Music
Is trance the most enduring musical genre on the planet?
Over the past 20 years, trance has maintained one of the most loyal fanbases in dance music. Trance mainstay Ferry Corsten, new-school producer Ciel and more talk about the sound’s enduring appeal.
Trance feels like a natural feature in the dance world: a mountain or canyon, huge, unchanging, always there. When we think of trance, we generally think of megastar DJs, most of them Dutch (Tïesto, Ferry Corsten, Armin Van Buuren) or huge live acts like the UK's Above & Beyond.
We think of those huge ’90s and early ’00s anthems (Children, For An Angel, 9PM Til I Come, Cafe Del Mar, Adagio With Strings) that are still staples in summer party resorts and on daytime radio and which get perpetually remixed for new generations. We think of huge arenas, lasers, whooshing breakdowns building up to enormous earworm synth riffs, unchanging, uncool, removed from the currents of fad and hipsterism.
The stark truth is that there’s no room for funk at 140 BPM
Its main formulae, even its stars will admit, have not changed significantly in the 20 years since it first reached peak success at the height of the first wave of superstar DJ culture.
Toronto's eclectic new-school electronica producer Ciel, aka Cindy Li, sums it up neatly as “Faster tempos – nothing under 134bpm, please – big melodies, complex arrangements, vocals-as-instruments and psychedelic, New Age-y samples.”
Ciel performs at Movement Electronic Music Festival
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It's perceived as very white in comparison to the roots of house and techno, very European and even Ferry Corsten says it “doesn't really have a groove: it's just either fast or slow. But it has a melody, a lot of melody. So it leans closer to classical music than to some kind of tribal rhythm.” Likewise, Tony McGuinness of Above & Beyond isn't joking when he says: “The stark truth is that there’s no room for funk at 140 BPM”. (Although he's quick to stress that their material of the last decade is slower and “pretty funky at times”.)
But of course nothing exists in a vacuum, nothing comes out of nowhere and club culture is nothing if not voracious. So trance, like every other form, is always interacting and interbreeding with other styles. It has deep roots and multiple branches. It can be swanky and jet-setting or gritty and aggressively proletarian and it seeps in everywhere. Its distinctive tonal and melodic qualities have found their way at various times into dubstep, grime, hip hop and far more techno than that genre's snobs would care to admit.
Its distinctive tonal and melodic qualities have found their way into far more techno than that genre's snobs would care to admit
In the past half decade especially, those sounds have been adopted with varying levels by a whole new generation of experimentalists. Most recently, these new flavours of deconstructed trance and club music are finding themselves mashed together with dancehall and other vernacular soundsystem styles in the global South to create vivid and radical new hybrids that are spreading rapidly round the world. Meanwhile, others still are returning to trance's own first principles and turning it super hypnotic and cosmic again, with artists like Ciel herself, Fantastic Twins and K-X-P making some of this year's most glorious records from its core components.
Trance's roots go back a long way. “Trance as an electronic form of music has existed since the birth of the synth,” says JD Twitch of Optimo Music, who has put out the new Fantastic Twins EP.
Giorgio Moroder
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It's true: from the first academic electronic composers through the hippie tone-wrangling of The Silver Apples and Giorgio Moroder's synth-disco experiments, as soon as people got their hands on the means to create a hypnotic pulse, they grabbed that opportunity with both hands. Even before techno was invented, hippies were dancing on the beaches of Goa to relentless electronic and industrial beats stretched out for days with the express purpose of mystical trance induction.
Trance has an image of putting on big shows, but in the end, trance also comes from dark clubs in the '90s. It was always about dancing
But it was in the early '90s in Europe, especially in Frankfurt, that the genre itself was actually born. “These days, trance has an image of putting on big shows,” says Corsten, “with lasers... or Sensation White, but in the end trance also comes from dark clubs in the '90s. Sven Väth and people like that playing fast techno with these very melodic sounds. It was always about dancing.”
Sven Väth
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Those early '90s days were full of wildness, strangeness and hedonism, with hippies and ravers embracing an anything-goes sense to the music. Early on, UK labels like Rising High and Choci's Chewns and outlaw collectives like Spiral Tribe bridged the gap between nascent trance and the hardcore/rave scene, while more experimental acts like the Netherlands' Psychick Warriors Ov Gaia connected to the alternative/industrial/occult world. It also went global almost instantly.
Jane Fitz, now a respected house/techno DJ, was a dedicated trance raver back in the day; working as a music business journalist she travelled widely. “I was going to these little parties round Asia run by my friends,” she says. “I also had friends living in Hong Kong who would make a pilgrimage to Goa or to Thailand every winter for the parties there. Or it would be in Canada or Indonesia or even Japan. It was a really free and crazy scene that to me felt more like a lifestyle and at that time I thought house was just really cheesy and had run out of ideas.”
At that time I thought house was just really cheesy and had run out of ideas
As well as the ad-hoc word-of-mouth parties, clubs like Sven Väth's Omen in Frankfurt and Megatripolis and Return To The Source in London cemented a multi-ethnic aesthetic of glowing fluorescent colour, sci-fi designs and general delirium.
