Progressive politics

John "00" Fleming gets tangled up in trance semantics

 

JOHN "00" FLEMING Part of Breathe with Joy Kitikonti, Mark Scaife. Friday, April 26. System Soundbar, 117 Peter.

BY JOSHUA OSTROFF

"I know Breathe is one of the best nights in Toronto, but they've got
their own progressive sound and I'm like hard trance. There isn't a club night
in Toronto which suits me at the moment."

Or so John "00" Fleming thought last fall after discovering his gig at the Guvernment was cancelled with little warning. But as the dance music cycle spins ever faster, the inevitable progressive house backlash is brewing, and trance is making a not-very-long-awaited comeback -- and Fleming now finds himself breaking it down at Breathe on Friday night.

"In the U.K., everyone's saying, 'Sod progressive,' and the clubs have been filled with people saying they want trance back," Fleming says over the phone from England. "I'm not saying it's gonna hit back in the same way, but people miss the music. Now it's either too boring or too hard -- there's nothing in the middle for them."

Fleming felt the backlash first-hand when he released the mix-disc Euphoria "Progressive" last year, a title definitely not of his choosing.

"I wanted to call it Trance, but the record label had to stop me. They're like, 'We're not going to sell it 'cause trance has a bad name.' So I had to call it Progressive. Which is quite sad, really."

Now Fleming is free to admit that his latest release, White Label -- a collection of singles previously available only as white labels, acetates, DJ promos and CD-Rs -- is all about trance.

But after nearly two decades spinning wax, the continuing debate over dance semantics seems particularly trivial. Heck, house hardly existed when Fleming got his first residency in 1984, while still in school. With far fewer competing DJs than today, he quickly rose up the ranks, spinning in Ibiza in '87 and alongside Carl Cox and Grooverider in the early acid-house rave scene.

But just as England went beat-happy, Fleming was diagnosed with lung cancer and had to watch his scene explode from a hospital bed.

"I was in the hospital for a good two and a half years," he recounts. "I tried my best to keep up with music, but obviously I was concerned about if I was going to live the next day. When I got back in, there were a lot of changes, but they were for the best because there was a lot of badly produced music in the early days of rave, a lot of people just making it in their bedroom. It was good to start hearing some quality productions."

Following a year of recuperation in Florida, he was somewhat out of touch. Where there had been only house, techno and garage, suddenly a sea of sub-genres had flooded the landscape.

"I was confused at first about which way to go," he recalls. "But I got drawn towards trance and I'm glad I was."

With a residency in Brighton, he slowly built his reputation back up, eventually benefiting from the trance peak of 1999, during which he released four DJ-mixes (including Virgin's The Best Trance Anthems... Ever! compilation) and earned a "DJ of the Month" nod from Muzik magazine.

After doing a number of remixes over the past few years -- for the likes of Mansun, Erasure, Junior Vasquez and, uh, Gloria Estefan -- Fleming is now concentrating on his own productions.

Following three underground hit singles, Fleming's latest is an '80s-inspired crossover track called "Belfast Trance," which samples Simple Minds. Though he feels a bit concerned about its overt accessibility, he justifies it by working on some dark Goa-influenced tracks as well.

He's also formed a band with Hemstock & Jennings called Genetica -- whose first acetate can be heard on the White Label disc -- and busied himself building up his new label, Joof Recordings. He even hopes to hammer out a new style of trance, one that ditches the "blips and funny noises and running along at 145 BPMs" for a slower, classier, more "intelligent" sound.