Oliver Lieb: Search & Destroy / Classic or Dud

i think ralf hildenbeutel or marco zaffarano or even dag are better bets

Commited admirable heresy for replacing the much-loved, analogue kick-drum THUMP with that unmistakable, mid-range, cup-shaped PUMP as the standard Euro trance beatformula; to be repeated globally, ad-nauseum, to this very hour. You know EXACTLY the sound I'm talking about.

I'm not so sure if Lieb alone can be credited with this - bit by bit, everybody started adding more compression to the kicks in the general shift from minimalism to maximalism. The old 'clean 909' kicks work well in the old sparse no-bass-and-thin-strings trance style but they would completely disappear in todays big wobbly "funkbass" basslines.

The only comparison to the whole exercise was with his Frankfurt contemporaries Dance 2 Trance, and their drug-addled fetish for peyote cactus via lip-service to American Indian culture. Yuk.

I blame them for all that silly shroom-munching, dreadlocked backpacker goa stuff (which I do love tho - it's this year's rediscovery for me actually and there's a lot of catching up to do).

What I don't get is that trance always gets dismissed as "music for e-heads", while of all the full-on dance music, techno, hardhouse, hardcore, minimal/tribal house, progressive house etc are all more repetitive and monotonous in nature and (for me) require(d) artificial stimuli to a much greater extent. The crossover success of post-'96 trance (or at least the adoption of the aesthetics in pop/eurodance) certainly indicates that for large groups of people this music works just as well without drugs.

Oh and I've been wondering: what ever became of Frank de Wulf? He seems to have disappeared from view completely after '96...

indeed, i have a group of friends who absolutely love this stuff and the scene seems _huge_. i just don't get it though. give me my villalobos any day.

this thread is making me reminisce about R&S from back in the day - the in order to dance comps and the trance/techno/dnb crossover that was happening. (or am i just imagining it?) wax doctor's remix of de wulf's drum in a grip to thread.

I haven't heard this Utah Saints remix you guys talk about. Sounds interesting. I hardly think my search list could be definitive when I've only been paying attention for some of the time, and I missed that one.

Siegbran is right to suggest that Oliver Lieb alone was not responsible for the 1993 shift to ornately-produced compression in trance bass-lines. I regard him as a key conspirator along with Sven Vath, DJ Dag, and Jam & Spoon.

I suppose it's also true that this music is no more about drugs than any other 'rave' sound, but I just remember Lieb's oppulent string-scapes and fuzzy, neo-classical melodies as really pushing the definition of the ecstacy experience to it's synthetic frontier - a real glossy, urban aesthetic.

By 1993, Lieb-style trance seemed to offer kids from the suburbs (like myself) the same space to lose their heads as earlier rave music, only with the soothing familiarity of warm melodies and clean production that nestled snuggly into our middle-class comfort zone. I'd agree it's this accessability that challenges any argument that the music was just for e-heads.

It's also no surprise that within no time, this Frankfurt formula (from Lieb, Vath, Jam & Spoon) found mass appeal via chart-bound Euro-cheese (Culture Beat) and the whole Gatecrasher juggernaut.

i think it was Bonzai records (and in particular jones and stephenson - first rebirth) that altered trance, moving towards wagnerian maximalism, there is a dystopian dead eyed hedonism about that record that seemed a shift from the more dreamy soft but fast frankfurt sound

But It's true that Bonzai was a parallel influence on Europop next to Frankfurt hardtrance, and for that matter, Dutch trancecore like Dyewitness.

It's those 3 strains that we have largely to 'thank' for the likes of Scooter being in our lives.

The Frankfurt sound circa 92-94 was the backlash againt rave: those unashamedly populist, badly produced cut/pastefests with cheesy samples and noisy sirens, hoovers etc: "James Brown Is Dead", "Poing", "Pullover". In the end, when rave was gone and the sharp black/white distinction/counterweight thing faded, things went full circle and trance became primal, unpretentiously euphoric dancefloor fodder itself, to fit the hole left by the disappearance of rave (which quickly turned into Dutch hardcore and faded after 96).

