Dutch super-DJ's new album
If any music video captures the go-go optimism of the late '90s, it's System F's 1999 trance single "Out of the Blue." The camera takes you to a snow-covered Berlin, where time-lapse cranes are robotically building a city of the future, two gloved clubbers are (shall vee) dancing with angular motions, and the glassy, curvilinear architecture of contemporary, reunited Germany is displayed like the glorious conquest of a bitter past. It's a capital that's ready to be plugged in, wired, and Wi-Fi'd. Indeed, the post-Cold War Western world was cresting on a wave of dot-com promise, Berlin's annual Loveparade was a million-strong rave-stock of fuzzy happiness, and it was still cool to have a sunny outlook.
Fast-forward to 2006, and System F is recording under his birth name, Ferry Corsten, the world is on the brink of Middle East catastrophe, the dot-com revolution has taken two steps back, the Loveparade is half its former self, and trance music has become a relic of an overly hopeful time. You would think that, similarly, all has been lost on the dance floor, but Corsten still carries a torch for eternal good times, even if he's older and much more aggro. His latest album, L.E.F., released last week, fits the times with its theme of "Loud, Electronic, Ferocious." Where trance had become a critic's piñata, with its symphonic loopiness and spiky-haired followers (the '90s equivalent of the white-suited disco citizens of the '70s), L.E.F. is a buzz saw of aggression and pumped-up motion, like steroids versus ecstasy.
"Personally, the album was something I needed," says Corsten, 32. "I needed to broaden my horizons again."
L.E.F. starts with "Are You Ready," a twisted, swirling, Roland V-Synth-driven track that could have come straight out of Jacques Lu Cont's studio. (Lu Cont, a.k.a. Stuart Price, is perhaps best known as Madonna's producer du jour. His sound is loopy, compressed, and digitally guttural.) "Fire" finds Duran Duran's Simon LeBon on vocals, sounding like a siren calling out from a mountain peak made of incendiary wavelengths. On other tracks ("L.E.F," "Forever"), Corsten introduces crunchy, electro, '80s elements to his crisp, momentous, and melodic production. Guru of Gang Starr guest raps on a muscular breakbeat number, "Junk." A redux of 808 State's 1990 classic "Cubik" (once heard on KROQ, if you can believe it) appears, only this time faster and more furious. Finally, there's Corsten's high-flying, on-the-run theme for Fox's TV drama Prison Break.
"There are a lot of different new styles coming up," Corsten says of his inspiration. "The typical arpeggiated trance sounds with the big riffs are already seven, eight years old."
Corsten formed his first band as a teenager in the late '80s and by the mid-'90s was producing European "clubhouse" and trance hits. It wasn't until "Out of the Blue," however, that the Rotterdam native would become an international club sensation, helping to define the trance wave. Along with his fellow Dutch super-DJs (Tiesto, with whom he once worked, and the younger Armin Van Buuren), Corsten has continually been noted as one of the world's most popular spinners. The early-'00s backlash against trance - critics have called it cheesy and perhaps too upbeat for dark times - didn't quash the scene's enthusiasm for the Dutchmen, who continue to command five-figure paydays and marquee status at the planet's largest clubs. This year, Corsten undertook a bicoastal L.E.F.-themed DJ residency at Avalon Hollywood and New York's Crobar. Next month, he plans to launch a tour supporting the new album.
Reflecting on his muscled-up sound and his L.A.-to-New-York residency, Corsten says he "was looking for the ferocious part of L.E.F." Ironically, he found it in the subtler-but-more-instinctual groove of house music. "Trance and house are coming together," he says.
It would have been blasphemy to entertain the thought of a trance-house détente only five years ago, what with trance representing the consumerist ego and house representing the soulful id of clubland. But, after years of shooting off into dozens of directions, club music is melding like a giant mash-up of decades, styles, and technological techniques. While Corsten and fellow Dutch trance kings have been toning down their emo-trance in favor of dark, rockist, and tribal-house elements, deep-house dons such as San Francisco's Kaskade are now making pop-flavored dance tracks that feature uplifting, flowery traces of trance.
"Sound," Corsten says, "is evolving."
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