20091104

descriptum37

state> half asleep
soundtrack> Marie-Joseph Canteloube de Malaret - La delaissado/La delaissee (from Chants d'Auvergne, 2nd series)


I find myself in the empire of sound, trying to oppose the permanent enemy: another empire, the empire of uselessness and boredom.

And speaking of sound>

I arrived recently on a personal web-page of a pretentious someone criticizing modern music, such as house, dance or trance, for being over-simplistic and based on a poor melody line, while, for instance, classical music is real music. Well, I don't know if that is precisely the case. Actually I have good reasons to believe this is not true at all. It is just like arguing that culture, for example, is only composed by high culture and that popular or pop culture has absolutely no meaning, and thus no importance.

When I discovered trance, back in 1997, I was amazed precisely by its capacity of expressing emotions by melody and small variations only, with a minimal voice theme, if any. Another thing that comes to my mind is that well-known trance producers - such as Brian Transeau, a.k.a. BT, Rolf Ellmer a.k.a. Jam El Mar from the German duo Jam & Spoon; or, for the Romanian case, the band Sistem, are in fact trained (and, which is even more to it, well trained) in classical music.

My view is that we should not automatically infer that, if a new form of expression is simpler and more minimalistic than a classic form, it is necessarily poorer, 'tough this is unfortunately often the case. This is a confusion. The opposite could be, in fact - and in a good deal of cases it actually is - more appropriate.

I would finally like to demonstrate my point. Thus I invite you to listen to the next song. Composed in 1997 by Brian Transeau and part of an epic album that I already mentioned on this blog quite a few times - Electric Sky Church Music, a.k.a. ESCM -, album which actually set up trance music as a independent genre, firewater is simple and minimalistic if we consider the musical texture, but at the very same time rich by its meanings.

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