Hirschmilch PsytranceHirschmilch Psytrance

Psytrance arrived on Hirschmilch's first anniversary, at the end of 2009, a year after Michael Reese had put the station on air from Hamburg as a free non-commercial thing with two channels. Since 2013 the channel has given every Monday evening over to oldschool psytrance, four hours of the records that actually built the genre, which is a rare piece of scheduling on a station that otherwise runs on rotation. Newer sessions have joined it since, arriving on Saturday nights instead.

The main rotation is full-on with the melodic edge kept in, weighted toward the Latin American and Israeli labels that dominate the form now. The Monday slot pulls in the other direction entirely, back to the Goa records of the nineties, so the channel carries both the canon and whatever came out last week. Listener votes have shaped what stays in the pool since 2010, which is why so little of it feels like filler.