“Fuck Trance”: A Story of Revulsion and Revival

An original "Fuck Trance" t-shirt from the early days of DEMF

Next week marks the 15th annual techno festival in Downtown Detroit. Those who attended the very first DEMF, way back in 2000, look back at that weekend as a magical moment when the city's thriving electronic music community came out of the darkened clubs and warehouses of the 1990s and into the daylight for the first time.

But even out in the wide-open space of Hart Plaza, there was a shadowy underground at play. Down the main entrance path that spilled out into the center of the riverfront public space, a bustling row of temporary commerce consisting of booths selling glow sticks and techno t-shirts hid a secret shipment of contraband. Underneath the table of one of the stalls run by a local clothing boutique sat a box of t-shirts unfit for public display. The items of clothing in question featured just two words written across the chest: "Fuck Trance."

Printed as a mischievous middle finger to the late-90s mainstream electronica scene that many purists viewed as the antithesis of Detroit's austere-yet-soulful sound, the organizers of the festival proclaimed the profane shirts as inappropriate for the family-friendly (at the time, free) event. Others humorless buzzkills objected to the negativity at an event meant as a positive celebration of music.

The only way to procure a "Fuck Trance" t-shirt was to know somebody who could get you one. Like finding out the directions to one of the secret underground parties that had nurtured Detroit techno scene for a decade. And if you happened to be hip enough to buy one, it was worn with great pride.

Fast-forward to 2014, and one can imagine the same sentiment being directed towards EDM or dubstep, the sounds du jour that have reached mainstream oversaturation. Trance, however, has become largely a non-issue in contemporary dance music. But listen closely, and you can hear the genre's melodic vibes creeping back into vogue. Now, it's not the old generation of gelled-hair disc jocks bringing the sound back. Rather, a new generation of buzzy underground acts are rediscovering the emotive side of house and techno—a style that is rich in lush chord progressions, bleeping arpeggio synths and swooning atmospheric vocals. Even the epic breakdown, the epitome of trance's crimes against techno and house, is back with a vengeance.

"It has that epic break, where you put up your hands and reach for the lasers," laughs Beatport marketing manager Mike Chapman. "But now it's the cool crowd doing it."

A veteran of the 90s Denver rave scene, where he first developed a love of melodic dance music, Chapman says he first began noticing the reintroduction of emotive trance vibes in his current home city of Berlin several years back. Of course, as a major nexus in the underground dance music scene, what gained popularity in Berlin soon caught on around the world.

"Going out in Berlin, especially in the Open Air scene, you're hearing more melodies than loopy drums," Chapman says. "I don't think [the sound] ever went away, to be honest. Now we just have some pied pipers, who people are looking up to, playing it.

One need look know further than the Movement-Detroit festival line-up this year to confirm what Chapman is saying. Many of the most popular purveyors of the new melodic sound, including Tale of Us, Daniel Avery and Dixon, mingle unassumingly with revered techno titans like Carl Craig and Jeff Mills. Unlike 15 years ago, no one would accuse the former of being less authentic than the later.

This arbitrary divide in sound isn't completely new, either. Two veterans on the Movement bill, John Digweed and Michael Mayer, have been delving into the melodic side of house and techno for decades. For it, techno tastemakers dissed Digweed in the late-90s for his famed progressive house style. Mayer, on the other hand, has never lost the purists credentials he garnered as one of the heads of Cologne Germany's Kompakt Records. Maybe the genre "pop ambient" (a termed coined as the title of Kompakt's annual compilation, now in it's 13th edition), was simply more palatable for those who pass judgement.

"The word trance has been given a bad rap," Chapman says. "I feel weird even calling it trance. I use it tongue and cheek. It's house music that's just changing into something else."

That change has actually been a long time coming. Chapman traces the current revitalized trance sound back to one particular track, Innervisions artist Åme's signature 2005 tune, "Rej." But like all new musical styles, that theoretical ground zero was derived from plenty of influences that came before.

"At the time we made 'Rej' we were listening to a lot of music by Philipp Glass and Steve Reich, which inspired us to try out some arpeggios," explains Frank Wiedemann, one half of Åme. "Isolée's music also had an impact on our music by that time. I guess we were searching for something that sounded "minimalistic," but with harmonies and melodies instead of just bleeps."

"I had a debate with some friends about what genre the song belonged in," recalls Chapman. "It could go trance, deep house or techno. It confused everybody, which is great."

Chapman is still excited to hear more and more melodic, emotive, epic and (let's just say it) trance-y sounds seeping into dance music, although he still favors a limited approach to the hands in the air moments these sounds inspire, lest the predictable routines than killed trance the first time take hold again. "You don't want too much sugar in your bowl."

"Things come and go in fashion," he states, before predicting as a lark, "It'll be disco house around the corner.

"For now, people are just happy to hear those sounds and to have something emotive coming around again,' he concludes. "I'm really happy that people aren't afraid of melodies in dance music.