States Of Trance: A history of trance music w/ Jack Moss

Two trance veterans go through four decades of electronic music's most misunderstood genre

It probably wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that trance changed my life. Before stumbling upon it as a starry-eyed 14-year-old in 2007, I wasn’t even that into music, I wasn’t much of a music kid. But then all of that changed when I came across those grand strings and sweeping arpeggios … and now here I am, writing this on my Substack about electronic music, two decades later.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of doing something on trance for a long time, but it always felt a bit too daunting, too big of a topic to tackle — there’s just so much to cover, so many things to get into. But then, following the first conversation-style piece I did with Sunik Kim early this year, I thought it might be easier to tackle trance history with the help of a friend — that friend being Jack Moss, a Manchester-based DJ (you can listen to his excellent trance mixes here) and trance lifer with the kind of deep and holistic understanding of this genre’s very fractured history that few possess.

I first met Jack in person a couple of years ago, but I have known him since 2009 as a fellow member of the TranceAddict forums. While now mostly defunct and basically unknown to the wider world, TA was far and away the biggest dance music message board of the 2000s. It was the kind of messy, tight-knit, and thoroughly human Web 1.0 space that led to friendships and rivalries, breakups and makeups, gender transitions, marriages, children, divorces, and more than just a few mental breakdowns.

While the site also had a very active off-topic section, Jack and I tended to mostly post on the Music Discussion subforum which was the kind of hardened old-school forum battlespace that has mostly gone extinct in the social media era. And although our conversation is not really about TA itself — there is much left I could say about the forum here, but I will save that for another time — it does inform the backdrop of our conversation, insofar as it was the primary discourse space of trance on the internet for most of the 2000s.

It is worth noting here that our perspectives on the history of trance are very much shaped by the fact that we both got into trance between 2002 and 2007 — a very weird time to be a trance fan, in that the genre had neither the mainstream popularity it enjoyed in the 90s, nor the underground credibility it has accrued in recent years. Being into trance at the time was like being into electronic music’s ugly step-sibling, a genre of dance music that wasn’t played in any clubs, a niche genre that was also highly commercialized, a scene full of purists that often knew little about the actual history of their favourite music.

Much has changed since then, of course. Being into trance is now cool (even Tiesto announced he is back on the trance wagon just last week), a state of affairs that I don’t think either of us ever thought to be possible. If there is an overarching narrative here, I think it is one of cycles; of demise and rebirth. As Jack says towards the end of our conversation:

But this music, at least the good stuff (laughs), never actually stopped being good, and it was still good in that long stretch of time where it was the most uncool thing on the planet. You know, I’m not so young anymore now — I’m thirty-six and rapidly approaching being middle aged (laughs) — and so I am really enjoying this Indian Summer I am having as a clubber right now, finally getting to dance to this music I’d been waiting to hear in a club ever since I was a young teenager back in 2002, twenty-three years ago.

While we picked a large and varied selection of tracks released between 1991 and 2021 to guide us through the history of trance, there are still inevitable gaps in chronology and styles that we just didn’t manage to get to. But even in its unavoidable incompleteness, I think this is really as thorough as anything you’re going to find on the history of trance on the internet. Coming in at over sixteen thousand words, this is easily the longest thing I have ever put out here and it took quite a while to put together, but I really wanted to do this in a way that would do justice to this music that changed my life. I hope you enjoy the trance, and go grab yourself some glow sticks! — Vincent

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Trance I: Within A Budding Groove. The 1990s.

1991: Dance 2 Trance - We Came In Peace (’91 Mix)

Vincent: “We Came In Peace” is often considered to be the first trance track. Do you have an opinion on what the first ever trance track is?

Jack: It’s certainly a strong contender. But then there’s also The KLF “What Time Is Love?” (1988) of course — and you could say that’s trance, but it’s very primordial. There’s a lot of very primordial records from that era, tracks that are this kind of proto-trance. But yeah, I still really like We Came In Peace. The original 1990 Mix is really good as well, but the ‘91 Mix is just a beautiful track. It’s very of-an-ilk with tracks like 808 State “Pacific State” (1989) or FSOL “Papua New Guinea” (1991) — these very blissful “sunrise” tracks, it’s really got that special fall-of-the-wall, early 90s positivity to it. But I don’t know if there’s necessarily anything to it that marks a definite cut compared to the other primordial stuff.

Vincent: Do you think there is any other track that would qualify as marking that kind of watershed moment?

Jack: I think it was just a very slow coalescing, really. In terms of establishing trance, I think the most important thing was really the use of the word — “Dance 2 Trance”. But then again, there’s also a Belgian¹ record — D-Shake “Techno Trance” (1990) — from that time that uses the word “trance”, so it was already going around and other people were using it as well. So I don’t know if there’s really any particular record that specifically marks the beginning of trance.

Vincent: Right.

Jack: You know, something else I was thinking about when you told me we were going to go through the history of trance is that I really don’t think there is any other genre of electronic music that has had such a fraught relationship with its own history.

Vincent: Yeah, for sure.

Jack: Like, I don’t think techno — well I guess there’s “business techno” now and techno has finally had its moment of being commercialised (laughs) — but I don’t think that techno or house ever went through this kind of extreme identity crisis that trance has gone through. In trance, already from very early on, there was really this idea that trance had fallen from Eden, that it’s deviated from what once was a Platonic ideal of “pure” trance.

And obviously, that then quickly led to the question of what it actually is that defines “real trance”, and one common notion was always that it’s about being hypnotic, about being in a “state of trance” … but I think when we actually look at the tracks we have here, most of them aren’t actually that hypnotic, they’re probably less hypnotic than your average techno record. But that said, I do think that “We Came In Peace” is quite a hypnotic track, it does embody this ideal of what trance often likes to think it’s about. There is something quite pure and innocent to it, especially in comparison to a lot of the trance that followed later.

Vincent: What’s always struck me about this track as a foundational trance record is that … you know, I think people often tend to associate trance with a kind of happiness or euphoria, but this is really a quite melancholic, almost sad, record. At least to me, trance has never been this unambiguously euphoric music, there’s always been this melancholic, wistful tinge to it.

Jack: Right.

Vincent: Going back to the “primordial soup” of trance — are there any other records you would consider to be a part of that?

Jack: To me, trance was definitely always a German scene. I guess Britain had progressive house, and Germany had trance. So if anything, I’ve always thought of that Berlin School thing as really being the original prototype for trance — like, you put a kick drum under a lot of those 70s Klaus Schulze records and it just sounds like trance, these 23-minute long arpeggios (laughs).

1993: Humate - Love Stimulation (Paul van Dyk Lovemix)

Vincent: I guess talking about the German scene then brings us to Paul van Dyk’s 1993 mix of “Love Stimulation”, which people like Ishkur — we’ll talk more about him later I think — have really considered to be that moment of original sin for trance, where it all started falling into overly emotional, un-hypnotic cheese. But of course, that is a bit of a silly narrative, because that would then mean that “real trance” only ever existed for a period of less than two years (laughs).

Jack: Oh, Love Stimulation! To be honest, I’ve always thought that PvD Mix was cheesy bullshit (laughs). But there’s also other tracks from that era that are very big, bordering on cheese, like Jam & Spoon² “Stella” (1992) — it’s not as saccharine, but it’s very soft. So I don’t think that Love Stimulation specifically was the moment where it all became about over the top emotions. But yeah, I don’t like this mix, although I do like the Oliver Lieb Mix (1998) from a few years later, which is more on the melancholic side. Although now that I’m thinking of it … isn’t there also something a bit melancholic to the PvD mix?

Vincent: Yeah, now that you say it, I do think that’s true — it’s a very end-of-the-night track, it’s euphoric, but there’s also a certain melancholy to it.

Jack: So going back to Ishkur — I don’t know how much you want to talk about him because I don’t know how many people today know who he is — I really don’t think I agree with that narrative of his …

Vincent: I guess I will put in something here that will explain it to people (laughs).

Note from Vincent: Ishkur was a fellow member of the TranceAddict forums and is probably best known for his infamous Ishkur’s Guide To Electronic Music. The early 00s Flash versions of the guide hosted on Di.fm were pretty much much the only thorough resource on the history of underground dance music to be found on the 2000s web, and thus left a lasting impact on the education of multiple generations of dance music fans. Here are the relevant passages from the 2.5 guide we were referencing in relation to our conversation:

“Trance is the most emotional genre. It can make you cry, make you shout, make you cheer, and make you celebrate absolutely nothing of substance except pure, ecstatic bliss. This is interesting, when at one time it was very repetitive and hypnotic (hence its label, ‘trance’) and was very easy to get lost in whilst divulging in aforementioned emotions. But now it’s quite difficult to get entranced due mostly to the fact that the genre has devolved into such trite, derivative junk that even the biggest culprits of it are having trouble lying about how interesting it is.”