I don't think the new direction can completely be attributed to Bonzai (Frederico Santini, Axel Stephenson and Franky Jones - these three did nearly everything on that label in 92-96) but they certainly helped shape the new style, as it was a full-on rave/hardcore label at first and always produced for dancefloors only (like their old anthem Thunderball "Bonzai Channel One" - complete cartoon-rave), unlike those Frankfurters who always seemed to like making ambient a lot more than stuff with beats. Besides, "The First Rebirth" is not a blueprint for exhuberant euphoric breakdown-buildup-release trance - it's a way too evil for that. It is still one of the most requested anthems in hardcore/oldschool circles, while it doesn't fit in any but the hardest trance sets. "The First Rebirth" is more like a purification of the old rave sound: it replaces the cheesy pianos/hoovers/helium voices with a sinister, minor key melody. As such, it became more melodic, more serious and less "fun" - a step closer to modern trance but from a different starting point. I'm not so sure how Dye Witness and all the other proto-hardcore projects fit in here soundwise, although it is striking how many trance producers of today started with oldschool hardcore (Dye Witness = Piet Bervoets = Rank 1).

But there IS a direct successor to the Frankfurt sound: dreamy melodies pushed to the front, fairly distant strings, fast tempi, ascetic rhythm tracks, hardly any bass, ambient soundscapes - that old Frankfurt-paradigm found its successor in goa (Blue Planet Corporation!).

And re: the Utah Saints remix, it's a fairly simple, almost laidback techno loop over a steady kick, but that vocal! Nothing much to do with trance, really.

I'm curious. Could you please join the dots for me between the KLF and Scooter? And I'm not quite sold on the notion that the Frankfurters held ambient in higher esteem than dancefloor music. Yes, it's there but on final count, a far greater slab of their collective catalogue was produced with dancefloors in mind. Need more information.

Frankfurt - Goa? Maybe...
The early 90s Goa parties are the real spanner in the works for any discussion of trance bound by Anglo-European localities. That's where every Continental sound seemed to converge and mutate several times over during the northern summer before being brought home for absorbtion. But Goa trance is no DIRECT descendant of the Frankfurt sound: the UK's Simon Posford, for one, crystalised that formula as early as 1992. Need more info on Blue Planet though.

Your distinction between cut'n'paste rave cheese and the emerging Farnkfurt sound makes perfect sense. And there are some interesting parallels between Germany and Australia about these two genres vis a vis the idea of populism.

Between 91 & 93, that earlier, sampladelic headbanger rave with its vamps and sirens struck a chord with us folks in Adelaide, South Australia, as a mentalist release from our newly-collapsed state economy. Over the border in Melbourne, Victoria, from 93 to 96, Oliver Lieb and Sven Vath were received like popstars, pulling crowds upward of 4000 while still maintaining this veneer of sounding 'intelligent'. This in a state led by a conservative premier, whose tacit approval for the proliferation of the rave industry, like any other, was part of a policy that generated Victoria huge economic prosperity.

My point is, that far away from the other side of the world where these sounds were being created, the difference between the cultural appeal of clang-banging, bells & whistles rave and Frankfurt's harmonious hardtrance was fairly reliably segmented along economic/class lines. This feeds back into my earlier point about the middle-class comfort zone afforded by Oliver Lieb, Sven Vath et al, but I ask you if a similar situation played itself out in your part of the world at that time, assuming from your discourse that you've been living in Europe.

Goa and Frankfurt trance were played alongside in sets up to '96 (Paul Oakenfold made his name with this combination, like many other UK DJ's). Blue Planet Corporation is Gabriel Masurel, a French producer who produced "Overbloody Flood", a widely revered 1993 Frankfurt-style fast trancer, and who went on to release full-on goa on Flying Rhino - I'd cite that as one of the more concrete links. But with the Frankfurt-Goa connection I mean the sound and general feel of the music (fast, minimal beats & bass, busy melodies), I'm not saying that the Frankfurt producers evolved into goa, or had much contact with those (mostly UK & Israeli) producers.

The KLF-Scooter link isn't that hard to see, is it? Shamelessly pop, completely over-the-top, sirens, bells, whistles, silly samples, ludicrous nonsensical MC'ing - apart from the fact that Scooter nicked loads of KLF soundbytes (their "Mu Mu" chant, "Respect To The Man In The Ice Cream Van").

I'll agree that Scooter takes his cues from the KLF in terms of unabashed showmanship and sampling. And although that amounts to a pretty big chunk of both their whole products, there are some stark differences in terms of the texture and shape of their melodies and rhythmns.

