Written by Jax Figarola One should always listen to a trance album with an open mind, open heart, and an open area to move freely and dance. D Waviee’s ‘Epitome’ reads less like an album than a carefully staged rite of passage. Rite of passage (detachment, liminality, incorporation) in a way that the album stages a formal emotional transition for its listeners. Only at first, it might seem like a collection of tracks produced over time by D Waviee and simply arranged for the release of her sophomore album, but the first few tracks already interrupt the flow of mundane daily sounds. As an independent producer, she fashions her sets into ecstatic incantations; on record she does the same and invites listeners to a manufactured liminality of a dissolving material world. Yet, the texture of music, as an art form, remains in this world. The opening title track performs this perfectly: voices layered like organ lines, a fractal cascade, and a wind that seems to hug and lift you, until you register that you are not dancing alone, but part of a constructed sociocultural matrix that accepts music as cathartic like the rave scene. “Blizzard,” a techno-trance wink at Far East Movement’s “Like A G6,” and the light “Moody,” steer the album to a Jersey-club glitch vogue realness, which feels like walking into liminal geography. And if rave culture has always flirted with ritual, the album makes that flirtation explicit. There’s a temporary suspension (or detachment) of the social selves that makes it possible to enjoy yourself with a new sense of belonging. Therefore, midway through, ‘Epitome’ sharpens into a focused body of art. “Put It Down – Femme Queen Edit” in its Jersey-club, explicitly queer choreography, and vogue-ish punctures pivots into her most dangerous and most thrilling track “Electric Erotica,” which as a track feels like being fucked in all holes by a bionic octopus. Here, the body transforms into a site of ambiguous desire. The track is not sexual, but it is sexualized in a way that feels intentionally destabilizing, suggesting that the body in trance is neither wholly male nor female, but a porous, androgynous surface for electronic music to latch on. That interface is programmed to give temporary liberation, just as the track is programmed to put you into a sexual-psychedelic trance. Thus, the concept coheres from the fifth track to the eleventh. D Waviee’s techno flip of Pette Shabu’s “COA” starts the sequence to the project’s most successful continuity exercises. “Shot Para Igat” is libidinal and kinetic with all the moaning sounds and it feels like reaching the climax. However, the record jolts toward an awkward “Green Light (Extended Mix),” almost like an interstitial pop serenade in the middle of a ritual, as “818” and the ending “Bleach & Tone” tilt the project toward memory work. The latter, with its dusted PS2-era textures and pre-rendered nostalgia, performs the incorporation phase: the collective spirit, after its temporary detachment, returns altered to the world and carries a residue of the night as memory. There is a delicate, enchanted quality here — an insistence that communal dance can rewrite how we relate to technological and cultural memory, as if those PS2 textures remind us of the manufactured nostalgia’s power to anchor us back into our own living reality. The project may occasionally feel disembodied, and it’s a part of its strategy as much as its weakness. This made the opening songs read more like experiments. Further, sounds and the self become more fidgety, and the records become very danceable. In this sense, ‘Epitome’ is less about individual tracks, but about what the listener performs for themselves. The album becomes a mirror for how one carries the energy to a liminal space that they enjoy. Like any other dance album, it’s a highly participatory work. D Waviee’s performance ethos posits that euphoric dance is something made, not merely found. Raves’ socially unrestrained atmosphere already captures the spirit of trance music. It is through the act of assigning memory to her music that the listening experience shifts into something more joyous and sustaining than simply dancing. Lastly, there is a sense of alchemy in how D Waviee, as a producer, turns influences of different genres (Jersey club, acid trance, techno) into tools for communities to use to map the sounds that reconfigure social intimacy. If trance is a practice of temporary unmaking, D Waviee’s ‘Epitome’ is the night’s manual. It needs you to surrender your social script, to accept a shared illusion, and to step back into the world with a new, quieter devotion to your body, to the people who moved beside you, and to whatever tenderness the music carved through your night. D Waviee was able to turn sexiness into cathartic communal love for electronic dance music. It’s the reason why trans is a near-homophone of trance. SUPPORT THE ART AND THE ARTIST: Epitome by D Waviee