September 15th, 2006

So how did I end up creating an Ambient Trance Dance Song?

One Saturday night recently my wife and I drove past one of those trendy, cool, hip, groovy nightclubs (oh, sorry: sick, fly nightclubs) that pop up for a couple of years, host a few knifings and fistfights, then melt away into obscurity again.

I could hear the drum beat of the "music" and thought little about it ... except that there are a lot of different types of dance music these days—I mean, a lot. DJs have built their own sizeable sub-culture around what beats and signatures there are, what "schools" of music there are, what region the music comes from, etc. I mean, there are several Industrial beat variants, Techno beats, a whole bunch of Ambient House beats and even more straight House beats, not to mention all the Trance beats, and Break beats, and probably a thousand more, all spiralling into obscurity and silliness. I could never hope to keep track of it all ... and frankly, who except some teenagers and DJs cares?

But I started fiddling with my computer and realized I could probably make up some danceable little trance-house dance song myself. So I did. It's probably so square it makes the kids cringe (or sneer), but it was a fun diversion for me.

I started with sampling bits and pieces of another song Ken and I did, much more traditional, called, So Alone. I patched bits of them together into other sounds, and processed them, sometimes heavily. I also sampled and left completely un-processed, some of Ken's drumming sound-check, which gave me some good drum sounds to work with. Then it was a matter of assembly and "artistic expression".

The result is Chase You Out Again, a song that bears absolutely no auditory relations to the song whose sounds it was assembled from ... or any other song I've ever done up to now. Secretly, and in moments of weakness, you might get me to admit that I kind of like it for sentimental reasons.

But have I become a closet Moby? Well, that's very doubtful ...

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