“… this music [early, pure trance] encapsulates what I think of when I hear the word ‘trance’. Music that rewards paying attention and looking inward, on a meditative level. Music that you can get lost in. Parties that last several days, and songs that last 8 hours. You don’t hear that anymore. Today Trance is either a sequence of disjointed, disaffected, unrelated predictable anthems laid out one after the other (hardly entrancing), or is completely overshadowed and drowned out by the posturing and hero-worship of people who really do nothing more than operate a glorified stereo.”

Jack: So back in the early-mid 2000s, he really was a big part of spreading — at least on the internet — this narrative that at one point early on in its history, trance used to be this pure hypnotic underground music that then was bastardized into commercial cheese. And like we’ve said, I really don’t think that holds up to the facts very much, because the cheese was always there. I think that narrative was a lot more compelling back in the early 2000s before broadband and YouTube when it was a lot harder to actually track down and listen to those old trance records. But now with the modern internet, you know, you can easily search for and listen to all this old stuff (laughs).

Vincent: I remember certain people on TranceAddict were always hyping up those early Cosmic Baby records as being the real deal “pure hypnotic trance” — and you listen to them now, and they’re just so … incredibly cheesy (laughs).

Jack: Yeah! A lot of these early trance tracks are really pretty naff when you actually listen to them, they’re not cool, they’re pretty cheesy! Like, even the original mix of “Café Del Mar” (1993), that’s pretty fluffy. So I do think this idea that trance lost its way is a bit overstated — I mean, in certain periods there was definitely a trend where it got worse over time, but it’s always had this tendency of being overwrought and overly emotional, people breaking out into tears on the dancefloor.

Vincent: But I’ve also always had a certain appreciation for the fact that it was so absolutely sincere about being overly emotional. I feel like today, you really can’t find anything that is this emotionally intense without a single hint of irony — like, you remember that one clip of that middle-aged guy just bursting out into tears at a late 2000s Armin van Buuren show? I actually think I still have the DVD lying around somewhere, I bought it when it came out (laughs).

Jack: I remember that clip you are talking about, it’s infamous (laughs). I do think there’s something to how trance can be so emotionally extreme that it draws in people that are looking for this very strong, over-the-top emotional relationship to the music.

Vincent: I think it’s also the fact that by that time, during the later 2000s, the trance community had become very insular, if you were into trance you really didn’t listen to any other music, you didn’t go to any other shows. So when you finally got to go to that big Armin van Buuren show, that was your big moment, that’s where you let it all out …

Jack: I also really do think that there is, if I may use a slightly cheesy term, something genuinely “spiritual” about trance music that can invite this very emotionally deep connection to it. Like, if you go back to these early records, there’s this very prominent notion of spirituality, the idea that these — at the time very futuristic — records were also tapping into something very primal, of “going back to the source”. You had a lot of samples from quote-unquote “ethnic” music (laughs), nature sounds, that sort of thing. It’s all very early 90s, this early internet-era interest in primitivist spirituality, but I don’t think you ever really got that side of it in techno, for example.

1994: Vector (Cari Lekebusch) - Trance Test

Vincent: I picked this because I think it’s interesting that this is an early record by Cari Lekebusch, who later became a very influential producer in that whole late 90s Swedish percussive techno sound. So it’s really a snapshot of this very short-lived period from around 1992 to 1995 where you had techno producers making these techno-trance hybrids that are pretty stripped-down compared to a lot of trance, but also just a bit too exuberant to be techno — do you like this kind of stuff? It’s never been hugely my thing personally, but it’s gotten really popular with that Discogs digger crowd over the years, like a lot of these early techno-trance records are super expensive now.

