This week, an all-time classic by one of the most influential projects of the genre: Binary Neuronaut by The Infinity Project.

The project featured Raja Ram, who had been a flautist in the massively popular band Quintessence in the 1960s (they sold out Royal Albert Hall in London), together with Graham Wood – and their engineer at Butterfly Studios would be a young musician by the name of Simon Posford.

1994 was a major year for the group, which produced some groundbreaking music that started to help define a flavour of psychedelic dance music directly related to the parties. Olli Wisdom pointed out to me that the music being played in the early years of the parties was written for clubs – but by 1994, many musicians had experienced the events themselves and started writing music specifically for these parties… a thoroughly defining moment for the articulation of a particular kind of psychedelic character of these parties in the music. The Infinity Project produced 7 cutting-edge tracks that year (including 3 versions of Uforica), among them thoroughly mindblowing one featured today: Binary Neuronaut. You can see here a picture of a DAT tape from Graham Wood’s collection (with Simon Posford’s handwriting) showing their output for 1994.

What is particularly striking about this track is the freeflowing nature to the storyline: in under 7 minutes, there is a massive meandering journey that is undertaken that has a thoroughly organic feel to it. While there is a clear structure – it fits with the classical ‘sonata form’ structure of A-B-A and things still evolve in multiples of 8 bars – it does not feel rigid, the evolutionary nature of the story taking precedence over the form that contains it. The spoken samples stimulate consciousness expansion (that was the intended purpose of them in the early years of this music), and the harmonic framework of the track (Graham Wood’s magic – he’s a master with these dark, groovy harmonies) propels the dancer forward with a relentless forward-moving rhythm and a magical array of psychedelic, otherworldly sounds. Simon Posford told me that the track wasn’t progressing smoothly structurally and creatively until they all decided to get in the psychedelic frame of mind, and that’s when that magical middle section came to be created (this is the reason there is a shorter edit that has been issued – that was produced before the middle section was completed). 

Incidentally: the track was first issued on the Spirit Zone label, despite the fact that TIP had their own label. Back in those days, there was a cross-pollination of releases, the artists being friends with one another and happy to see their productions released on each others’ labels; things had not become competitive or proprietary yet. The track on the flipside – Telepathy – is also one of TIP’s all-time great productions.

I have played this track for a number of people new to the scene and they were simply stunned by the depth and character of the music – and the fact that this was produced over 20 years ago! Epic, mindblowing music for the ages!