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Timmy Trumpet, Vini Vici

Thunder

The Australian trumpeter-DJ Timmy Trumpet and the Israeli psytrance duo Vini Vici meet again on Thunder, a 2020 Dharma single that WeRaveYou heard as a kick-and-bass track infused with trumpet sounds, under three minutes long.

By korczis 3 min read
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Review

Genre and Mood

Timmy Trumpet and Vini Vici made Thunder for festival stages. It sits where psytrance, the duo’s home ground, meets the mainstage dance music Timmy Trumpet plays, and the feelings it aims at are the ones those stages run on: energy, euphoria and intensity, delivered fast.

Song Summary

When WeRaveYou announced the release in October 2020, it described Thunder as a monotonic track centred on kick and bass and infused with trumpet sounds. That is the clearest published account of how it is built: the kick and the bass as the engine, the trumpet colour as Timmy Trumpet’s signature. The single came out on Dharma, the label run by KSHMR under Spinnin’ Records, and its official audio runs under three minutes.

Musical Breakdown

No published analysis walks through Thunder section by section, so this review does not either. What the sources do give is enough to listen with: a low end of kick and bass that carries the track, trumpet-flavoured sounds on top, and a running time short enough that whatever happens has to happen quickly. An extended mix of about three and a half minutes appears on Timmy Trumpet’s album Mad World, still compact by club standards.

Concepts in Focus

Festival dance music is built on the build-up: the music withholds something, often the low end, so that tension rises before a peak. At festival scale that tension is what makes thousands of people move at once.

The release is the drop, the instant the full beat and bass return. In a track under three minutes there is little room for long preparation, so listen for how quickly Thunder moves from one to the other.

Psytrance and mainstage dance music share the four-on-the-floor kick, a beat on every count of the bar; in a track WeRaveYou heard as centred on kick and bass, that pulse is the thread everything else hangs on. Compare how Anna Lunoe – Radioactive, by another Australian DJ, builds its own festival drops.

Artistic Context

Timmy Trumpet, born Timothy Jude Smith in Sydney in 1982, started playing trumpet at four, taught by his father, and won a scholarship to the Conservatorium of Music before becoming a DJ who plays live trumpet over his sets. His breakthrough was Freaks with the New Zealand rapper Savage in 2014. Vini Vici are Matan Kadosh and Aviram Saharai from Afula in Israel, who worked together as Sesto Sento from 2001 and as Vini Vici from 2013; The Tribe and Great Spirit, with Armin van Buuren and Hilight Tribe, made them one of the best-known names in psytrance. Thunder was their second collaboration with Timmy Trumpet after 100 in 2018.

Impact and Reception

WeRaveYou counted Thunder as Timmy Trumpet’s sixteenth release of 2020, a year in which he was also playing streamed concerts, one of them from the Sydney Cricket Ground. We found no chart record for it; it is a festival and DJ-set track, made to be heard loud.

Learn from this track

Introductory

What you will learn

  • Explain the build-up and drop, the basic dramatic shape of festival dance music, and listen for it in a short track.
  • Describe the steady four-on-the-floor kick that psytrance and mainstage dance music share.
  • Compare a radio-length version of a dance track with its extended mix and say who each is for.

Listening guide

  1. the low end The kick and bass that WeRaveYou heard as the centre of the track: notice how much of the music rests on them.
  2. the trumpet colour The trumpet-infused sounds the same review noted, Timmy Trumpet's signature set inside a psytrance frame.
  3. the drops Festival tracks build tension and release it in a drop; count how often Thunder does it before the end.
  4. the length The official audio is under three minutes; the extended mix on the album Mad World runs about three and a half.

Concepts in this track

build-up

35 tracks

A passage that raises tension toward a release: rising pitch, faster drum rolls, opening filters, added layers. In dance music it prepares the drop.

drop

6 tracks

The moment after a build-up when the full beat and bassline return, often after a short silence. It is the release the arrangement has been preparing.

four-on-the-floor

20 tracks

A steady kick drum on every beat of a 4/4 bar. It is the pulse of disco, house and most techno: the body always knows where the next beat lands, so everything else can move around it.

Listen next, and why

Questions for discussion

  1. Thunder is under three minutes long. What does a short form gain, and what does it give up compared with a long club track?
  2. Timmy Trumpet is a trained trumpeter. How can a live instrument still matter in music built in the studio for festival stages?
  3. Why might a psytrance duo and a festival DJ want to work together more than once?

References

  1. WeRaveYou. Timmy Trumpet & Vini Vici join forces on brand new track 'Thunder': Listen (2020). Article
  2. Wikipedia. Timmy Trumpet. Encyclopedia
  3. Wikipedia. Vini Vici. Encyclopedia
  4. MusicBrainz. Thunder (recording). Database
  5. MusicBrainz. Thunder (extended mix). Database
  6. YouTube. Timmy Trumpet & Vini Vici - Thunder (Official Audio) (2020). Video

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