I don't know about all that, it sounds like you're using the term "rave" just to carry your argument. Whether people were taking it at "raves" or "clubs" makes little difference, and they were, and it absolutely had something to do with why it was placed under schedule 1. To say MDMA was outlawed before it was a popular rec drug in America is a total lie.
Originally posted by wotyzoid
I don't know about all that, it sounds like you're using the term "rave" just to carry your argument. Whether people were taking it at "raves" or "clubs" makes little difference, and they were, and it absolutely had something to do with why it was placed under schedule 1. To say MDMA was outlawed before it was a popular rec drug in America is a total lie.
the majority of early users were hippies and new age yuppies who had come into contact of it bc of therapy. did some random people take it at clubs or nights out? yes. but people were far more likely to be on cocaine or even lsd at a nightclub in those days. and none of the Detroit guys or even the early house pioneers were familiar with the drug when they created house and techno. Heck even Carl Craig who is part of the second wave apparently had never taken it before the 90s. The Detroit and Chicago guys were not making music for people on MDMA when they started. That is a huge difference between electronic music before the rave explosion in 87 and after. And trust me on knowing the story behind the FDA classification. Ive literally had this conversation with the people who were there when it got scheduled 1. The guys who fought against it etc bc they were using it for therapy. The reason it got banned in 85 has far more to do with the fact that right around 84 there started to be the first mention of the drug in the press about how the drug was becoming popular among Hippies, Yuppies, college students, and gay people. You know the exact type of people who were hated by the Reagan administration. The one exception to this is the Texas area where apparently by 83-84 it was already spreading in clubs all because of one guy, forgot his name, who is responsible for coining the term ecstasy btw. but after the schedule change, the market for it collapsed in the US and especially Texas. But what had happened is by 85 it had spread to ibiza through the hippy network. Its from ibiza that it eventually made it out to England and right about this time by sheer good luck and fortune, the early house and techno pioneers were making music that would go perfectly with the drug without knowing it. It was sheer dumb luck.
I think I am not explaining my point very well. When the early house and techno pioneers started making house and techno, none of them set out to make music for MDMA users. They made dance music. Not rave or drug music bc they didn't even know what MDMA was. After the explosion of MDMA in 87-88 suddenly producers started to tinker with music for the experience of the MDMA user specifically. Thats my main point. House and Techno would have been invented even without the drug. I don't think you can say the same for trance and progressive. House and techno might have been forgotten if it wasn't for MDMA but neither Frankie Knuckles or Juan Atkins set out to make music for MDMA users. That all changed. By the time you get to early trance and progressive in the early 90s, those producers started to tinker and make music with the MDMA user specifically in mind. Same for house and techno producers who also tinkered with both genres for the drug user in mind but by that point, house and techno as musical genres were already invented and defined. Just take Phuture Acid Tracks. One of the most infamous MDMA tracks from the first raves in 87. Not one of those guys even knew what MDMA was when they made that track. It just happened that what they made was exactly what guys on MDMA would go wild for.
When the FDA scheduled MDMA as class 1 in 85, it is estimated that only 500k doses of it were consumed total at that time. That is literally like nothing. 500k doses wordwide in a 15 year period is borderline nonexistent use. And the great majority of them were therapeutic use. To think it was some huge popular rec drug is to believe the garbage peddled by the Reagan administration that was fought against tough and nail by the docs on the ground at that time. Its schedule 1 classification is one of the most infamous cases in history bc the entire scientific board of experts disagreed with the scheduling and a primary driver of that was the fact that they didn't actually find evidence for wide spread recreational use and abuse. Without divulging too much about myself, I am a trained physician scientist who is more than familiar with this drug from a scientific perspective and public health perspective and I have had intimate conversations with people who were literally there when this happened.
I see what you're saying, but the PLUR and MDMA relations in dance music didn't just happen with the then baby trance scene. Plenty of PLURTASTIC tracks from other genres in the 90's openly call out to ecstasy.
Generalizing a whole genre back then saying all the music had a drug experience in mind, and a specific drug at that, is kind of a stretch I think. Acid house is the only case. I mean, unless the track is openly calling out to it, I don't know. Even now when some one says K-house, it's ambiguous. Same as saying trance and prog where born out of, or made for MDMA, doesn't sound completely accurate to me.
this thread would be better if you could back up some of your claims with facts or references. You're generalizing a whole lot. And while I understand what you're getting at, it's not really fair.
Also props to DJ RANN for post of the year above. Well said
Oct-12-2018 05:05
SYSTEM-J
IDKFA.
