Above & Beyond and the state of trance

Above & Beyond and the state of trance

7 October, 2009 | 8.32AM

• Written by: Kirsty Kane
• Filed under: Music News: above & beyond, anjunabeats, anjunadeep

Three men conquered clubland. A Finnish ex-garage producer, a British lad who loves trance, and a former marketing director of Warner Music Group who was once a guitarist and songwriter for the cult indie band Sad Lovers & Giants.

On paper, Tony McGuinness, Paavo Siljamäki, and Jono Grant are very different people, and in person, they are too. Siljamäki is shy and exudes contentment behind geeky glasses, McGuinness is smart and well spoken, full of wisdom and snappy one liners from the bear pit of the music industry, and Grant is quietly confident, able to charm just about anyone with a cheeky wink and a magic trick.

If you ever needed proof of the unifying power of trance, it is these three individuals, who together, as Above & Beyond have become a worldwide trance phenomenon. They run one of trance’s most successful record labels, Anjunabeats, they produce some of the genre’s most popular tracks, and they raise hundreds of thousands of hands in the air each year, with their headlining DJ sets.

With the trio’s highly anticipated annual mix compilation ‘Anjunabeats Volume 7’ out today, we met Paavo Siljamäki to discuss Above & Beyond’s rapid ascent, Anjunabeats’ humble beginnings, the state of trance in 2009, and why trance is the gateway to electronic music for so many.

The last time you spoke to Beatportal, Anjunabeats was growing stupidly fast. What shape is the label in now?

We’re really lucky, as we have an incredibly good team of people we work with. We launch ‘Volume 7’ of our label mix compilation today, so the last few months have been really manic trying to get music for that, as well as mixing it.

When you take a step back, you realise everything that you’ve achieved, and it has been very good. When you’re doing these things, it’s hard to see from the inside, but how it started years and years ago, with the three of us using Anjunabeats as a means for releasing our own music, now it’s a movement, a family, and a community.

It is still growing, and there are new areas we’re working on. Initially it started on the internet, on our own website and forum, but nowadays it’s on Facebook, and more and more people are discovering the label.

Do you feel like you’ve done everything you can with the label? Where else can you take it?

To me it still feels like there are a lot of new challenges for us to take on, to covert more people to decent dance music.

Is that your aim - to convert more people to dance music?

As a label, our main aim is to find and release the finest quality dance music out there. But what is always nice for me, is when people discover our scene through Anjunabeats and Above & Beyond.

When we go to remote places in the world, like recently we were in Bolivia, South America, 3600 meters above sea level up a mountain, and we had thousands of people there dancing.

Was that an outdoor party?

No it was at a club there actually, called Soundbar. It’s the second time we’ve been there. We made a film about Bolivia there a year ago.

A lot of people might not know this, but didn’t Anjunabeats begin life as a university project?

Yeah, I met Jono at uni. We did a track together at uni, and we were both studying music together, so we decided to start a label.

We gambled our student loans on 1000 pressings of our track, because we took a calculated risk and figured that if we could make a good song, get it distributed, and sell 400 or 500 copies, we would make our money back. Luckily, we managed to sell them all.

How did you manage to sell them all?

What helped was that we managed to get a dubplate of the track into the hands of Paul Oakenfold. We were waiting outside Home nightclub in Leicester Square, London, for Oakey to walk past as he was a resident DJ there. We managed to give him the dubplate, and Oakey gave it his full support.

At that time, he was one of the biggest DJs in the world, so if he endorsed a record, it really helped. For me, that’s where I feel like we entered the world of dance music. Us nervously waiting outside Home in 1999.

In 1999, trance was at its peak in the UK.

It definitely reached a certain peak in 1999. But it was a peak mainly in the UK and in parts of Europe. What I didn’t realise back then, was how global it would become.

There are remote parts of Russia, China, and South America that are just as crazy, if not more crazy, for trance as the Brits were back then. So the peak in 1999, was just the peak of trance in certain parts of the world, but now the sound is huge everywhere.

Do you think trance is still the most popular form of electronic music worldwide?

I think if you added up everyone worldwide who loves trance, there are probably more today, than ever before. Because it’s so new, and still growing in places.

China is one of the new big places, and it’s still early days for much of Asia. Places like Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Beijing have established club scenes and educated crowds, but in China and other countries there are like 100 other cities that are still just waking up to it all.

Musically, where has trance been going in the last few years?

About four years ago, trance started sounding quite stale, as most of the producers were using the same sounds, and the same tools.

Because everyone was writing music on computers, and the software not too developed, there weren’t that many ways to make electronic music.

