Jam & Spoon - Tales From A Danceographic Ocean

If you wanna speak about the roots of Trance music, then this track has to be mensioned. For the first time electronic music was smooth, soft to hear, basic and complex at the same time. Altough Fantastic FF uses the wellknown TwinPeaks time, it still stands as an original track. And ofcourse Stella is the masterpeace here.
But... the one who is most forgotten on this record is Keep On Moving. Yes indead, not realy tranzy, rather breakbeat house. But brilliant it is. And because it is unknown, it is still like a fresh floorfiller. I am very attrackted to the sawbass in this track. Wonderfull line to get the people start to dance. Check out!

Luckily, I had the chance to find out about one of the tunes that influenced me on the early nineties - "Stella" (whose name I promised myself I would give my daughter one day, but unfortunately its author Rolf Ellmer A.K.A. Jam El Mar stole my idea and did it first, he has a daugher named Stella). This classic from 1992 was conceived back when the word Trance had a completely different meaning - something to do with a hypnotic environment, a warm atmosphere, regardless the 'label' the music in question would get from the specialized media or the DJs.

The German producer responsible for it mentionned above which was by the way part of Jam & Spoon, Mr. Jam 'El Mar' (born Rolf Ellmer) shared with us his thoughts about "Stella": "Well, how did it happen? It was just a lucky moment. At that time, I was a newbie to this, like a virgin (he laughs). I just did what I liked. You need the blessing of the moment.

Jam El Mar used a Oberheim X-pander (The reso-sound), a Wavestation (for the Pad), Procussion-EMU, an old Akai S-1000 Acoustic Guitar sample, very common those days (to simulate the Guitar sound), and Moby´s legendary "Go" beat loop. "I had this samples of the vocalist Tayah still around - "Hold me... Love-me(...)" - and a Proteus to make the Piano line, that´s it..."

According to Jam El Mar, when Mark Spoon (Markus Löffel R.I.P. 1966-2006) came in that afternoon in the studio, "Stella" was halfway finished - so they did the final things together. Then, Renaat got the playback from the Jam & Spoon duo, this is how everything started.

On 'Stella', Jam & Spoon sample the beats of Moby's 'Go'. They also did remixes of 'Go', and Moby did remixes of 'Stella'.

The EP title 'Tales From A Danceographic Ocean' is a reference to the progressive rock album 'Tales from Topographic Oceans' by Yes (1974).

Unimportant trivia to those who don't know: in "My First Fantastic F.F.", the last two letters actually means "Fist F**k". What a beautiful name for a track. ;)

"Stella" is very different from the two other tracks. "Keep On Movin'" and "My First Fantastic F.F." are trippy and dark tracks with excellent atmosphere. If "Stella" is "like a breeze on a hot summer night", the other two are "like a rave in thunderstorm".

Stella was one of the first trance tracks I heard and helped get me interested in R&S. Years later, Robert Miles stole the sound and commercialised it when doing "Children".

An early morning E-classic, a huge anthem in '92.
Established 'Jam and Spoon' as producers.
They simply have not equaled this since.

"Stella" is one of my all-time-favorites...
It has a very long ending with all kinds of bleeps and sounds, it's somekind of ambient-pirece which relaxes like a breeze on a hot summer night.
STILL IN LOVE WITH STELLA...