EURO
Energy Flash column #2, SonicNet 2000

by Simon Reynolds

Trance rules the world's dancefloors with a white-glove fist. Occasionally, though, voices of dissent pipe up to insist, "that's not real trance, that's Euro". Uttered with a disdainful wrinkle of the nostrils, the E-word is code for “cheese”, for dance music that's too close to conventional chart-pop . And these grouches have a point--the original early Nineties trance was harsh, trippy, and coldly cosmic, and it almost never featured vocals or normal song-structures. Although it was drug music and people raved to, in ways the first-wave Teutonic trance from Berlin and Frankfurt was born as a reaction against rave--or what rave had degenerated into (all goofy kids TV samples, pianos, anthemic choruses). As much as purist Detroit techno or progressive house, the original trance was intended as a stripped-down, somber, cheese-purged purification of techno.

Between 1994, when first-wave trance's hipster credibility was usurped by drum & bass, and 1998, when trance's popularity resurged dramatically off the back of the Mitshubishi phenomenon (the return of reliably high quality Ecstasy), the music changed substantially. Borrowing elements from commercial house (hands in the air breakdowns and crowd-inciting drum rolls) and from Balearic (the spangly MDMA-friendly textures and wistful refrains popular in Ibiza every summer), trance reinvented itself as the populist softcore option---cheesy and proud of it. It became Euro-trance, and as far as connoisseurs were concerned, an abhorrent thing.

What makes it Euro? Maybe it's that's there’s too much Aha and Erasure in the mix. The hallmark of this music is an indecent amount of melody (remember, there's an inverse ratio between tunefulness and deepness in dance culture), a hint of melodrama and operatic-ness. Rhythmically, the Euro element comes in with the nu-trance’s debt to a style of music that will probably never enjoy the hipster rediscovery afforded electro or disco: Hi-NRG. Huge in gay discos all through the Eighties, this genre is defined by a butt-shaking rhythm that is best conveyed by the words "Blue Monday".

Alongside the shameless Mozzarella content, trancephobes always accuse the music of lacking "funk" and "soul"--of being too white, basically. The "funkless" accusation is pretty incontestable. It goes back to Giorgio Moroder, whose productions for Donna Summer pioneered the first all-electronic dance music: Eurodisco. Moroder deliberately simplified funk's clustered beats into an even flow of metronomically regular pulsations, all synched to the unsyncopated four-to-the-floor kick drum. Rhythmic children of Giorgio, trance DJ's like Paul Van Dyk emphasize seamless transitions between tracks, creating the sensation of surging through a frictionless soundscape. And without friction, where's the funk?

The "soul-less" accusation is unfair, though---if anything, trance can be too
E-motional. Besides, there is a European soulfulness to trance, a quality that descends from the serene glide of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" and "Neon Lights", both hymnal songs about falling in love with the modern world while in motion through it. Listen to today's trance, and you think of the pristine, hygienic beauty of a modern unified Europe--the high-speed trains, the autobahns, the pedestrian-only boulevards of city center shopping districts, the noiseless moving walkways of airports. It's why Euro-trance flourishes wherever the romance of streamlined, sterile modernity holds sway, from Hong Kong to Sao Paolo (the most European of Brazil's cities).

It's also why this music, so rootless and synthetic sounding, comes from the Old World. On a recent vacation to Tuscany, I started to understand how the ancient stuff everywhere--medieval hilltowns, cobbled streets, ruined farmhouses -- could feel oppressive to young people. I'm sure it's got something to do with why Italian kids have long favored shiny man-made fabrics and shiny machine-made music. Italian pop radio plays nothing but Euro (that, and the occasional Bon Jovi tune, pop-metal at its most glitteringly inorganic), and it's perfect precisely because it doesn't fit the picturesque landscape of olive groves, sunflower meadows, and ruined farmhouses scrolling past your car windows. In the land of terracotta, plastic has a liberating future-buzz about it

The Italian contribution to rock is negligible, but they did play a significant role in the history of house and techno. Moroder came from the Northern province of Tyrol, culturally poised between Italy and the German speaking world. The style of post-Moroder electronic dancepop known as Italodisco was popular in Detroit, where they called it "progressive"--artists like Klein & MBO and Alexander Robotnik. Robotnik's "Problemes D'Amour" was actually the first dance track to use a Roland 303 bass-synthesizer, the basis of acid house and a staple of trance. Later, Italo-house--all tingly-rush inducing piano vamps and shrieking divas--by artists like Black Box and Starlight was hugely influential on the British rave scene. Even today, Italian producers like Tigino & Legato more than pull their weight when it's comes to fuelling Ibiza's midsummer blissfest.

