Audio By Carbonatix
If one word describes Miami’s current club culture, it’s trance, the joyous, bubbly sound that currently dominates the playlists at the major nightclubs. “People like happy stuff. When they go out, they want to have a good time,” is how Duncan Ross explains trance’s triumph over house and techno as the club beat of choice. As the codirector of the electronica-focused Womb, the Miami Beach-based Internet radio station (www.thewomb.com), Ross is bombarded daily by virtually every strand of electronic dance music. To the casual listener, trance may simply be one of those myriad strands. To some of electronica’s adherents, however, it is a distinctive subgenre, one that signals ominous aesthetic shifts.
Ross does not consider himself a fan. “When I heard trance initially, I liked the way the DJs took you on a journey, setting a mood,” he says. “But now it’s just buildup, breakdown, buildup, breakdown — and it draws a very cheesy crowd accordingly. Even the records themselves are so easy. You take some chords that build up and you make them louder, then you add some hi-hats and snares, put on a drum roll, and then a breakdown. Then you build up again until … woo! Everybody throws their hands in the air. It’s just such a formula.”
Formula or not, the massive popularity of trance signals more than just a shift in tastes. Critics of electronica have continually cited its lack of accessibility, the fact that it is based on musical principles diametrically opposed to pop music, as grounds for its dismissal. But these very principles are what give techno and house their distinctive strengths. Drawing on minimalist traditions forged by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, techno and its offshoots rely on subtle changes in timbre, timing, and pitch to mutate infectious rhythms, creating a hypnotic effect. In marked contrast, trance (or progressive house, as it is often called) uses an overt melodicism that often recalls the arcs of sweeping neoclassical movements, making it much friendlier to ears weaned on pop tropes. Even more pronounced is trance’s decisive break with the black traditions of funk and R&B that underpin techno and house.
If one gazes out at a packed dance floor’s denizens attempting to dance to trance, this stripping away of black musical source elements becomes obvious. Because the music lacks a clear groove, the body reactions to it are either a flowing, loose-limbed sway akin to the crowd at a Grateful Dead concert, or a stationary epileptic fit that attempts to mimic trance’s manic pace. Either way it’s a far cry from any of the choreographed moves patented at Studio 54.
Perhaps because of this newfound accessibility, trance has captured the hearts of a younger generation, one that missed out on the first wave of American raves. Making up for lost time, they’re voting not only with their dancing feet, but with their wallets, creating a new tier of international DJ stars. Germany’s Paul Van Dyk, England’s Paul Oakenfold, and the British duo of Sasha and Digweed, all occupy princely positions, jetting around the world and commanding upwards of ten thousand dollars for their DJ sets. Record labels have been quick to pounce on this boomlet, finally smelling a payday after two years of electronica hype. A peek inside the South Beach Spec’s reveals a sizeable Sasha and Digweed section that rivals both the Beatles’ and Rolling Stones’ displays.
Rama Barwick, head of marketing for the Miami label Max Music, thinks America is simply catching up to Europe; Miami’s influx of European visitors has only accelerated that process, putting us ahead of the rest of the country. “In Europe trance is pop music. Oakenfold and Sasha have records on the pop charts there,” Barwick says. “Dance music is bigger than rock or hip-hop overseas, and America is next. Breaks had its period, house did its little thing, then drum and bass, but trance is what’s really selling right now. Paul Oakenfold is doing 3000 copies a week in the United States.”
Members of X, Max’s latest release, is a collection of trance-inflected songs from DJ George Acosta. According to Barwick it’s a healthy seller, 200 copies per week in Miami alone. For Acosta, who holds down a popular weekend residency at South Beach’s Shadow Lounge, the conversion to trance came only after years of creating and spinning more commercially oriented club fare. The irony that trance, once considered strictly underground music, is now assuming a position at the center of mainstream Miami clubbing, isn’t lost on him.
