Trance/Progressive House -- breaking news, slander, lies, etc...

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swears

preppy-kei
I don't get trance or progressive house at all. I personally think the Mitsubishis/glow stick/megaclub boom of the late nineties killed off any interest in people under 25 taking dance music seriously. Most of the people I met who were into that scene just annoyed me.
I used to date a girl that shared a student house with a load of Gatecrasher types, they would come back from shitty trance nights off their faces on trips and pills. They were all fucking terrified of "negative vibes". If the conversation turned towards anything on a downer, they'd skip out of the room humming to themselves. I couldn't fucking stand them, they listened to the worst commercial "hard dance" going and were the most boring, pedestrian squares you'd ever be likely to meet. Every other sentence ended with "On a mission." One of them told me to take Daft Punk's Da Funk off the stereo because it was "depressing".












*shudders*
 

D84

Well-known member
Yeah I got a bit of that as an undergrad in the early to mid `90s but my mates weren't quite as bad as that and their thing was breaks and britpop.... I loved them all the same - at least most of us liked Front 242 and they were nowhere near as bad as your acquaintances: Daft Punk too dark..? :slanted:
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
That's weird... E comedown= massive negative atmosphere... and hence the most INTERESTING BIT. Bang on something disturbing. Feel the unease. Ok serious question: What I never got about trance is how it is "uplifting"... Fair enough it has a fast (relatively) Bpm, but everything else about it seemed to be reflecting a melancholic, sepulchral, mournful atmosphere of decaying innocence and the corrosion of societal bonds... the minor key chord patterns (that in retrospect could often have been lifted straight from a Coldplay type indie song only played on massive arpeggiated synths instead of pianos and guitars) combining with white-voiced melisma-free vocal exhortations= desperate pathos... Such depressing music! It was the perfect soundtrack to the activities of 'Crasher Kids in a way, bloated kiddie-Euro-Requiems for the products of a society unable to engage with collective experience outside of the selfish consumption of designer narcotics with their Orwellian/Huxleyan solipsistic-happiness-as-compulsory fascism...

Prog was a bit boring ("When's something going to err happen") but it wasn't that bad. Its the fact that texturally it was quite conservative that made it kind of pointless in that the subsequent rise (and rise) of minimal (similarly "When's something going to err happen" what with the similarly 10 minute long records...) has shown that something can just sit there quite nicely if enough attention is focused on the constituent elements...
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Ok serious question: What I never got about trance is how it is "uplifting"... Fair enough it has a fast (relatively) Bpm, but everything else about it seemed to be reflecting a melancholic, sepulchral, mournful atmosphere of decaying innocence and the corrosion of societal bonds... the minor key chord patterns (that in retrospect could often have been lifted straight from a Coldplay type indie song only played on massive arpeggiated synths instead of pianos and guitars) combining with white-voiced melisma-free vocal exhortations= desperate pathos...
It's that classic euphoric / sense of impending comedown thing, though, isn't it? Whatever it is, it's kind of got to be in the chord progressions though (I am not a musicologist) cos afaict there's not a great deal else to define the mood...

What's interesting is that trance has a lot of the factors that hardcore continuum proponents say made those scenes so good (especially the focus on dancefloor reaction with coolness, mainstream success, highbrow respect and so on as at best nice side effects) but has had almost none of the musical development (again afaict - it threw up a clutch of genius pop tunes, but (anthem) trance only really seemed to develop in terms of a gradual refinement of methods rather than massive scenius-derived innovations. Is this just me lacking perspective (would a trance-head say that jungle never really developed from 1992 to 1996), or is there some fundamental difference going on?
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
It just sounds tragic, like "Decades" by Joy Division pumped up on 90s drugs and fatter synths, with the prophetic croon of Ian Curtis replaced by an anonymous Dutch session singer... dark music really, wrapped in plastic, like the feeling at the back of your skull after too many pills... "Euphoria" to me is contained in ascendant major chords... or the itch of a chicken scratch funk guitar, or Billy Mackenzie's octave straddling voice, or even the "trance" of old skool minimal classical, like Cage on a good day (Music for 18 Musicians springs to mind, but that's surely more a "techno" record, if we are to draw lazy comparison, than a "trance" one...?)
 

Tim F

Well-known member
I think the crucial difference between minimal and proper prog is that the former has a more open-ended sonic palette, so that even though tracks may be similarly long and drawn-out, there's usually greater variation b/w tracks sonically. Whereas prog relies mostly on the difference in actual tunes to establish that the track has changed - it can be hard to tell just by listening to the sound of the beats or the synths etc. Although they often try to spice it up with breakbeat tracks.

