The Grand Narrative

My Personal Introduction to Trance Music

(Photo by rjane)

(To all new readers of the blog, welcome, but you may well wonder what a post on Trance music is doing on a blog ostensibly about Korean social issues. It is still linked, but to understand how you really need to read part 1 and part 3 and part 4! I’ll add links to the latter two once I’ver written them. In the meantime, hopefully you’ll find the post interesting in its own right)

For now, please forget what you think Trance music is. Even if you consider yourself an aficiando, what you consider Trance music to be may be quite unlike what I do, and for understanding my ultimate point to this series of posts it’s vital that you know what I mean by it. But this post isn’t about Trance music per se, and so won’t have any definitions, or long, convoluted histories of the genre; for that, see the link above. It’s not about the dance music scene in Korea either. Rather, it starts with short discussions of the songs that got me hooked, and then the bulk of the post is about how they make me feel. So yes, one of my more personal posts…consider this a warning(!), but I think that many people will be able to relate to the feelings, even if they reached them through other means.

Any quote from the Matrix is by now a cliche, but I saw it on TV last night and I was reminded of one as I typed the above: to paraphrase Morpheus then, not providing a definition means that I can’t show you what Trance music is…you just have to see and experience it for yourself. Accordingly, I’ve uploaded all the songs I mention, but when you click on the links, give them a minute or so to download. And jumping ahead, if possible then I recommend you listen to them all on headphones.

Okay then, I first got into Trance as a university student in Auckland in late-1998, when I bought the Lagered!2000 compilation soon after it was released. I didn’t know what to expect, but it was difficult to ignore the posters for the CDs and promotional dance-parties, and living with the resident DJ at the (then) premier gay nightclub in town at the time, I was already getting into electronic music anyway. Buying it slightly hungover on a rare Saturday morning I wasn’t working, my stomach soon turned at the House music that was on the first CD, although much later I did learn to like 666 by Amokk on it, which isn’t Trance at all but which I’ve linked to because some grizzled Korea old-timers like myself may be grateful, recalling that it was popular in Korea for years afterward. By the time I actually got around to the Trance on the second CD then, my stomach and hangover told me it was high time to take a nap, so I lay in bed, plugged in the headphones, and this is what I heard:

Legacy (Show Me Love) - Space Brothers.mp3

As you’ll see, being sleepy certrainly helped a lot in my first impression of that. But I’m especially glad I listened to it on headphones, because listening to almost any Trance on a stereo makes it difficult to pick up the background melodies, but which to me define it. Maybe that’s why House music is more popular: slow as shit (with the exception of 666 above), and something I couldn’t dance to it to save my life, but you’re sure not missing much when you first hear it at a nightclub. But if that track didn’t do it for you, then I forgive you: it was never that popular, and if I wasn’t sort of…nearly…well not quite in the end really involved with a girl at the time and hadn’t immediately associated it with our relationship, then it probably wouldn’t be one of my favourites either (my wife never reads this blog, so…ahem…Zoe Hilton, this post is dedicated to you!). New mixes of this next one, though, are still being produced 8 years later:

Gouryella (Original Mix) - Gouryella.mp3

The first 2 minutes are admittedly a little loud and much too long, but they’re worth it for the change at the 2:10 minute mark. Personally, it made me feel like I was floating on clouds, and I still revel in a piece of music, that from 2:45 on, somehow still sends my spirit soaring but which I can sense is dying at the same time, although you only really get that effect if you’ve listened to the song many times and so know what to expect. Sure, if you’re not converted yet, then that sentance may sound like the height of literary pretension, but that’s honestly how it makes me feel when I listen to it. And never fear, for there is this even better track from the 2nd CD of the Gatecrasher Global Sound System compilation of 2000 instead. The section from 1:20 is simply divine (sounds gay I know, but it’s a bit late to worry about that), but unlike the section from 2:45 in the track from Gouryella that you just listened to, the section after 1:20 here would be lacking and not so climatic without the buildup before it: 

