Saturday, April 04, 2020

Dance and Trance

Today’s direction was doled out by the dear, dependable, doting, devoted… Dog Whisperer! And she has determined that the dissertation of the day shall be:

Delirium

Which is a state of confusion which I tend to dabble in thanks to regular sleep deprivation. But I’ve written about that quite enough, thanks, so how about we fudge one letter:

Delerium!

That’s better. Now, back in high school some of my pals would talk about this new Canadian band, now referred to as “industrial dance pioneers,” called Skinny Puppy. I never once looked into them which in hind sight might be a mistake. One of Skinny Puppy’s premier regular guests was Austrian-born Canadian Wilhelm Anton “Bill” Leeb who is probably most famous as the founder of group Front Line Assembly.

But Bill Leeb is also the founder and constant component of a long evolution of partnerships who passed through blended phases of industrial, trance and dance  recording projects under the commercially successful brand Delerium.

Leeb and his Delerius partners have produced fifteen albums since 1989, more than a dozen charted singles, twenty music videos and two Juno awards; the last in 2000 for single Silence with vocals by Sarah McLachlan. It charted number three in the UK and number one in both Ireland and Scotland and it’s in pretty much every conversation about best trance songs of all time along with best dance songs of all time.

Rockin’ Roddie put me on to Delerium early in the millennium and I really dig them for all the same reasons I dig Enigma. Though I’ve never been a dance music guy they have many songs I just straight-up dig, and partly for the ambient ethereal qualities which have been a regular component through the decades, to varying degrees, and which makes all their music (like Enigma) very prone to the sci-fi, fantasy and mystical moods which make these two groups constant features on almost every writing project music playlist I ever throw together. I often write to music.

Here are some great lesser-known offerings from my fave albums if you wish to sample:




And of course: One of at least 60 remixes of word-wide hit Silence with vocals by Sarah McLachlan:


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