On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Dan Sicko wrote: > >>Trance in its roots was a marketing tool to identify techno with melody > > That's a real shame that the definition of "techno" had degraded that > quickly in the early 90s, don't you think? > Well real Detroit techno was over before it started in some respects. Kind of like the Velvet Underground -- by the time anyone paid attention it was long since gone. Later on it was seminal in influencing a later generation. The people nowadays that call what they do techno, and more particular Detroit techno are influenced and informed by the originators, but Techno stopped being 'TECHNO' when it spread beyond a very exclusive scene that only really involved a few hundred people in and around Detroit.
Which isn't to say that good music in the dance idiom stopped in 1990 -- it's just not the same thing. There's a global dance culture that has as much to do with fashion and pills as it does with music, and thousands of people producing music on every continent, each with their own agenda. About trance: I've seen a couple of trance DJs that I really liked, and it was because they have taste and seek out interesting things outside the mainstream. The real problem with trance is the same problem with things like filter house, drum and bass, and two step: Specific, limited production tricks and rhythms, that a producer should use once or twice and then try something new, become codified and serve as the basis of a thousand slight variations, all inferior to the original. That there's a market for all that cheap repetition says something about the utilitarian nature of dance music -- DJs always want something new and slamming, but it can't be so new they lose their audience. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
