Israel · progressive-psytrance · psytrance

Perfect Stranger

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Progressive psytrance with a deep, patient groove — closer to a slow tide than a peak.

Yuli Fershtat was born in Moscow in 1970 and moved to Israel at age eleven. He grew up around classical piano, studying from age four in a family of pianists, and later named prog rock groups such as King Crimson, Genesis and Jethro Tull, along with Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygène, as formative listening.

Trips to India and Goa in the early 1990s introduced him to psychedelic trance, a style he had disliked until then and came to embrace fully after a second visit in 1994-95. He began producing after friends gave him a synthesizer for his 27th birthday, first working under the name BLT.

As BLT, Fershtat released four albums between 1999 and 2004, starting with Alchemic Anecdote and moving into slower, more down-tempo material on records such as God is Love, at times performing live with drummer Danni Makov. He retired the BLT name in 2005 to focus on acupuncture and Chinese medicine before returning to production as Perfect Stranger, a name chosen at a label owner's suggestion to reflect a deliberately slower tempo.

As Perfect Stranger, Fershtat favours long, gradually unfolding arrangements over psytrance's faster and more aggressive strains: rolling basslines, restrained melodic detail and slow shifts in texture rather than sudden drops. He has been a regular presence on the progressive trance circuit since the mid-2000s and owns the label Digital Structures, which he took over in 2011.

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