The Electric Trance

The time signature is drawn as an axiom and in the empty space of the notation’s lines, the beats come into being as the sequence passes over their places. None before, one after, one before, two after, two before three after, each of these silences between pulses determine the order of the next one, arranging things as pulses of activity between the emptiness between them. Play two of a beat and the third is anticipated without being played, filled in automatically by the relationship predetermined. “Keeping the beat” of the music is keeping to the sequential script of the music, anticipating as the song does, fulfilling the premade way of the piece.

The time signature in this way forms the piece’s foundation. As the initial imposition upon the empty silence, it forms the pattern by which the rest of the song follows. All rhythmic patterns upon it take the form of its boundaries, following where it is and isn’t as their guide for where they are and aren’t. Just as the rhythm has this relationship to the beat below it, the rhythm of bodies is the same, making their steps in response to the pulses of the beat. The waltz occurs on a three beat stepping, the march on two, the rhythm built atop, rolling like the tassels dangling off the dress uniforms and ballgowns of the revelers. Music flows by this pattern, by these steps, pulses that determine the outer borders along which the flow travels.

The beat thumps on like the regular pulse of machines, driving the Marxian base underneath the blooming flowers of dance and rhythm, the superstructure. No wonder then, that those who truly comprehended the immense power of art in religious music criticism were so desperate to rid music of the base, making pure cathedrals without laborers, forbidding instruments, scouring away drumming, hoping to create a music solely made of chants raising higher and higher to heaven. The beat has always had this allure, the allure of the real. Its hypnotic properties are like those of various natural plants which drive the user to ecstasies, pounded drumming inspiring ecstatic states by its primal allure, the call of the starving wilderness to the mind civilized by city or tribe or village.

In the 1960s, when ecstatic states were rediscovered by the west, one of the methods of introduction was the practice of acid tests, where ballroom concerts were given with LSD-spiked beverages, locking the revelers into a night of intoxication beneath both the drug and the blues-rock played by the band. It’s from this scene that the Dionysian forms of psychedelic music emerged, the long drunken rambles across blues rock rhythms alongside the Apollonian aspect of elaborate studio production and orchestral pomp, the balance of which informs classics of the era. From the same dark corners of the deep state that birthed the psychedelic revolution however, comes the electronic experimentations in the 1970s which led to the development of electronic music and thusly to music which left behind the eroticism of psychedelic rock. The flow of music has its primal level at the beat, but then grows into higher forms of linguistic layering in rhythm and ornamentation, the same as the unconscious libido is translated into being desire through eroticism. Electronic music developed in one strand as a way to undo this, to make a form of music of pure primitive trance, MDMA replacing LSD.

It’s this ecstasy which is the purpose of beat-centric music, made to be played in inducing spells and trances over mass crowds of listeners. Music made to dissolve, music made to hypnotize like poison, turning the crowd from a group of individuals to a melted mass of flesh, returning to animal thrills. This has been modulated in degrees as well, with modern iterations developing low key versions of the same, trance states induced to “chill, relax/study to”. The trances induced in all these cases is the end of this form of music, music electronically regulated to produce a trance along the pulsing regularity of the beat.