Aquila are Thomas Van Hulle and Jonas Dryhoel. They both hail from Belgium. It makes a change from all those Israeli guys making full-on right? Just joking, but it’s nice to know psytrance comes from all over the world. Anyway, you might have already guessed it, but Aquila is all about full on. The promo text says they have a no nonsense approach to it, and I tend to agree. If you’ve heard tracks from them before on compilations, you already have an idea of how these guys sound. Think along the lines of Atomic Pulse or something similar and you’re pretty much there. The sounds on offer here characterize themselves mostly because of a deep bass line that rolls along nicely. There’s not much variation in the bass line, but then again, it isn’t needed if the rest is interesting enough. And that is surely the case here. Most of the tracks have nice acidic loops and melodies swinging around, and that’s the main focus here. For the rest all the basic psytrance ingredients are here, bass line, acidloops, beat, hi-hats and occasional percussion. Effects are used with precision and exactly where you’d expect them to be. The album plays along very smoothly, with never a sharp edge poking around where you wouldn’t want. This makes the whole thing an excellent DJ tool. There are plenty of tracks here that’ll fit into a nice uplifting set easily. For home listening it is recommended too, especially if you like that massive full on bass line hitting away at your ears for about 70 minutes. One of my favorites here is Fuerza (T6) in collaboration with Chronos. It’s one of the fattest sounding tracks here. Another favorite is Down Under (T9) which is also really fat in sound and great in melody. The only real downside of the album is the artwork, which is functional enough, but kind of bland in my opinion. |