Jack: I do quite like this track actually, I was listening to it earlier when cooking. And I think this is a good pick, in that we’ve mostly talked about these more fluffy records so far, but there was also definitely a faster and harder side to it — although again, a lot of these really fast techno-trance tracks can also be quite silly. I think I told you about this a while ago, but I bought this early Harthouse³ CD compilation on Discogs and I thought “this is gonna be some real hypnotic shit” (laughs) — and then I put it on, and it was almost like Gabber, these absurd 150 BPM tracks. So yeah, this is definitely on the less fluffy end of things, but it can also veer into silliness in its own way.

Vincent: Yeah, for sure.

Jack: Something I’m curious about is — you’re from Berlin so you obviously know more about this than me — but I’ve always had the impression that in Germany, the lines between trance and techno were quite blurred at that time, especially in Frankfurt?

Vincent: In Frankfurt with Sven Väth and the Omen club, there was definitely a blurring up to a certain point, yes. It was quite different in Berlin though, by around 1993 there was already a very conscious split between the techno and trance side of things, where the hardline techno crowd really wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with anything Paul van Dyk was doing (laughs).⁴

Jack: In general, you definitely had some people blurring techno and trance though, like some of those early Speedy J records for example?

Vincent: Yeah, that’s true. You also had Percy X in the UK with the Spacebuggy stuff for example — that first Spacebuggy EP, “Spacebuggy A1” (1994) … now that’s a trance track!

Jack: There was another Belgian guy as well, what was his name ... Robert Linier? — Robert Leiner!

Vincent: “Aqua Viva” (1992)! God, what a gorgeous track. But yeah, in a certain way, it was quite blurry between trance and techno, at least for a time. Even Jeff Mills was playing stuff that would be considered trance now up to about 1994. Like, there’s a 1993 mix where he plays that absolutely ridiculous track on Bonzai, something with “Stephenson” … you know what track [Jones & Stephenson“The First Rebirth” (1993)] I mean?

Jack: Yeah (laughs)!

Vincent: But by around 1996, things had become quite different, all of these techno guys like Lekebusch just totally stopped making anything even remotely close to trance, they were all like “okay, we can’t do this anymore” (laughs). Even with someone that was so heavily associated with trance like Sven Väth, by 1997/1998 that Frankfurt Omen sound was all tool-y percussive techno.

I think especially in Germany, that was really because trance had become emblematic for this very insane commercialisation process the scene was going through at that time, where things had gone from tiny clubs with a few hundred people to massive commercial raves with tens of thousands of people within just three or four years. There are people that made their millions with trance-pop in the mid-90s, it was big business. And if, like so many of the first rave generation, you had gotten into this music with some kind of idealistic underground ethos, you were obviously going to react to that in some way.

1995: Cygnus X - Indakasa

Jack: I think this is a good example of that whole 90s spirituality thing we were talking about earlier. This was also a track that Sasha played around the Northern Exposure period, where they were mixing these progressive trance tracks with more downtempo and ambient stuff. And I think that this is also something that this track touches upon — that there was not only an overlap between trance and techno and house, but also between trance and ambient, which I think has been forgotten a bit now … like, even Oliver Lieb⁵ made lots of ambient!

Vincent: That whole chill out room culture that doesn’t really exist anymore today, at least to the extent it did back then.

Jack: I think things were a bit looser in general back then. Dance music was much less concerned with being “DJ friendly” because they hadn’t really codified it into these maximally effective forms yet where records follow a specific structure specifically suited to the dancefloor. You know, in the UK — I don’t know if this was culturally relevant in Germany — we had this thing called the “Crusty” scene, those white-dreadlocks-traveller-people (laughs). That was also basically where the psytrance came from, and they had this massive night in the UK called Megadog.

This was a huge thing at one point, these huge parties on a Sunday in the suburbs that had people like System 7, The Orb, Dreadzone and Orbital doing these chillout live PAs. And I think this track is a pretty good example of that whole scene, the more ambient end of trance sitting between the dancefloor and the chillout room somewhat ambiguously.

1995: BT - Divinity

Jack: The album this is from is actually quite house-y, this is probably the most trance-y track on the album. In the mid-90s, there was this very balearic, summery evolution of trance where things got a bit slower and softer for a bit. And this is an important track to me because this was really the trance sound — you know, the first and second BT albums, Paul van Dyk’s Seven Ways period, Way Out West, Chicane’s first album, Blue Amazon, Salt Tank, and so on — that first struck me as a teenager. I was living in the countryside at the time and I remember just listening to these tracks on my walkman while walking my dog through a forest, so this whole era of trance really has a lot of personal weight to me.

