Trance never quite entered the centre of Americanoise understanding, the project running a freer and more ambient understanding which linked to but never aligned with the rougher Self Abuse and Mother Savage surges which dominated my survey of that place and time. ‘Ancient History’ compiles three extended Trance live performances from the early 1990s, recorded at the time on a DAT recorder strategically (or not) placed in the audience and sonically tweaked by John Wiese’s expertise. On each Mason is joined by Elden M, whose Allegory Chapel Ltd project similarly stood near but never in the Americanoise lexicon as I appreciated it – but which I’ve had a long and unassailed admiration of nonetheless.
The first track here is Trance’s first live show, emerging from the shadow of a run of late 1980s/1990 cassette, and heavily reliant on elements of Mason’s earlier musicality as rhythmic patterns merge with free-form junk percussion, flanged but discernible guitar and large empty spaces of withdrawal. The set is too long and meandering to truly succeed, something even the liner notes partially acknowledge, and is at its best when the percussive elements decline near the end, setting up a brief but edgier war of sustained guitar notes which are cannoned out to achieve feedbacked bliss, melting into some brief destructive kinesis; before that, however, the stretch of the piece is a bit laconic for me.
The second set from October 1992 is what I would have expected from a Trance show based upon the materials I’d heard previously: a swarm of mid-range guitar and keyboard tones struggling to be contained within a loosely formed shape, and bounded by minimal percussion. The groaned vocals add a strange ‘80s industrial undercurrent but fit the piece well, which (grunting aside) hits the intended target somewhere between an untidy Aube and a lite version of C.C.C.C. (whose Oakland visit this performance was in support of): better in the denser opening tranche and the gleeful extended closing feedback duel (which finds the vocals re-emerge in a more aggressive manner) than when the guitar takes up a rhythmic role and leaves Elden to fill too big a gap. While experiencing a brief lull in the middle the piece makes proper use of the loudness apparent in the room, genuinely transcendental moments emerging from the volume-driven forces of the duo at the peak of their free-form noise-making, making the fairly demure audience applause at the end rather surprising.
The final track is at Starlight Furniture Company in July 1991, supplementing the American live outfit with core Hijokaidan duo Junko and Jojo Hiroshige, and turning the project away from its more meditative qualities and straight into Japanoise scrawl with Junko’s screams a pervasive and typically abrasive feature alongside the drilling qualities of Jojo’s guitar. Another unusual feature to this track is the clear low-end murmur which has been extracted from the recording, adding a somewhat fidgety undercurrent to portions of the piece which is absent from the confined frequency profile of the other tracks. The collaborative track found edited release on a 7” previously which I’d always attributed to the Hijokaidan part of my collection rather than the American contributors, and hearing the full piece confirms that view – if the screech of 1990s Hijokaidan is for you, then here’s a dialed-in chunk of it.
‘Ancient History’ supplements rather than explains Trance’s history, with only the middle track really profiling the project at its place in American noise lore – although I suspect the first track strongly reflects Trance’s emergence from the 1980s as Mason extricated Trance from its noise rock and proto-industrial beginnings. The recordings stand up well given their age and derivation, expertly salvaged and presented in a typically loving digipack by the team at Helicopter and Troniks.
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