Trance music once provided the very definition of cheese, but producers use it intelligently now to play with the idea of scale.
Everyone who reads, writes or talks about music much comes to
dislike particular words. The gulf between the glorious variety of music
and the relative laziness of common language means words such as
"soulful" or "ethereal" or "raw" become sketchy markers for huge clouds
of effects and feelings. My personal bugbear is "cheesy" – that
catch-all for any music that's a little too direct in its desire to
please. It's such an idle, dismissive word. But like most words,
sometimes it seems to fit exactly.
Take trance music, for instance. Like every dance genre, there are 100 varieties of trance, whose devotees wage sullen war against anyone who gets the details wrong. But for the casual listener, "trance" means the kind of dance record that got into the Top 40 in the late 90s: Fragma's Toca's Miracle, Chicane's Don't Give Up, ATB's 9am (Till I Come). I remember listening to the radio then and thinking first that this stuff was the very definition of cheese, and then wondering where pop would go from here. What kind of music would trance inspire?
Well, now we know. Trance, as Simon Reynolds and others have pointed out, infests modern pop. Its signature sounds – the huge, airy keyboard lines and uplifting chord progressions – are the backbone for a host of recent hits (Think Rihanna's Only Girl in the World, for an obvious example). Trance got little critical respect in its heyday and the pop that borrows from it faces many of the same criticisms: that it's homogenous, unimaginative, its perpetual euphoria is quickly exhausting.
But what happens when musicians start using that euphoria in more interesting ways? The greatest quality of trance was always the scale of it – it was most popular in dance's superclub era, its DJs were also globetrotters, and its riffs were the sonic equivalent of laser lightshows: spectacular but weightless. The music worked to turn any space into an aircraft hangar. So producers using trance now are playing with that idea of scale: often just for its own sake but sometimes more intelligently.
Lady Gaga's album Born This Way, for example, is stuffed with trancey sounds. Gaga's songs are often about self-empowerment, which the euphoric enormity of trance seems an excellent fit for. But empowerment in Gagaland isn't a glib process with a happy ending – it's something messy and unfinishable. So the album is also filled up with any other kind of swagger she can think of: classic rock moves, rolling ballads, a sax break from the late Clarence Clemons. The trance riffs don't get the soundfield to themselves – they have to fight to cut through, work for their uplifting payoff.
The most exciting use of trance I've heard, though, is 22-year-old hip-hop producer AraabMUZIK, who samples the music extensively. In a hip-hop context, trance makes a surprising amount of sense – on the Diplomats' Salute, which AraabMUZIK produced, the echoey vastness of the keyboard riffs makes it feel as if the MCs are filling and dominating a colossal space. But it's his instrumental cuts that really catch the imagination. Last month he released Electronic Dream, an album of trance-derived beats and one of the year's freshest and most beguiling records.
Electronic Dream zeroes in on the vocals in pop trance, sampling tracks such as Jam & Spoon's Right in the Night and cutting in rushing, skittery beats. AraabMUZIK has a reputation for virtuosic real-time sampling and groove-making, in which he often burns out or breaks his equipment. But on Electronic Dream that energy is held back. Occasionally, as on Underground Stream, AraabMUZIK drops in a thrillingly sudden breakdown, but mostly the mood is a strange combination of intimacy and scale. It's as if the heaving club spaces implied by trance have been emptied out, their euphoria a happy memory not a bludgeoning presence.
Is Electronic Dream "cheesy"? Its source material might all have been called that – but AraabMUZIK finds surprising angles on trance without ever trying to subvert it. His affinity for the music is one of the things that makes his album such a pleasure – as well as a welcome reminder that even the most disrespected sound of the past can still be sparked into life.
Take trance music, for instance. Like every dance genre, there are 100 varieties of trance, whose devotees wage sullen war against anyone who gets the details wrong. But for the casual listener, "trance" means the kind of dance record that got into the Top 40 in the late 90s: Fragma's Toca's Miracle, Chicane's Don't Give Up, ATB's 9am (Till I Come). I remember listening to the radio then and thinking first that this stuff was the very definition of cheese, and then wondering where pop would go from here. What kind of music would trance inspire?
Well, now we know. Trance, as Simon Reynolds and others have pointed out, infests modern pop. Its signature sounds – the huge, airy keyboard lines and uplifting chord progressions – are the backbone for a host of recent hits (Think Rihanna's Only Girl in the World, for an obvious example). Trance got little critical respect in its heyday and the pop that borrows from it faces many of the same criticisms: that it's homogenous, unimaginative, its perpetual euphoria is quickly exhausting.
But what happens when musicians start using that euphoria in more interesting ways? The greatest quality of trance was always the scale of it – it was most popular in dance's superclub era, its DJs were also globetrotters, and its riffs were the sonic equivalent of laser lightshows: spectacular but weightless. The music worked to turn any space into an aircraft hangar. So producers using trance now are playing with that idea of scale: often just for its own sake but sometimes more intelligently.
Lady Gaga's album Born This Way, for example, is stuffed with trancey sounds. Gaga's songs are often about self-empowerment, which the euphoric enormity of trance seems an excellent fit for. But empowerment in Gagaland isn't a glib process with a happy ending – it's something messy and unfinishable. So the album is also filled up with any other kind of swagger she can think of: classic rock moves, rolling ballads, a sax break from the late Clarence Clemons. The trance riffs don't get the soundfield to themselves – they have to fight to cut through, work for their uplifting payoff.
The most exciting use of trance I've heard, though, is 22-year-old hip-hop producer AraabMUZIK, who samples the music extensively. In a hip-hop context, trance makes a surprising amount of sense – on the Diplomats' Salute, which AraabMUZIK produced, the echoey vastness of the keyboard riffs makes it feel as if the MCs are filling and dominating a colossal space. But it's his instrumental cuts that really catch the imagination. Last month he released Electronic Dream, an album of trance-derived beats and one of the year's freshest and most beguiling records.
Electronic Dream zeroes in on the vocals in pop trance, sampling tracks such as Jam & Spoon's Right in the Night and cutting in rushing, skittery beats. AraabMUZIK has a reputation for virtuosic real-time sampling and groove-making, in which he often burns out or breaks his equipment. But on Electronic Dream that energy is held back. Occasionally, as on Underground Stream, AraabMUZIK drops in a thrillingly sudden breakdown, but mostly the mood is a strange combination of intimacy and scale. It's as if the heaving club spaces implied by trance have been emptied out, their euphoria a happy memory not a bludgeoning presence.
Is Electronic Dream "cheesy"? Its source material might all have been called that – but AraabMUZIK finds surprising angles on trance without ever trying to subvert it. His affinity for the music is one of the things that makes his album such a pleasure – as well as a welcome reminder that even the most disrespected sound of the past can still be sparked into life.
Tom Ewing
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