Placed Aurinko above Starfall. Like I said, it’s tough ranking these tracks. I have no doubt about the first two spots, but after that it’s difficult. Anmitzcuaca is powerful, but how can I seriously compare it with Aurinko? The former is pure rage, nonstop energy building on itself, while the latter is pure bliss, with a simple yet powerful melody. Saying Anmitzcuaca is better than Aurinko is ultimately saying pure rage is better than pure bliss, since both these tracks are near perfect representations of these feelings.

So take my ranking from the 3rd place onward with a grain of salt. I just placed Starfall below Aurinko, because I prefer Aurinko‘s main melody. Aurinko might be simpler, but it does not get boring, whereas Starfall‘s 2:50 melody verges on the annoying after a not-so-distant point. The 4:27 transition is a terrific touch, a little bit of fresh air, some distraction from the main melody that leads to another powerful melody at 5:15. But then at 5:45 we’re back to that first melody that was already verging on the annoying when it left and… it takes a special kind of person to want to endure this kind of discomfort. This, however, is practically what defines Száhala’s music. These persistent feelings and this painful pursuit of delayed gratification (the gratification we feel when a melody finally advances to a different stage, or a new note appears, or some gimmick messes around with the tempo, etc.) can be found pretty much in ALL of his tracks if you bother to take a closer look. Even Aurinko‘s final exploding melody persists far longer than your random MTV teenage pop song. And that’s a good thing. There’s already enough girly music today I say!

Another thing is that Starfall clearly gives a much more contemplative vibe than Aurinko. Aurinko is happiness full stop. But Starfall has a clear dreamy vibe, so ranking one above the other would once more be equivalent to ranking feelings and emotions, and saying happiness > contemplation. But since I feel Aurinko is a more perfect representation of happiness than Starfall is a representation of contemplation, I decided to change their relative positions. Starfall is more complex, in a way, just as Sunray is more “complex” and at the same time is still not good enough for me to consider placing it on a top 20.

Reposting this, because it seems to have disappeared:

I know what you guys are thinking btw. “This dude sure loves Száhala lol”. And you can bet your ass I do. As I said elsewhere after all, his best music is orders of magnitude above his competition. I will however make an alternative top 10 with no Száhala. I have too many gigabites of this kind of music on my hard-drive, and I’ve listened to many other artists in the genre throughout the years so I think can make this with relative ease. I’d say this alternative list would be mostly composed of DJ RX, Pain on Creation, Epyx & Cyrez and Nomic, but I’ll have to give it some thought before I type it down. Not sure if Grimsoul would qualify. Carbon Based’s Cyclone would make it, I think.

You know, I’m not even sure Nomic would get that far in the list. His style of music is even harder to make than Száhala’s. I mean the 180 BPM four-to-the-floor tragic style. The sweetspot for the nomic-style is even narrower than the one for the száhala-style. This is inherent in ALL tragedy. And this is something that I will for now quickly try to make you realize with three rhetorical questions: You can’t exactly make a mature man cry in 5 minutes can you? And what do you think of a mature man who flips from seriousness to crying in the spawn of 5 minutes? Wouldn’t that make you laugh? Herein lies the problem with pretty much all of Nomic’s music: he gives us these HUGE tragic climaxes almost out of nowhere! But that’s a subject for another day. I’m going now lol.

I’m pretty sure Nomic is intuitively aware of what I’m talking about, and this is, I suspect, the reason he has officially released so few tracks.

With this in mind, though, I fully support Nomic. The reason for this is that tragedy is awesome. And, in theory, if Nomic was able to create a proper aural tragedy (in the nomic-style, of course, because there have been already plenty of those in the classical style) he would almost by definition be ranked above Száhala. This is because we as human beings have evolved to absolutely adore tragedy, and have indeed practically raised all the artists who successfully managed to create it to demi-gods, immortalizing their names for centuries. A great tragedy is valued more by us, as human beings, than a great comedy, or a great epic, or a great parable, or whatever. There are psychological reasons for this, but we shouldn’t stray too much off-topic here, so I’m ending this train of thought here. The point anyway is that Nomic can potentially (meaning: in theory) create music that is MUCH MORE powerful than Száhala as ever created. And I think if he actually put his mind to it, he could. He’s a competent producer and clearly knows what to do with his DAW. He’s also already created a characteristic sound design, one of the things that I value so much in Száhala. And his little tragic sketches sound powerful indeed (when judged as sketches, not proper tragedies). So if he made a track that got into his ultimate, super tragic climaxes in, say, 15 or 20 minutes, instead of in 5 puny minutes which is what he is basically doing now, I think we’d all be in for a treat. A track that progressed as tightly as a Száhala track, but which instead of bliss gives you tragedy? Wouldn’t that be awesome!

“But oh bern you must be crazy, a TWENTY minute track? Isn’t that TOO long?”

But isn’t this genre of music supposed to be called “freeform”? Why do all the tracks have to last less than 8 minutes? Are there any unspoken rules out there that I’m not aware of? Perhaps in some theoretical book about EDM that I have never read about? Then show this theory to me and tell me about it. And even then, if you are so keen on sticking with these random rules, then why are you calling your music “freeform” lol? To impress your hipster friends perhaps?

The only logical explanation I find for 20 minute tracks not being common in the EDM scene is: it would put DJs out of business–or, perhaps more realistically, have the artists who made these huge tracks not being played on clubs. But it’s not like Száhala and DJ RX are regularly playing at Tomorrowland, anyway, so this is in the end a weak explanation.

So, yeah, that’d be my solution to Nomic’s problem: have his tragic climax temporally delayed, and increase the length of his tracks.