But in the last two years, there has been an incredible expansion of sound. People have been taking things from house and techno, and using that to expand trance.

There’s very much a cross pollination of genres, and lots of interesting new sounds are emerging. Plus the tempos have dropped a bit. Our sets used to be around 137 to 140bpm, but now we drop to as low as 128, and the majority of our sets is 132 to 135. When the tempo slows, the music gets more funky as there’s more you can do musically, rather than just bang it out.

In your opinion, what labels in trance and progressive are doing good, forward thinking music?

Euphonic is always good. The Armada camp can put out some fantastic records. High Contrast Recordings has done some really interesting stuff, as has Enhanced, and Andy Moor’s Aardvark Records.

Anjunadeep has managed to fill the void between trance and progressive house. These days, are you finding more inspiration in the progressive and electro scenes, than in trance?

In recent years there has been a lot of very exciting deep music. We launched Anjunadeep because we were being sent so much good deep music and it wasn’t right to release on Anjuna.

Musically, for our own music, I tend to find inspiration from outside of the dance music thing.

Oh really, like where?

Film scores inspire me. Thomas Newman and Hans Zimmer are great, as is John Debney who did the score for The Passion of the Christ. If you listen to a lot of the music in films, it’s actually quite close to trance. Trance music can be classical, but with more simple chord structures.

Plus in movies, soundtracks are designed to create a certain emotional state, as is trance.

Were did your fascination for emotional music come from?

My background is musical theatre. From the age of 12 to 15 I worked in theatre, making music. So I have a lot of appreciation for the power of theatre. You can’t beat the emotional impact of a great film or great theatre.

The emotional impact of trance, is implicit in the word ‘trance’. Wikipedia claims that the genre description came about as the music was perceived to have an ability to induce an altered state of consciousness - and put people in a trance. Do you think the music still does that?

Trance to me, the word trance, actually came from the early 90s when there was a very hypnotic sound in the music. What we now perceive as trance is not very hypnotic these days, and actually more euphoric, which can also induce a trance state.

For the hypnotism, you’d have to go back to the Goa side of the music. Some tracks have more hypnotism, some tracks have less, but if you wanted to generalise there isn’t as much hypnotism these days.

And what about Above & Beyond? Where do you guys fall?

I suppose you could say we’re on the euphoric side.

As you mentioned, trance in the early 90s was deep and repetitive. The stuff coming out of Frankfurt was quite loop-based, and there was acid trance too. Can you ever see the scene returning back to those psychedelic routes?

It’s very hard to say what the future will bring. But what was then, was a mixture of everything, and there was definitely a psychedelic element, that really starting happening in Goa, and eventually it became the psy trance sound. But psy trance became its own scene and separated from the mainstream trance scene, and there hasn’t been that much cross pollination between those two. Although John “OO” Fleming has always pushed the two sides together.

Why do you think that trance is known for being the gateway to electronic music for many people?

Out of the different types of electronic music, trance is obviously the most melodic. A lot of the trance we like are actual songs, and so that means it’s more accessible for people to understand when coming from outside of dance music.

A lot of house is also quite accessible, and house can also be a gateway. Trance sometimes can get quite techy, but it definitely serves as a gateway to deeper, harder,
and more underground dance music.

How did you discover dance music?

I first got into dance music in 1995. Back then, trance was very melodic. I started with trance then went into Detroit techno. But that got too hard for me, so I switched to Chicago house, which then progressed into UK garage, and then eventually I returned back to trance.

At home, what music do you listen to?

Last night I listened to Speech Debelle who won a Mercury Prize recently, which is probably not what you might expect from me, but I’m very varied in what I listen to.

Because I do a lot of A&R for the label, I am constantly fed new and exciting electronic music so I’m spoiled in that way. On my iPod I always have the Road To Perdition soundtrack which is simply epic.

How is it, working with Jono and Tony?

We’ve been getting busier with our DJing, and we’re more and more on the road these days. Normally two of us go out at a time, with one of us staying back to do studio work.

Recently we’ve had less and less time when all three of us were in the studio, so next month we’re not touring at all so we can all be there. They’re wonderful guys to work with.

Can you explain what ‘Anjunabeats Volume 7’ is all about?

The volume series has always been about upfront Anjunabeats music. We try to get a good balance between the tracks, and we do one a year. The majority of the music on the compilation is unreleased, so it’s very upfront, and a good indication of where the sound is right now, and where it’s going to be in the next year.

Above & Beyond TV: Episode 11

The latest episode from Above & Beyond’s ‘TV’ series.

• (1) Comments
• (4140) Views
• Get Above & Beyond 'Anjunabeats Volume 7'