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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.
- Release
- Long mix
- Style
- Psytrance · warehouse & afters
- Tempo
- 124 – 142 BPM
- Tonality
- Varies
- Runtime
- 1:20:36 (full mix)
Listen
Written, produced and mixed by Steven Ran Cohen under the name BALIMORE.
The style behind it
This is psytrance, and the mix is the form the music was written in rather than a compilation of things that already existed. The psytrance guide covers the mechanics — the rolling 16th-note sub, why 138–145 BPM specifically, why a psy breakdown releases pressure instead of landing an impact. What follows is about this particular record: why it is eighty minutes long, and what that length does that a six-minute single cannot.
Eighty minutes is a structural decision, not a running time
The full mix runs 1:20:36 — 4,836 seconds. At 142 BPM a bar lasts 4 × 60 ÷ 142 = 1.690 seconds, so the set is roughly 2,861 bars: about 358 eight-bar phrases, about 179 sixteen-bar phrases.
That last number is the real problem with long-form dance music. Electronic music is built in eight- and sixteen-bar units, and the default is to mark every boundary with something — a filter opening, a snare roll, a drum cut. Do that here and the listener meets 179 identical arrival points in eighty minutes, one every twenty-seven seconds, and stops registering any of them long before the halfway mark. The ear calibrates to a repeating event and then files it as background.
So most of those boundaries are left alone, and the changes that do happen are put where the grid does not predict them — a few bars early, a few bars late, or inside a phrase rather than at its edge. There is deliberately less marking of the grid here than in any of the singles, and that restraint is the reason the set holds for eighty minutes instead of for twelve.
The tempo range is where the psychedelic part comes from
The set spans roughly 124 to 142 BPM. As a tempo change that is 14.5% and sounds modest. In the low end it is the difference between two different genres.
A psytrance bassline triggers on every sixteenth note. At 124 BPM consecutive sixteenths land 121 milliseconds apart — far enough that the ear resolves each one as a separate event, so you hear a fast bass pattern. At 142 BPM they land 105.6 milliseconds apart and they stop separating: what reaches you is one continuous tone that flickers, not a sequence of notes.
The bottom of this set's range sits below psytrance's usual window on purpose. It means the same kind of rolling pattern is legible as notes in the lower-tempo stretches and fuses into a single texture in the faster ones, without anything about the writing changing. The listener experiences that as the music tightening rather than as it speeding up, which is the more useful of the two effects and the harder one to fake.
Why a psy mix is cut and not blended
Two psytrance tracks playing at once are two 16th-note sub patterns, each ducked hard under its own kick, both sitting in roughly the same 40–80 Hz window. If the two kicks are not phase-aligned, each sub fills the other's ducking gap, the low end never clears, and the one part of the frequency range this music cannot afford to lose turns to mud.
That is why the transitions here are short and land on a downbeat rather than running as long blends. It is also why the joins are hard to hear: a cut placed on a downbeat inside a texture that never resolves does not announce itself the way a crossfade does.
There is no best part, and that is the point
The usual question about an eighty-minute set is where to skip to. Here the honest answer is nowhere in particular. A track with a drop has a moment worth jumping to; a set built with its arrival points deliberately unmarked does not have one. It is made to be entered at any point and left at any point.
One practical note: the effect lives almost entirely below 100 Hz. On a phone speaker the bassline is essentially absent and the mix sounds thin and repetitive. On headphones, or on anything with a woofer, it is a different record.
Two uploads, and which one to use
The channel carries two versions of this mix. The full album mix runs 1:20:36 and is the one to start with. A shorter edit runs 1:16:40. Both are free and neither is gated.