For a certain cross-section of dance music and hip-hop heads, AraabMuzik’s 14-years-in-the-making Electronic Dream 2 might as well be Chinese Democracy. Which makes the original something like Appetite for Destruction. Electronic Dream was an over-the-top portrait of a sound—in this case, sappy trance with acrobatic MPC work over top—that landed at just the right moment, at the height of EDM’s mainstream takeover in 2011. A promised sequel was leaked, then relegated to an obscure EP series called MVP of the MPC. Other tracks trickled out and AraabMuzik continued his day job as a pretty damn good rap beatmaker. (More recently, he scored a Harmony Korine film.) Now, out of nowhere, we get the definitive Electronic Dream 2, whose paranoid, swooning first single, “3AM,” beckons us into the overstimulated underbelly of stadium-sized dance music all over again.
The first Electronic Dream was a low-key masterpiece that sent AraabMuzik to huge festival stages. He finger-drummed wildly over garish EDM beats, wowing audiences with his dexterity and preternatural sense of rhythm on even the most straightforward beats. The album rocketed the former Dipset affiliate to a level of fame he might never have reached if not for the mainstream dance music maelstrom. It also came at a time when underground rap producers like Clams Casino were making names as artists in their own right, as beats like “I’m God” tunneled a hole through hip-hop and helped turn weirdos like Lil B into overground stars.
Like Clams’ Instrumental Mixtape, Electronic Dream was a hip-hop beat tape accidentally elevated to the status of a statement album. Its success came down to mass appeal: the muscular MPCs and undeniable hooks made its tracks catnip for rap fans and rappers alike, while the way AraabMuzik turned the most maudlin of trance music into stylish, often abrasive hip-hop appealed to underground dance music heads who prefer their beats with a little grit. No matter what angle you were approaching from, the combination of drum-machine fireworks, candy-sweet vocal hooks, and dreamy synths was just right for the moment.
The sequel, then, is a bit like a specimen encased in amber. Electronic Dream 2 comes straight from a time when kids were rinsing Kavinsky’s “Nightcall” off the Drive soundtrack, everything was bathed in bisexual lighting, and the Weeknd was sampling Beach House. Kicking off with a breathy chopped vocal and spring-loaded trap drums in “Someone Like You,” AraabMuzik moves like no time has passed at all. It’s instant gratification followed by a hint of numbness, like unwrapping exactly the gift you asked for and realizing that what you’d really wanted was a little surprise. There are no real missteps on Electronic Dream 2—but there are boring stretches where the sound starts to wear thin, including the six-minute single “3AM.” It sounds beautiful at first, but no matter how long you wait for a bass dive or a mood swing, it just floats, glassy-eyed.
Aside from two beats that sample Eartheater instead of the usual trance artists, any of these tracks could be from 2011. They exist only in conversation with the first album, which invites comparisons that would be difficult for any artist to live up to. A few Electronic Dream 2 tracks are all-timers that deserve a place alongside “Streetz Tonight” or “Feelin’ So Hood.” The Milk Inc.-sampling “Circles” is all exquisite depression, framed by blown-out basslines and drums that rattle your skull like electroshock therapy. The hissing vocals and heaving bass on “Perfect Silence” sound like someone at the end of their rope. These tracks call back to the original album’s tumultuous midsection, when the drums became frantic, the synths went haywire, and the screaming samples pushed into every nook and cranny. It’s easy to remember the prettier parts of Electronic Dream, but the journey to the depths and back is really what made it stick.
The beats on Electronic Dream 2 don’t segue together or build tension. Worse, most of them run too long, wallowing in a disaffected gloom—the same hollowed-out feeling as when the drugs stop working. That leads to some stunningly despondent moments, like on “Galaxies,” where AraabMuzik turns Kevin’s pumping “All in My Mind” into an on-edge fidget, its jittery refrain letting off steam but not powering forward. It also makes the LP feel sluggish, with tracks like “Til You Drop” (a carbon copy of his “I Remember” edit) rotely rehashing past glories.
It’s not as if AraabMuzik hasn’t tried to evolve. There was the mercifully short-lived Trap v. Drill v. EDM experiment, which traded dreamy trance for skronky dentist-drill synths and LFO wobbles. And the two Eartheater tracks here, “Deep Side” and the gqom-ish “Run Off,” offer fresh texture: Eartheater’s vocal runs are more layered and complex than the trance singers, which opens up a new site of dream-pop potential for AraabMuzik. Those tracks also feel a little out of place, as if he’d dropped them into an existing project to make it sound more contemporary.
In the same way they might discover a new path hidden in a park they’d walked through for years, plenty of people will enjoy Electronic Dream 2. But it makes me yearn for the original Electronic Dream, whose hard-edged rhythms and beautiful synth textures captured a wide-eyed wonder and a real menace that isn’t there 14 years later. No one else can make trapped-out trance beats like AraabMuzik, and therein lies the problem: When he isn’t firing on all cylinders, he’s trying to imitate himself. Electronic Dream 2 adds some new gems to the canon, but it’s not going to change anyone’s mind about trance, or open up new avenues in hip-hop. The original will always reign supreme.