Registered: Sep 2003
Location: Manchester
Even when I have Kenny on Ignore I can still see him posting utter shit. PVP is exactly right. MDMA was not a drug associated with the Chicago or Detroit scenes. It was more associated with the club scene in places like Dallas before it was made illegal. It wasn't until 1987/8 in the UK when British tourists brought the drug back from Ibiza that it cross-pollinated with early house nights in Manchester and London. A sound that was a regional concern in the US exploded into a youth culture phenomenon. The early Chicago and Detroit pioneers were absolutely baffled when they were invited to the UK raves. They'd never seen anything like that reaction to their music, and from white European kids as well! The power of the drug in action.
PVP is also right that trance and prog, like breakbeat hardcore, were the first genres to evolve alongside an active Ecstasy scene (unless we count the nebulous "Balearic" movement as a genre). They are sonic drug science in action.
I think he touches on a really interesting idea, which is that the two waves of popularity for both trance and prog happened at the start and end of the 90s when Ecstasy was particularly strong and available. In the mid-90s MDMA was usurped for a while and dance music generally became darker. Hardcore, for example, mutated into drum & bass. Then in the mid-00s when pills were terrible and everyone did ket, trance and prog again died out. And now, from 2013 onwards when super-strength pills have been flowing out of Holland, look at how strong progressive is again, and how many people are throwing old trance records back into their sets.
Perhaps the fact house and techno don't have MDMA genetically encoded into them has allowed those genres to ride the various drug fads of the last 30 years. I think the problem for trance is that it was so commercial around 2003 that it couldn't go back underground with dignity and wait for the next phase. Its stars clung to the stadium life, and sold the genre down the river to keep themselves there. Now it's too far removed from credibility to do what progressive is doing and get back into the playlists of serious DJs.
Also, paulversuspaul... I wish you'd drop by more than once a year. The quality of discussion you generate is thousand times better than what we normally get.
You're also bang on the money about trance on pills. About a year ago I went to a classics night where Airwave and Oliver Lieb were playing. I heard a whole raft of "good" euphoric oldies: Age Of Love, Perception, Netherworld, Greece 2000, Hale Bopp, Amber, Twilo Thunder, Lost Vagueness etc. etc. Honestly, I've never rushed so much in my life. I assumed it must have been the pills, but on no subsequent night out did the same batch feel even half as good. That music really was precision tuned to extract every last molecule of serotonin from within you.
thanks system-j, you always have the right words to convey the ideas. You really should write more about electronic music and rave culture, really mean that.
Here is something funny and interesting you might not be aware of. They have done these crazy experiments in rodents in which they have found out that when you give them MDMA, if you play electronic dance music it can release extra serotonin!!! the music gets you higher. That is insane if you think about it but perfectly right if you have ever paid attention to what a roll is like at a rave versus at home.
Another interesting paper they found out that techno music can make rodents on MDMA the horniest of all types of music, hello berghain
And the people who do underground MDMA therapy have said they have noticed that different kinds of music can radically affect peoples rolls.
I dare anyone here to do the following. If you ever leave a party while you still have a little of it in your system, get home and put on some 90s trance or prog mix. the roll will come back. I've had to turn it off at my house bc either my girl or one of my friends say they start tripping too much. I don't find this to occur with house at all. I do find this to somewhat occur with techno music but not to the same degree.
My working theory has been that the stuff those bastards put into trance music to make it trance music in the 90s just happened to be things that released more serotonin just like in the rats.
heck a Sasha mix from the 90s would be inconceivable without the MDMA experience. The entire thing isn't there for people to dance to, its literally just about taking the MDMA user on a journey. The constant breakdowns and buildups and rise of tensions and releases being a near perfect description of what it is actually like while you are on MDMA.The music in essence would roll just like you were.
I was talking to a local la techno DJ, nice guy and decent stuff but bastard never remembers my name , about why its gotten in vogue to drop trance and he blatantly said more people are taking MDMA instead of K at parties now and for whatever reason they go crazy when you play a trance track. My point is that its not by accident. I think it actually gets you higher. I don't think the crowd is going crazy because they are all clued in underground heads who know you just dropped a trance classic.
Originally posted by DJ RANN
The problem with this post is that it assumes something changed from the early days in terms business; it didn't.
Clubs were always run by shitty semi criminal promoters who would fuck anyone at any chance. Labels always ripped off artists. Bootleggers would popular tracks to make a quick pound/dollar. The only difference was that it was physical records so you could track how many were sold (to a degree) but even they people got stiff which is why a lot producers just took upfront fees for a track or remix (Timo Maas got paid $2k for Doom's night and that was all he ever saw from one of the biggest tracks of the decade).
The whole business world is dark and murky. Just like all the business world, it doesn't care about the truth. It is full of corrupt assholes that don't give a shit about the music, don't care about the culture, don't care about the ideology, but want everyone to get drunk and take drugs, get smashed and go crazy.
