One Trancer For Every Year Since 2003
So who is dead again?
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2022-06-03 & 2022-10-14
2022-06-03 & 2022-10-14
It's about a decade ago I first started this blog and if you head back here and scroll through it all real quick you can tell I was in my final year of Cultural Anthropology as the columns just kept coming and coming and coming and jeebus... There is no end to my rambling. Aaah to be young, idealistic and full of delusions!
Still, I felt it would be nice to commemorate the occasion. I do believe it could be fun to see where Trance has gone in the last decade. Personally I think all the constant doom and gloom crying about our scene is vastly exaggerated and merely launched by each generation realizing they have gone from younger wet-behind-the-ears-noobs who find every release exciting to insufferable, agitated, older purist nags who overanalyze every single detail. Let's be real here, a decade has passed, those of us who have been around long enough can all testify that we've gone through these phases. While some stay stuck in it and others decide to just move on to completely different things altogether, others loosen up a little once they realize that not just the music but also its fans come in cycles and so they just enjoy what comes by. Life is hard enough. Take what you can get. Once you loosen up, music tends to sound a lot better anyway since it has nothing to prove to you, it simply is.
Regarding myself I am not sure if I am less "purist" than I was a decade ago, I do have to say that with the rise of the so-called "Melodic House & Techno" tag on Beatport, and Bigroom finally being labeled as such instead of the misleading "Progressive House" have done various scenes Electronic Music a lot of favors. The former in particular has become the most accepted excuse for Techno producers to make Trance and Trance producers to make Techno. Honestly, a lot of this so-called Melodic Techno is really what Trance used to be about a long time ago. At the end of the day, genre labeling only really matters if you are obsessed with archiving and have that categorization OCD I have too... You know, that thing that makes you call a Spade a Spade, and it pisses you off insanely when someone calls a Spade a Diamond "because that's how they feel about it". Order doesn't care about your feelings. Trance is Trance. Period. It's not Trouse. Trouse is it's own thing and that's fine. But anyway.
Of course the Good Old Days are hard to ever fully replicate since those days coincided with everything being new and fresh to you. A long, dark decade onward and we tend to be a little less wide-eyed, a little less believing in wonders and magic because adulthood has beaten that out of us for the most part. But a quick look at my Top 30s for 2018, 2019 and 2021 (2020 was an odd one, so I'm leaving that out) shows three eclectic collections featuring not only many Heroes Of Old but also interesting blends and tempos. Moreover, with Trance often dropping below 130 BPM these days the shift from House entries to Trance entries is becoming smoother and harder to tell. But some great melodies have been crafted the last couple of years. So we got Melodic House And Techno to thank for that but another thing we have to thank here is the revival of Synthwave and '80s electronic music/synthesizers. Whether it was due to Daft Punk's Random Access Memories or killer streaming hits like Netflix' Stranger Things with its delicious synth-driven soundtracks, the past imagining the future has come back in full effect and well, for me it's just pure enjoyment all-round.
It also fits my growth as a music fan: discovering Jean Michel-Jarre in 2015 was an eye-opening experience and curiously since that period he's gone on to release new albums again. Oxygene Part 3 and Equinoxe Infinity have been some of my favorite albums over the years and especially the former utilizes so many Trance-oriented synths. It makes me happy because this man served as one of the earliest heroes and examples to MANY of our Trance legends and his earliest work was laying the foundation for what was to become our scene in the '90s. For him to then end up using sounds and instruments that have become a staple of the genre is things coming full circle. The Digital Blonde went on to release no less than THREE synthesizer-inspired albums (NEON, NEON 2 and N3ON) in the last couple of years. Envotion and Roger Shah both did something similar in 2018 (We Are) and 2021 (Jukebox '80s) respectively. Gaia even made an album and though it might not have gone for an '80s or synthwavey approach it did rely heavily on analog gear and analog ethos. And it shows because quite frankly Moons Of Jupiter might be the very best of all albums Armin and Benno have ever done, or at the very least on par with Benno's debut album Symsonic as Rank 1 and Armin's debut album 76 that released a year after that.
The synthesizer has been an inescapable influencing fact in the last 6 years or so and I would say that's not surprising. After the SHM, Avicii and Martin Garrix Festival Sound craze, everyone sounded nearly identical. And these styles that became the new festival norm don't exactly contain any longevity. Because everything sounds so alike and everything is supposed to be rush-inducing, few tracks stand out and few stand the test of time. Of course some were fun for the time and whoever grew up with it will look back on it with the same nostalgia me and my fellow '90s spawn do in regards to stuff like Spice Girls and 2Unlimited.
What has however always stood the test of time is that '80s synthesizer sound. Like one of my music friends aptly observed, back in the '80s it was the music of the future. If it's making a comeback now, 30 years later, we are now living the future of the '80s. But it is exactly that association with the future, that makes those sounds and instruments so timeless in a way. Sure, you can hear it sounds from the '80s. And yet it doesn't. It fits the now as well. It fits space. And space is timeless. Hmmmm, getting a little vague now, even for my standards. xD Where was I going with this?
Oh, right! '80s synthesizers have helped Trance! Perhaps even saved it? I read it a lot back in my ASOT forum days, "music comes in cycles" and that has most definitely been the case in recent years. Though there seems to be the emergence of the follow-up to all things Bigroom in the so-called "Future Rave" sound, it would seem that the logical anti-reaction to all that festival-driven mass produced stuff would lie in the genre's roots and earliest inspirations. In general I feel we've been getting pretty cool styleblenders set to the modern day BPM ranges, not unlike we used to have back in 2005ish, after Trance slowly withdrew from the Top 40 charts and sought to re-invent itself by branching off and becoming Progressive Trance, Tech Trance and Electro Trance... And tracks that kinda fit in all and none of these subbranches.
A lot has happened in the last 10 years of course. The world has somehow managed to become shittier by the year in terms of geopolitics, economics and even culture. Where popular culture seemed to be going on a good run for a while, it too is slowly devolving into an uninspired cycle of rehashing classics under new superficial "equality" standards and turning every medium that once served as an escape from the drag of a dreary everyday life into political manifestos and biased echo chambers. And outside of that, everyone seems to have lost their friggin' minds, especially since 2020... Welcome to the newest era of Mass Outrage and Mass Intolerance I guess! :D
...Disregarding my cynicism about that, this article is about music and Trance in particular. And for what it's worth, the music has offered enough evidence that people with a heart and soul for the genres they love still exist and work hard to keep said genres alive. Yes, Trance has splintered into ever more subforms since 2012 but luckily the balance has tilted from commercial-heavy festival pleasers to deeper, layered crafts of love and care overtime. No least thanks to the efforts of artists like Solarstone, Orkidea, The Digital Blonde, Airwave, John Askew but also underrated masters of the genre like Rank 1 and M.I.K.E. (who were some of the first to go Retro when everyone else wanted to be a Swedish Trouse Mobster)... With continued excellence by the likes of Ferry Corsten and Marco V and even Bolier coming back to the genre, my generation of Trance fan has little to complain about (provided we are willing to put a bit more effort into finding the good stuff). Then there's guys like Estiva and Matt Fax doing brilliant stuff, blending all sorts of Prog, House and Trance forms into exciting new aural experiences. Shadows can never be cast without a light source. If you feel there is a shadow cast over you, look for its light source. Trance still lives and breathes. And hopefully it always will.
Funny I still even bother with a blog... Because Trance might be alive a decade since its 92040th death declaration, but blogs sure as hell have died... xD Perhaps time to switch to The Razormane Vlog for the next decade? If there was ever a time... ;)
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