The acceptable face(s) of trance?

i've always been a huge fan of Way Out West, Sasha and Speedy J but i suppose they're progressive house than trance (also applies to anthems such as Jaydee's 'Plastic Dreams' and Energy 52's 'Cafe Del Mar')- i just class it all as 'epic dance' ;) this way you avoid arguments about whether Marmion's 'Schoneberg' is trance or hardhouse or euro or whatever...by the late 90s there was a breed of the music that was a lot less heavy than the Dutch and German stuff (of which Ferry Corsten has become the main man over the years) that owed more to classic anthems such as Jam & Spoon's 'Stella', AGe Of Love's Age Of Love' and BBE's 'Seven Days IN One Week' - this eventually spawned mainstream pop variants such as Sash, ATB, Ian Van Dahl, Darude, PPK and Lasgo - all of which i detest because i feel they water and cheapen the formula down too much in order to secure hits, but thats the way it goes with all genres of course

I think the underlying music structure of trance makes it shit no matter how well engineered the music is. From different technical music lists that have had trance producers I have picked up a few ideas.
One thing to bear in mind with trance is that there is a community similar to the underground purist community that techno has. When you are fully immersed in this, you do not have the perspective to judge how obscure your tastes actually are. I suppose there is "good" trance out there. I doubt that it would be my cup of tea and therefore have not made a great deal of effort to search for those records.
Musical complexity is one of the attributes that separate producers. I mean complexity in the compositional sense, iow, producer A's songs have more parts, the writing is more dense, and utilizes more weird theory/musical idioms so it is better than Producers B's records. The English Prog musical ideal that we sneer at is very much alive in that scene. From what I have gathered, they consider their music to be better because a producer needs to have a greater understanding of the technical end of writing music in order to do it well.
Trance is also more synth based, rather than being more sample-manipulation oriented. Producers who can program weirder patches, and incorporate more timbres into their records are better. Also, engineering and mastering play into this a great deal as well (although I think that is true of just about any genre of recorded music)

There are also the usual, less musical differences, such as what labels you are on and who is playing your records. As always, who you know is as important as what you know in the music business. Star Power/Charisma plays a role too. All the bologna that applies to the rest of music business exists in trance.

Union Jack, Transa, Binary Finary, Metal Master, X-Cabs, Qattara, Elevator, Art of Trance and Commander Tom.

Mike I get the impression from what you said after this that a lot of trance producers are dickheads, but I don't think you actually backed up your opening statement here adequately. I'm no staunch trance defender, but it's certainly not the only dance genre to have producers with weird and silly ideas.

The biggest problem with trance (has always been) is the soundalike tracks - loads of producers, Rank 1, ATB (in his 9pm period at least), Dumonde, DJ's @ Work, Cosmic Gate, etc seem to use the same synth patches for EVERY track they make, even if those tracks are very well produced. Trance also has the handicap that it doesn't work very well outside its natural habitat, ie clubs with good sound systems & high volumes. The radio edits always eliminate the, well, trance inducing repetitiveness, and hence have to rely on whatever cheesy hookline/vocals that get thrown in for the crossover appeal. Case in point: Jurgen Vries "The Theme". Without the massive bassline you feel in clubs, this track is reduced to a cheesy novelty tune on the radio.

On the other hand, it does seem a bit harsh to pick on trance because of the pop excesses and the mediocrity of most material. Most charthits out of the UKG, R&B, Eurodance, Techno, Rave, Diva house, scenes etc are/were just as predictable and formulaic.

