Thursday 10 March 2022

Dreamscape 17 vs 18 @ The Sanctuary, Milton Keynes 11/03/1995

 

Hixxy

After kicking off 1995 at Dreamscape 15 vs 16 here we are at the next Dreamscape event. This was the first Dreamscape tape pack I owned. Once I acquired the Dreamscape 15 vs 16 tape pack at a later date I noticed that things had changed a lot in the space of a little over 2 months.

There were obviously tunes that appeared at both events and with the benefit of internet track lists I have the numbers. We have 20 happy hardcore tunes and 19 drum & bass tunes. There were also 6 happy hardcore tunes which were remixes of tunes that appeared at the previous event and 4 drum & bass tunes.

That does sound a lot, but when you consider we have 12 hours worth of tunes on the tapes it's not that much really. When looking at individual DJ's who played at both events, Swane had the most tunes he played at both events with 4. Some DJs don't have any.

Quite surprisingly this is the first rave featured this year to have Hixxy playing at therefore I've chosen his set to post. He's one of the biggest names of the modern era, but this was a pre-Toytown Hixxy. The MC on the set is Sharkey and during the set he introduces what was the new record label from Hixxy and Dougal called Essential Platinum.

The tape pack was aimed at those who liked both happy hardcore and drum & bass as each tape has a happy hardcore DJ one side and a drum & bass DJ the other side.

Even though I would become more of a happy hardcore fan in the end it was the drum & bass sets that I was listening to more at the time. One tune that sticks out to me from this pack was "The Lighter" by Sounds of the Future. This samples the theme from "Love Story" and was around the same time we had the "Tums" advert where they were singing "tum tum tum tum tum" to the "Love Story" theme. This is the most played drum & bass tune appearing in 5 of the 8 sets.

These were the new for 1995 drum & bass tunes that appeared:

Notorious - Feel Love

Mental Power - Deep Soul

Sounds Of Life - Hidden Rooms

DJ Hype - Freestyles Of Bass 

DJ Rap & Voyager - Burning Love

DJ Harmony - So Real

Scratch C & Shaka - Dread Ah Star

Cloud 9 - Snow

Happy hardcore wise, quite appropriately given the title the tune which appeared the most was "95 Style" by Happy Rollers which appeared in 4 of the sets.

There were the new for 1995 happy hardcore tunes which appeared:

Billy Bunter - New Sensation

Force & The Evolution - Show Me Heaven

DJ Brisk - Airhead

Dougal & Mickey Skeedale - Emerald

A Sense Of Summer - Around The World

Psy-Quest - I Believe

Bass X - Morphine

Scott Brown - Do What Ya Like!

Lord Of Hardcore - Work That Sucka

Happy Tunes & Hixxy - Set Me Free

Brisk vs Rebel Alliance - Adrenaline Flowing

Midas - Meltdown

DJ Pooch - Take Control

Ravers Choice - Givin' It All I Got

The happy hardcore sets were generally leaning towards the English tunes as opposed to the Scottish and Dutch ones. The exception to this is the Brisk set where the first 8 tunes are all Scottish or Dutch including the opening track "XTC Love" Bertocucci Feranzano who is Dutch, though back then I thought he was Italian.

The Slipmatt set goes Scottish and Dutch towards the end, maybe it continued in that way once the tapes stopped recording. The Ramos and DJ SY/Seduction tapes don't have any Dutch or Scottish tunes on at all.

There is also a techno 2 pack from the night which was supposed to come with the 8 pack but it never came with mine. 

The Daz Saund set is a very international one with tunes from 7 different countries, most notably Germany and Belgium. Colin Dale was roughly half English half international. The Loftgroover and Clarkee sets were leaning more towards Scotland and Holland though the first 4 tunes on the Clarkee set were by Elation who are English and come from the same EP.

Dreamscape were pretty much the biggest rave of the moment. This is evident from the tapes and line up. It was just as much a happy hardcore rave as it was drum & bass and when I learned that tape packs were a thing the first one to spring to mind was Dreamscape.

It's therefore inevitable that Dreamscape 19 will feature once the time comes.

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