Dance 2 Trance - Moon Spirits

Blow Up: 1992

The first trance album I ever owned, though I didn't buy it with that intent. Oh no, I was after a euro-dance album, and Dance 2 Trance was an act I recognized from a couple compilations. Throwing it on when I got home, the opening ambient-chant of Kayenta caught me off-guard – I wasn't expecting a Deep Forest clone! Then We Came In Peace played, and that's a cool melody, but why's this music so minimalistic and loopy? Wait, all these tracks are like this? That's weird, but not as weird as the lack of vocals. Ah well, I'm sure P.Ower Of A.Merican N.Atives will have Linda Rocco on- what the...! Nothing here either? Damn it, I must have gotten some bunk demo version of Moon Spirits. No wonder it was in a used shop. What a gyp.

It wasn’t long after when I clued in that Dance 2 Trance weren't euro-dance, but a number of years did pass before I understood their impact on electronic music at large. For these two guys, DJ Dag and Jam El Mar, invented trance. No, really, it was them. It’s right in their name, man!

Seriously though, their self-titled debut single was more of a New Beat thing, a popular mini-trend around mainland Europe of the early ‘90s. First released on Suck Me Plasma in early 1991, the B-side featured a curious little tune called We Came In Peace, stripping away New Beat’s aggressive EBM roots in favour of a hypnotic, space trip. Other Germans caught onto the sound, and soon labels were exclusively churning out the stuff. A genre and scene were born, enduring to this day despite many permutations since.

The clubbing success of that single and follow-ups like Where Is Dag? and Hello San Francisco got Dance 2 Trance onto a major label, Moon Spirits the inevitable LP that followed. I wonder if Dag and Jam were caught off guard by their success, because this is one raw album. We Came In Peace and P.o.A.N. are undeniable classics of the genre, but Sit Together, the Golden Gate Mix of Hello San Francisco, and even Where Is Dag? have the barest of musical ideas going for them, some synths and hooks outdated even by ’92 standards. Elsewhere, hazy downtempo cut Mr. Cannabis, prog-rocky Remember Exxon Valdez, and moody trance-grumbler Freaks have cool ideas running through them, yet too often sound muddy or half-baked. Compared to their following work like Take A Freefall (added to later editions of the album) much of this music lacks studio polish, as though rushed out to meet market demand.

Unfortunately, Moon Spirits isn’t an important album in trance’s history, totally skippable if you already have the singles off here. Dag and Mar would make better music following this, including as Dance 2 Trance. Check Moon Spirits out if you’re curious what an early-early crossover trance LP offered, but seeing as they were still trying to figure it out themselves, there’s a fair bit of miss with the hits.


ACE TRACKS:
We Came In Peace (Desert Mix)
P. Ower Of A. Merican N. Atives
Freaks