Nestor wrote:kensuguro wrote:Nestor, there's a lot about psy trance that's not necessarily in the music. I think the whole subculture that surrounds it gives it definition. Also, there are particular ways of listening to trance, esp psytrance/goa. (not just drugs) It's much less about harmony and content in terms of notes but more of evolving textures and "overall" dynamics.
If you listen to enough, you'll be able to spot the "good" ones. Problem is that there are more bad ones than good ones, so if you listen to a random mixture, you may be just hitting the bad ones. But anyway, it's a culture, and it takes a bit of persistence to learn its ways. It's strange, I don't know why, but I happen to like psytrance. I don't really get it, and it's among the few genres I don't compose in, but I like listening to it. It's a sensation in the ear sort of thing for me.
I have not listened much to it. I am sure that there must be among so much music something I would eventually like. What happens is that having at your hands music that drives you crazy of pleasure and enjoyment, well, you will rarely reach for something which is just a little tickler in your stomach. I listen to many kind of called “unpopular music” like world music which I like very much: Arab, Indi, African, Folk music, etc., wonderful stuff, like Omar Faruk for instance, what a musicianship! If you don’t know him, please get to listen to this super musician, absolutely recommended. Then I listen to orchestral music, among them classical music. The problem with classical music is “time”, so it is a bit more demanding.
What I will not do again, is forcing myself to like something I don't like but can undertand very well in the first place. Remember when I did the album called “Acoustic Paradise”
for a guy here in the Z, from London, called Roberto? He duplicated my album making 100 copies of it, and then distributed to the London underground dance boxes in the city, the album was accepted but people would wonder what this jazz-trance kind of music was. Well, many here were after me because I was into Fusion and most were into Trance.
They said that I did not appreciate Trance music, so I decided to listen to some of it and then try doing it myself. I did, then Paul Martin said something really cool about it: “It is like Weather Report having fun”,
that was really hilarious for me. He was saying, “No, you are not succeeding at doing Trance at all, this is just Fusion music disguised as being Trance music, go away”. When I was very young, I would be open to anything because I didn’t know what I wanted, but today I know what I want in every detail, exactly I could say when it comes to music composing and the kind of music and what to listen at, and most importantly, I know the all important
*WHY*, but trying to explain it is like trying to explain which the meaning o life is.
BTW: I am tempted to upload all those old tracks, I will when I have some spare time, just to have fun with them, it's going to be interesting.
A few points here. FIrst I should start with saying that I had a fondness for trance around 1992-1994, some of which was influenced by coming from the Axiom/Submeta/FAX records side of ambient when I exited my 'guitar phase' (which went from age 5-6 through about 1992). A good deal of the things I did on my own towards my late childhood were attempts to create 'sound washes' and 'spaces' using silly pedal chains and overuse of spring verb etc, as a guitar and those pedals were the only tools I had available (besides a cheap 286 PC running modtracker with a turtle beach soundcard--which I mostly used for gaming and programming in honesty). My reason for dragging you through that is to say that what I found in trance and ambient at that time was something I was already looking for, so it made sense a a step for me. But looking back now I understand that to properly 'promote' dance music culture (which I've done for almost 2 decades now) you have to build a bridge to that person's tastes.
In any case there are some things that I tend to point out to more 'acoustic' or 'rock', 'blues', 'jazz' etc artists about the *dance* side of electronic music:
- The music is repetitive because you're typically 1, not listening to the full track but rather a blend of tracks 'mixed' by a DJ and 2. supposed to be dancing
- The melodic structure for a given track at most will tend to go through maybe 1 chance. In the early 90's this wasn't the case, tracks would often even fit what we would consider 'multiple genres' into the same track back then. Being very dense in terms of ideas however meant that the execution was usually rough and of course the tools a lot more primitive than what came later. I could expound on this single point for longer but I'll be brief and suffice it to say that a good deal of what we have now is either a logical extension of what came before (more stripped down and refine) or typical postmodern recombinings of more than one previous idea (or both). I don't see this as *bad* though, you tend to see this in other efforts over culture, where ideas are filtered and the best bits selected and explored fully. Of course when you get to the point where such a culture is fully 'mature' to the point where many of the people are just literally recycling the same ideas I think subcultures can become self-referential to the point of often excluding most external influences. Or perhaps the individual just hits the point of saturation so there is little 'new information' left and you feel the need to push on, while the neophyte punter next to you is completely off his tits with excitement at the amazing array of NEW stuff to absorb.
