Above & Beyond

One Liner:  Electronic trance music with at least a jillion tracks

Wikipedia Genre: Trance, vocal trance, progressive trance, progressive house, big room house

Home: London

Poster Position: Level 2 (4) 
Both Weekends.
Friday.

Thoughts:  Fun facts about this phrase.  Two films are titled Above and Beyond, and while both are about World War II pilots, one is about the bombing of Hiroshima while the other is about pilots defending Israel in 1948.  There is a UK political party called the Above and Beyond Party.  There is a country song with the name, a jazz album with the name, and then this EDM group.

Three guys, and DJ Magazine has repeatedly ranked them in the top 25 in their annual lists of best DJs.  The group name inspiration came from a web page belonging to an American motivational trainer - the slogan used by the motivational trainer was "Above & Beyond", and they decided to use that as their name.  From their Wikipedia page, it sure seems like they are huge and sell out everything they do.  Two members met at University of Westminster, and then the third member was the marketing director & manager of Warner Music Group, who recruited the pair to help him remix someone else's track, and then just made himself part of the group.  That first remix went to #1 on the UK club charts.

Their new album is weird, as are many popular EDM groups who remix things and get remixed.  Makes it feel strange, like I am hearing the same songs over and over again.  Because I am.  The new disc is just strange - the mostly-music-free, thirty-one second intro has 10.2 million streams, and then nothing else on the disc even breaks 10k as of right now.  WTF?  Their discography begins back in 2001 with very bad mixes of a song called Razorfish that maybe also features something called Tranquility Base.  Sounds like a tune that was featured on the Matrix.

After that, the Compilations (Anjunabeats) start rolling out annually until a 2006 album called Tri-State.  This is the first one with a few tracks with serious streams.  Top one is "Good for Me" with 5.9 million streams.

Huh.  Surprisingly lovely.  Nothing like that initial freakout.  Although, a little boring if I am being honest.  Five minutes of almost the exact same thing.  After that, more singles and remixes and another Anjunabeats Compilation before 2008's Sirens of the Sea, and then another Anjunabeat before  Anjunadeep 01 and Anjunabeach (and I'm going to not write about all of this, because there is SOOOOO MUCH HERE).  I just need to show you the top tracks, because I bet they have a hundred million individual tracks on Spotify.  Here is "We're All We Need," from 2016.  33.1 million streams.

I've said this 100 times by now - I just don't really get it.  If I told you that was Avicii with Chloe Cooper, or Zed featuring Suzy Summers, or Boopfart featuring Mary Chins, instead of Above and Beyond featuring Zoe Johnson, would you have any clue?  Feels like each new EDM thing coming to ACL sounds just like the last one to me.  Sorry.  I'm sure some true EDM-head knows exactly why this type of laptop jockeying is totally different from the other, but not me.  They have so many tracks, very few of their individual songs have major numbers.  Only a few have over 10 million.  One of the few others is "Sun & Moon," with 28.7 million streams.

Holy shit!  A dude singing!  Oh, so this is how they are so different than anything else!  I'm good with moving on from this.  If you are a big electronic person, then this is your headliner once Odesza is done!  Enjoy!