The Predatory Wasp
Nothing I write here about the backstory to bvdub’s new album Replicant Memories is going to do justice to the incredible write up on Bandcamp, so if you want all the details, go there. Briefly, it reminds me of both the long form, genre-flipping sketches of recent Burial and the emotional gut-wrench of 36’s ambient trance masterpiece Cold Ecstasy. So a fairly high bar.
Danny L Harle is a man of many talents; from working with Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek to producing perhaps of the greatest modern odes to hardcore to his latest project Starlight Divergence a haunting ambient LP producer in collaboration with Dutch producer Torus. Years ago when I worked at a house music record label in London, people lol’d at me constantly for my love of trance. Well who’s laughing now, you pricks?? Trance is back baby; in myriad, evocative, interesting forms, and you’re saying the poster boy for house is this guy?
Another stone-cold banger from the princes of modern trance. How these megababes haven’t been booked for Glastonbury is beyond me.
https://djheartstring.bandcamp.com/track/staring-into-the-sun
August hasn’t been the most exciting month for new releases, but trance is here to save us once again. Four years ago Oklou and Sega Bodega to cover Italian trance titan Maurco Picotto’s Komodo – which I guess was a very low key version of all those celebs getting together to murder Believe in lockdown – and today it gets a wide release, proving once again that trance is Best Genre Of Music. Komodo (Save a Soul) heavily sampled Deep Forest’s Sweet Lullaby, a reworking of which was included in one of my favourite mixes of all time. So many layers!
It’s taken more than two decades for the music I was obsessed with as a teenager to become fashionable again. It’s been worth the wait. There are a few artists pushing this sound now, but German duo DJ Heartstring have got the formula down to a fine art. Trance? Yes! Hardcore? Sure! 90s pop-dance. Of course! Taken from their three-track EP Don’t Stop which clocks in at sub 10 minutes for the lot. Saccharine beats for happy-sad lads.
Given the artist and title of this, I’m not sure I really need to explain why I love it.
“How are you expected to put your hands in the air when you can’t even rise from your knees?”
https://3six.bandcamp.com/album/trance-anthems-for-a-sunken-generation
Continuing the trance revival theme today with this melancholy banger from Lee Gamble’s new album Models, which, when compared to some of his previous work, is surprisingly accessible. According to the PR, “it’s pop music, but it ain’t background music” and I’m not sure I entirely agree with either of those statements, but it is very good. Elsewhere on the album you’ll find him autotuning the fuck out of Lana Del Rey, which is also fun.
Trance really is having a moment. It feels like everyone is finally ready to accept what I’ve known all along: trance is the best, most credible and timeless genre of all! The latest evidence of this seismic shift is the Warp-approved Evian Christ and his debut album Revanchist, which explores “the latent potential in Trance to evoke, beyond Euphoria, the fullest feeling of the Sublime.” Yes! Silence is a reimagining of Delirium’s proggy masterpiece of the same name. Rave like it’s 1999 all over again.
Dennis Huddleston aka 36’s new album Cold Ecstasy is a pitch-perfect homage to 90s rave, focussing on “the happier side of the hardcore spectrum, which I feel was unfairly maligned at the time.”As a teenager obsessed with happy hardcore and later trance, I’ve always had a massive soft spot for the unashamed positivity of those genres. A companion piece to 2021’s Weaponised Serenity which was equally brilliant, this new LP is further proof that Huddlestone is one of the most consistently excellent electronic producers out there.
Finding albums like Not Marshall’s Fragments of Varnished Visions makes me a bit happy and a bit sad: happy, as I feel like I’ve stumbled on something brilliant that hasn’t already had its praises highly sung; sad as this is flying so hard under the radar that it’s difficult to imagine any more than a small handful of people will ever get the chance to enjoy its magnificence. I literally can’t find anything about it online except its listing on AOTY, not even a Bandcamp page. It’s not often ambient is explicitly joyful, but that’s certainly the case with About The Desert, and the rest of this deeply buried gem is equally lovely.
The Predatory Wasp 