RA.863 Earth Trax

You might have first heard of Earth Trax under his original alias, The Phantom. Or maybe his given name, Bartosz Kruczyński, which he uses for gorgeous ambient music. Or Pejzaż, where he cuts up Polish records from his vast collection. Or as part of Ptaki, another sample-based project he did with fellow Warsaw resident Jaromir Kamiński. You get the idea—dude makes a lot of music. And a lot of it is very good. Earth Trax is the project that really made us swoon, with a soft-focus, sunset-hued meld of techno, breakbeat, progressive house and trance.

On wonderful records like LP1, melancholy is the operative word, but Kruczyński isn't exactly a sadsack. It's more complex than that, nailing the tears-on-the-dance-floor vibe with the part that many people forget: it's still club music. That's why tracks like "Dream Pop," which kicks off this mix, are so successful—they're heavy but never weighed down by emotion, with a skip in their step and a robust low-end to go with the sighing vocals.

Kruczyński's RA Podcast is something of an excavation of this sound, using his own tracks and those of like-minded producers to sketch out a style that's equal parts rousing and pensive, midtempo but still propulsive. Over two and a half hours he lets these tracks breathe and leisurely mixes them together, almost like an old-school progressive house double mix CD but in the more vibrant, varied clothes of today—before it starts to unravel into an extended, beatless outro that's worth sticking all the way until the end for.

@earthtraxonline

Read more at https://ra.co/podcast/863