To me, there is nothing more precious than Trance. I'm proud to be part of this music's history as well as some of the artists I have helped out, but at the sametime, I am dishearten what people have done to this music. Our efforts have fallen in vein and gone down the gutter because of how SICK this world is. It's been raped, battered, bruised by people who you thought would never do it but did.
quote:
DJ'ing used to be this mystical art that not many people could do. By the early 2000's, Technics Decks surpassed all guitar sales in Europe. It became far more accessible meaning less talented people due to less barriers of entry and the quality slid. Sasha was harmonic mixing in the early 90's and why his mixes were light years ahead of anyone else. By 2005 Mixed in key was available and I remember a mate bought a set of decks and was harmonic mixing within hours. It didn't mean he was any good but the barrier to entry was gone.
DJing used to be inspiring but Trance became a victim of its own success. People went to go see djs for the love of music. I'm still posting tracks, because I am forever in debt with this music and it's a debt I am happy to keep paying because it's keeping me alive and keeping my spirits up but the reality really hurts when it seems that people have stopped giving a shit about this music when trance music is so powerful.
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I've talked about this at length but the same thing happened with the music itself. It use to take someone musically talented, with arduous dedication in terms of time, and a financial commitment in the thousands to make all the hardware producer a finished track.
Even then, you then had to find someone willing to press and distribute it, and that was hard up front investment. If the track was shite, no one was going to press 500 copies at 2 quid each (cost) and piss away a grand. Sure, there were the odd idiots/bales with poor taste, but they got burned pretty quick and either disappeared or stopped making that mistake.
If costs and finances were a problem, how come the Techno/House producers who really produce trance(see my deep selection thread, many many great trance records in there) are still being made? These guys still release it on vinyl and digital and don't seem to have a problem giving stuff for free either. People will buy records if it's worth it, but the problem is that these so called DJs have narrowed their selection, by only playing tracks from their friends/who they know/who they have a partnership with or a contract with or who kisses their ass the most. I've seen it in the underground scene just as much in the commercial scene. I would name names, but I will tell you that via PM and not here.
Clearly it's not the fans fault here but it seems to be the dickheads in the Trance scene and the promoters who are dodgy as fuck screwing these people but since producers/djs are emotional, they take it out on the fans who are not at fault here.
quote:
These things acted as a quality control filter meaning to get a track out there, you spent years of dedication, and months of work on maybe one track. I remember people like BT and PVD saying they spent anywhere from 4 months to a year on a single track. Chicane's far from the maddening Crowd took two years.
Ah the quality filter, that old saying but the problem is who do you trust? Some people form a bias and refuse to listen to anything by a certain artist. We are all guilty of this. I am sure I've pissed off a few people who I have had an exchange of word with, but I don't hold a grudge and not listen to their works. I still listen to it but some people still hold a grudge and simply refuse to play your stuff and play nasty mind games with you.
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People spent time making tracks and making them well so they would see light of day (or better said, strobe of club).
Fast forward to around 2000 and suddenly you could make a track from start to finish on a somewhat shitty PC, a cracked copy of logic or cubase and less than 2 grands worth of kit. And you could put it out digitally on CD's or even online for free.
There is nothing wrong digital making. Infact, digital crafting is just another way of making music. What is missing is heart and whether these producers mean it. Unfortunately, music is like honesty. It's pretty obvious when someone is lying or doing a half ass job at it and things get pretty heated emotionally if you say that it sounds too loud, or sounds sloppy or doesn't hit the right mark. I believe that some of these producers are just physically drained from all that touring that their sleep is out of whack and that they can't get their thoughts together. I know all too well from not putting health and especially not getting good sleep that I require a respirator to breathe for me but these people get so clouded in their ego that they only look after themselves when it's too late and have that YOLO attitude.
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It meant labels had zero risks. Just churn the shit out and see if makes money. They could also hide the sales figures. It meant digital labels popped up everywhere and at the same time digital file sharing knocked the bottom out of paid for music.
What are you on about?Labels don't have zero risks. There is more risk now and now it's just as hard to get your name out there as it was before because people can simply not buy it if they don't like it. I do the same thing. If I don't like an artist's track? I simply move on and don't bother after 5 bad tracks.
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By 2005 record stores were all but dead and any muppet with a laptop and ableton could churn out some crap track and with the right marketing or logo design, get a few sales.
That's still needed with modern labels but no one cares who produced it, who engineered it, who mastered it, who did the artwork, what was the story. No one cares because everyone has lost their imagination and glued to stupid facebook and we have all become slaves to the corporations.
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The rest of the market adapted or died. Armin, Tiesto, BT etc, all changed their sound for the new ADD generation and cashed in.