The Adventures Of - Terra Ferma.mp3

And if you still didn’t like that, then just fuck off, you philistine I still haven’t given up on you quite yet I’m afraid, because the genre has naturally changed quite a bit in the 8 years since those tracks were produced, and I confess that tracks like the above are a little too slow even for me these days. So finally here’s another, much faster masterpiece from about 2004, and as I’ll explain, the accompanying video is especially appropriate. If you do like it, and surely you’re a mere husk of a human whose soul has already long since died if you don’t, under that is my favorite, even better version of the original song, albeit without a video. A little long at 9 minutes, then feel free to jump ahead 2 minutes, or even to the 3:50 mark if you’re impatient:

Love or loathe all of the above, you get the idea: it’s called Trance music because it puts you into a trance. A profound and most unexpected point I hear you say, but then even supposed experts at Real Groovy in my hometown, the biggest record store in New Zealand, simply have no clue and in 2008 will dump them alongside Hip-Hop, Garage and House in the “electronic music” section, meaning it can take an hour and half just to sift through everything just find a few Trance CDs that you like (some CD stores soooo deserve their declining sales).

That rant aside, when I say it puts you into a trance I’m not talking about drug-induced ones, although obviously drugs like ecstacy are a natural fit to the genre (I’ll talk more about that in Part 3). My point is that the music put(s) me into a trance without drugs, and I’m not just saying that because this is a public blog, and in Korea; I merely lacked the money and a spare weekend to zonk out while I was a student, and with using chainsaws and jackhammers and diggers in my part-time jobs on building sites, couldn’t afford too many late nights either (I’m rather fond of my limbs). And now? I’m on the wrong side of the Sea of Japan (another issue for Part 3, and bring it on VANK!), and come to think of it, am a responsible husband and father too.

Landscapes of the Mind

But what then, is a trance that isn’t induced by drugs? Do I mean I was hypnotised? No…at the time it was difficult to describe, but if pressed I would have said that it was a palpable sense of being transported to another place, complete with futuristic electronics, exotic locations, bright clothing, a sense of enpowerment and of being an adult, lots of attractive, sexually assertive girls in tight-fitting clothes (naturally), more money, more power, a lot of potential, and of living my dreams, whatever they may be. The music was and is certainly the best vehicle for getting “there” (although nowadays youtube videos like the above help a lot), but so too were even the flyers and posters for the associated CDs and dance parties and magazines like Re:Mix, which, in hindsight, I started to collect for precisely this reason. And then of course, my free plane ticket to Korea arrived, and suddenly I thought I really was “there,” especially after being a peniless student and then graduate previously.

(photo by davidbarker2)

Like a friend I discussed this post with 3 nights ago did, you may balk at the amount of meaning and significance which I attached to Trance paraphanalia before I came to Korea, especially when you learn that I still have some, in pristine condition, next to me in a folder as I type this. But responded with mentioning the “Look of the New” series of articles in this edition of Time magazine from July 2000 (I was on a roll that night), which made here what I thought, back in 2000, were ludicrous claims for the significance of fonts, of all things, in people’s lives. But then I reread this in the introductory article, and gradually came round to their point of view:

…design can be the place where art converges with ethics, as it does in some of the work by the people profiled here, the first of 100 in a new series on the world’s most innovative people. With them, determined imagination has rescued ruined landscapes or built housing for refugees. Design can also be the point where art meets science–some of these creative characters use computers the way another generation used pencils. In the end, design can even be the place where art and commerce both meet metaphysics. It is, after all, mostly by the sum of what designers produce that we understand ourselves to be living in a particular time. Nature is so slow to change that we can hardly grasp the flow of things. It is the world we manufacture that shows us how time passes. “Then” was when things looked that way. Now is when they look this way. Here are people making that way go this way. (italics added).

People thing nothing of remembering an art exhibition or concert significant to them by framing a poster of it for posterity, like I did for this one below 3 years ago, and my friend came round to the idea that retaining flyers and CD covers and so forth was no different. But what thing, or what place, exactly was I trying to preserve by so doing? 

