SYT Vinyl & CDs

Review: Reissued 30 years on, SYT's 'Deep Drift' first hover-slammed its way onto our turntables as a spinoff EP of the much-nattered-about Shave Yer Tongue free party, which took place every Sunday night somewhere in suburban West London. The night's founders, Scott James and Christopher Hayne, took on this duo-deistic alien guise as a response to the tractor-beaming blisses they'd experienced on the dancefloor, yet which they could not find solid enough expression for in words. 'Siren' and 'Loop Hole' span allotropic forms of the same style, quantum superpositions of trance: cascading, welcoming, introductory; then cautionary, hovery, supernatural. 'Drift' goes big on the surround mix with extra boxy kicks; 'Jitter' then serves as a bleeping, free-teknikal enervation in trance, and is by far the best on the record, for its unguent stereo design and strobing synth patch layers.

Review: Cubic Space by SYT is a highly sought album from UK's mid-90s underground trance/rave scene, originally released on the Magick Eye Records, the label co-founded by Swordfish from Astralasia. With SYT short for "shave yer tongue" - don't ask us, we don't know - Cubic Space amounted to the only record outputted by the pseudonym, yet still went on to charm club-goers, owing to its unique trance sound-sources not available to the average high street shopper, and its many sprouting tangents through futuro-"tribal" sounds, dashing any concerns over tempo regulation or idiosyncrasy in the process; an ill a fellow artist might suffer from. Club numbers like 'Eclipse' and 'Global Drift' are torrential enough; it's the filterpassed breakbeats of the likes of 'Nu Dawn', and the punctiform, recherche sound design of 'Lost Cargo' that really get us moving.