Raime - You Wouldn't Believe It If I Told You (cassette rip, 2025)

‘You Wouldn't Believe It If I Told You’ is the first Raime mixtape since they signed off the 2010s with a pair of deeply adored jungle and dancehall selections for Reel Torque. The 80 minute odyssey is likely to flip wigs with hitherto unexplored corners of their shared record collections gelled into a high grade, low-lit special like some idealised recollection of ‘90s ravers’ listening, or what they term "A journey through the psychedelic optimism and thoughtful dystopia of the mid 90's trance adjacent underground.” Cue crackly cuts of sublime, wide-eyed bliss-outs full of seraphic pads, burbling acid lines, and trilling 909s harnessed in free flowing, hallucinatory geometries, idealised for the gouch-out and regression sessions to that Goa trip of your youth, imagined or not.

With feet carefully on the gas and brakes they cruise and glyde thru sacred realms of the ‘90s hive mind, when a soundtrack to the comedown or afters was taken almost as religiously seriously as the main event, and when a wave of ’80s punk/post-punk operators and plugged-in dreamers began adapting to the dawn of a new age. 30 years later it may feel like that promise has waned in scale and effect, which makes this selection’s blend of pie-eyed naiveté and fine-tuned techgnosticsm feel more needed than ever.

Raime make that lost future almost palpable with faith in the sound’s potential to align chakras and buoy knackered bones as the vibes subtly escalate and expand from off-planet panoramas to asteroid-dodging acid techno via swingeing downbeats that hark to their earliest works, all threaded with a lush feel for tone and pressure that marbles their 15+ years of singular work.