I had this idea that James Holden was the unexpected consequence of this ongoing narrowing in prog's sonic perspective. I think this often happens to styles of music: it gets forced through this really narrow sonic channel but somehow this generates some sort of creative friction, causing it to disperse really widely once it passes through.

(e.g. like how 2-step was sorta forced <i>through</i> "Pulse X" and then widened out again into grime proper)

With Holden, he's obv. prog, but it's like the <i>only</i> thing he takes from prog is that bleary post-"Xpander" surge (prog at its purest) such that he then has to add all sorts of stuff from outside of prog's borders.

The style of minimal that is really bare-bones reductionist (Hawtin etc.) is also kinda anti-anthemic, so the closer reference point at that point becomes old minimal techno (er, Hawtin etc.) rather than prog.
 

tate

Brown Sugar
or even the "trance" of old skool minimal classical, like Cage on a good day (Music for 18 Musicians springs to mind, but that's surely more a "techno" record, if we are to draw lazy comparison, than a "trance" one...?)
(reich, not cage - sorry to be annoying here) And yes I agree with you on this point, though to be honest a lot of steve reich's music can be quite elegiac and dark, e.g. different trains
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
and where did Reich get his ideas of repetition, modular progression, counter-point, etc?

African music.

I heard a Madagascar CD on Ocora which blew me fucking mind about 4 years ago - lost some respect for the minimalists (realised that they didn't come up with their thing from scratch).

surely the "trance" impulse originates from the oldest traditions - traditions which western music deviated from for a few thousand years.
 

swears

preppy-kei
What I never got about trance is how it is "uplifting"... Fair enough it has a fast (relatively) Bpm, but everything else about it seemed to be reflecting a melancholic, sepulchral, mournful atmosphere of decaying innocence and the corrosion of societal bonds... the minor key chord patterns (that in retrospect could often have been lifted straight from a Coldplay type indie song only played on massive arpeggiated synths instead of pianos and guitars) combining with white-voiced melisma-free vocal exhortations= desperate pathos... Such depressing music!

I don't think the music was intended to mournful or depressing in a gloom-rock Joy Division/Cure kind of way....more that it was striving towards something very serious and cinematic, but just coming off as mawkish cheeseball shite. The dancefloor equivalent of the soundtrack to a "stirring" moment in a chessy Channel 5 made-for-TV movie.
 

Rambler

Awanturnik
Much as I love gek-opel's take at the start of the thread, I think the spritual/uplifting thing through minor/modal keys comes about through connection with religious chant (look at Enigma (!), or everybody sampling Hildegard of Bingen, eg), as well as aspects of a vaguely Eastern-ish spiritualism (eg, ragas filtered through the Beatles, etc). Taking it out of a major key sucks all the tension out of your harmonies, makes the music less directional, allows headspace for various (pseudo-) spiritualism to creep in. The Coldplay comparison is a good one - this sort of minor key/modal whitewash can either be the medium for non-committal, half-arsed indie foppery, or trance-induced ecstasy.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
But anthem trance rarely uses eastern modes and scales, (from what I recall)--- and in reference to traditional minor key choral music, the sense of space given by the fact the arrangements most often consist only of voice puts it into a different kind of space to trance, ie- a contemplative one with overt religious implications, devotional, spiritual music... anthem trance chordally always reminded me of Indie at its most minor-key ballad-bathetic... but I fail to see how it can be connected to "ecstacy" or "euphoria", in their psychological and religious senses...
 
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hamarplazt

100% No Soul Guaranteed
It just sounds tragic, like "Decades" by Joy Division pumped up on 90s drugs and fatter synths, with the prophetic croon of Ian Curtis replaced by an anonymous Dutch session singer... dark music really, wrapped in plastic, like the feeling at the back of your skull after too many pills...
I once heard a trance version of Japan's "Ghosts".

The melancholic aspect of trance, at least to some degree, comes from the EBM roots. The german trance scene originally developed more or less out of EBM, many of the producers had been part of that eighties german scene (they actually called it "techno" back then), and then got turned over by rave culture, just like b-boys in the UK. And a lot of that darkness and Depeche Mode-ish melancholia went into early trance. That's also why there's often this weird, paradoxical sense of sad euphoria in a lot of this music - not exactly "uplifting", but still strangely glowing.

An interesting transitional record is an album called "Transforming Tune" by Time Modem, an excellent example of that particular kind of german rave that combined ebm, electro and belgian hardcore, and all the same was a kind of proto-trance. It's an album full of techno-futuristic triumphalism as well as an almost defeatist melancholia. The last track (with spoken vocals) is basically about the sadness and loneliness of hiding in your headphones, or in cyberspace, almost directly acknowledging your interpretation of trance from earlier in this thread. They know that the style they're inventing is totally escapist, but they're unable to take any other way.

