![]() ![]() Part oral history, part annotated discography, part spirited defense, Rietveld’s book isn’t just a document of a critically neglected scene it’s an attempt to translate the transcendent feeling of its peaks, to capture “the actual beauty of trance.” The problem, he says, is that the scene has come to be defined by its worst elements. He ended up publishing a book called Hypnotised: A Journey Through Trance Music 1990-2005. “It’s this feeling that you can’t get from any other genre.” ![]() “I would have these odd moments during the day where I would turn up some trance on YouTube, and it gave me so much joy and energy,” he says. But a few years ago, Rietveld, who discovered his homeland’s trance scene as an impressionable pre-teen before graduating to techno and experimental electronic music, began feeling nostalgic. “It has a lousy image,” says Dutch curator, writer, and label owner Arjan Rietveld. Its bigger-is-better ambitions (packed stadiums, a breathless obsession with superlatives) and Jesus-posing DJs made the music ripe for ridicule. Uptempo, relentlessly melodic, and unabashed in its pursuit of transcendent emotion, the music often fell prey to maudlin overreach. Trance, whose vast commercial success in the 2000s paved the way for the EDM boom of the 2010s, has long been maligned for what critics see as its spectacular excess and its paucity of good taste. TDJ’s video is steeped in the uplifting sounds of early-2000s trance music-all weightless arpeggios, soaring toplines, and massive, buzzing synth patches known as supersaws-like a Tiësto anthem spun from pure cotton candy. Yet what might be most striking about the epic setpiece is its soundtrack. Its stomach-turning surrealism recalls the sensory onslaught of experimental filmmaker Ryan Trecartin’s work, or Chris Cunningham’s “Come to Daddy” video for Aphex Twin. Shot in a high-end vacation rental in Tulum, Mexico, the video plays out like a Black Mirror episode about leisure-class narcissists at some dystopian afterparty. This is the opening scene of SPF Infini 2, a 43-minute visual accompaniment to the Montreal electronic musician TDJ’s 2022 compilation of the same name. ![]() “Our whispers float to the ceiling,” coos an angelic voice. Framed by palm fronds, a DJ in a brightly colored bikini top and skirt is immersed in her mixing. The camera zooms out to reveal more people lounging on cream-colored sofas, all of them cosmetically and cartoonishly disfigured, all preening into their phones. From Tamagotchis to pencils with cartridges, and from ye olde Cartoon Network to flare jeans, you'll find many things that'll remind you of your careless youth.The most hypnotically bizarre music video I’ve seen in ages begins with a young man peeling the bandages off his surgically enhanced jaws and chin, which jut out of his face like the haunches of a Thanksgiving turkey. Starting, of course, with toys and ending with poking someone on Facebook, this decade was moving into the future at a breakneck pace.īut, without any more of my essayistic babble, let's dive a few decades back and reminisce on the things that we all loved dearly when growing up. ![]() So many new cultural experiences and opportunities were never present. Straight from oblivion, we went to the Western civilization and its pop culture with half-naked ladies, boy bands, electronic toys, TV series, and even portable phones (those definitely came out of some witch's brew)! Also, the sense of liberation - both literal freedom regained by my homeland and the one given to us by the ever-expanding World Wide Web - was just overwhelming. Nevertheless, I can definitely feel the importance and the impact of the 2000s on our lives. ![]()
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