As I dive into different roles, both within and beyond the music scene, I’ve decided to split my website into two separate entities:

• dsokolovskiy.com now covers everything about my persona — music, education, blog;
• daniellesden.com is dedicated exclusively to my music alter ego, where you’ll find my tunes, gigs, podcast, and more.

Don’t worry; I’ll still be posting everything here on this blog, same as always. If you stumble upon any broken links due to these changes, just give me a heads-up. I hope you like the new look of my websites!

The Rave Podcast is back and is now available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Patreon. I’m really enjoying such a deep, heads-down, groovy sound now, and I hope you’ll like it too. Enjoy!

Tracklisting:

I had the privilege of giving a short interview from the label manager’s perspective to LabelRadar, a platform for streamlining demo submissions.

I like this question:

Question: How important is an artist’s image and branding in today’s music industry?

Daniel: I wish it’d be otherwise, but branding is important. Social media are still king, even though it pains me to say that. Establishing a good online presence and building a strong fanbase is equally, if not even more important than making good music in the first place. Modern technologies lowered the entry barriers so everyone can be a music producer or a DJ now, but at the same time it created a lot of “noise” and one has to break through in order to stand out. And sometimes, music alone is not enough for that.

Read the full interview on the LabelRadar’s blog:
blog.labelradar.com/interview-daniel-sokolovskiy-joof-recordings

As you probably know, I now work as a music curator at Beatport and am responsible for three trance genres: Psy-Trance, Trance (Main Floor) and the recently added Trance (Raw / Deep / Hypnotic).

Since arguing about genres can be endless, I’ve created audio example playlists of how I define them. This comes in handy when working with colleagues, distributors, artists and labels, but can also be interesting for general listening and broadening your perspective.

I’ve collected links to such playlists for each sub-genre below. I wonder if there’s anything you think doesn’t fit the classifications? Is there anything you’ve discovered that is new to you? What is your favourite genre or subgenre?

Personally, I’m amazed once again at how diverse trance music is (and it’s just crazy that before I joined the company all these subgenres didn’t exist and everything was mixed in one pile).

Trance (Raw / Deep / Hypnotic):

• Raw Trance
• Deep Trance
• Hypnotic Trance

Trance (Main Floor):

• Trance
• Uplifting Trance
• Tech Trance
• Vocal Trance
• Hard Trance
• Progressive Trance

Psy-Trance:

• Psy-Trance
• Progressive Psy
• Psychedelic
• Goa Trance
• Dark & Forest
• Full-On
• Psycore & Hi-Tech

You probably know me for more peak-time and intense sets, but this time I had an important duty for preparing the dancefloor for John 00 Fleming, so I stayed at a lower tempo to save the crowd’s energy for the headliner. I must mention that Keros from the Amplify Events did an excellent job opening the night, so you know when the energy level is set right, even the lower tempo sounds banging.

My personal favourite part of this set is the transition at around 1h17m mark, pure bliss (I remember one person jumped into the DJ booth after that moment and said it was the best moment he had ever experienced on the dancefloor, kudos to that guy!).

Anyway, I hope you enjoy my warm-up set: