Don't like trance? You don't know what you're missing... (Trance in general)

Member Name: thequy

Product:	Trance in general
Date:	08/05/01 (116 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nothing better to dance, drive, or fall asleep to, Brings together a lot of diverse friends at the w/e

Disadvantages: Accounts for a ridiculously large amount of my £

Trance has exploded in popularity over the last few years and is today the undisputed face of dance music and club culture. What was a niche genre back when dance music as a whole was still finding its feet has become a catch-all phrase covering a massive spectrum of styles and quality.

I'll not go into how good trance is because it's already been dealt with and can be taken as read. This opinion is an attempt to describe what, to me, is the single most important differentiator within the genre. For want of better terms, let's call the opposite ends Quality and Cheese - no disrespect intended to the fromage industry.

The main motivator in writing this (other than the handy points it may earn) is that Cheese has overtaken Quality in prominence and has come to represent Trance, period, to the uninitiated masses. This is not fair to Quality trance nor to the masses. Many people who think that they don't like trance have only ever been exposed to Cheese and this opinion is expressly although not exclusively for those people. In my unbiased (is a little white lie allowed by the rules?) opinion, you are missing out on a fantastic phenomenon that has literally changed the lives of many, many people (I rarely use figures because it's much harder to get corrected on an adjective). And that's just Trance the Music. More on the joys of Trance and Clubbing some other time.

Upon close inspection few people would claim that ATB and Darude (Cheese) were the same breed of artist as Brian Transeau and Breeder (Quality). Someone who would gladly pay upwards of £20 to catch Sasha (pure Quality) for the last hour would probably walk out of a free night that Alice Deejay (pure Camembert) was headlining. What separates them? What defines them?

It's a tricky one because trance is music is art, and one of the defining characteristics of art is that it doesn't readily lend itself to neat little classification
s. Yet fans of trance (including the Cheese lovers) are usually unanimous on whether something is Cheesy or not so there must be some consistent feature(s) that set(s) the Quality aside from the rest. After much brain bashing and soul searching I whittled it down to 4 characteristics. The first one is very much subjective i.e. only you can decide. The other three are also subjective but to a lesser degree, and are somewhat intertwined. It's worth repeating now even in the same paragraph: music is an art, not a science. There are no precise boundaries and there will always be exceptions to the rules. Indeed the following are more guidelines than rules for picking out the wheat from the chaff (eh?!), the Quality from the Cheese:

1) The timelessness of the music,
2) The prominence of the main melody,
3) The subtlety of the music,
4) The number of layers in the music and the attention/detail that has gone into each layer.

TIMELESSNESS
Cheese tends to jump on the latest bandwagon and like all trends, it's not long before the track that was rocking the Top 10 and the school bus is as dated as 501 jeans and permed mullets. Quality trance, whilst not totally immune to trends, will still evoke that "Mmm, that's a good tune" feeling when you dig it out years from now and if you happen to be Djing, it won't invite looks of scorn and the odd garden vegetable aimed at your head.

MAIN MELODY
Cheese will usually be built upon 1 main melody that came to its composer when s/he was on the bog. Being a flash of inspiration, it will indeed be very catchy but whereas Quality will build upon this, whether with more inspiration or pure perspiration until there is a complete track of Quality, the Cheese-meister will think that's their job done, add some drums, bass and chords from the pre-programmed accompaniments and then go to bed the same day. ATB says that '9pm - Til I Come' came to him in
a flash and was finished in a couple of hours. Probably stopped for a coffee break too.

With Quality trance, there will usually be more than one lead melody, with each one taking on a different sound. As a result each one isn't repeated twenty times as if the artist couldn't think of anything else.

SUBTLETY
I think it was John Digweed or Sasha that said (oh dear, I'm taking on a very trainspotterish persona aren't I?) he didn't like tunes that revealed themselves in the first 8 bars. That's taking it too far maybe because even Cheese may have 32 bars of build-up before the main melody kicks in. However, you can take it for granted that the Kicking In will not be subtle, nor will it happen just once or even twice.

LAYERS
By layer, I mean a discrete part or voice within the music. The bassline is a layer, the hi-hats another, the keyboards playing arpeggios yet another. Cheese will restrict itself to a minimal number of layers - the bare essentials to qualify it as a trance track with maybe one or two extras. This ties in to the earlier point about the time and effort that goes into producing the track. You see, the more layers there are, the more sophisticated they have to be because they all have to fit together otherwise you're left with a wall of noise unappealing to all but the terminally deaf or insane.

Two Quality examples are 'Flaming June by BT and 'Twilo Thunder' by Breeder. Both build and build, with swirling melodies and countermelodies, underwritten by a driving rhythm, proving incidentally that it doesn?t have to be simple to be catchy. Everything fits together into one kaleidoscope of sound. The first few times you listen to them as well as on the odd subsequent occasion you will hear something new each time - perhaps a subtle little synth part that fits into the gap between the bass and the kickdrum, perhaps a voice effect that happens only ONCE in the entire
track.


Now, those of you that watch Top of the Pops will be wagging your finger at the monitor by now, "Aah, but who has been in the Top 10 more? Who the h*** is Breeder? Even my little sister knows who Alice Deejay is." And if I were there, I would gloomily concede that Cheese is indeed what sells to the masses. Which leads to a very important point - Cheese does not necessarily mean rubbish. Music is all about opinion after all.

Cheese is more prominent and enjoys greater commercial success because it is catchy and more often than not, you can easily sing or hum to it. I actually quite liked Alice Deejay's 'Do You Think You're Better On Your Own'. As the learned Ali G said, "I'll probably be killed in the ghetto tomorrow for saying that." Although I generally despise Cheese, this does not preclude me from appreciating a good melody. Similarly, admitting I like SOME Cheese does not contradict the theme of this opinion, which is not to slate it but to inform/remind you that there is also Quality out there. Cheese is the shallow end of trance which makes it more polarising by nature. Quality is just what the name implies. If you take the time and effort to sample it, you are more than likely to find something you like.

To sum up, if you like Cheese, fine. If you hate it but haven't yet tried Quality, please don't write off all trance. Give the Quality stuff a try. Many of you will be pleasantly surprised.

PS. By all the four criteria, I rate Orbital as THE masters of building musical tapestries, but their artistic direction has taken them more into the home listening arena rather than blockbusting tunes that will rock the dancefloor at midnight. I do appreciate their tunes in the car but in a club, well... If you're taking my recommendations seriously at all, go for their early albums (Brown and Green). By the time you get to the Grey album it's all go
ne a bit too avant-garde for my tastes. Too Quality even.

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