Substrata: Our First Psybient Album

Substrata is a 20-track psybient album produced by the Azarius team, released free on our YouTube channel with custom trippy visuals for every song. One hour and 22 minutes of psydub bass, downtempo pulse, and slow-blooming ambient textures — built to sit next to a truffle session, a long drive, or a quiet Sunday afternoon. It's our first proper foray into psychedelic music, and we're a bit proud of how it turned out.

Press play and the player runs all 20 tracks of Substrata in album order, starting with "Petrichor · First Rain Awakening". Every video also lives on the official Azarius YouTube channel.

We've spent 25+ years selling the tools of altered states. It felt about time we made the soundtrack too. Substrata is exactly that: a psybient album shaped by everything we've heard from customers, from festival tents, from the shop's back office at 2am. If you already live in the world of Shpongle, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Ott, Solar Fields, or Entheogenic, you'll feel at home from the first bar of Petrichor.

What is psybient, actually?

Psybient is psychedelic ambient music — slow, spacious, and designed for the inside of your head rather than the dancefloor. Think of it as the chill-out room's answer to psytrance: same cosmic curiosity, quarter of the tempo. Most psybient sits in the 60-90 BPM area, closer to a resting heart rate than a rave.

Psydub is its dub-influenced cousin — heavier basslines, wider reverbs, that classic tape-echo tail you can practically see stretching across the room. Downtempo is the broader umbrella both live under: unhurried electronic music where texture matters more than drop. Substrata leans into all three. Some tracks (Loam, Taproot) sink into deep dub territory. Others (Psalm, Anthesis) drift toward pure ambient. A few (Fulgurite, Synapse) sit in between, with a pulse you can nod to but never quite dance to.

The genre traces back to the mid-90s Goa scene, when producers started making slower records for the come-down tents. Shpongle's Are You Shpongled? in 1998 is usually cited as the moment psybient became its own thing. Twenty-five years later it's still one of the most rewarding corners of trip music — and one of the most underserved on streaming.

Why a smartshop made a psybient album

Because we wanted to hear it. Simple as that. We've been recommending psybient records to customers since the late 90s, and there's a specific kind of album we keep wishing existed: 20 tracks, no filler, nature-and-mineral texture, made to run alongside a session without demanding attention. Nobody was making exactly that record, so we made it ourselves.

AZARIUS · Why a smartshop made a psybient album

Substrata was produced by the Azarius team using AI as a creative instrument. We're saying that openly because there's no reason not to. AI tools sit next to synthesisers, samplers, and drum machines now — another box on the studio shelf. Every track was shaped, arranged, sequenced and named by humans who've spent decades inside this music. The AI helped us get there faster. The taste is ours.

From Our Counter: we've watched psychedelic music evolve from tape trades at Boom Festival to Bandcamp to whatever this next chapter turns out to be. Being early to a new tool has never been a bad idea in this scene — the first samplers were treated like cheating too. Substrata is us jumping in with both feet. If you hate the idea on principle, fair enough. If you're curious, put on Petrichor with headphones on and tell us what you think.

Substrata tracklist: all 20 songs

Here's the full running order, 1h 22m from top to bottom. Every track has its own video with custom visuals on the official Azarius YouTube channel (@Azariussmartshop) — hit play in the player above to run the album in sequence, or spin up any record below to open that track’s video.

The track names follow a nature-mineral-light theme on purpose: loam, obsidian, verdigris, marigold, fulgurite, karst, petrichor. Each subtitle is a small sketch of where the song goes. Ember · Smouldering Ascent does what it says. So does Karst · Subterranean Voyage — five minutes of dripping cave acoustics and low-end pressure.

Visuals made for tripping

Every one of the 20 videos has its own custom visual, built to be watched during a session. Slow morphing shapes, mineral textures, molten light, plants unfurling in impossible directions. Nothing strobing, nothing aggressive, nothing that yanks you out of the state you're in. If you've ever wished a music video would just keep going instead of cutting every two seconds, these are for you.

AZARIUS · Visuals made for tripping

The visual style matches the track names — Obsidian lives in molten black glass, Verdigris in oxidised copper greens, Aureate in gilded dawn light. We wanted the eye and the ear pulling in the same direction. Put a phone on a stand, cast it to the TV, or just let it play on a laptop across the room. It's not a music video in the MTV sense; it's a slow-moving painting that happens to breathe with the music.

How to listen: set, setting, and everyday use

Substrata was built with two listeners in mind. The first: someone deep in a psychedelic session — a magic truffle afternoon, a microdose walk, a long herbal blend evening — who wants sound that supports the trip without steering it. Sit down, dim the lights, put the visuals on a screen you can glance at, and let the album run. 1h 22m maps neatly onto the early plateau of most truffle experiences.

The second: everyone else. This is downtempo music, which means it works perfectly sober. In the car on a long motorway stretch. At your desk while you're writing something that needs focus. On the sofa at the end of a long day. As wind-down music an hour before sleep (skip Fulgurite if you're actually trying to nod off — it has a bit too much pulse). We've been testing it in the shop's back office for months. Nobody's asked us to turn it off, which is the highest praise most background music can hope for.

Psybient vs psytrance vs ambient: where does Substrata sit?

If you're new to these genres, this small table might help you place the album.

Substrata mostly lives in the middle two rows. A handful of tracks drift into the top row (pure ambient); nothing in it comes close to psytrance tempo. If you want the fast stuff, Substrata isn't the record. If you want something to inhabit for 82 minutes, it is.

What's next

Substrata is the first album. There will be many more. We already have ideas piling up for the second — a heavier psydub direction, longer track lengths, more field recordings from the Amsterdam canals and the Fungi Farm. Follow @Azariussmartshop on YouTube if you want to catch the next one when it drops. Comments are open on every video and we actually read them.

AZARIUS · What's next

Put Petrichor · First Rain Awakening on last, headphones on, eyes closed. That's how we'd start.