- Typical melodic structures are often not the 'point' to dance music per se. In Jazz I often though of my (albeit poor and youthfully executed) playing as 'suggesting' or 'playing around with' or 'hinting' at the melody or melodic structures, with accidentals and riffs thrown in with such wild abandon as to hit 7's and 9's far far more frequently than one would when literally just playing the chord progression and an accompanying melody in the 'rock music' I was more familiar with. In dance music I would suggest that we go the opposite direction of 'jazz' many times and flat out repeat the melodic motif to the point where it becomes more of the background of the song, a pulse or rhythm upon which you explore timbre and texture by combining elements in ways that weren't really doable before (at least not without a large studio and many players all in perfect sync). Filtering and the interplay of elements become as much a part of the movement of the tune as 'where the notes are going' in a more traditional composition, in fact this is so rudimentary that I would suggest it predates trance (or co-existed with early trance) as the fundamentals of TECHNO. The 303/808/909 and MMT-8 driven rack of synths usually had very simple pattern sequencing (thus simple melodic progressions in tunes) but there were TONS of knobs to fiddle with. So that became the 'region' of 'exploration' for people playing around with such gear. *That* defines techno to me personally...whereas Trance I would suggest comes from the idea of mystical/eastern 'trancendental' meditation achieved either through the repetition of elements (again to the point where they recede from the main focus) or through such sheer cacophony as to overwhelm the physical senses. Psytrance came about with tools like the JP8000, Virus and other VA synths where you could now create entire signal chains right within the synth and run multiple patches (aka different timbres and textures as the different players) alongside each other. Certainly there were blasts of noise and Knight Rider style patterns that went beyond the pcm based glory of 'workstation' synths that came before the dsp drive VA's of the late 90's. And now that everything is achieveable in software...well...you can just combine all of the aforementioned elements. Of course I've excluded the merging of soul/motown & disco with Frankie Knuckles layering 'garage' soul records on the 909, the birth of hiphop with first turntable based and later MPC/software based sampling...the use of advanced samplers to cut the beat to rediculous degress with drum&bass and jungle...and now the use of modern mixing tools to maximize the BASS (bass music, dubstep, trap music, mohmbaton) in combination with extreme rhythms all drawing on the ground laid by the giants before them.....
All of which I time and time again heard my former bandmates and 'classically educated' friends say 'but its so repetitive and boring'. 10 years ago I'd have simply suggested that the DJ provides the rest...the 2-3 minutes of track playing purely by itself between mixes/at intro and then the melodic and rhythmic 'progression' of mixing to the next..and to the next. And once you've consumed yourself with the culture to the point where you see the minutae of many of the ideas that are being explored musically, I even think a lot of the stuff that might be considered 'boring' by a neophyte takes on different characters. Again this is dj-oriented because it becomes more about context and what you combine things with. And I'll conclude this paragraph by saying that I said '10 years ago' in reference to the DJ because software is changing things so much now that I think the 'slow mixing' methods of the last 2 decades of dance music are mostly fading away.
In their place I see a bright side in the use of Live and other tools (possibly Xite and the upcoming Bitwig etc) to accomplish what I had in mind at the beginning of the 90's when I departed from Guitar to play with synths & rack gear...to perform 'live' dance music that's got enough control over the individual elements (or stems) as to be able to really create things on the fly. However the downside is that what you often wind up with as well is 6 month dj's relying on autosync and the 'beat sync' button in Traktor and 2-track mixing in Ableton by beat-warping everything and just using 2 faders on a midi controller and possibly a button or key for the 'beat repeat' etc.
So whether you're hearing a DJ playing on vinyl, CDj's, Serato, Traktor, Ableton Live or something beyond this as a 'live act', we have the performers in question and how well they're able to capitalize on the giants they stand on.
And as my last thought I'll refer to #2 from my first bulletpoint, that it's about the body as much as anything else...dancing. The image that always comes to mind here for me personally is some combination of my experiences drawning on: high school where there was this gulf between people involved in athletics/spirit/youth politics and the drama/band camp, and my first ten years of dance music where many clubs & parties had 'dance music' rooms and 'ambient' or 'chillout' rooms. While certainly everyone flows through the whole party, there was a certain divide between people who seemed to prefer the almost thoughtless movement of the 'main room' material and the people who would spend a huge portion of their time lingering in the side rooms and chatting, exploring, sitting, relaxing etc. I noticed this as I first started with ambient in the early 90's (which almost noone cared about), then shifted to 'main room' trance/techno(93-95), then back to the 'side room' (95-97) in the same club I'd been playing in for a few years already, then back to the 'main room' as my downtempo & jungle gave way to 'mainfloor' drum & bass styles....
Now of course the gulf is somewhat different, but if you go to a psytrance party you have the dance music and the psybient/chillout even still. I also see a similar but different sort of divide finally emerging in the US that Eu/UK has had for some time now. The 'festies' (garyb's deadheads) and what's left of the clubgoing population (which still hasn't hit levels it was at 10 years ago let alone where it was in the 90's stateside).
wise words, and a surprising preference, knowing you a bit.
But what to say to this? Ok..., here I go:
