Tour De Trance

It’s difficult to forget a ‘lollipop’ moment – a small, seemingly insignificant incident that just makes you feel a certain type of way. A salient personal lollipop moment was when August relayed to me Luca’s epoch-defining track recommendation – ‘Steel’ by DJ Life – in the latter half of 2021. A combination of overwhelmingly euphoric, 90s-inspired trance tones, motivic Miniclip-esque melodies and of course the striking tempo change (by house music standards, moderato to allegro in just 45 seconds) made the track stick. Just as ‘Steel’ sunk me into the nostalgia of playing 3-foot Ninja 2, Bloxorz, and Poptropica on a 2011 iMac in my parents’ study, memorable electronic music takes you somewhere – usually, by nature, to fabricated settings and synthetic realities. Swedish trance producer Atmos (Tomasz Balicki) embarks on the same journey on his psy-fi release Tour de Trance, navigating an intergalactic expedition with precision and success.

The album is by definition a tour and I will review it like one – painstakingly, in order. Album opener ‘Stay Awake’ begins with a hypnotic, cyberpunk vocal address, insisting that you “relax” atop a kaleidoscopic pattern of synths. If it sounds a little disingenuous at first, the patient build and celestial house breakdown makes good on its request. The track’s bassline is pulsating and its percussive highs are pleasantly glitchy. Ever gradually, the song transforms. In the space of 8 minutes, the listener has entered The Millennium Falcon, digested the pre-flight instructional safety video and felt the engines roar for take-off. The planetary tour commences – cue the hyperdrive segway from Star Wars.  

Third track ‘46 at Daz’ sketches out the tour’s first destination, descending into a dystopian concrete jungle inhabited by cyborgs – an inorganic setting similar to Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film Ghost in the Shell. Ringing, dubby modulation and cloudy drum kicks echo a dark, spiritless cityscape dominated by looming, functionalist infrastructure and philosophical zombies. 90 seconds in, you are confronted with a seraphic narrator – as if it’s the first-time human life has reached this city for a millennium. “Did you think about me at all…did you imagine what was happening to me…does an empathy virus work long distance”. There’s something in the track’s thumping, progressive basslines, staccato synths and psychedelic melodies that builds trust and rapport in the beguiling voice. The music fills in what may have occurred in this city: ecophagy.   

Popularized by Robert Freitas and Eric Drexler, ecophagy is where awry self-replicating nanotechnology consumes all biomass, literally eating the ecosystem and its inhabitants. This perhaps explains the recurring digital vocals throughout the album. In this context, Tour De Trance is Atmos’ allegory to rational theorist John von Neumann’s ‘technological singularity’ – if machines can achieve singularity, then “human affairs, as we know them, could not continue”. Technology dominates, populations are void of qualia, and organic human life is stripped down. This pessimistic foreshadowing is reinforced in following tracks ‘To What My Mind Attend’ and ‘Ride the Flow’ through harsher atmospheric pads, itchy breakbeats and vocals that remind me of the floating heads from Rick and Morty.

The album traces a well-worn narrative arc, moving through tense doomsday passages into a buoyant, optimistic coda. In its final act, we arrive at ‘Into the Groove’ and ‘Jellybean’. ‘Into the Groove’ builds tension over the first half of its expansive runtime with rolling percussion, snappy, high-pitched synths, and a slow-burning accelerando. The successive, hard-hitting vocal sample begins to signal a beat drop and suddenly it sounds like being immersed within an intergalactic disco-funk rave. You turn left and see the alien Paul shouting “Track!” (arms above head), you turn right and see Chewbacca chucking a mean gabber, all the while Bender dances behind the decks, inhaling Löbrau and inheriting social capital. The night then reaches its peak with ‘Jellybean’. It’s brazenly sentimental and unashamedly trance – the 2000s-esque metallic harmonics and loading-screen-of-a-sci-fi-video-game sonics evoke a sense of personal accomplishment, or maybe just supreme satisfaction. The track gracefully closes out with experimental percussive elements, guiding the astral tour to its end.  

After a 1 hour and 10 min journey, the listener begins the return flight back to reality – in this case, a dull 3/4 Chifley Library. This moment of fuzzy fade-in to real life reinforces why I love trance (psytrance in particular) and especially releases from the 2000s. It’s a temporarily transformative genre, imaginative and surprisingly subtle in its nuance more often than it is given credit for. Tour de Trance, in particular, achieves an impressive dual purpose – to both story-tell and maintain vibrant danceability. Contemporary trance mixes share this dual mandate, and some of the best sets I’ve seen this year – Omformer and Ekkel at Outsider Festival, Cybernet at Whimsy of an Imp and Kasper Marott at ikke åben in Copenhagen – earned that mantle precisely for the way they achieved it. The search for fictitious exploration is what makes electronic music so appealing to me. A new world is there to be found in any thoughtful trance record – no matter how repetitive – if only you are ready to seek it.

Angus McCulloch

22 October 2024