Every scene has one label whose catalog numbers people recite like scripture. For nineties trance, a strong case says it's Platipus — the London imprint Simon Berry founded in 1993, with a cartoon platypus for a logo and a roster that was, to a remarkable degree, Simon Berry wearing different hats.
Berry recorded as Art of Trance. With Claudio Giussani he was Union Jack. He surfaced again as Poltergeist, and the label filled out with kindred spirits like Terra Ferma and Quietman. From the outside it looked like a bustling stable of artists; from the inside it was closer to a workshop, one small crew refining a single idea: British trance that valued melody and strangeness in equal measure.
Two Full Moons and a Trout
The label's founding statement arrived early. Union Jack's "Two Full Moons and a Trout" (1993) took the acid squelch that Frankfurt was weaponizing and made it whimsical — a 303 line that grinned instead of glowered, under one of the great absurdist titles in dance music. The album "There Will Be No Armageddon" (1995) proved it wasn't a fluke, with tracks like "Cactus" showing a label happy to be playful in a scene that often took itself deadly seriously.
Then came the darker sibling. Poltergeist's "Vicious Circles" (1996) is Platipus at its most hypnotic — a coiling, serpentine groove that DJs from the progressive and trance worlds alike hammered for years. It's the rare record equally at home in a Sasha set and a hard trance peak hour.
"Platipus records didn't sound like anyone else's. They sounded like weather — slow fronts of melody rolling in until the whole room changed climate."
Madagascar and the Peak
If one record carries the label into every history of the genre, it's Art of Trance's "Madagascar" (1998). The original is gorgeous — that keening lead over a patiently building groove — but the remix package turned it into a phenomenon, with Ferry Corsten's rework becoming a staple of the era's biggest rooms and compilations. For a certain generation of clubbers, the opening bars of "Madagascar" are the sound of 1998 itself.
Around it sat a catalog with an absurd hit rate: Terra Ferma's "Floating," Quietman's ambient-leaning excursions, and a stream of Art of Trance singles — "Kaleidoscope," "Easter Island," "Killamanjaro" — that kept the label essential deep into the 2000s. The Platipus compilation series became a trusted brand of its own, the kind of CDs that introduced landlocked teenagers to a scene happening in clubs they were years too young to enter.
The lesson of Platipus, looking back from the far side of trance's superclub era, is that scale was never the point. A tiny label, a handful of aliases, and total quality control produced a body of work that outlived a hundred better-funded imprints. Lightning, bottled — with a duck-billed mammal on the sleeve.