N.O. got me enTRANCEd

One thing I really enjoyed back in the day is going to a good dance club. Yep, it’s true and I’d probably still do it if given the chance. It may strike one as strange but the kind of music I really enjoy dancing to is called Trance. There's something to that ever present, pulsing beat that gets to the heart of me. One of my coolest dancing experiences happened in Mexico when I got invited to rave a few blocks away from Monterrey's Gran Plaza. I was a little leary about going into this apparently abandoned building, but after going through a few doors, there in darkness you felt the thumping music emanating from the DJ's table. That rocked.

Today, as you can tell, I am a huge fan of trance music and I can trace this specific musical leaning towards my introduction to one of my all-time favorites bands, New Order. In the late 1980s, New Order’s Substance and Technique, were a couple of my favorite albums. In my own modest, musical tastes, I’ve always considered N.O. as the vanguards of the 80s new wave movement and the godfathers of today’s techno-trance music. This assumption was confirmed when I read the liner notes from their 2000 release, International. This is an excerpt from those notes:

New Order doesn’t dance, but really like it anyway.
They stood there, without saying a word to their audience. It was cool.
If New Order hadn’t played in New York, they would have never discovered Larry Levan’s Paradise Garage and John Jellybean Benitez’s Fun House.
They would never have worked with Shep Pettibone, Arthur Baker, John Robie or Steve Silk Hurley.
And the history of House music wouldn’t have been the same.
Without New Order, rockers would still listen to rock.
The true punks do dance music.
The techno generation is still running 20 years after Blue Monday.


Through the years, New Wave eventually became House and Techno, which could be lumped in the all encompassing Electronica genre, and finally we get Trance. After New Order, Depeche Mode, and even Nitzer Ebb, came Front 242, then into a certain extent, Nine Inch Nails, Republica, & Garbage. In the mid to late 1990s there were the likes of The Chemical Brothers (formerly the Dust Brothers), Fat Boy Slim, & today's Paul Oakenfold. But the most remarkable aspect of all this is that it's amazing to know and even hear that New Order's music is still relevant to today's music scene all these years later. It just goes to show that good music is hard to put aside.