There's something really appealing about the concept of "deconstructed trance." Trance—the musical genre—is so structural, you can only imagine it would lend itself especially well to deconstruction. You imagine an artist sitting down with a box of tools and taking apart the canon piece by piece, ending up with tidy piles of components. Over here, a heap of glassy stabs. Over there, a stack of snare rolls. All the kick drums could go in a box, like so many nuts and bolts—because what is a genre, after all, but a collection of nuts and bolts? The process might be a little bit like disassembling Ikea furniture before a move: carefully stacking all the boards and storing all the little metal bits and wooden pegs in Ziploc baggies—something anyone who owns a lot of records can probably relate to. Except in this case, the goal isn't to reassemble an Expedit; it's to cobble together an entirely different shape, maybe one with a different purpose. It's about a kind of creative misuse.
I'm thinking in particular of a record that Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk put out in 2001, Aural Illusions, under the alias Digital Terrestrial. It consists of just two long tracks, each more than 19 minutes long: "Deconstructed Trance Anthem (Part 01)" and "Deconstructed Trance Anthem (Part 02)". The project isn't as methodical as the process imagined in my hex key fantasy, perhaps, given that Kirk doesn't seem to be stripping trance down to its component parts so much as slicing a blade straight across it. (Come to think of it, "Hex Key Fantasy" would also be a great name for a trance project.)
Both versions of "Deconstructed Trance Anthem" consist mainly of lumpy machine beats spun backwards and forwards while synth stabs rain down in a thin mist. The erratic rhythms recall Oval and Thomas Brinkmann, both of whom have been known to create loops out of the skips generated from physically manipulated media—CDs and vinyl, in their respective cases. With its unsteady assemblage of loops upon loops, "Deconstructed Trance Anthem" seems to be largely about a kind of interrupted energy, as though functionalist dance music's roller-coaster course of crescendos and drops had been twisted into a rickety staircase designed by M.C. Escher and built by drunks.
This week, the concept of deconstructed trance surfaced again, this time in the hands of Teki Latex, head of Paris' Sound Pellegrino label. His "Deconstructed Trance Reconstructed" mixtape is the latest contribution to an ongoing conversation about trance as trope, genre, and state of mind. One key voice in that conversation is Lorenzo Senni, whose 2012 album Quantum Jelly, on Spectrum Spools, plays similarly Escherian tricks with the concept of buildups and sustained intensities; his tracks are similar to Mark Fell's clipped repetitions, but instead of the latter's plucked, plasticized tones, they employ the lush pads and fizzy super-saw stabs of classic Continental trance. At the other end of the spectrum, there's the new wave of instrumental grime artists, like Visionist, Mumdance, Rabit, et al, whose tracks often emphasize trance-like synthesizer melodies over bare-bones beats. Even more explicitly, Planet Mu's Mike Paradinas fused trance and footwork in his "Trancework" mixtape.
To put together his mix, Latex really did break things down in the manner of my imagined home-improvement project. First, he gathered several different kinds of components: drum-free trance in the vein of Lorenzo Senni; synth-based, drum-free grime tracks with trance influences; beatless synth-lead loops from trance sample packs (like this one); and melody-free drum tracks. Then, he says, "it was like playing a musical construction game and re-contextualizing these synth-based pieces by giving them totally different and unpredictable rhythmic identities. The result is meant to be perceived as one long piece of music with several melodic motifs coming in and out."
I had initially assumed that he constructed the mix in an arrangement-friendly software like Ableton, but it turns out that he did the whole thing live, using three CDJ players and a stack of CDRs. That's impressive. I like the fact that his approach unites high concept with a back-to-basics concept of the DJ's craft. As it turns out, that had more to do with his own abilities, which are rooted in traditional DJ skills rather than contemporary digital production. When I asked him if he had created DJ edits of his component parts to mix with, he replied, "Nope! Due to my inability to use any kind of music software to edit tracks (despite 15 years of hanging out in studios and watching producers work) I have developed a liking for the loop functions of the CDJs. So I'm looping in and out and using filters on tracks throughout the mix, and it's all done live, which was especially hard with those trance tools I found in generic trance tool albums (those labeled "Tool 12", "Tool 15" etc. in the tracklisting) because they're all 1 minute long and I had to stretch them out several minutes." Still, he says, those constraints come with their own rewards. "I like it that way because I like working with raw materials rather than edits."
Unlike Paradinas' "Trancework" mix, in which canonical melodies like ATB's "9pm Till I Come" and Da Hool's "Meet Her at Love Parade" are readily recognizable, Latex' mix plays more with trance-like sounds and energies. Indeed, the recognizable elements that make themselves heard—Ellen Allien's "Sehnsucht", Wiley's "Ice Rink", Masters at Work's "Ha Dance" (via MikeQ's "The Ha Dub Rewerk'd")—tend to have little in common with trance, the genre. But the end results are fascinating in their own right. Rather than opting to graft trance melodies onto new rhythms, Latex has created a more complicated, more integral sort of hybrid out of the component tropes of trance and grime—in real time, using three CDJs and their loop buttons. All that, and it flows remarkably well, like a proper club set. Not bad, for something built out of a pile of nuts and bolts.