Various Progression Plusquam (Germany)

If sparklingly-produced deep progressive is your bag, you may have found what you’re looking for. Progression, compiled by DJ Laureth, gives a home to eight cutting edge progressive trancers with depth and sheen. Filur aka the mighty Seb from Son Kite / Ooze kicks off in a sub-heavy stylee, and sounds like old acid house through a psychedelic blender. Cute percussive squelches are all over the place and drive it through to a nicely layered, revolving tune. Buzz’s Do I? is sparklingly layered in a kind of post-atmos style, it’s percussive with a certain dubby energy and it sucks you right in. Mark Allen’s Hopefiend project offers Right Time (Ready Steady Mix), an unremarkable housey low end groove with a few scifi stabs littered around. And he pops up again with Quirk’s Dynamic Twist. On the strength of this, we might see another Quirk resurgence – it’s filtered tech-house with deliciously fat analogue blobs seeping out keeping a linear, club-friendly vibe to the Quirk sound. We go several steps darker, and a wee but faster, with Necton’s From Here to Yer Ear, with fat hardcore stabs over energetic techno percussion that all in all lacks a bit of psychedelic energy to fling you around the room. Frogacult’s Chinese Wood is a nicely-engineered bit of morning’y trance, with remarkable interwoven samples that’ll freak you out no end. All the pads ‘n stabs are in the right places, and it got that good balance of uplifting without being cheesy. Tegma feat Franco step in with Big Bardajona On A Pasteleira (okay), a very visual and sparky tune with nice deep samples and a busy, uppy groove; and finally Trancefeld’s Music Is More is a slow builder with trademark Trancefeld texturing, and a nice dreamy vibe to end the album. Progression is a nice, if nondescript, collection of clean progressive numbers that represents the current spectrum deftly.