If possible, try and hear Paul van Dyks "X-Mix-1 The MFS-TRIP" mix album, made in 1993 exclusively with tracks from MFS, one of the earliest Berlin trance labels; simultaneusly sweetly sad and full of extatic joy. Track titles like "Skysoaring", "Breath of Stars", "High on Hope", "Heaven's Tears" and "How much can you take?" perfectly capture the musics e-fuelled belief. And sure, it's cheap and cheesy and simple, but when have subtlety been necessary to make good rave music?
 
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Rambler

Awanturnik
Well, I don't mean exactly Eastern scales, but that Orientalised version of Eastern scales that Western music has drawn on since at least Debussy - flattened sevenths, lots of minor thirds, that sort of thing - that actually sitis close to old church modes (which Debussy also made use of). If you take Indonesian scales or Indian ragas and try to push them onto your Western equally-tempered keyboard, they're going to tend to be more minor sounding than major.

I doubt it's often a conscious thing using these scales (and the harmonic progressions that they tend towards), but it seems they stem from some, unidentifiable, similar psychological root that possibly goes back to a shared social memory in liturgical/spiritual chant. What I'm getting at really is that minorish keys and scales have a long history in the music of ecstatic ritual, so it doesn't surprise me to find them used all over the place in trance etc.
 

borderpolice

Well-known member
I always thought that what characterises Trance, and i have not really listened to this form of music since the mid 90s, is

  • that it introduced chords, i.e. harmonic development, into techno/house. I think it is not so much that Trance used minor chords or whatever modes, but rather that chords, chord progressions and chord-like melodic progressions (arpeggios) featured at all. This was something completely absent from chicago house, or detroit techno, or belgian hoovers.
  • Further, Trance rhythm is mostly syncopation- and surprise free, i.e. completely lacks a certain funkyness. To be sure, a lot of techno productions at the time also echewed conventional funk -- and that was a great thing too -- but compensated by subtle weirdness (eg stuff on chain reaction). trance was just mercilessly quanties on /16.
 
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qwerty south

no use for a witticism
"On the dance floor itself, a great seething mass of people move like maggots in a tin. With so large a number of people crammed into so small a space, it is astonishing that there is no social contact among them. Most of the pairs do not even look into each other’s eyes; because of the noise, verbal communication is out of the question. They dance solipsistically, each in a world of his or her own, literally entranced by the rhythm and the continual physical activity. They dance the way Scotsmen go to bars: to blot out the memory of their lives."

from 'Festivity, and Menace' by Theodore Dalrymple http://www.city-journal.org/html/6_1_oh_to_be.html

more right-wing nonsense by the greatest living writer in the English language:

http://www.city-journal.org/author_index.php?author=47
 

borderpolice

Well-known member
"On the dance floor itself, a great seething mass of people move like maggots in a tin.

one of funniest things is to go to a <B>big, packed</B> metal concert, stand at the back, slightly elevated, and wait for a headbanging moment, when the light shines way from the stage on the moshing masses. you will only see wildly morphing and mutating long shiny <B>hair</B>, like a gigantic, crawling, alien organism. the only thing like it, in terms of surface structure, is the grass in a couple of scenes in Tarkovsky's Stalker, when the three get lost in "the zone".
 

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
"On the dance floor itself, a great seething mass of people move like maggots in a tin. With so large a number of people crammed into so small a space, it is astonishing that there is no social contact among them. Most of the pairs do not even look into each other’s eyes; because of the noise, verbal communication is out of the question. They dance solipsistically, each in a world of his or her own, literally entranced by the rhythm and the continual physical activity. They dance the way Scotsmen go to bars: to blot out the memory of their lives."

from 'Festivity, and Menace' by Theodore Dalrymple http://www.city-journal.org/html/6_1_oh_to_be.html

more right-wing nonsense by the greatest living writer in the English language:

http://www.city-journal.org/author_index.php?author=47

This completely negates the idea of psychic interaction with regard to crowd, dance and drugs. The problem I've always had with the trance scene is that it is so psychically communal that any dispersion from the normative, any wayward character or behaviour, is condemned. I personally find that hard to deal with but I can see its benefits with regard control of large crowds. I've been in rooms with 10,000 people with no fights etc and that surely has to be congratulated. I think this is the main reason why people hate trance so much, is that its lowest common denominator appeal is successful, it blands everything out in order to appeal to a mass experience. Functionality as form.
 

qwerty south

no use for a witticism
i think dalrymple is talking about a standard uk high street nightclub, but it is still a valid picture of most clubs imo.
 
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