Trance fever

DJs Paul Oakenfold, John Digweed, and Dave Ralph

by Michael Endelman

Paul Oakenfold

Depending on whom you ask, trance is either the best or the worst electronic music on the planet. Equally loved and hated for its populist accessibility, über-clean production ethic, and anthemic, ecstasy-friendly vibe, trance is the sound that packs swanky dance clubs and cavernous raves from Tel Aviv to Texas. It may not register in album sales, media coverage, or radio play, but check out the attendance figures. More than one million revelers turned up for Berlin's trance-centric festival, the Love Parade, last summer. British trance duo Sasha & Digweed have held down a monthly residency at the New York superclub Twilo for almost four years, attracting thousands to every gig. When Paul Oakenfold (above) performed at Avalon last fall, hundreds were turned away at the door. Quick-fingered turntablists like Q-Bert and Mixmaster Mike might be postmodern guitar gods, but superstar DJs like Oakenfold (who returns to Avalon in Boston this Monday), John Digweed, and Dave Ralph (who

comes to Avalon this Saturday) are the new rock stars: they command four- and five-figure fees for three-hour sets, induce mass worship, and hang out with models.

Still, trance artists have never cracked the Billboard Top 10 or appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone (or Spin, or any other mainstream stateside music magazine). And most Americans think that trance is a state of mind, not a musical genre. Produced mainly by European white guys, stripped of obvious American influences, and lacking any sort of political agenda, trance is a rootless sound that's hard for rock critics and pop fans to grasp. Whereas deep house, trip-hop, and jungle offer clear-cut historical reference points -- jazz fusion, funk, disco, and hip-hop -- trance relies on the perfection of samplers, drum machines, and sequencers to create rhythmic roboticism and emotional futurism. Which is exactly why it appeals to such a broad fan base. The motorized rhythms are like training wheels for bad dancers; the mechanical throb puts the body on booty-shaking autopilot while the mind zones out into a state of wide-eyed reverie. Driving forward like some frictionless Tomorrowland monorail, trance seems to float in the air -- every drum fill, bass twitch, and synth stab drives effortlessly forward to the lockstep binary code of the computer. Listening to the music is like looking out onto a grid of geometric perfection that stretches out beyond the horizon.

Like most electronic-music genres, trance has a million regional and stylistic subdivisions -- psy-trance, Goa-trance -- that keep multiplying and expanding. But the mainstream trance that fills superclubs and mega-raves has codified into a recognizable style over the past few years. Trance gathers elements from across the spectrum of electronic music -- Giorgio Moroder's crispy Italian-disco pulses, Chicago house's 4/4 kick drum, ambient's swirling soundsculpting, new age's poofy synth pads, acid house's aggressive tone sculpting -- and melds them into a streamlined sound that's clean and shiny enough to eat off. And now that popping a pill and dancing for six hours has become an acceptable leisure activity for scruffy hippies, dot-com yuppies, and overeager frat boys, trance has emerged as the most reliable vehicle to help dancers capitalize on ecstasy's empathetic rush. It stokes that body buzz with cosmic tones and trippy sound effects; the constant bass pulse and rigid drum patterns keep the hips jacking in time; and the gushy melody lines, tingly chord changes, and wordless nymph-diva moans trigger those overwhelming peaks and euphoric rushes.

Paul Oakenfold's 1998 Tranceport (Kinetic/Reprise) CD mix is a near-perfect example of the genre's lighter side. The spiky-haired British DJ triggers numerous hands-in-the-air climaxes with a liberal mix of sky-tickling piano tinkles, endless breakdowns/build-ups, sugary synth hooks, and countless catchy melodies. Tranceport is the aural equivalent of a Steven Spielberg movie -- emotionally manipulative, technically amazing, and impossible to resist. The album went on to sell more than 150,000 copies (huge numbers for a DJ mix CD), and it helped to establish Oakenfold as a massive marquee draw.

