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| quote: | Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
The problem for me was that tracks like Loving You More, although trancey, were irrefutably house, resembling the early Renaissance sound. There's a whole body of this stuff- I've got close to 200 tracks from the mid-90s that one person would call trance and the other person would call house. These tracks were influential to later trance but if you look at the period immediately preceding them, it's obvious they came out of progressive and vocal house of the early 90s. I was reading a lot of comments by old clubbers who'd been around at the time when I stumbled across this recurring term "epic house" used to describe this body of music. A bit of research revealed it was Mixmag's term. In a recent issue they had a feature on short-lived fads in the 90s, and epic house was listed as one of them, because this "Is it house, it it trance?" style only really happened for a couple of years: 1995 and 1996, with a couple of forerunners in the years before and a couple of late entries in the years afterwards.
But I'm not surpised you haven't heard of it. It was a short-lived style and only BT's Ima is still in print to represent the style. I think the likes of Sasha and Digweed are a bit embarrassed now about playing this kind of thing- if Sasha would famously say "I don't play trance" in 2002 then he would hardly want to admit to playing Billie Ray Martin, so this era is passed over.
It's been my mission over the past year or so to remind everyone on TA of that gap in the history books. |
Many classics and good tracks are know not only to slip unnoticed but not to gain any attention, however for an entire genré to dissapear out of the blue especially after having some influence upon what house is today is kind of strange. Unlike trance it seems that house still has some of its integrity left while its sister genré trance, colapsed now into a pile of stereotypical radio garbage. Kinda ironic for a style that was meant to represent the suburban hypnotic club-scene in the late 80s/early 90s.
I guess that for that time when epic-house existed, producers wanted, as today to be able to fusion trance and house together, simply creating a new sound. However the fact that it dissapeared shows that either they didn't succeed or that the audience at that stage was not mature for the particular sound, I for one will not comment on this untill further documentation.
Maybe it's time for someone to bring it back. Maybe we're mature now and able to revive a lost sound.
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