A psytrance compilation closing with a track called 'Anything Goes' at 90 BPM is a statement of intent. Psygressive reaches its nineteenth volume working as a census of the Iono Music catalogue: eighteen cuts stretching from the 66 BPM of Rawolle and Seidewitz's 'Positive Thinking' to the 143 of Shock Therapy's 'Universe Vibes', an arc few houses in the genre dare to pull this wide across a single record. The opener already tips you off: SOME1's 'Egoless' starts at 117, far from the full-throttle launch cliché.
The series' name gives the game away: psy plus progressive. Iono Music was born in Berlin in 2005, founded by Cubixx (Matthias Sperlich) after meeting Murus at a psytrance festival in 2003, and its stated creed ever since has been to never release a track they don't truly love, even when the result strays from whatever fashion dictates. That creed explains this volume's stylistic elbow room: alongside the dominant psy-trance sit a cut tagged as hypnotic techno ('Earthquake' by Mr.Speaker, 127 BPM) and another filed under deep trance, a natural fit with Iono Black, the sublabel they opened to explore lower tempos, from techno to progressive house.
The fast half clusters between 139 and 143 BPM — 'Natural Instinct', 'Real World', 'The Valkyries', 'Eternal Sunshine', 'The Secret' — and that is where the most recognisable Iono lives. But the record's personality sits in the slow lane: Atacama's 'Planet Alone', the longest cut at 9:42 and 70 BPM, or Numayma's 'By Your Consciousness' at 87, pieces that breathe where other labels would slot in another peak-time round. There is even a nod to the label's own history: the only remix here comes from One Function — a name Trancentral placed among the twenty essentials of the Iono catalogue — reworking Flegma's 'Psybizzare'. Nineteen volumes in, the series doesn't document a genre; it documents a criterion.
Sources: RA · Trancentral