And this brings me to back to another subject raised earlier...

That compressed, digital, almost bass-less kickdrum whose origins I attribute to the Frankfurt crew -- WHY did that happen?? WHY Europe?? While other parts of the world continued to explore and expand technology's limits with bass, it seemed that the majority of Europe nodded in consensus to head down the path of mid-range and treble.

I wouldn't have started this thread if I didn't love European trance and techno, but I so much want to understand the motives behind this major fork in the road circa '92/'93. You could argue that the Europeans have *always* demonstrated a penchant for melody-driven music since the birth of Baroque, but then I'd ask how the anomaly of Belgian New Beat/Bleeps and bass-driven German techno fit into the picture.

Feed me...

As for Ultra Sonic - they were happening simultaneous to Scooter. And they were just as much, if not more a part of Dutch hardcore. Hence tours from Dye Witness, Nightraver, Reyes, Paul Elstak and the rest of the Rotterdam hoard to Scotland while Scott Brown was getting Evolution records going. It's a parallel connection. The whole KLF circus was happening years before and Scooter would be better traced back to the same influence rather than Ultra Sonic, who were doing much the same thing at the same time.

Also, my wording was bad, I didn't meant that you should bring old trance back wholesale, but it really seems like no one's interested even in the ideas anymore. Air Liquide and Sven Väth (and many more) have gone electro, Cosmic Baby and Hardsequencer (and many, many more) have disappeared(?), Paul van Dyk does the pop stuff nowadays... It seems like the old trance disappeared without leaving a trace; the only one I can think of who still does that sort of stuff is Banco de Gaia. I guess you could say IDM took some clues from the old trance, but it certainly lacks the honestness and energy of the former.

Because like I said, that was a shout-out to a CONTEMPORARY artist. There's no great feat in Scooter buying an Ultra Sonic record or even turning on his radio and 'wording-up' with similar pop-core to his own noisy crap.

And okay, so your heros of yesteryear have been put to pasture, but what WERE their ideas as you saw it? It's pretty easy to take a swipe at present-day Europop, but what do YOU want to see happen?

It just makes me think how blindly pompous the whole idea of the artist-led revival is. Last year FC Kahuna alotted themselves the pilot's seat of the supposed 'Acid House' revival, but who gave a fuck? They sooner blended into the wallpaper of every other dance act who declared themself the very Second Coming of the 1988 dance Epiphany; tapping more into the thirty-something's appetite for nostalgia than being any kind of genre-busting bombshell.

This year The Black Keys are having their crack at the old time machine. Just listen as they romantically ignore the last 37 years of music history and carry us back to 1966 with their heart-tugging pelvic grit, contrived 'authentic' backyard production and Credence/Hendrix vocal pastiche.

These are just the latest in a continuous line of wannabe revivalists who truly believe that period revivals are actually the handiwork of one or two 'visionary' artists, like themselves. Revivals have NEVER been the product of someone identity's self-absorbed quest to re-kindle their youth, they're always the convergence of a whole bunch of socio-economic factors. And it's worth noting that these factors almost always include props from the fashion/leisure/culture industry, which really undermines ANY whimsy for revival of any sound/style/period worth cherishing.

Don't you think?

DESTROY:
Anything and everything he's done since 1996.

I recently picked up a copy of L.S.G.'s Into Deep from 1999, and I think it's gorgeous! Lovely astral synth pads, sun-soaked Ibizan vibes, breathy Spanish vocals, witty drum programming... I can see why back in the day "serious" electronic music heads would have dismissed it as a sell-out (even Bryan Adams was doing music in this style back then!), but 15 years later, maybe in can be reassessed as a classic? I'd say Lieb used the best parts of the downtempo and pop trance trends of the era here, without succumbing to their worst excesses. IMO Into Deep should be as rated as high as his early 90s cosmic trance/ambient records.

Are there any other post-1996 Lieb records in this vein?

The 2002 "Unreleased Album" he put up for download recently is excellent. Also, the "Singles Reworked" ambient album is very good.

Funny to see all the downtempo trance hatred ten years ago, now that under the much hipper "balearic" tag the exact same stuff is now the flavour du jour.

Yeah perfect example is the love for the Terje remix of Balearic Incarnation (which is excellent)