All of which brings back to my original point, the puzzling fact that the word "Euro" is an insult, when "in the beginning" European-ness was the quintessence of cool. Detroit techno, for instance, began as a scene of affluent black teenagers who defined themselves through their obsession with all things European, from music to fashion. It's not inaccurate to describe techno and house as white European music that black Americans "got wrong"---a sort of reverse parallel with the emergence of rock as a white misrecognition of the black blues. Detroit cognoscenti fetishize the obscure Italian records that Carl Craig and Derrick May spun at high school "socials" in the early Eighties (alongside tracks by Yello, Depeche Mode, Liaison Dangereues, and other Euro exotica). But they have no interest, and nothing but contempt, for contemporary Euro, which has clear ancestral links with that music.

“Deep” is a buzzword in dance culture, code for the sort of cognoscenti-pleasing subtleties that ensures the music will never cross-over because it’s not instantly appealing or anthemic enough (see also “dark” and “progressive”, two other praise terms that virtually guarantee a lack of blatant tunefulness and overt emotion). The opposite of “deep” is “cheesy”, basically anything people-pleasing. It’s worth remembering, though, that the Italians have had centuries of experience with using just the right amount of cheese--think risotto, pasta, pizza. Too much and it's inedible, nauseating. Too little, and it lacks flava. The same thing goes for dance music: “cheese” adds savor and pungency. When dance producers get too tasteful, the result is music that is completely tasteless.

DANCE MUSIC OVERLOAD
Energy Flash Column #1, SonicNet, 2000

by Simon Reynolds

There's a record store in downtown Manhattan* that always strikes me as some kind of metaphor for the state of dance music. The store is choked with vinyl, chock-a-block. The wall-racks are so densely layered with 12 inch singles, the records overlap so you can only see a narrow strip of each sleeve's right side--the artist name and track titles are concealed, you can't just scan the walls to find what you want, you have to peer up close at the price label, where the store has helpfully printed the information in tiny type. The record bins are so tightly crammed you can barely extract the discs from their sections; sleeves are torn and vinyl scuffed. Underneath the shelves, there's an overflow of back stock extending so far out into the aisles that customers have to put a foot up on top of the vinyl sprawl just to get near the bins or the listening decks. And at every deck, there's a tense-looking, sweaty kid in headphones with a fat stack of new tunes, skipping through the tracks with the stylus and trying to make judgement calls based on four seconds of intro/four seconds of groove/four seconds of breakdown, all in the desperate attempt to keep up with dance culture's Niagaran torrent of product.

This record store is just about the only one left in New York that still tries to stock every kind of dance-floor oriented music, all the myriad subgenres of house, techno, trance, drum and bass, and breakbeat. (Its one concession to sanity: skimping on experimental electronica and CDs). Others Manhattan stores have narrowed their focus to just hard techno, or just deep house, or just jungle. But precisely because of this particular store's valiant attempt to encompass all the tributaries of the post-rave delta, it's getting harder to use the place, so overcrowded is it with records and customers trying to get at them. And that's where the metaphor bit comes in, because this mirrors the increasingly challenging nature of navigating the electronic dance music universe, with its bewildering profusion of styles and its hyper-productivity.

Ten years ago, when rave first started to take off in North America, it was still physically possible to monitor the best output of every subgenre--a full time job, sure, but do-able if you were dedicated and determined. There weren't that many scenes to check, after all--everything was under the umbrella of house music back then, even techno. Today, it would take all your time and energy to stay on top of drum & bass, or minimal techno, or garage, or any single genre--such is the high turnover of releases, the vast number of independent labels and self-released records. This double whammy of stylistic splintering combined with ever-increasing volume of releases is the reason why people increasingly get on a narrowcast track and become obsessed with just one kind of music. Take trance, for instance. Until a few years ago I'd always thought it was a homogenous and basically unified genre, but all of sudden, that same Manhattan store had an entire wall of trance divided up into a myriad micro-genres. Then I met this English psychedelic trance DJ and, curious whether she checked out stuff outside the psy-trance ghetto, asked what she thought of hardtrance warrior Commander Tom, progressive trance god Paul Oakenfold, and others. She just looked blank. Clearly, to be on top of your shit as a psy-trance DJ, you have to have tunnel vision focus.