Anyway, I might as well list a few tracks that really worked for me this year:

Matanka - Lost In A Dream (Push Transcendental Remix)
2 Players - Signet
DJ Astrid - Starfever
Exposure - Magic Impuls
Way Out West - Mindcircus (Gabriel & Dresden Mix)
Solid Sessions - Janeiro (Armin Van Buuren Remix)
DJ Kim - Jetlag (Alpha Zone Remix) (
Moon Project - Moments Are Forever
Plastic Boy - Silver Bath
lex Barlett - Amnesia (Flutlicht vs Shokk Mix) (although, cheesy vocals alert)

And I really, really enjoyed Tiesto's mix cd "In Search Of Sunrise 3", after the mediocre first and second ones. This is rather dreamy earcandy, rather than uplifting high energy tracks.

i just like sophisticated epic dance music - sometimes it makes more sense to listen to it rather than actually dance, but it can still be fun and it doesnt sound either pretentious or just instantly make you think of high-energy formation dancing on top of the pops and beery louts throwing woefully mistimed shapes

The earlier Alice Deejay tracks were done by Pronti & Kalmani, who are still producing tracks from hardstyle (DJ Isaac) to dreamy 'summer' trance and DJing, the later ones by Wessel Van Diepen, who has a radio show on Dutch national radio. He's also are behind the (aaarrgggh!!!!) Vengaboys. Sven Maes & Johan Gielen also did one or two Alice DJ tracks, I believe. They're the ones behind the Delerium "Silence" remix that became the radio/video edit, and had loads of succesful 12"s this year: "We Know What You Did", "Sensation Theme", "Twisted" and a remix of Ultra "Free".

Darude was a guy from the Finnish MP3-scene who indeed hasn't released anything since the album came out two years ago.

Sash is Sascha Lappessen and he apparently has an upcoming single with Boy George on vocals. Probably eurodance rather than trance though, maybe the remixes are interesting.

Who is/are the acceptable face(s) of trance?
If I have to name one, Dirk Dierickx, the guy behind M.I.K.E., Plastic Boy, Push, Exposure, Moon Project, Mass Effect, Liquid Overdose, Perfect State, Yves De Ruyter, etc on Bonzai Records.

What, in a musical sense, makes he/she/them better than the unacceptable faces?

• No vocals! (apart from a few snippets in some of his remixes)
  
• Really cool oldschool TR808 kicks and little else in the drum track, very "pulsating" retro/electro in that respect.
  
• Loads of reverb and a huge "big room" sound on the synths
  
• Very repetitive and somewhat deep and "dark", minor key melodies
  
• The buildup of his tracks, unlike virtually all other trance tracks, the "peak moment" of his tracks is always near the end of the track - after six minutes of continuous building and teasing, rather than cycling through two or three predictable tension/release cycles.
  

cool answers Siegbran, ta

main hook will typically consist of arpeggiated hard synth notes/chords triggered in an ascending sequence to indicate the sense of building euphoria and 'rushing'...synthesized choiral 'voices' are also a trademark, as are general ethereal sounds and things like bells and sirens

pulsating but ultra-compressed bassdrums and one to three not bassline

use of sound effects synonomous or similar with science fiction and advanced modes of transport common (e.g. the 'woooooooosh' of a jet plane, the monotonous thud and clank of a locomotive)

a vocal hook of some kind, either sampled or sang...usually based around themes of love or intoxication and appreciation of the music and the experience you're having

160 bpm for the first wave stuff (1993-94), 130-140 for the recent material (roughly 1998-now).

a vocal hook of some kind, either sampled or sang...

Not really necessary though. I'd say 50/50 between vocal and instrumental tracks. Obviously tracks with vocals have more crossover appeal, so lots of instrumental tracks get a vocal remix for the radio edits.

So it's definately at the hard/fast end of the spectrum then.

Depends. The German/Swiss hardtrance variant is, the more summer-y Ibiza-inspired style is rather laid back and lush "ear candy" type of stuff.

Do any pop hits employ trance production style?