Use it or lose it

Some of these essays function as an elaborate mechanism by which the author removes, or at least scratches at, a particular thorn in his or her side. (Thomas Beller, Personals, p. ix)

No matter how much I felt like it was for my first few years here, in hindsight this place or thing wasn’t and could never have been Korea, because it was well before I arrived that I got into the habit of staying up late at night writing and drawing mindmaps about it, feeling that I had my finger on the zeitgeist of the millenium, that only I was so close, and that it just had to be gotten down on paper. Not succeeding, my mind eventually roamed beyond Trance music, if only for the fact that it’s difficult to sustain an interest in it when you can’t afford to go to dance parties, and ultimately came to rest in spending the odd hour or so sneakily photocopying entire books on popular culture in my newly “old” university library. Fortunately, it was at about that time that I got my golden ticket to Korea, and soon had the money to buy the books themselves. Barely pausing for breath, in the course of my first two years in Korea I ended up buying the following books, in addition to all the money spent on typical newbie activities like drinking, trying to sleep with as many locals as possible, a trip to England, and numerous books on Korea and learning Korean: 

• Postmodernism and Japan, ed. by Masao Miyoshi and H. Harootunian (1989) 
• Cultural Imperialism, by John Tomlinson (1991)
• Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of the American Consciousness, by Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen (1992)
• Elite Media amidst Mass Culture: A Critical Look at Mass Communication in Korea, ed. by Chie-woon Kim & Jae-won Lee (1994)
• An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, by Dominic Strinati (1995)
• Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North, by Paul Smith (1997)
• Hyperreality and Global Culture, by Nick Perry (1998)
• McDonalidization Revisited: Critical Essays on Consumer Culture, ed. by Mark Alfino, John Caputo, and Robin Wynyard (1998)
• Mirror of Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, ed. by Stepehn Vlastos (1998)
• Postmodern Cartograhies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture, by Brian Jarvis (1998)
• The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries, and Global Cultures, ed. by D. Martinez (1998)
• Postmodern Encounters: Baudrillard and the Millenium, by Christopher Horrocks (1999)
• The Zizek Reader, ed. by Elizabeth and Edmond Wright (1999)
• An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture, by Dominic Strinati (2000)
• The McDonaldization of Society (New Century Edition), by George Ritzer (2000)
• The Pocket Essentials - Cyberpunk, by Andrew Butler (2000)
• Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire, by Peter Stearns (2001)
• From Tradition to Consumption: Construction fo a Capitalist Culture in South Korea, by Dennis Hart (2001)
• Postmodern Encounters: Umberto Eco and Football, by Peter Trifonas (2001)
• Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea, ed. by Laurel Kendall (2002)

(Photo by /\ltus)

(Edit: Don’t let me forget the hundreds of pages I copied of articles from the cultural studies site www.popmatters.com either. It’s still a very cool site)

I didn’t mention all of those books just to show off my geekish credentials: those few of you still reading this will already be well aware of them. Actually, I didn’t realise how many they were, and as I pulled more out of my bookcases the growing list served to show me how simply nuts I must have been back then, although on the positive side it did at least lead to the first, albeit very small sign of my existance on the internet (written in response to this), the only one until this blog came along 5.5 years later (Yay! I’m a player!). Also, many of them are quite obscure, and I’m curious as to if any readers have read any of them and what they thought of them: ultimately, writing out all their titles out by hand may be the only way to find the odd one or two people worldwide who not have only read them, but are stil sufficiently interested in them to type out their titles into search engines (but which is not to say that all are worth the effort!).

But in fact, in the end I didn’t read over half of them, and until I gathered them for writing these posts I hadn’t even gone so far as to physically touch any of them in about 5 years. For yes, through some of them I did finally discover what “it,” or that “place” was, but while it was good in an intellectual sense to find out, it left me feeling older, wiser, and much more cynical about life, all of my previous enthusiasm and passion for the subject literally dissappearing overnight.

And at 2500 words, I’ll have to finish this post on that nail-biting cliffhanger I’m afraid. Part 3 will be actually much more academic - that is, after all, how geeks like me come to their epiphanies - and part 4 will conclude the series with my manifesto, as it were, akin to the original post’s title.

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