“When I started working at the Shadow Lounge, Dade [Sokoloff, the club’s owner] told me, ‘Don’t play records that have long breaks. Don’t be too hard,'” Acosta recalls. “So I gave them what they wanted. ‘Okay, here’s three records you want to hear, now two for me. Then it was two for you and three for me. Little by little the crowd came around. Now it’s all for me and the place is packed! Now Dade says, ‘George, you made me a believer — let’s go trance!'”
As for the notion that trance is somehow lacking in soul, Acosta bristles. “Oh, that’s bull, total bull,” he declares. “There are trance records with jazz elements!” The Cuban-born DJ pauses and then adds, “That’s like saying since I’m not black, I’ve got no soul.”
The actual musical components may only be one factor in trance’s explosive growth, however. Simon Reynolds, the author of Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture, points to the proliferation of the Mitsubishi brand of Ecstasy (so named after its imprint depicting the Mitsubishi automobile emblem), renowned for its purity and strength. “Mitsubishi E’s have totally brought back the ecstatic loved-up vibe,” Reynolds explains. “In ’96 and ’97 Ecstasy had really lost its luster for the general public; it was just one of several drugs people took. Somebody realized that they could clean up if they actually produced a good product. The quality of Ecstasy as a whole has risen to compete with the Mitsubishis.”
One of the main results of the spread of this high-quality Ecstasy is the gravitation of clubbers toward a music that seems tailor-made to an Ecstasy high. “If you’re a sixteen-year-old now, and you’re taking E, there aren’t that many sounds around that go well with it,” Reynolds continues. “Minimal techno has become joyless; it doesn’t go well with it. Neither does drum and bass, which has become very dark and serious. That’s why trance has blown up: People are looking for a soundtrack that goes with that kind of euphoria. And the people making trance have gotten it down to an incredibly fine art. They’ve taken all the most crowd-pleasing elements from the past decade of dance music: the breakdowns, the bells, the snare rolls, the melodrama, the wistful little naive melodies, and combined them all.” Laughing, he says, “It’s cheese-tastic!”
This renewed connection between high-grade Ecstasy and trance is hardly a veiled one. During a recent Paul Van Dyk set at Sheffield, England’s famed Gatecrasher club (where more than 1000 people were turned away from the filled-to-capacity venue), enthusiastic fans held aloft signs reading, “PVD + Mitsubishi = fucking heaven.” Other advocates of brand loyalty sported the Mitsubishi emblem painted on their arms and faces.
Miami’s club owners seem to be taking their cue correspondingly. In addition to Acosta’s tenure at the Shadow Lounge, David Padilla continues to play trance to a packed house throughout the weekend at South Beach’s The Mix, while Groove Jet has established monthly residencies with several British trance DJs. (Sasha spins a solo DJ set there this Saturday, May 22.) The bulk of Miami’s other clubs and lounges are following suit.
For advocates of stylistic diversity, however, trance’s stranglehold on Miami doesn’t augur well. The Winter Music Conference may have put the city on the map as a haven for DJ culture, but aside from that one week in March, many of the most exciting artists to appear at the WMC (Detroit techno and house pioneers such as Carl Craig and Stacey Pullen, or German experimentalists like Oval, Funkstsrung, and the Chain Reaction crew) have been unable to land Miami shows. Local promoters are much more interested in the now tried-and-true (and profitable) strains of trance. Raves thrown outside the established club network also show little sign of picking up the stylistic slack.
But time may not be on trance’s side. Ecstasy has a built-in tolerance factor, one that requires higher and higher doses to achieve the same effect, until any buzz become negligible. “The scene might renew itself,” Simon Reynolds offers. “New people might keep coming in as old people burn out and depression and paranoia set in. Still, any scene where people are caning drugs that intensely is bound to go through a dark phase eventually.”
Duncan Ross is even more frank. “Once you’ve had enough rolls and you’re tired of that tingly feeling, you start listening to the music,” he says emphatically. “When that happens, you’re not going to want to hear trance.
