to breathe and intertwine. There is no vocal, but the melodic lead carries an almost chant-like quality, ancient and circular. Platipus Records, where Art of Trance released much of this work, was consistently interested in trance that incorporated ethnographic textures — sounds from outside the European clubbing tradition used to make familiar structures feel genuinely transporting. What this track delivers is not so much warmth as strangeness, the specific pleasure of musical otherness, the sense that you have traveled somewhere that operates by different rules. Best heard with eyes closed, ideally at moderate volume where the subtler textural elements can register, in a moment of genuine receptivity rather than background listening.