The inside photo on Oakenfold's latest double-disc mix CD, Perfecto Presents Another World (Sire), attests to his drawing power. Performing in front of 100,000 in London's Wembley Stadium, he stands with arms outstretched toward the mass of indiscriminate faces, as if to say: "Dude, I'm huge!" And if there's one word to describe his sound, that's it: huge. I don't think there's a club large enough to contain him -- buzzing tracers cut swaths across the sound spectrum, synth lines sketch elliptical patterns in the sky, distant explosions fill up every remaining space. This feels really cool enveloped inside a club's mega-sized speaker system: every echo hit and tonal nuance registers on the skin and in the gut. But at home, Another World is not as powerful. Because even though it sounds great -- the effects are tingly and shiny in all the right places -- it doesn't deliver the euphoric pleasures that Tranceport did. In fact, it never really launches off the pre-orgasmic plateau.

Oakenfold displays an acute identity crisis here. Half of him wants to please the crowd of rock fans, Europop lovers, and fresh-faced candy ravers who flock to his shows -- thus the inclusion of embarrassing Led Zeppelin remixes (Quiver's rerub of "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You"), Lost Witness's hair-tossing remake of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren," and gauzy Sarah McLachlan vocals (on Delerium's "Silence"). But he wants his underground DJ cred, too. So Another World shuns the heartwarming melodies and goal-oriented trajectory of Tranceport for a mix that's more oblique. Weighed down with trippy instrumentals that are impressive from a geeky sound-design point of view -- how do you get a bass line to mimic a jet engine? -- most of the album feels like interchangeable DJ tools used with precision but no direction. The result is a disc that's too gooey to make it with technophiles and too reserved for American pop tastes.

John Digweed displays a far more single-minded purpose -- the 22 tracks on his new double-disc mix CD, Global Underground: Los Angeles (Boxed), could have been produced by a single Prada-wearing hipster. Dark, sleek, austere, and surprisingly subtle, Los Angeles sounds like a two-hour extrapolation of one musical thought. Over the course of their residency at Twilo, Digweed and his DJ partner Sasha have garnered a reputation for marathon track mixing: their once-a-month turntable sessions sometimes last over eight hours. On Los Angeles, Digweed attempts to compress the essence of a particularly memorable five-hour set at LA's Mayan Theatre into two hours. Even at this "short" length, he takes it slow and methodical. On disc #1, that distinctive "boom-tiss-boom-tiss" doesn't enter until the 18-minute mark. It sounds more like Darwinian evolution than track blending: twisting, rubber-banding beats explode and implode like dying stars; distant hi-hat sizzles morph into staccato drum snaps; corrosive synth drones drift from background buzz to frontal-lobe burn.

Digweed's æsthetic is very English; there's something reserved and precious about his pristinely arranged and micro-managed techno-funk. Even when the groove gets pretty potent, he pulls it back from that Dionysian edge, as if to say, "Now we wouldn't want to get too sweaty, would we?"

And whereas Los Angeles sometimes sounds like architecture, with Digweed building layer upon layer of spacy effects, electro-tribal rhythms, and deep bass into a towering block of sound, fellow Brit Dave Ralph practices a bit of deconstruction on his latest disc, Love Parade: Berlin (Kinetic), which was inspired by his performance at last summer's Berlin extravaganza. In the course of a 62-minute mix, Ralph slowly applies then strips away rippling syncopations, sentimental synth pads, and rococo ornamentation to reveal the automated, piston-pumping heart at the core of trance's worldwide appeal. Alternating rugged breakbeats with lush keyboard patterns, luxurious arpeggios with pounding bass, Love Parade manifests the yin-yang duality of Ralph's æsthetic -- aggressive and fierce, but also willowy and lithe. Disregard the hip cachet, the bloated salaries, and the celebrity gigs: Ralph, like Oakenfold and Digweed, proves worthy of the superstar-DJ tag for all the right reasons.

Dave Ralph performs at Avalon this Saturday, April 7. Paul Oakenfold performs at Avalon this Monday, April 9. Call (617) 262-2424.