Vincent: Were you listening to this around the time it came out, or a few years later?

Jack: This was a bit later, the very early 2000s, around 2001 or 2002.

Vincent: As you know, I didn’t get into trance until the later 2000s when it was all already very mp3-based — back then, it was still mostly CDs, right?

Jack: It was CDs, yes. This was before broadband and it was still the very early days of downloading stuff off the internet — so you could read about things on the internet, but you couldn’t just stream or download them. I also never had a record player, I wouldn’t even have known where to find the underground record stores that sold trance vinyl. So I was really limited to what was available on CD at HMV, but this was the tail end of that era where dance music was quite mainstream and could be found in high street stores, so at an HMV you would have this enormous long aisle of CDs that was basically all dance music.

I remember going to Florida for a holiday with my family in 2003 when I was fifteen and they had a massive Virgin megastore there, and I just spent hours in there because there was all this American stuff that I’d maybe read about, but just wasn’t available in the UK at the time. A lot of the German stuff was actually also quite hard to find. I think this is one of those things that is very much forgotten about now and difficult for younger people to appreciate, that back then you were really at the mercy of what got licensed to your territory, especially when it came to CD releases.

Vincent: I think a lot of younger dance music fans also aren’t aware of the fact that in the 90s and early 2000s, mix CDs and compilations were really the only way to actually listen to dance music at home for most people, because like you’ve said, vinyl was this very specialized DJ thing that was far from accessible.

Jack: CD mix compilations were a big part of how you found out what was being played on dancefloors. You had all these compilation series, and you bought them to find out what the big tunes of the season were — because even if you’d heard them on the Radio 1 Essential Mix or something like that, you wouldn’t have known what they were actually called! Unless you were a DJ, it was only through these compilations that you could actually find out the name of tracks … this all sounds very quaint now, doesn’t it?

Vincent: Certainly (laughs)!

Jack: What I find interesting about this track is that it’s both well and badly produced. In some aspects it goes down quite well, but it’s got one of the worst kick drums I’ve ever heard on a dance music record. But I guess that’s also reflective of how someone like BT wasn’t necessarily making dance music for dancefloors — do you like this track, what did you think?

Vincent: I don’t necessarily have the same attachment to this particular sound that you have, but I do quite like this track. I was surprised by how house-y it is for someone that I guess has mostly become known as a trance artist. Maybe this is a good point to talk about progressive house a bit, because I think not a lot of people know where that genre actually came from originally.⁶

Jack: So to me, “progressive house” was really just the first wave of UK house music. Before that you did have acid house records made in the UK, but they were just replicating that Chicago sound, they weren’t really distinctly “British” in the way that progressive house was. And I’ve always thought the big thing we added to the dance music lexicon as a nation was really the influence of Jamaican music, that sound system thing.

Vincent: I was going to say that.

Jack: And if you listen to Leftfield — I think there is a clearer contender for the first progressive record than there is for trance, and it is Leftfield’s “Not Forgotten” (1990) — there you already have that really heavy dub bass, that tribal percussion. It’s very different from what was coming out of the US at the time. And while some of that early progressive house stuff wasn’t super melodic, it then quickly sort of became Britain’s version of what Germany was doing with trance. So progressive house really brought together all these different influences — the groove of house, that melodic aspect from trance, the Jamaican dub influence, and even a bit of that early UK breakbeat hardcore thing.

I think I’ve mentioned this theory to you before, but I’ve always thought what defines what genre of dance music a track belongs to is really the groove. And so with trance, I’ve always associated it with that rolling offbeat bass; a pumping, less groovy rhythm, a bit more metronomic. So to me, what decides how “proggy” a track is is really the bassline, in that prog has these chunky basslines and looser, more organic percussion. That’s certainly what progressive house stood for originally, although I think for a lot of people now it just means “trance-y house”.

Vincent: Right.

Jack: You know, actually, around this time — ‘95 or ‘96 — the use of “progressive house” became quite uncool, it fell out in favour of the term “epic house” for a bit. The tracks became longer and more epic and airy for a while, and there was actually a lot of criticism directed at Sasha and Digweed for going into that direction, they got absolutely hammered in the British dance music press for playing all this swirly floaty stuff.

Vincent: I actually didn’t know that (laughs).

