Entranced by the Beat

A sampler of post-rave tracks takes the Trance pulse on both sides of the Atlantic

Pomme Fritz

The Orb

Island Records

Headtravel

Various Artists

Moonshine Music

Late in the 1980s, raves ruled the landscape of dance music. Thousands of people congregrated in unusual places--abandoned warehouses, empty fields, condemned housing projects--to get high on Ecstasy or Special K and dance to techno.

The atmosphere at raves, what with drugs and music at 170 beats per minute, tended to be intense--a cross between Woodstock and Hieronymous Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights." And so a cooling room was introduced. In the cooling room, ravers could come down from their highs while listening to a sort of music that came to be known as trance.

Trance is electronic music often built on dance beats, but considerably slowed down. Creative and eclectic sampling lies at the heart of trance, and its success depends on creating a rich aural texture. The theme of trance music was often an aural voyage, a good trip ravers could take while on a bad trip.

With the popularity of raves dying down, trance has taken on a life of its own, and is now played in clubs. Trance is also being marketed as a 90s version of mood music, and with considerable success, one might add. Just look at the success of the two Enigma albums, which display most of the elements of trance but are friendlier to the demands of radio.

Orb, one of the acknowledged masters of trance, recently released their first album since 1992's U.f.orb. It is really a mini-album, a sort of appetizer to Orb's new follow-up full-length album. Orb really takes on the metaphor of appetizer, calling the album Pomme Fritz, and naming some of the tracks after English pub food--"Pomme Fritz (Meat 'n Veg)," "More Gills Less Fishcakes," and "Bang 'er 'n Chips."

Pomme Fritz, recorded in London and Berlin, certainly reflects its AngloGermanic origins. The CD cover shows a diagram of what looks like strangely beautiful 19th century machinery. This idea of the mechanical as beautiful is developed in the music, which is much more industrial-sounding than Orb's previous work. U.f.orb was remarkable for its blend of technology and natural sounds--running water, gurgling Russian voices and an Arabic muezzin--but Pomme Fritz focuses more on the technology of the music. Some of Orb's trademark water sounds remain, but Pomme Fritz has a more metallic and apocalyptic flavor.

There are some very witty touches, such as a sampled British voice proclaiming over and over, "Don't worry; all your childhood traumas have been erased, along with most of your personality." "His Immortal Logness," Pomme Fritz's last and shortest track, is in many ways the best, combining the sound of a German accordion playing what sounds like a distended techno polka with a richly layered sonic fabric. It is ironic, irreverent and immensely enjoyable.

Pomme Fritz, like pommes frites, is not a full meal, but it certainly possesses a great deal of flavor and whets the appetite for Orb's next album.

Another recent trance release is a compilation from Moonshine Music called Headtravel, which defines its purpose as "exploring electronic music and imaging." Headtravel describes itself as "poking a stick at the rapidly decaying boundaries that separate modes of media/methods of communications/us." This sort of talk would appear to lend the whole enterprise a certain air of pretentiousness, especially when the liner notes include the quote, "It is only when we step away from the actual and begin to explore the possible that life's infinities begin to reveal themselves to us." Deep, eh? The musicians on Headtravel certainly take themselves and their music seriously, and that's not altogether a bad thing. It makes for excellent music, and you can disregard the Alvin Toffler futuristic cyber-Utopia talk.

Headtravel comes from San Francisco, which for a decade and a half has been a hotbed of electronic music, and the group reflects the richness and diversity of San Francisco's electronic music scene. The CD also suggests San Francisco's close ties to the computer industry in the Silicon Valley: the first track is a CD-ROM file featuring hallucinogenic digital imagery by SFX Lab.

The music on Headtravel is excellent and seems to improve with each new track. "Shell," by Nail, is the best groove on the album, mixing a throbbing beat with the best in atmospheric trance sounds, winds blowing, sudden bursts of melody and rainforest noises. "Tesseract," by Darin Marshall, and "Environment," by A New Consciousness, are also standouts, delicate, lyrical and incessantly danceable. Headtravel is highly recommended. Trance on.