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Hear it now
Press play.
This is BALIMORE — written, produced and mixed by Steven Ran Cohen. Full tracks, no sign-up, no download. Four minutes is enough to know whether this is your sound.
- Tempo
- 120 – 132 BPM
- Key
- Minor
- Build
- 64 – 128 bars
- Vocals
- Rare, treated as texture
First, what the sound actually is
People describe this music by feeling — “emotional”, “epic”, “cinematic”. Those words do not help you find more of it. These four things do, and they are what the records have in common:
A long approach. Sixty-four to a hundred and twenty-eight bars before the payoff. At 126 BPM a bar is 1.90 seconds, so that is up to four minutes of patience. Club records state their idea in eight bars; these do not.
A sixteenth-note arpeggio. One note every 119 milliseconds at 126 BPM. Fast enough to read as a single moving texture, slow enough that you still hear each note land. That is the signature more than any particular chord.
A drop that resolves rather than explodes. The low end is revealed by a filter opening over four bars, not punched in on the one. You feel relief, not impact.
Voices used as instruments. Where a vocal appears it is a short phrase, pitched, stretched and repeated — never a lyric you are meant to follow.
Where to go next
If Anyma is your entry point, the names below work in the same or adjacent territory. I am listing them as listening directions, not ranking them: Tale of Us and the Afterlife label catalogue, ARTBAT, Mind Against, Adriatique, Argy, Massano, Kevin de Vries, Mathame, Agents Of Time, Innellea, Colyn, and Stephan Bodzin, who has been building this kind of arrangement far longer than the current wave.
One caveat worth stating plainly: artists move, labels change and line-ups shift, and my information has a cutoff. Treat the list as a direction to search in, not a current roster. For anything live — shows, tickets, tour dates — go to each artist’s own official channels. This page has no connection to any of them and sells nothing.
How to search for more of it yourself
The useful queries are the structural ones, not the adjectives. Melodic techno 124 BPM. Melodic techno extended mix. Progressive melodic techno set. Searching “emotional techno” returns everything and nothing; searching a tempo returns the lane.
On streaming, the thing that actually works is letting a long set run to the end rather than skipping. The recommendation systems weigh completion heavily, and this music is built in twenty-minute units — skip-heavy listening teaches them the wrong thing about you.
And this project
Full disclosure, since you are on my site: BALIMORE is my own techno project — I write, produce and mix all of it myself as Steven Ran Cohen. It sits in this lane at 124–130 BPM for the melodic material, with the same long builds and resolving drops described above. I am not going to tell you it belongs next to the names in that list; they have been at it far longer and in front of far bigger rooms. But if you came here looking for more of this sound, there are twenty to eighty minute continuous sets below, free, and you can decide for yourself in about four minutes.
BALIMORE sets
Continuous 20–80 minute mixes, written, produced and mixed by Steven Ran Cohen.
- Best Hits Psytrance 2027 — The Last Light1:20 · psytrance
- No Borders After Darkafro & latin
- Techno House Best Mix 2026 — Project Xpeak time
- Tech House Mix — Time To Shine Againtech house
- YouTubeplaylist