Jack: They basically went into hiding and only played in the US for a year (laughs), and then returned to the UK with a bit of a harder, more streetwise sound.

Vincent: That does sound like the Chris Domingo track you picked, which is from ‘96 and certainly a lot more chunky and stripped down than this BT track.

Jack: Yeah, that’s a good segue to the Domingo track.

1996: Chris Domingo - Believe

Jack: I found out about this track through a promotional mix that Sasha and Digweed did when they were touring Northern Exposure, and this was a track on it. And yeah, if you compare this to the BT track, it’s not nearly as naive and starry-eyed, it’s quite a cruel dancefloor record, isn’t it.

To be honest, I’m also not really sure if this is progressive house or trance. I feel like it lands somewhere in the middle — it could be either progressive trance or progressive house. Certainly to people that aren’t as immersed in trance and prog and that don’t care so much about these small nuances, this and a straight up trance record would probably sound the same anyways (laughs).

Anyways, I think this is a real gem of a track, it’s practically unknown. And I do think this is a good example of trance music that is actually hypnotic. There’s all these little layers, there’s a lot of call and response, it just keeps building these layers, adding more and more until you’ve got like ten different things by the breakdown — to me, that’s what trance music should be, but it’s very often not.

Vincent: You know, it’s funny, it’s like over the course of trance’s history, we have the same dynamic repeating again and again — where things get progressively more fluffy until it hits some kind of maximum-cheese breaking point, that then leads to a backlash where people start making more hypnotic and stripped down tracks again, rinse and repeat (laughs).

Jack: Certainly, with Sasha and Digweed, they did get a big beating from the press, and then came back with something quite different to these thirteen minute over the top epic house tracks they were playing a year or two earlier, although that is not to say that they didn’t play some cheese still (laughs).

Vincent: I think something that is also easy to miss for people that haven’t gone back and listened to a lot of old mixes from the 90s is that you very rarely had someone only playing one type of track throughout a set. Like, even with some of the more commercial DJs, they usually started their sets playing pretty stripped down house and prog, only building up to something more epic towards the end of a set. It wasn’t just this endless string of big tunes with massive breakdowns, which is what I think a lot of people now think a “trance set” is.

Jack: That’s true. It’s also worth noting that at this point in trance history, the whole giant breakdown thing hadn’t even really been introduced yet, although, obviously within just a few years, trance then did devolve badly into an endless string of enormous breakdowns —

Vincent: — “Airwave” (laughs).

Jack: (laughs) … and don’t get me wrong, I do like me a big breakdown as a peak in a set, but it has to earn that moment. But what happened to trance around this time is that big breakdowns started to appear in tracks and then very quickly, every single trance track had to have a massive breakdown and basically every track started to follow the exact same structure.

Vincent: Where do you think that whole breakdown craze started?

Jack: There’s actually a few contenders for the track that really popularised the big breakdown formula. And I think it’s interesting, because you can look at something like Hardfloor “Acperience 1” (1992) from the early 90s, which did technically invent the whole massive snare-roll breakdown thing, but it wasn’t like that suddenly started off this massive trend of people only doing that.

Then you also have Union Jack “Two Full Moons & A Trout” (1994) — who did the remix on that, let me Google it … Casper Pound! — so yeah, the Casper Pound Mix of that track had a really massive ending, but that was also quite early, ‘94. I’ve also heard people say it was L.S.G. “Netherworld” (1996) — but I find it quite hard to believe that Netherworld was responsible for all those massive trance breakdowns.

Vincent: Yeah, no way that was Netherworld⁷ (laughs)!

Jack: So I’m genuinely not sure. Although what I do know is — you know, a very important track we haven’t talked about yet is Robert Miles “Children” (1995). It was incredibly influential and while the rhythm section is rubbish, I do have a bit of a soft spot for it as a saccharine piano thing.

Vincent: I was actually at a house party the other day, and there was this twenty-one year old DJing … and they dropped “Children” (laughs). I do think it’s quite interesting how this track specifically has really endured in cultural memory.

Jack: Right — and actually, now that I think of it, if I had to pinpoint a specific track that really started the whole massive breakdown craze, it would probably be Faithless “Insomnia” (1995). I don’t know how big Faithless were in Germany, but they were massive in the UK, that was a top five record in the pop charts. And from there and the whole Robert Miles thing, you very quickly got tracks like B.B.E. “Seven Days In One Week” (1997), and then all that quickly coalesced into the whole big late 90s Dutch trance thing.

