Surprisingly, it's got more going for it than the whoosh of expensive machinery. Chalk that up to Maas's handle on trance's crucial characteristic: not its abandonment of song structure, but its rigid and formal dependence on a closed set of sonic elements. You can manipulate a crescendo in a finite number of ways, so Maas sidesteps this limitation by spicing his compositions with healthy dollops of camp and a sense of restraint that's the opposite of the genre's typical bluster. Of course, it doesn't hurt that a couple of actual songs do show up: English astral-soul crooner Finley Quaye gives shape to "Caravan," connecting its forward momentum to trance's ancient antecedent, raga. But Maas needn't get ahead of himself: Just attaching a personality to the proceedings is a step in the right direction.