Weissensee I have never been a fan of electronic music. Electronic music always seemed too mechanic too short-lived for me. I mean that I usually got bored very soon of it. There is something lifeless in most of electronic music. When I was in my teens there were these bands like Tangerine Dream or Kraftwerk or electronic hit producers like Jean-Michel Jarre around. Their music never did anything for me. I was more into prog (or is it artock?) like Genesis, some Pink Floyd or Eloy, a forgotten German band but that's another story... Recently I got a little more into new electronic music which is usually labeled IDM standing for intelligent dance music. That's a ridiculous term: what an arrogant assumption that normal dance music is stupid! It is even more misleading considering that to dance to e.g. Boards of Canada seems to me a rather unworldly idea. The starting point was an mp3 I downloaded from filepile I think called Everything You Do Is a Balloon by Boards of Canada. I wrote about it here in this blog, a gorgeous impressionistic ambientish instrumental with discrete beats and dreamy synthesizer soundscapes in the second part. I then bought Geogaddi, Boards of Canada's latest offering which couldn't live up to that song. Recently I got their first LP Music Has the Right to Children which has a nice flow but still some tracks I almost hate. It nevertheless is the best electronic album of the last ten years I know (I hardly know any though). I also bought Autechre's latest record Confield but I must admit that I never got past the first track. What I heard was like a dentist's drill and that was enough to put me off. I will certainly try to listen to this album one day but I am not yet ready for it. In any case Autechre seems to be one of the most important bands in the IDM genre. Therefore I listened to a couple of mp3s from them I had downloaded from the web. And I found that their music was exactly as I remembered electronic music: dull and soulless. But then I stumbled upon their version of Weissensee, a track from the first album of Neu (a Kraftwerk-offshoot who pioneered punk and techno). And I was totally blown away. Weißensee is a city in Thuringia (in the East of Germany) who used to be the capital of Thuringia and Hessen (the Bundesland where I live) long ago. They claim the oldest German Reinheitsgebot (beer purity law) dating from 1434. I am not even sure if this Weißensee inspired the song but this is a nice connotation anyway. Autechre's version is almost nine minutes long. It is one of the most hypnotic songs I have ever heard. The beats sound like African slow-motion drums announcing a war, tribal and dark. Extremely powerful. They are garnished with some scratching sounding like duck cackle, bird's chirping or the squeaking of rusty doors. The synthesizer layers add a floating spherical flair to the song. If you want to know what trance is listen to this. I can't refrain from dancing to the beats with my buttock in my fully mobile office chair at home when listening to the song on my computer. What a perfect marriage of ambient and refrained dance beats. There is a 30 second real audio snippet on this page. The original seems to be less successful according to the snippet here. I nevertheless ordered Neu's first album from 1972 to check the full version.