Afterword
Back to Basics with the Roland 303
Andrew Ross
One of the things this essay collection demonstrates is that advanced technologies are often sold on the premise that they can deliver elemental experiences which are no longer available through the technologies they are seeking to supplant. According to this pitch, our current toys have formed an obstructive, mediating layer that the new ones will leap over and restore access to the authentic stuff. This is a key principle of techno-primitivism, and the best contemporary example I know of is the dance music genre that is labeled “trance.”
Trance is now so popular in so many First World nations that it can’t help but be reviled by discerning music critics in every one of these nations. Not since disco’s critics saw Moroderania spreading like the bubonic plague has an industry formula swept the boards with less resistance. U.S. mass taste has been fiercely isolationist in its indifference to dance music, but large sectors are now turning into treacle before the lush, sweet soundscapes of Paul Oakenfold, Paul Van Dyk, Sasha and Digweed, and the other anthem champs. As passionately as its devotees flip their lids, the discerning critic decries the trance formula as an engine of easy sentiment, its practitioners as manipulators of middlebrow escapism, and their product as the last word in cheese. Fair enough as a verdict of taste, but quite irrelevant to any understanding of the sheer popularity of the music’s quasi-symphonic euphoria.
Nor can it help forty-somethings, like myself, whose crush on the genre has all the makings of a top-notch guilty pleasure. Physically outdone, these days, by the challenge of the nightclubber’s graveyard shift, my use of the music as an emotional regulator, at home, in the office, or in transit, has become both routine and devotional. I’m convinced that the attachment has little to do with envy of a scene in which I cannot participate, or nostalgia for the blissed-out yearnings that are mandatory in late adolescence. My own memories of that period carry way too much guilt and too little pleasure for that. Besides, the wonderment of the time had a firmly medievalist cast that is quite removed from the galactic odysseys of trance. Indeed, the first album I really coveted was “In the Court of the Crimson King.” Its jugglers, fire witches, jesters, prophets, and knightly tournaments were of a piece with those Tolkienesque (and Lovecraftian) currents of the hippie mind that fed into progressive rock and managed to survive in an abridged edition through the Celtic twilights and Teutonic death-fests of heavy metal. The pixie-dust and sword & sorcery were straightforward, late Romantic fantasies about a simpler, more flamboyant past, but there were no illusions about the advanced technology that delivered them. According to the recipe for this techno-peasant cocktail, what made the debut of the Moog synthesizer so “progressive” (for King Crimson, Yes, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and their like) was not its futurist feel but its ability to conjure up associations with ancient tongues and Nostradamian auguries.
Thirty years later, the trancey descendants of the Moog are still in possession of the conjurer’s bag of tricks. The transcendental journey is still the coin of the realm. But the medievalism has dissolved. Perhaps the gaming boom of Dungeons and Dragons and all its descendants has drained the market for the time being. Youth’s wistful historicism has given way to a geographical imagination that carries the clear imprint of popular ecology. Where fey chevaliers and eloquent griffins used to hold court, Gaia is now the presiding deity. No doubt this has a lot to do with the centrality of environmentalism in youth consciousness—the sublime goal of planetary care is much more appealing and less threatening than the impure politics of local statecraft. Since trance is almost wholly instrumental, this one-worldism is commonly evoked in the ethereal soundwash (in the “oceanic feeling” that Freud described as the source of religious musings about eternity), or in the iconography, trappings, and accessories of its rolling raver fans.
Vocal samples in trance are few and far between, and they tend to verbalize a mood rather than a message. Every so often, however, a dreamy female voice utters something that requires thought, as in the breakout vocal on the Lost Tribe (aka Matt Darey) classic, “Gamemaster,” where the Gaian profile is quite explicit. “Embracing the goddess energy within yourselves will bring all of you to a new understanding and value of life … Like a priceless jewel buried in dark layers of soil and stone, Earth radiates with brilliant beauty into the caverns of space and time. Perhaps you are aware of those who watch over your home and experience it as a place to visit and play with reality. You are becoming aware of yourself … as a Gamemaster.” It’s hard for me not to think of this as a software upgrade of Richard Brautigan’s 1968 famous poem, much admired by the early Bay Area cyberculture, about the dream of “a cybernetic meadow / where mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony / like pure water / touching clear sky,” and all of it “watched over by machines of loving grace.” In the Lost Tribe sample, the kinship between technology and ecotopia gets looped into a benign mind-warp—melodramatic for sure, but in no doubt, finally, about who is in control. The machine is in the garden, and the garden might also be a product of the machine.
Trance is commonly described as a global music, even a global movement, unifying many of electronica’s subgenres: hard house, psy, techno, hybrid, progressive house. Naturally, the term “global” refers to mostly white people in the overdeveloped world, and to the process by which trance draws inspirational sources from the underdeveloped world. Deejays do their R&D in wild places, like the beaches of Goa and Thailand, the deserts of Australia or Israel, or wherever “native spiritual energies” can best be tapped, and then the polished product is released in metropolitan mega-clubs. While the communitarian rituals of dance music are essentially urban, the expansive ambitions of a genre like trance often require larger, open spaces, and nomadic journeying to prove their point. In the techno-primitivist setting of freedom events like Burning Man, the push toward things primordial has given rise to a whole new generation of McKennadrenched talk about deejay shamanism and higher being. There has always been loose, usually urbane, talk about tribalism among dance music communities, but the children of trance want to get much closer to what traditionally tribal peoples are supposed to possess. Again, this might be seen as an expression of the geographic imagination, since it is timelessness, and not history, that is being sought out.
In proto-trance hits, indigenous chants were often directly sampled. Future House of London’s “Papua New Guinea,” Enigma’s “Return to Innocence” (discussed at length in these pages by Timothy Taylor), and Deep Forest’s shopping spree of UNESCO recordings of rainforest peoples were all massive commercial wins. But the genre fully matured on the world traveler circuit, way beyond Ibiza and Nevada, so it is less about raiding and poaching native sources (like the corporate pharmacologist) than about simulating a journey for Western youth to faraway places. The synth-driven peaks, valleys, and plateaus of the trance formula are really a kind of narrative that reflects the yearnings of modern Euro-individualism, a Bildungsroman for the age of the Roland 303. It is a solo quest narrative, in other words, and not a story about migration, or syncretism, of the sort that non-Western peoples tend to have experienced. No doubt, trance will encourage some reverse-ethnography, or fusion music a la Yothu Yindi, if only because the commercial opportunities are too ripe to pass up. Even more likely are scenarios of the sort described here in Janet Sturman’s diagnosis of tecno-macondismo, whereby local music scenes will use the digital technologies to recombine their own regional styles, preserving folk expression through the media of modern relevance.
For myself, I can’t help spinning the CDs. Trance puts my head on a platter but keeps my brain working. That’s not a lot to ask for, but little else in my life will do the trick. It’s a plain expression of functional music, doing its job well.