Lucid Living: (Important) Tendons Of The Organic Trance TotalityL
Trance as a name for a musical category is a misnomer, as it doesn’t put us into a surreal context, it pulls us out of one! Our daily surreality (or should it be sub-reality?), imposed by an unhappy and mediated world, dissipates like a contrail, and we are left with a clarity that is unmistakably real. Any haze that remains has a laser plane shone through it that highlights its organic curvature, beholden to no structural logic that would normally draw our focus a la our capitalized and technologiized societies. The experience we have gradually draws all of our bodies into motion (as they should be given our biological predispositions). Feel free… to listen to the exquisitely titled “fake awake” as you suffer through my breaches with logic.
Sweep The Filter: Towards A Revisceration Of Im-media
Trance allows the real world (that is, the cold technologized world) that we have now to enter in elements such as filtered down sounds. Through acts such as filtering and amplification, trance is displaying in sound what all mediums in our over mediated world really do. Mediums don’t add anything to vitality—they strip away many surrounding overtones to give a very contrived, weak, and alienating connection; a controlled and corrupted connection. Trance utilizes this feature which we as the captive victims from civilization’s domesticating modalities (as in Stockholm Syndrome) are so allured to, and then it quickly yet gradually adds back the wholesome tones. It does this perhaps (because not all trance ingeniousness need be the same) through both a filter sweep in the single lead, and a volume sweep through the larger movement of the full orchestration, all instruments choosing to be in full interrelation as cells of a body. Before this unity, in the previous minutes of the song, the individualized or cliquey instruments were all introduced as powerful yet fiercely independent and essentially lacking to reach their full potential (though still beautiful if the composer chose the elements correctly).
The domesticated sounds from before the breakdown are then all transformed through synthetic combination and amplification that lay out a path for all of we freedom seekers to leave our alienated pigeon holes of reified experience. Trance does all this—it displays our cages naked, then it melts our chains, and then finally we are guided in the art of flying.
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When the song is in full swing, there is the overflowing of emotion and energy, and the rhythm sings to all of our emotions and speaks to all that is neglected and marginalized in our current world. It recognizes the waking reality that we feel, but it takes us in waking life in to the literal dreams that we have of rebecoming the animals that we were so intended by a mutualistic natural milleu. Animals that are so free we wouldn’t even call them human. Indeed, there would be no suggestion, no impetus, no need to call…
Only the most brilliant trance songs have us climb up the mountain and jump off the world. Most fall short and return us to earth, elevated perhaps but still as caged animals. The select songs (or the songs that select us) are the matchmakers to wed our true dreams with a truer reality. It would be wrong to say it was goD’s music, but not so to say the music of gods.
Notes:
L – As the title suggests, this piece is a tendon, or element, of a larger philosophical expose that I have kept caged up for almost a decade. It has overgrown its cage many times, and I thought I’d give it some play time now. May that time come soon, if not in writing then in the unleashing of the bottled up organic forces of difference that we suppress in lieu of conformity.
Subverses 