Diagnosing the dance vinyl glut, it's tempting to bandy around phrases like "cultural overproduction" or "excess of access." But it's not like the do-it-yourself boom is generating mountains of mediocrity that are snowcapped with one percent brilliance. No, the problem is there's too much good stuff out there--well-made, intelligently conceived, tastefully executed, and pretty deserving of your attention. The same cheap music-making technology that causes the do-it-yourself phenomenon to keep on mushrooming is also allowing people to make studio-quality records at home. An unexpected side effect of all this abundance, though, is a sort of optical illusion--the landmark records don't stand out so starkly against the plains of lameness. It also means it's harder for producers to make money, with average sales of a good (i.e. not a huge anthem) 12 inch in most genres hovering between 1000 and 2000 (and that's globally). Many producers only make tracks to boost their profile as DJs (which is where you can actually make some dough).

As demanding as it is for consumers faced with dance music overload, there's no turning back the clock--the DIY genie is out of the bottle. Ultimately, do-it-yourself/release-it-yourself, both as ideal and as practice, has been fantastic for music. It just means that you have to abandon the notion of keeping tabs on all the good stuff from across the genrescape, accept that you're going to miss great records. One aspect of the DJ's job--and almost a justification for the fat fees these guys charge--is their processing function: sifting through the pretty-decent stuff and finding the nuggets of genius, stringing the pearls together as a stellar set or slamming mix-CD. Well, that's how it's supposed to work anyway.

Meanwhile, the last time I went to that store, the over-stuffed-racks were almost falling off the walls. I'm waiting to read about the first record retail catastrophe: Aspiring Disc Jockey Crushed By Vinyl.


* Satellite Records on Bowery. About a year later it moved to much larger premises further down Bowery below Houston St. Now it's closed.

JOEY BELTRAM
Classics
(R&S)
eMusic, May 2008

by Simon Reynolds

here

VARIOUS ARTISTS
BERLIN 1992 TRESOR COMPILATION: DER KLANG DER FAMILIE
(Tresor/NovaMute)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
THE HOUSE OF TECHNO: FRANKFURT TRAX VOLUME 2
(PCP)
Melody Maker, autumn 1992

by Simon Reynolds

Tresor is a famous Berlin club located in a vault that was once the safe of a department store. Maybe because the temperatures inside this strobe-blitzed sauna reach tropical levels, the techno made by DJ's and groups associated with the club (and gathered on Der Klang Der Familie) is sweat-less and cold-as-ice.

The Berlin sound as represented here has a similar clinical-but-crazed vibe to the stuff coming out of Detroit on the Plus 8 label, like F.U.S.E.'s "F.U.": basslines that pulsate in sinister wave-forms like radioactive ore, rigorous programmed beats, synth-twitches that instil a strange ectastic dread. Unlike UK hardcore's epileptic basslines and sped-up vocals exploding like fireworks, this music doesn't speed-rush forwards in blind propulsion; the repetition seems to take you deeper and deeper towards something primal and not a little threatening.

Voodoo possession is the model here, rather than the hyper-hyper exhiliration-whizz of breakbeat house. "Drugs Work" by System 01 is like venturing into a cyberdelic jungle, parting wave after wave of foliage towards some secret, pagan grove. Maurizio's "Ploy" is a cloud of oscillations and wave-forms that's almost beyond
dance. Voov's "It's Anything You Want It To be And It's A Gas" assembles programmed rhythms and grids of sequencer pulses into a percussive lattice of near-symphonic
complexity. Mind Gear's "Don't Panic" is simply symphonic, rivalling the poignant grandeur of Orbital's "Belfast". A brilliant compilation.



Planet Core Productions's Frankfurt Trax offers more German vanguard techno. Abbreviate the label's name to PCP and you get a good idea of the vibe of the Frankfurt sound: mad-as-hell, mental-as-fuck, apoplectic/apocalyptic frenzy,
all stomping 4/4 beats and gut-busting bass-blasts. Mescalinum United's "We Have Arrived" is a storm-trooper stampede with a smeared, blaring riff that'll rip your
entrails out. With its infernal bass and down-swooping drones, "Nightflight (nonstop to kaos)" by The Mover presents Frontal Sickness is like a cybernetic version of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man". But it's not all mayhem. Six Mullahs' "Persian Lover" is an Islam-otronic mood piece. Project AE's "Whales Alive" is an extraordinary, undulating soundscape: stereo-panning slow beats, brief arias of whale song, tidal
synths, a terra-technic bass that glows like the Earth's core. Imagine "Once In A Lifetime" if Talking Heads had been ripping off Kraftwerk rather than Can.

Another brilliant compilation.