All of this – even though acts like Jam & Spoon, Robert Miles and Paul Van Dyk were crossing over into the dance mainstream – was still an underground scene, until the tail end of the decade, when the big-breakdowns-and-lasers formula really hit big. Some didn't like it: JD Twitch talks of “'The T-word'... having terrible connotations from the mid-90s”, while Jane Fitz says, “from 1998-9, for me, it had just stopped being innovative, [especially] the commercial sound associated with Gatecrasher or Judge Jules.”
Crasher Kids
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For those who embraced it, like Corsten, it proved not just popular but durable. “Yeah, I stuck with it,” he laughs. “Maybe mid-2000s, I played around with electro[-house] and at the end of the 2000s when that 'big room' EDM sound came, I experimented with that. But ultimately I returned to the good old trance recipe of back in the day, because that's what works best for this sound!”
And crucially, that mainstream trance sound was infectious. Hip-hop, always magpie in nature, grabbed its big riffs – listen to some of Timbaland's mid-2000s beats, most notably on Justin Timberlake's Your Love and it is unmistakably there in the mix.
An apocryphal story goes that Lil Jon, DJing in Atlanta strip clubs, found the dancers loved Euro dance tracks and began appropriating the drum and synthesiser sounds for his crunk beats. Dubstep and grime, too, embraced it, with Skream and Joker being notable lovers of a trance synth, while drum 'n' bass, coming out of its turn-of-the-millennium inward-looking phase, burst out with new chart-friendly sounds featuring layers of fizzing trance synth.
The influence of trance really began to kick in round the start of the 2010s, when a ‘neon’ aesthetic in producers like Rustie, Hudson Mohawke, SOPHIE and, in subtler form, Kuedo and Ikonika. By 2014, the phrase 'deconstructed trance' was in circulation and even trance's biggest, cheesiest anthems were fair game for remaking.
Skream
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All of which brings us to a point where the different eras and styles of trance are all part of the musical language of 2019. Thus you can have the likes of Canadian producer Christian Douglas, aka Antwood, who smashes commercial trance into virtuosically complex and intense electronica beats and admits to a sense of irony in his work, albeit for sincere purposes.
“I think a wink and a nudge works well with modern trance,” he says, “because it can deliver emotional resonance to a cynical audience and make them feel excited, however reluctantly.”
On the other hand, London DJ Yewande Adeniran, aka Ifeoluwa – who also plays abstracted electronic beats but blends them with global hip hop and soundsystem stylings – insists that the trance tonality that heard woven through her sets is played straight.
Trance is about this emotional journey – people really talk about their feels with trance, I have people crying in front of me!
“Sometimes,” she says, “you need a break from the darkness and to consume yourself in something that has pure optimism. The various diasporas and black, brown and queer people have always used popular club sounds, whether that's disco or house, for just that purpose and now there is a new generation utilising the sounds around them including trance, for a similar purpose.”
It's not so very far from Corsten's own thoughts on trance. “It's not like EDM bros who just want to fist-pump – trance is way more about this emotional journey, people really talk about their feels with trance, I have people crying in front of me! I hear from people on active service in the army who say they wouldn't be here if it wasn't for this music, people who say that this music got them sane again. It does a lot more to people than what the hipsters think they hear.”
Ferry Corsten performs at O2 Brixton Academy
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McGuinness, too, talks about trance – underground and experimental or arena-sized – having real-world functions, not some unknowable mythical, mystical, transcendent purpose. “The songs of Above & Beyond are undoubtedly uplifting and optimistic,” he says, “but they usually start from difficult life events and real sadness. I think it’s important to acknowledge that shit happens, shit happens to everyone, so when it happens to you you know you’re not alone. That’s the point. We’re not trying to jump over all the blood, sweat and tears to some kind of idealised afterlife, we’re just trying to help you swim through it. That’s how music has helped me and if our music can do that for someone else I think that’s a hugely positive thing.”
Ciel agrees about appreciating trance's sometimes naïve optimism for what it is, without burdening it with cynicism. “Everything's kind of going to hell in a hand basket right now,” she says. “So when I'm going out raving on the weekends, the last thing I want to hear is a big whiny weep fest.”
She looks less to the big-time mainstream of trance, though, and more to its '90s roots – its wild enthusiasm and anything-goes vibe vaulting over questions of problematic appropriation. "It samples so much from videos about space exploration, meditation, New Age mysticism and, yes, traditional music from Asia and Africa and the Middle East. There's something beautiful about this amalgamation of old and new, traditionalism and futurism.”
Meanwhile, Fitz has returned to playing records from that era in her virtuosically structured sets: “To me it just sounds like incredibly intricate techno,” she says, “with melodies, stories, narratives.”
And all this time, trance itself endures in its own world too, whether that be the commercial variety, the aggressively simple acid trance for squat raves, the maniacal sound of hard trance, the gentler versions that blur into the 'melodic techno' of German labels like Kompakt and Get Physical, or the micro scenes like Northeast England's makina / 'new monkey' scene, which incorporates grime-like MCing over 150-plus BPM trance.
And let's not forget the Goa-centric sound of psy-trance, which Fitz says is possibly “The biggest and longest-surviving underground global music scene in the world, with huge star DJs, vast festivals like Boom and Ozoro, while most of the world outside of this scene knows nothing about it.”
You may like it or you may not; these various thronging, living scenes don't particularly seem to care about what outsiders think one way or another. But if you want to know about the ecosystem of wider global dance music, you can't ignore the strange and tangled world of trance.
Tïesto
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