Strong acidity here, especially on the opening side. I like it! Hard to pick a favourite on just a couple of listen-throughs, but overall I favor the earlier tracks and feel the quality somewhat lessens towards the end of the album.

I disagree with the previous reviewer about the drums; IMO goa needs beats that drill through your skull, should you ingest too much. However, I would have liked a bit more texture in the tracks, more layers of sound, concurrent melodies and/or basslines. Maybe this is what evokes in others a sense of misbalance between the drums and the rest: the ’rest’ are slightly undermanned. (’Heroic Act’, which I’m listening to right now, sounds like one of the better ones in this respect, with many different complex and varying themes fusing nicely together.)

More layers would also allow for more build-up, which is another aspect of good goa.

On the one hand this has nothing to do with the new (built-in) player

You’re right, I misinterpreted the mention of Ogg streams in the opening post. Sorry about that.

I always used VLC as external player together with the Ogg stream and since they are delivered by OxyRadio things just work like a charm. There is no problem to skip to any position in a song.

In VLC they indeed seem to be seekable. I’ve been using Totem until now, and with it the latest changes really did make the streams unseekable there. So something has changed, but it affects seekability depending on the app’s support for it. Apparently Totem’s streaming support is more limited than VLC’s.

It seems the Ogg streams (m3u, xspf) are no longer seekable, i.e. it isn’t possible to skip forward or backward in playing time. This makes it somewhat cumbersome to quickly get a feel for new tracks, to know which albums are worth downloading. I’ve switched to MP3 streaming for the time being, since they are still seekable, but I hope that seeking returns to Ogg streams as well at some point, as I otherwise prefer them.

A comparatively well-produced album with nothing fancy or surprising.

What I was left to hope for was for one or some of the songs to stand out. I found I’d quickly listened the album through with nothing left echoing in my head, save for the soloist’s voice. A practical consequence of this is that I’m unable to name a favorite track.

To the artists’ defense I must say this genre is far from being my usual cup of tea, and stress the fact that I don’t know enough Spanish to understand the lyrics.

This is not techno, trance or jungle, but the tracks that don’t even try to be stand pretty good on their own. I liked ’Tristesse’ and ’Aquaria’ the best, and I too liked the oriental elements in ’Pursuit in Istanbul’, although on the whole that track too fell victim to the attempt of mixing with the rougher genres, and failing to impress at that.

Had this been a shorter album with only the unpretentiously electro-ambient tracks, I’d have rated it higher. Alas, the rating is given for the entire album, making me rate it a 6.

A cross between Boards of Canada and Daft Punk with a catchy, funky soundscape and a monotonously repeating theme. I’m not sure if was intentional, but at times it also sounded a bit clipped, which is the part I didn’t like.