Dave Seaman – Global Underground 016: Cape Town

Being contrary… 😬 one of my least favourite of DS’s GUs/ mixes. Sorry everyone. The production is great, and like everyone else I love the Mandalay and Ananda Project's-Cascades Of Colour bit.

I guess the litmus test for me has always been (possibly) if I’m chasing the vinyl down and with exception of hovering over the buy button on cascades of colour, I’m not. I love the original Snake and the Pete Lazonby tracks - I don’t care massively for the reworks

Still pining for the days of REN Worldwide or REN 4 mix #1 which were all consuming lush affairs.

🤪 ====•••••• 🔫

Lithuania on the other hand - that’s back to form. Moulds a soundscape of sorts. Melbourne disc 2 was ok too. All being said - remarkable career

As a fan of this mix especially CD1 I've done this list:
https://www.discogs.com/lists/Dave-Seaman-Global-Underground-016-Cape-Town-2000/967138

Lot of hard to please peeps on here it seems....

This one is a classic. All his GU's are very well put together. It's rare to see mixes done so well like cd1's guten morgen => deep love => cascades of colour. HELLO!? That's just an awesome flow.

I'm a big fan of this one. CD1 starts off slow and tbh i'm not keen on the first 3 tunes but after that it's excellent - some real nice progressive trance to get lost in. CD2 is just great prog trance all the way through, great for listening to while out running!

This is easily my favourite mix comp that Dave did for GU. I love CD1 as at the time it was way deeper than most progressive jocks were playing. The intro grabs you, the sexy tribal groove of Earth by Rui Da Silva, the sharp echo crash of Simon's-Free at last, the instrumental here without the Martin Luther King speech. The techy, groovy Futureshock Instrumental of Moby-Porcelain. I agree with the previous comments that what he does with the Charlie May rmx of Mandalay and Rui Da Silva's Saffron mix of Chris Brann's Ananda Project's-Cascades Of Colour is amazing.
Like it say's in the sleeve notes, this mix is meant to bewitch not bludgeon you and it does exactly that. Whenever I'm in the mood for some deep, stirring, tribal house with the deeper end of progressive house I put this on.
CD2 is worth a listen but to me it doesn't sound as if as much work went into putting it together. It's still good and the beautiful intro to Pete Lazonby's prog/trance classic always stirs the soul.
It was definitely mixed by Dave and his engineer in the studio.
CD1 for me is a classic and I come back to it regularly, it has a classic, timeless feel. I don't love every track on it but as a cohesive whole it works.
Apart from the first half of CD1 Dave's Buenos Aires mix is far too trancey for my tastes. I like my progressive more on the house side and my trance with a small T :-).

This is easily my least favorite Seaman mix for GU, or any other series he's done I think. It's not a bad mix but it's nowhere close to the Buenos Aires mix and I think Melbourne is also better. I gave it 4 stars but its more like 3 1/2 to me, a good mix but nothing special.

I feel I should weigh in now after reading some of these negative reviews. I probably hadn't listened to Disc 2 for over ten years until the other day but over the 15 years since it's release I have often listened to Disc 1. This compilation could never have been better than his GU012 Buenos Aires album, let's face it, not many compilations are, it was probably the best GU album and as a 2 disc mix, up there with the best dance mixes of all time. Anyway, this album has aged well I think, Dave Seaman does not do anything like this anymore, with this he was on a trance journey and it has some brilliant tracks, Rui Da Silva, Ian Wilkie and the late, great Slacker and his mix of 'Tyrantanic' for the first disc is nothing to be sniffed at. Disc 2 is where he goes full on trance with the not often seen on compilation albums, Sacred Cycles by Pete Lazonby, Planisphere and 'The Fall' by Way Out West. As ever the mixing is faultless and he had obviously put thought into how he shaped each mix with the first mix a slightly more spiritual journey and the second a more driving energy mix. Probably better than his Melbourne mix a few years later!

Should stick to playing football! He was a brilliant keeper.

By no means a bad mix. After al, this is Dave Seaman, whose mixing is pretty solid. Unfortunately, aside for a few good tracks (1-800 Ming for instance), nothing really stands out. It falls victum into sounding a bit to similar to the other mixed complinations that were floating around at the time. It's still a good mix however, but given the strength of the GU releases up til then, it should have been better.

This isn't as good as his Buenos Aires mix, on which Disc 2 was a real gem. The problem with this mix is that it's lacking some sort of cohesiveness or direction, the mix is just a typical progressive trance mix and it fails to extricate itself from the countless other comparable compilations.

Additionally, it is sort of the on the cheesier and more mainstream side of the trance spectrum. Mixes that use the lesser known underground tracks gain more credibility in my eyes because they are working with less. They aren't using the most accessible and popular tunes to get people to listen to the mix, they are using their actual mixing skill and track selection to come up with something original.

It's not terrible, but it's probably one of the weakest GU releases out of the first 20.