DAT Records

For more than 10 years now DAT records releases some amazing albums and EP of GoaTrance : Mind-blowing music and beautiful artwork with often a lot of super interesting infos. This is pure love. Each of their releases is a big event for people like me who like this music. DAT records is one of the reasons why this underground genre is still alive and will still kick you ass in 10 years from now.

DAT Records was created with the goal of releasing previously unreleased Goa Trance music from the golden era of the 1990s. They had a strong start with the legendary canceled Crop Circles album. Unfortunately, over time DAT Records has proven to be a disappointment.

The Crop Circles album was the first and last time DAT Records released anything of importance. Most of their releases have been reissues of popular classics plus inferior remixes that could have stayed unreleased, or tracks that were previously released only on vinyl. Some of their purely unreleased works, like Opale, were not good music to begin with. In over a decade of operation they've failed to find unreleased material of significance or to secure contracts to release it. That is because the great majority of unreleased music was unreleased for a good reason (it was inferior).

The second and bigger problem with DAT Records is their poor judgement when it comes to mastering and remastering. Unfortunately, this is a serious problem which sours almost everything they release. The owner of DAT Records, Draeke, has at times commented about "modernizing" the music, which seems like a peculiar thing to want to do when releasing unreleased tracks from the 1990s. In practice what this means to him is compressing the dynamic range of the music and making it louder. To those of us with fine and delicate hearing, this effectively degrades and ruins the music: it is not an improvement to have everything at the same volume; it's fatiguing, and these tracks were better in their original forms.

I cannot recommend DAT Records because in all cases I would prefer to have the original releases of tracks that they reissued, or to try to find a digital copy of tracks that were not previously released before they were butchered by DAT Records' mastering engineers. And beyond the Crop Circles album, they haven't released anything of great importance anyways. DAT Records releases cause listening fatigue and I've not encountered any cases where their remastering was an improvement.

Note that DAT Records has a cult-like following on Discogs, with a small army of friends-of-the-label-owner keen to rate all of their releases 5/5, shower often-illiterate praise on them, and attack and berate anyone who dares to raise a criticism. Anyways, it's an unimportant label that can be ignored by all but the most enthusiastic Goa Trance aficionados. This genre of music flourished in the mid-1990s and anyone interested in ought to go directly to the source: the original classics, without any questionable "modernizing" applied to them.