Saturday night at MSG was a celebration of all things Trance at a five hour extravaganza of EDMs, played live on the radio/internet "A State Of Trance" program. DJ and producer Armin Van Buuen's very popular and influential show.
The packed to the gills MSG felt like the grandchildren of Tony Monero back to the dance floor during New World Punx, aka German duo Mark Schultz and Ferry Cortsen, 90 minute coming out party. Both DJS are Trance great, Ferry is responsible for the epic and colossal "Never Coming Down", played to screams of joy late in the set. It is Trance as written, not the swoop of bass which personifies House (though Armin would have enough of that in the evening's final set) . And "Not Coming Down" swoops from high quotient melodic choruses, towards and away over and over again. It uses the melody the way House uses the bass: the center of gravity.
The result is a disco ancestor and the audience are a working class teen to twenty something bridge and tunnel crowd more heavily working class than House seems to bring. These kids are in the business of dancing and their use for the sounds of trance are to explode through their blue collar alienation.
New World Punx were excellent at proving the tools for swift, loud, LED inspired release. The duo are very, very busy, there will be no YouTube of them having a cigarette while prerecorded tapes air, this was two master DJ working at a feverish pitch while being listened to by a huge following , 6.5 million people, worldwide.
Now in its 12th year, Saturday night was the penultimate night on the 12 city A State Of Trance: Expedition, other stops had included Beirut, Lebanon and Mumbai, India, making this a true and definably worldwide phenom doubtlessly helped by being on the web where everybody has instant access.
NWP set was a marvel which distilled partylines and made language subservient to beats (around the 145 mark it says here, but I think that would kill you!) and melodies (definitely Eurotrash) and the Arena was bouncing along with enormous power and beauty. If you have never been to a rave at MSG, imagine your local Long Island disco from the industrial beats era written very very large and that is what it is like: there seems to be a cause and effect between melody and class structure and not nationality. Spiraling organ s rub up against fast beats and melodies appear and dissolve throughout the 90 minute set. This is very dramatic for dance, very soap opera epic with stuff like "Collision" which builds into "Crank" causing a sort of mass case of epilepsy. AT the end the terms of of evening are defined: "turning the world into a giant dancefloor" is flashed across the scene while a disembodied voice claims "I am never coming down today".
This is a music without heroes or histrionics, from high on their perch, fiddling for protools and Apple PCs,. Marcus and Ferry decided to join forces after finding themselves playing show after show back to back, for EDM freaks this is supergroup, albeit not Swedish House Mafia time, but for the untrained ear it is hard to tell what has been added. However that might be seen, the sound itself is busier than House, the effect is less streamlined, more character involved, less useful but more personable.
Again, not unlike disco.
Grade: B+
I stayed for half an hour of Armin's set, and it was less Trance like more House but still, with a lot of Zedd in the mix, it was still unmistakable,
Below is the New World Punx setlist and a link so you can hear it yourself.