The New Trance

A few years ago, I played records at a small private party in Mexico City; the occasion was the Mexican tour of Montreal's MUTEK festival. After my set — nothing grandiose, just some of the records I was feeling at the moment, most of them German and most of them, to my ears, resolutely "minimal" — Alain Mongeau, the festival director and a longtime friend, approached me. What he said made my stomach churn: "That was pretty trancey."

Trancey? Could there be a more devastating accusation? In elite electronic-music circles, trance has long been a dirty word. Long considered electronic music's most compromised and least credible genre, trance is seen at best as a laughingstock, at worst an abomination. Either way, it wasn't something I wanted attached to my name, despite Mongeau's attempts to soften the blow. "I'm not saying it was bad," he continued. "Just trancey."

Looking back, however, he was probably right. What's more, these days, I'm playing trancier than ever — and so are a lot of techno's hippest names, all of them underground DJs that wouldn't normally be classed in with the Tiëstos, Paul van Dyks and Paul Oakenfolds of the world. In recent years, the hallmarks of trance music have come creeping back into virtually every corner of house and techno. And this isn't a bad thing.

Trance wasn't always a pejorative term; in early '90s Frankfurt, trance — fast, chemical, hypnotic and psychedelic — was the purview of labels like Harthouse and acts like Alter Ego. It was only later in the decade, as artists like Paul van Dyk and Christopher Lawrence turned the genre into an over-the-top succession of emotive breakdowns and rushing buildups, garish melodies and programmatic snare rolls, that trance became as what it's considered today: music for the masses, a lowest common denominator of clichéd motifs and by-the-numbers productions designed to stir stadium-sized crowds.

The funny thing is that as electronic genres continue to blur, it gets harder and harder to say what trance is. I'm reminded of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's 1964 proclamation as to what constituted pornography: "I know it when I see it." Regardless, there are specific hallmarks of tranciness. The first is almost certainly its melodic urge — those grand, stirring phrases that lead to hands-in-the-air high points that feel like the sky has broken apart. At their worst — for instance, with William Orbit and Tiësto's twin reworkings of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" — the results are treacly and overbearing. But you can't throw a rock without hitting a winning anthem in the new trance landscape. Gregor Tresher's " Full Range Madness" is a prime example, glistening with a heavenly high-end and a fat, buzzing sawtooth counterpoint. That the four-bar chord change is predictable as a ticking clock doesn't detract; it's the way that he manages to make the same progression build and build, with the illusion of bending time itself, that makes the track stand out.

Tresher's track is included on Cocoon Compilation F, the 2006 installment gathering some of the biggest hits played over the summer at Sven Väth's Cocoon clubs in Frankfurt and Ibiza. Väth is an old trance mainstay himself, and while his tastes have gone minimal in recent years, Cocoon remains central to the sound's new direction. On the same album, check Guy Gerber & Shlomi Aber's "Sea of Sand," with its goosebump-inducing arpeggios, and the uncredited "Sub-Atomic," which is actually a subtle re-edit of Mathew Jonson's snake-charming "Return of the Zombie Bikers." And don't miss Andreas Kauffelt's counterpoint-rich "Every Morning," which features pipe-organ synths straight out of the Border Community label's playbook. All of them are glorious affirmations of the power of a good, glistening hook.

London-based Border Community is another cornerstone of trance's new acceptability, which might not be surprising: its founder, James Holden, got his start as a young protégé of progressive house (aka trance) superstars Sasha and Digweed before breaking away to pursue a more idiosyncratic, experimental sound. Also licensed by Cocoon, his track "The Wheel" is a throbbing monster reminiscent of Alter Ego's early creations under the Acid Jesus moniker; squealing 303 basslines and gurgling treble melodies battle it out while martial snares prove that pulse-quickening crescendos, a staple of the form, needn't be formulaic. Holden & Thompson's "Come to Me (Last Version)" is another stunner that takes trance's hallowed (and often, hollow) formula and turns it inside out. Where so much of the genre is a bucket brigade of moments of tension and release, Holden's contribution is to toss aside the release and focus only on the tension, building up his white-noise-suffused epics into a never-ending arc of unrequited desire. (The EP is also a good place to mark Holden's transition out of a more traditional sound: the "Club Mix" of the same cut features hackneyed, breathy vocals representative of the genre's worst self-indulgences.)

Trance's incursion into the deepest recesses of German minimalism is evident in Border Community signee Nathan Fake's appearances on Cologne's Traum label. Once known for its relative restraint, Traum — which, trancily enough, means "dream" — showed an uncharacteristically uninhibited side of itself when it released Fake's "Dinamo," a bright blast of sunny melodies that skips from note to note as though playing hopscotch. "Dinamo" is currently unavailable, but other Nathan Fake tracks suffice to demonstrate the way he has folded minimalism's detail-intensive sound design into trance's grand gestures: the acidic "Undoing the Laces," the placid "Coheed" and particularly Michael Mayer's remix of the latter, which extends glassy synths out toward the horizon and beyond.

Fake isn't the only old-school trancer to sign to Traum; he's joined by Extrawelt and Minilogue, both of whom spent much of the decade recording straightforward trance of the "psychedelic" variety, so named for its tweaky, starry-eyed effects and insects-under-the-skin timbres. Ironically, on a split EP pitting Extrawelt against its better-known psy-trance alias Midimiliz, it's the Extrawelt track, "Weich8," that more closely recalls the headlong rush of classic trance, its minor-key chords and whooshing percussion suggesting a sense of airlock gothic; Midimiliz' "Crsh" flexes the supple, swinging rhythms, a hallmark of Afro-American house and techno, that are generally absent from Eurocentric styles of trance.

Minilogue have a decidedly old-school trance sensibility: just listen to the heartstring-tugging interplay between strings and bass on "Certain Things Around You (Part 1)," the moody, delay-rich counterpoints of "The Leopard," and the frost-crusted high end of "Out of the Curious." But listen closely to the melody line of "Certain Things Around You (Part 2)": yep, that's a Radiohead sample. The ease with which it slots into trance's rolling, no-sleep-til-heaven horizontalism suggests something else about the current state of the genre. Just as trance has often been dependent upon pop music for its hooks and its emotional charge — Paul Oakenfold turned U2's "Beautiful Day" into a rave staple, fer chrissakes — pop music, like techno, increasingly turns to trance for tips on opening up a world of perfect yearning.

Finally, no discussion of the new trance would be complete without mentioning the Connaisseur label — particularly Patrick Chardronnet's "Eve By Day," whose contrapuntal melody and grinding, six-against-four melody and bassline are like a categorical imperative for putting your hands in the air. Your lighter, even. The hidden piece of the puzzle is the pivot tone, the single note around which all the action revolves. Radio Slave, whose remix for Jamie Anderson's "Time Is Now" is another hidden gem in eMusic's new trance vein, employs the same trick. Held for the length of the track, the pivot tone suggests timelessness, which is of course trance music's most literal aim. It's what Terry Riley and Tony Conrad strove for in their "eternal music" of eight-hour concerts, and it's what dancers seek in today's all-night (and sometimes, all-day) raves. That dedication to repetition — the search for nirvana in a single held tone or an endlessly cycling rhythm — is one of electronic music's noblest gestures. We're fortunate that trance, so long a bad word, has re-entered the musical idiom to such effective and surprising ends.