MANAPOOL's 'Tower Trance: Yggdra' Is a Portal to a Video Game That Never Existed
MANAPOOL calls Tower Trance: Yggdra “romantic hardcore” and “keygen music,” and both descriptions land — this is the first installment in a planned episodic trance series for Tabula Rasa Record Company, a tiny label giving the project room to be as maximalist as it wants. The record folds Y2K-era trance, jungle, breakbeat, and hardcore techno together with new-age pads and the kind of soundfont textures that used to live inside dial-up-era video games, and somehow the combination never feels like a novelty.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: The breakbeat and hardcore techno elements keep a real low-end presence throughout, giving the record actual physical weight underneath all the gauzy synth work up top — this isn’t ambient music wearing a trance costume.
The Spatial Dynamics: The soundfont textures and new-age pads are mixed with enormous reverb tails, opening up a sense of scale that makes the whole EP feel less like a dance-floor tool and more like a soundtrack to somewhere that doesn’t exist yet.
Standout Performance
“Zoltraak” is the clearest distillation of the whole project — trance arpeggios, breakbeat drums, and video-game-soundfont melody lines colliding into something that’s somehow both nostalgic and completely new.
Why It’s Certified
Bandcamp Daily’s Zoe Camp put it best: “If BT scored a Kingdom Hearts, it’d probably sound like this.” That’s exactly the world Tower Trance: Yggdra builds — sincere, maximalist, unconcerned with cool, and generous enough with its ideas that a whole episodic series built on this template sounds like a genuinely exciting proposition. Certified great.