In the Sea of Shining Light

The other day I was running on the treadmill at the gym, searching for inspiration to continue springing my lumbering legs, when suddenly Mike Shiver & Aruna’s Everywhere You Are from Above & Beyond’s Anjunabeats 7 (Disc 2) began cascading over my cochlea, tickling my brain and lifting my soul. This shimmering trance track speaks of the songwriter’s experience of transcendence in a human relationship, one that marks a person so deeply that he experiences his beloved’s presence in some way wherever he goes. The song speaks of presence in the moment of togetherness, surrendered defenses, and the indelible nature of being born anew by such a renewing experience. It is the stuff of really terrible new-wave jazz cuts, of fifties soda-pop ballads, top-forty teenie-bopper fodder, the swooning achievements of Seal and Maxwell, the eighties canon of Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins, or the foggy longing of Dave Matthews and his band. Transcendence in the cradle of romantic relationships spans the gamut in pop music, from mere freshman limerence to noble star-crossed lovers. Simply writing about this strange and much sought-after phenomenon is not enough to make a great song though— something greater is required.

What caused me to stop and consider Everywhere You Are wasn’t solely the beauty of unmet longing in the lyrics. Pop music wouldn’t be pop music if it wasn’t smattered with musings about the merits (and costs) of love and interpersonal connection. What fascinated me was my total psycho-physical response to the song as it invigorated my tired body and enlivened my weary spirit. It was the collective harmony between every dimension of the song that carried me through. Trance as a genre tends towards an experience of the transcendent by the very substance of its mode of existence. Generally speaking, trance tracks are produced in keys that tend to be naturally emotive and uplifting. I don’t think it’s a mistake that the greatest trance artists of the day hail from Scandinavia, sometimes slightly south. There is high, structured drama in the music, like a good epic legend. There is continuity in storytelling, as trance records are mixed together, overlapping beginning and end. Just as each individual record reveals its own contribution to the drama, so does the whole mix meander through forests and seas and mountain crags. There is drama and achievement, tumbling back into continued drama. There is much to be discovered in a well-executed mix, if you are patient enough to listen to the whole story being told.

My good friend Taylor Black recently turned me on to the trance-trio Above & Beyond, and I was very pleased to discover that they double as my long-time favorite trance producers Oceanlab, in the company of the luminous Justine Suissa on vocals. Above & Beyond have nearly forty-thousand followers on Facebook. They offer a free Podcast on iTunes that Mr. Black clued me in on, called Trance Around the World (TATW). What impresses me so much about artists like A&B has to do with what I am getting at in this post. For those of us who love music deeply (and I suspect especially so for genres like trance, progressive house, etc), I believe it is the experience of transcendence in music that draws us in so profoundly. Just like an enchanted encounter with one’s beloved, brilliantly written music can touch one’s heart in a lasting manner. Such trance music envelops and overwhelms the listener, and it does so within the bounds of a building, metered order. It is wild and big, yet particular and elegant. The structure is bright and phosphorescent, spilling out of the quantitative and into the qualitative. Both are necessary for its success, neither can adequately hold its bounds alone.

Sometimes both melody and lyric aim at something higher; other times the lyrics or the music or both fall short. Some DJ’s blow it big time here, especially in the dimension of lyrics. They lose the light, instead steering the listener towards what Frankl calls in The Will to Meaning a “biochemical detour” to an experience of happiness or joy. Cheap sex or the siren-song of chemical cocktails comes between the listener and the true object of beauty, the object of remembrance that the listener consciously, or, more commonly, subconsciously searches for. One is invited to Pleasure Island instead, to squander whatever wages one had garnered in a more innocent stage of the experience. Pig & Dan’s Addiction from a few years ago drones repeatedly “Women, drugs, and rock n’ roll: Addiction.” Whether or not the record states it with such succinct brevity, you know what you are getting when such a record submits to needle: you want more than what you now have. A state of excited dissatisfaction sets in, and the listener is driven to the cheap thrill of adrenaline in whatever escapades ensue.

In contrast, the listener gets a record like Taxi Girl’s High Glow, or DJ Shah featuring Adrina Thorpe’s Who Will Find Me? Pure, pulsating beauty in a song produced for a serious sound system. It’s not difficult to picture the refrains in these tracks as solid stone archways pointed toward heaven, or fiery stained-glass windows emblazoned by sunlight. The arabesque four-and-four beat designs provide an adequate structure for lyrics about dancing in morning light in the sea of shining light or omniscient benevolence couched in “high glow.” The music is large enough to support the weighty lyrics, and something of a glittering Chinese dragon festooned in a number of unexpected charms meanders past you at 140 beats per minute.

The best trance music points the listener to joy, and the best study of joy that I have read is in CS Lewis’ Surprised by Joy. Before I mentioned the phenomenon of the conscious or subconscious search for a remembered object. Lewis’ definition of joy is Sehnsucht, unmet longing, and it is the object of that unmet longing that such music provides a taste of. This aim could never acquire a total view of what it intends, but a small, absurdly potent corner of a robe is revealed to share its glory. The greatest DJs tease the listener, repeatedly ushering the listener to a peek at flaming brilliance just beyond the veil of the limited, allowing a brief glimpse of this shining beauty. The properly-oriented listener who is looking for the moment is touched and inspired and something that wasn’t formerly present in the soul is born afresh. The dim grayness of the mundane is penetrated by a bright ray here and there, and one who is able to navigate around the doom inherent in the siren call of the inauthentic in the club world’s seedier elements may just find him or herself marked by an experience of radiant joy.