Psycraft’s second album “New Moves” sees a return to the use of live guitar in psy-trance - like Dark Soho - made popular by Delta / Sun Project a few years ago, but adding that special Israeli musicality. Tom Anteater beamed up to find out more

Who are you and where are you from?
We are Alon Algarsi and Nir Sadon, both 25 years old, from a little city called Be’er Sheva in the south of Israel

How long have you been writing trance music?
We started to make music six years ago, but unti we bought our first synth four years ago, we were more like playing with the computer. Since then, we’ve explored more and more the making of music.

Can you tell us a bit about your musical background?
We both learned to play guitar for 3 years and organ for 6 years before we did electronic music. We used to play Metallica and a lot of heavy metal. We have been into music almost all our lives.

When did you become interested in trance music, were there particular parties that you went to that “turned you on” to the sound?
Our first contact with trance music was in a local club in our city. We went to this party and we can remember that we were in shock all during the party, thinking, “what are those sounds“ (DJ Guy Sabag was playing, who at the time was the best DJ in the scene). A day after the party, Alon’s uncle brought us this music on a tape cassette and since than we knew what we wanted to do.

What then made you start writing it yourselves?
Hearing that this music is with computers (and being good in this area), we decided to see what was going on. We just played with the computer and it was not too good. We soon realised we needed more equipment to reproduce what we were hearing, so we started to buy a lot of modules ( a habit have until this very day).

There are two of you, how do you divide the labour in the studio. Who plays the guitar?
In the studio, we do everything together. We pretty much know what the other wants because we have known each other since kindergarten, but if, for example, one of us doesn’t like something, we delete it and move on to the next idea that we both like. Alon is the Psycraft guitarist because he does it better.

Do you use mainly software or hardware in the studio (or a mixture ;) )
We used to have a lot of modules and a lot of equipment, but recently, the programs became so good that they were better than our or any equipment. So we decided to move and work with the software and since then our sound has become more and more professional. For example, our track “New Move“, from our new album, was made 100% by audio work!

Your new album is scheduled for release early in 2004. Can you tell us a bit about it? What were you aiming for when you wrote it? A particular sound?
This album is a bit different from our first album. We were thinking a lot about the dance floor and we took this album into a more full-on mode. Loops in the tracks create power that was missing in our first album, but you can still hear the Psycraft melodies that I think will stay with us all the way and also you can hear the little details that we spend a lot of time on. Our sound in this album is 10 times better than our first album. We spent almost one week on each track, just on the sound engineering and every party that we played, we came back to the studio, opened the track again and did it all over again to be sure that the sound is very good.

What other music do you listen to apart from psy-trance and what are your psy-trance influences?
Alon listens to a lot of guitar players like Steave Vai and Joe Satreani and a lot of hard rock. Nir also listens to hard rock and a bit of club stuff (but not the fluffy kind).
Our main psy influences are Simon Posford, Infected Mushroom, Space Cat, and Dado.

What do you think about the current state of the “global psychedelic scene”?
As we have seen recently, the trance scene has become much bigger all around the world and the awareness of trance music has become very strong. We hope that it will keep that way, in a few years, who knows where trance will go!?

Do you have any particularly memorable experiences from playing live around the world?
There is one party that we really liked. It was in Brazil in a festival called “Solaris“
We think the reason we so liked it so much was because it was a HOMmega event and all of the HOMmega artists were there. We were surrounded by friends in a very good party, which made it very nice, more like a family!