Portals: Classic Trance Loops (Hypnotised)
Our next deep dive for the Portals series sees a revisit to a genre of music that heavily influenced ASIP growing up. Yes, cheese-and-chords in their full glory; classic Trance music. Love it or hate it, I embrace classic Trance music for its brilliance of the time, and the impact it had on me (and indeed electronic music) growing up. I’ve mentioned before how the chill-out side of Trance music was one of the many avenues to open me up to more electronic ambient music. But this isn’t the path we ended up taking for this Portals feature… This mix doesn’t come about by chance, or due to the fact that Trance is back in style (thanks to a number of techno DJs integrating some big Trance hits into their sets, or full releases getting the remix treatment 25 years later). It’s a mix I have considered making for a long time, where I could make use of my shelves full of Trance vinyl. But over the past year or so, I have been in conversation with Arjan Rietveld who has recently published an entire book called ‘Hypnotised: A Journey Through Trance Music (1990-2005)’ - a deep dive/encyclopedia on the classic Trance sound, that covers “its proto to seminal periods, through to its ascendance and glory years”, across “500 essential records, 75 record labels and 25 albums, with in-depth interviews with 35 influential artists and label owners”. [buy] It’s the first book of its kind, and for anyone who enjoys the sweet spot of classic Trance music in the late 90’s and early 00’s, it’s an unmissable factoid and commentary on the prime era of the scene. I wanted to support this new encyclopedic endeavor even further and had the idea to pull together some kind of mix here on ASIP to also shine a light on the launch of the book; on the many angles of classic Trance music; and also invite Arjan to provide a bit more detail surrounding his passion project (which follows further below) to round out the feature into a full-on Trance deep dive. Originally, I wanted to pull together the ambient-leaning side of Trance music - a side that is often misunderstood as questionable chill out music (i.e the ‘Chilled Euphoria’ series) or when done well, many of Global Underground’s Electric Calm mixes by The Forth, and the second CD of this Platipus Beginners Guide. But what may have been originally conceived as an Ambient Trance mix for this Portals feature, quickly took a new direction. For me to highlight the many Ambient Trance genres, sub-genres and styles, became a daunting task. It’s something that can go many ways depending on your upbringing (and geographic location), such as early 90’s psy/goa in style, acid+breaks, Ambitrance, Euro-trance remixes, or even the 00’s Space-Ambient style. All are often grouped around an ‘Ambient Trance’ notion, depending on your own subjective experiences, and it quickly became a massive task to whittle it down to one mix without going all genre-police on myself. So instead, I came up with a different concept and approach, taking inspiration from Arjan’s book title ‘Hypnotised’, the period, labels and artists that are a part of the book, and the idea of providing “a journey through Trance music”... What could be more hypnotizing than Trance music itself? The result is the accompanying mix, titled Classic Trance Loops, which was created by sampling specific segments of vinyl records from my collection. Each sample was ripped, digitized, and played back/edited live on CDJ’s looping feature, and further re-recorded as a continuous max~3-minute looped section. Then, it was all compiled into one mix in Ableton. (Note, I fully understand there is likely a much easier way to do this with various bits of gear, samplers, Ableton etc, but I enjoyed the process of doing it this way, as it both made me revisit my record collection and mess with my CDJs, which is a treat and a rarity nowadays - I’m a tactile DJ at heart). Once the core of the mix was compiled in Ableton, I realized it could do with some finessing