That's not to say there aren't people putting out great music or DJ's playing great sets, it's just that there's so much more crap out there than ever before due to there basically being no barriers to entry.
I still fear for their health. I just want to know why? Why did they decide to go down this route? What made them go down this path? Who if anyone pressured them? Did they really did this on purpose and that this was really their sole intent? Doesn't look like it to me since BT listens to Clare de Lune and Debussy and Armin plays eric sati every single morning and they both play and listen to their saddest pieces ever.
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I will however agree that in those early days the motives where somewhat different. People like Danny Rampling and Marshall Jefferson and Nicky Blackmarket and Orbital (etc etc) did it for the love and the scene. There was something purely enthusiastic about it and there wasn't these huge sums involved, Don't get me wrong, they made a living, but not like these Vegas idiots getting paid $300k per hour to play lowest common denominator drivel. People don;t realize that Sasha was getting 2-5 grand a night at a club, maybe more at a big rave and would only play 50 to 100 gigs a year tops. Night like the hac were an absolute money pit and a lot of clubs/promoters went bust due to it not really being about money and more about music. It's why you had the rise of the corporate clubs/brands like MOS and even Cream etc.
You can still find the music and clubs and DJ's that give a shit and are still making good music. It's just not the renaissance period where everyone was doing that which led to the sum being even more than the parts.
Money was seen as a way of compensating for their time/cost and effort because it's not easy making music, and playing music during late hours. These guys put their bodies at risk and they'll pay a heavy price later on in life. Right now it won't show up but watch when they reach 50 or above. They'll suffer from high BP, diabetes, stroke, cancer, and all sorts of other nasty diseases.
Last edited by Omnisphere on Oct-12-2018 at 08:36
Oct-12-2018 08:26
hoopoe
tranceaddict
Registered: Jun 2014
Location: In a tree
There is a new BBC documentary called 'how dance music conquered the world' on the iplayer at the moment (use a vpn if you're outside the UK) that covers everything being discussed here. It's not the first documentary to do so of course, but the third episode includes a section on trance which segues into the American EDM explosion. I was going to start a thread about it, has anyone else seen it?
Oct-12-2018 09:16
SYSTEM-J
IDKFA.
Registered: Sep 2003
Location: Manchester
quote:
Originally posted by paulversuspaul
My working theory has been that the stuff those bastards put into trance music to make it trance music in the 90s just happened to be things that released more serotonin just like in the rats.
I don’t think this is a secret. There are certain sounds that trigger an MDMA rush much more than others, and certain styles are chocked full of those sounds. Most electronic/dance music is ultimately drug noise, and different genres are optimised for different drugs. Dub is cannabis – the obsession with intricate echo FX suddenly makes perfect sense after a joint. Psy is LSD. Minimal is ket. And so on. Just look at “screw” hip-hop. It all came from producers (originally DJ Screw) making tracks to go with the “purple drank” cough syrup they were abusing. Most of the tracks were made under the influence.
One of the things I loved about old trance that has been jettisoned in recent years is the combination of really hard, dirty sounds with really pretty, sparkly elements. I was thinking the other day about how many great old trance records have amazing industrial “clanging” sounds in them. For example, Amoebaassassin – Piledriver or Origin – Wide Eyed Angel. It’s that juxtaposition of elements that make you twist your face into a mask of ugly pleasure and then sounds that lift you up out of your feet that make old trance so bewitching, and that is a pure crystallisation of the MDMA sensation.
Originally posted by Mebot
this thread would be better if you could back up some of your claims with facts or references. You're generalizing a whole lot. And while I understand what you're getting at, it's not really fair.
Who?
quote:
Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
MDMA was not a drug associated with the Chicago or Detroit scenes.
The drug was around and being used, that is total bullshit. One of the more popular drugs at places like Paradise Garage in the late 80's was ecstasy. This line that it wasn't in the clubs is a lie.
If you guys wanna jerk each other off go right ahead, but don't lie about it.
quote:
According to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in America, ecstasy was first spotted being used for recreational purposes in Chicago in 1972
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The first forensic detection of MDMA “on the street” was reported in 1970 in Chicago.
The root of trance goes back to goa. Worth hearing the goa mix by Ovnimoon. Forget the first hour because it's filled with what's exactly wrong with contemporary underground dance music. I don't call it Trance or believe it has anything to do with Trance. It's boring/lacks inspiration and absolutely no journey or substance in the style.
Second hour however, involves the serious trance stuff from Goa.
, about why its gotten in vogue to drop trance and he blatantly said more people are taking MDMA instead of K at parties now and for whatever reason they go crazy when you play a trance track. My point is that its not by accident. I think it actually gets you higher. I don't think the crowd is going crazy because they are all clued in underground heads who know you just dropped a trance classic.
