New releases last eight weeks: Uplifting Trance

Review: Our gondola having rounded a wrong corner, we wind up floating down the Styx via the Senne, as an unabashedly hell-themed classic trance record comes reissued through Belgian label La Musique De Beau Monde. D-Devils are a demonic Belgian trance act established in 1998; founding members Jo Jacobs and Pieter-Jan Verachtert did extremely well to uphold a fiery, chthonic theme over an expanse of decades. Dante's infernal Pandemonium is recalled on their dynamo track '6th Gate', a sinister, bat-winged-and-ram-horned trangressive techno netherworld, across whose magmatic lead line a certain brusque-voiced prince of hell urges us to take in the underworld's caustic surroundings: "the gates are open... look around you, they're everywhere... my guards are watching you... gate 6, pick up your weapons and fight, and dance with the devil!". Rising Belgian producer Erik Hubo laid these two remixes down in 2024, bringing an extra gladiatorial trance mood to an readymade eternal nightmare.