Madonna "What It Feels Like For A Girl" is the most mainstream release I can think of. The video/single mix was done by Above & Beyond.

oh and Sven Vath would be acceptable...were it not for that 'Doop' mimicking 'Fusion' track he did...i quite liked 'The Harlequin, The Ballet Dancer And The Robot' tho

Has he made any trance since the 1993/4 Eye-Q years? It's all been techno since, as far as I've heard the 12"s...

trance is that it seems to be music engineered solely for people on drugs

That's indeed more of a criticism towards the more minimal and harder stuff (techno, hardstyle, hardcore, etc), isn't it?

Well that's because a) he's abandoned trance; b) he runs "Cocoon", a pretty good tech-house label; and c) Mayer once remixed him.

When I say I don't like trance because of the underlying structure, I mean that I do not like it's reliance on melody over percussion and groove. It still relies on the old 8/4/2-bar loop formula that most dance music relies on, but it doesn’t have the funk of good techno.

There are certain things you have to do in order to make a trance track, sure there are variations, but a recognizable trance track sounds that way for a reason. I don't like the lack of funky percussion, I don't like the locked 8th note basslines, and I don't like 40 percolating monosynths playing variations of the Phrygian mode with an arpeggiator. I do not like the overly clean production and the ham-fisted stabs at euphoria the genre tries to foist on its' listeners.

I don't think trance producers are dicks; in fact, most of the ones that I have dealt with have been nice people. It is just that they are nice people with really bad taste in music. I think the musical goals they aspire towards are ridiculous, but I do not hate them for it.

In my first post, that comment was only my opinion about trance, I was not trying to objectively prove it one way or the other. The paragraph breaks were messed up, so it seemed like I intended that to be the main idea of the post. I was actually trying to mention the musical ideas that they said made their music better than other forms of dance music. If I were not such a sloppy writer my post would have read a bit more like this:

Here is what separates producers in the trance world:

A: Musical complexity is one of the attributes that separate producers. I mean complexity in the compositional sense, iow, producer A's songs have more parts, the writing is more dense, and utilizes more weird theory/musical idioms so it is better than Producers B's records. The English Prog musical ideal that we sneer at is very much alive in that scene. From what I have gathered, they consider their music to be better because a producer needs to have a greater understanding of the technical end of writing music in order to do it well.

B:Trance is also more synth based, rather than being more sample-manipulation oriented. Producers who can program weirder patches, and incorporate more timbres into their records are better. Also, engineering and mastering play into this a great deal as well (although I think that is true of just about any genre of recorded music)

Isn't that true for many other genres too? I mean, look at the whole concept of "breakbeat science" in Drum 'n Bass...come to think of it, that might be a useful comparison: just like trance, D&B suffers from one-dimensional sounds, lack of 'funk' and many soundalike tracks. Is Tiesto the trance equivalent of LTJ Bukem?

Presumably prog house solves a lot of the problems you have with trance - what do you think of it?

" I mean, look at the whole concept of "breakbeat science" in Drum 'n Bass...come to think of it, that might be a useful comparison: just like trance, D&B suffers from one-dimensional sounds, lack of 'funk' and many soundalike tracks."

Oddly, the term "funk" is in common parlance in both the D&B *and* trance scene - different scene have wildly diverging ideas of what it actually means. Presumably though any dance genre becomes like this when it has a standard it begins to ape semi-permanently (even detroit techno to a large extent). Hence the attraction of staying abreast of dance trends while they're "fresh" and can potentially go in any direction.

"Well Mike I pretty much agree with much of that, although I don't think most of the more functional trance producers are *that* concerned about the complexity of their music (a lot of it now just seems like "E Music" to me) - especially along the line where trance becomes hard house, nu-nrg etc. Also I'd say that there are positives to trance, although they're things I appreciate quite infrequently."

Granted, this is true (as far as mainstream trance goes.) What I was referring to was "good" trance for real trance "Heads". Supposedly, the really good trance is super complex and insanely produced. I have never heard the stuff; it is just how it has been described to me.

Tim also sez:

"Presumably prog house solves a lot of the problems you have with trance - what do you think of it?"

