This week, a short-lived project by two important musicians in the formative years of the Goa period… Nick Taylor and Ray Castle’s collaborative ‘Rhythmystec’ project, with their epic track ‘Stellium’.

Nick Taylor had been involved in the early years of the scene, partying to DJ Kudo’s music with his friend Tsuyoshi Suzuki at the Yellow nightclub in Tokyo, which would lead to the formation of ‘Taiyo’, which morphed into ‘Prana’.

Ray Castle had been in Goa in the 1980s and through its transition from proto-Goa into the full-fledged ‘Goa’ sound.

Shortly after Nick moved to Australia in 1994, he teamed up with Ray to produce five tracks under the project ‘Rhythmystec’ (an altered combination of the words ‘rhythm’, ‘mystic’, and ‘technology’). The first of these tracks was the incredible track Stellium, named after an astrological alignment whereby a group of several planets is in a single sign of the zodiac or a single house (Ray is a terrific astrologer and still consults in this capacity).

The track has an amazing array of sounds and textures, with a brilliantly structured introduction that is a chopped-up pastiche of elements that are presented later on in the track. The quasi-orchestral sounding sonorities and rhythmic punctuations give the track a dramatic flavour, while the nasal-sounding synth adds a mystical other-worldly quality. By the time the ‘guitar from outer space’ riff comes in, with a simple and somewhat geometric pattern, things blast into another dimension, and morphing alien voices chime in. After some random squelchy bleeps and radio noise prior to the work’s climax, an alien-sounding synth line seems to download the listener with an Egyptian-Pleiadian-style message and then all of the work’s lines overlay with each other with incredible polyphonic clarity.

A killer full-power track that was a classic night-time mystical stormer back in the 90s – still a timeless, inspired masterpiece!