EVERY GENRE PROJECT - September 30 - Uplifting Trance

Genre of the Day - Uplifting Trance

Album of the Day - Out There and Back by Paul van Dyk (2000)

Lord knows that I needed an injection of uplifting music today. I came to discover that, unbeknownst to me, my romantic pursuits had developed into a tragicomedy, playing out in flames until the theater had burned down while I continued to act out the show. My hard-earned notions of faith, trust, and love have been sucked dry by the vicious reality that there exist people with no loyalty to these notions nor basic integrity. I do apologize for using this lead as a diary, but I am at a loss at how to transcribe these personal misfortunes and realizations that certain people are simply sinister into my daily exploration of music and meaning. I suppose it’s perfect in grasping today’s genre’s function more intimately, in the long-release catharsis of a celestial trance rave. 

Uplifting trance is among the category of genres more having to do with vibes than musical distinctions. Vibes are still worthy qualifiers, even if they’re harder to pin down: music is simply vibration, after all. Psychedelically-inclined trance, the mainstay of Goa’s European visitors, has come up a couple of times in hi-tech and full-on psytrance and suomisaundi, but I haven’t delved further into trance’s overarching history. Trance emerged out of Germany in the late ‘80s, centered in Frankfurt; its vision was partly derived from techno and house, but the mechanism at its core to tease out a particular aspect of EDM’s euphoric potential was in its focus on extended build ups. Additionally, its emphasis on melodies, blended and weaved with fantastical and hypnotic flair perhaps indebted to dub, lent it an airy ambience. 

Uplifting trance fine-tuned these early defining strands of trance music, codifying the anthemic buildup-breakdown dichotomy and washing listeners with emotion-inducing riffs to truly give a raver the most bang for their buck, emotional-impact speaking, of their MDMA purchase. These riffs were often delivered in wispy pad synths rather than stabby piano melodies, giving listeners a bed of clouds on which to float, though it also hardened its drum sounds to accentuate presence across the sonic spectrum. You can easily trace a line from uplifting trance’s blend of maximalist buildups and drops, euphoric to a mass-pleasing extreme, to the later phenomena of festival and big-room house and EDM’s crossover to the mainstream. The same people instrumental in those later trends were at the forefront of uplifting trance: Armin van Buuren, Tiësto, and today’s Paul van Dyk among them.

Paul van Dyk came of age on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall to have properly experienced the vibrant EDM scenes of West Berlin; fortunately for his career, that arbitrary but insurmountable distance grew his appreciation for music that could expand to universal and transcendental levels tenfold. Vibes-based though it may be, a deeply-seeded drive to capture uplifting trance’s potential informs van Dyk’s exploratory 2000 Out There and Back. The indecipherable tongues-speaking vocal snippets, dubby piano keys that surrender to loungey, misty pads gradually and nearly imperceptibly ascend and ratchet up to high heaven as “Vega” opens the curtains. Elsewhere, more immediate moments like the upwards key change taking “Another Way” several degrees higher launches the listener into the stratosphere. Though its melodies are indeed uplifting and often gorgeous asin the sparkling luminescence of “Out There and Back,” van Dyk doesn’t shy away from harder-nosed sounds on the low-end as in the radioactive metallism of “Traveling” and the skittering, Miami bass-esque heavy claps sharing space with breathy nothings on “Together We Will Conquer.” When in the right headspace, this is music to raise serotonin: we all need a music-induced chemical shift some days.