Possibly, although I have no idea what progressive house is. Which producers are "progressive"? Perlon is prog-house as far as I am concerned. ;)

In common terms, Jakatta etc. I mean in terms of replacing trance's locked basslines with more of a dub feel, emphasising texture over melody etc. Unfortunately I don't think much prog house necessarily sounds beter than trance, and a lot of it is worse - I was trying to trap you you see ha ha.

"Supposedly, the really good trance is super complex and insanely produced. I have never heard the stuff; it is just how it has been described to me."

This sounds like psy-trance to me, only psy-trance doesn't sound like your earlier descriptions. I like Simon Reynolds' comparison of psy-trance to Mandelbrot sets, if that helps.

the mid 90s stuff seemed to be a sub-genre of techno (the harthouse, bonzai, important etc etc type stuff), but gradually shifting away, now it seems to be a completely separate genre (even allowing for the huge compartmentalism within dance music)

there has been a huge shift in what it seems to mean too. i mean, the idea of digweed as a trance dj in 94 would have been very strange (even dave angel was sort of considered a trance dj at one point - besides more obvious people like dag, hildenbeutel, vath, zaffarano, bondzio etc etc)

Five years on and is there an acceptable face still?

http://www.beatfactor.net/pics/djs/booka_shade_large.jpg

this thread sorta amazing, couldn't happen today

Isn't the point of trance to put you in a trance so you don't see any faces but if you do happen to catch a glimpse of a face and look at it study its curves and say hello etc etc you don't remember any of it when you wake up thus not knowing the answer to this very old paradox?

I don't think anyone would be willing to put any effort into fighting about it in 2007.

It is just a shame that trance and drug rave killed electronic dance music in the US.

it's not that, there's just a certain, ah, "line of argument" that didn't happen on this thread that just seems to creep into these threads post-2003 ...

Nop-one's metnioned Pulse yet. So I will. A highly acceptable face of trance.

here are the acceptable faces of trance I am familiar with:
http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/swiss_us_notes.jpg
trance records used to finance the buying & selling of other, better records at the shop I worked for.

Has trance become acceptable via mnml?

If so, has any of it actually trickled down market to cities that are not NYC/Detroit/Chicago/LA/San Fran?

The schumcks around here are still trying to get their heads around the hot new sounds of disco-punk and electrohouse.

wherd to the future sound of 2004... must get out of this state, must get out...

Wait, are you in Texas still?

Has trance become acceptable via mnml?

from all reports in europe it's the other way around!!

What "line of arguement" are you getting at Vahid? I am not trying to be difficult, I just don't follow a lot of the bobbins threads and I am not sure what you mean.

Yes, Ned, I am still cooling my heals in Austin. I am waiting for the GF to finish her capstone for grad school and then we are getting out of dodge.

I keep meaning to visit Austin -- maybe I'll catch ya before you go.

Anyway I revived this due to seeing VNV Nation last night, who obviously love themselves their trance but aren't solely that.

Ha Ha! I've lived in Austin since 2000. Although I loved the overall abundance of music here, my biggest disappointment has been the realtive paucity of the rave/electronic scene and prominence of trance here. I miss all the great techno DJs that I used to catch up in Boston and NYC.

Hopefully that won't scare you away Ned. Austin is a great place despite the lack of good DJs.

I've said it before, but I think trance was quite acceptable until the late nineties, before psych trance and pop trance turned it uncool. Check out some early nineties trance comps (Trance Europe Express, Trancemaster, Trancesylvania, etc.), the stuff on them is often way different from what is labeled "trance" these days.

yeah what "line of argument" Vahid? you have your finger on the button, drop the bomb!

4)"vernon's wonderland" vernon (eye-q)
5)"superstring" cygnus x. (eye-q)

-- michael wells (michael w.), Thursday,

scousers talking sense

Evian Christ releasing his first actual album, 12 years in

https://evianchrist.bandcamp.com/album/revanchist

(was torn between bumping this thread vs intelligent trance music)