Vincent: I think it’s also worth noting that the whole breakdown thing signaled a huge change in the culture of the scene. Because when every single track has a two minute breakdown with no drums where you are just standing around waving your glow sticks like an idiot (laughs), it’s not really “dance music” at that point anymore, and it starts to attract a crowd that’s quite distinct from that core nightclub crowd that just wants to get sweaty dancing on a Friday night.

Jack: I guess that brings us to Gouryella, which is ‘98 —

Vincent: — for the whole late 90s eurotrance thing, I think we could also just do Rank 1 “Airwave” (1999) instead.

Jack: I actually would like to say something about Gouryella — I hadn’t heard it for years, but I do have a bit of a soft spot for it still.

1998: Gouryella (Ferry Corsten) - Gouryella

Jack: Here we are really approaching a kind of giganticized version of earlier tracks like “Seven Days In One Week”. I guess the influx of very strong MDMA into Europe at the time probably helped fuel this kind of euphoric tendency. And I’ve always felt that Ferry Corsten specifically got the brief really, that this was becoming this sort of supercharged y2k futuristic Ecstasy pop music. Like, even with something like “Out Of The Blue” (1999), I’ve always thought that it really sounded like an 80s synth pop track, it’s even got that gated snare and everything. He knew what he was doing, and it wasn’t about trying to make people cry on the dancefloor.

This was also around the time that Gatecrasher started the whole “Superclub” wave here in the UK. They were playing this kind of trance, but it was also a whole fashion and lifestyle trend — bright blue hair, glow sticks, everyone dressed like absolute lunatics (laughs). It became a whole craze in the UK, and there was also a version of that in the US with the Kandi ravers. Those Gatecrasher crowds were really young, it was these seventeen, eighteen-year-old kids. Listening to this track, I can really hear the invincibility of youth in it, being seventeen and on Ecstasy for the first time. It’s just innocent fun, it doesn’t take itself too seriously — like I really don’t think this takes itself as seriously as something like “Airwave” does.

Vincent: It’s definitely more cheeky and self-aware than a lot of the stuff that came later. Like, the main riff on it is just absurd, this bizarre synthetic pseudo-saxophone thing (laughs).

Jack: It is very weird, isn’t it. But yeah, I can understand why a lot of people are nostalgic for this music, it’s the sound of being young basically and there is something quite endearing to that. You know, this stuff was really my introduction into dance music when I was twelve, thirteen years old. It was everywhere, it was on the radio, you’d go into a supermarket in the UK and you’d find Gatecrasher, Ministry of Sound, Cream, Euphoria — all those trance CD compilations, they were in the mainstream charts. It was pop music, in a way.

Vincent: I think it’s interesting that this stuff is also very popular with younger people today — like, to them it kind of represents this fantasy of the 90s as this utopian golden era where there were no problems in the world and no one had to worry about anything.

Jack: There’s definitely a lot encoded in this kind of music culturally. I know a lot of Gen Z people that weren’t even alive in the 90s that do look at this music as representative of what is this very idealized era in their heads.

Vincent: Right.

Jack: But yeah, going back to Gouryella, I think it’s an interesting track to contrast with “Airwave” … because now that’s a dire, dire record (laughs).

1999: Rank 1 - Airwave

Vincent: So, “Airwave”. Yeah, it’s dire (laughs). This is where trance as a genre really became heavily associated with — perhaps even defined for a minute — by that one sound, that supersaw sound. So there’s also a technological side to it, in that this was essentially the sound of the new generation of digital “virtual analog” synthesizers that were hitting the market around that time, specifically the Roland JP-8000 which came out in 1996, that’s the one with the infamous “Super Saw” oscillator.

And you know, it’s funny, because while I do quite like that 90s VA sound in general — like the Nord Lead and Access Virus — I’ve never liked that JP-8000 supersaw thing, I just can’t stand how the detuning sounds on that. Which is also why I’ve really never been very into the whole y2k eurotrance thing, because so much of it is literally just layers upon layers of this one sound.

Jack: “Airwave” is such a weird track if you think about it — like, to me, it just sounds incredibly disjointed. In the intro, there’s actually some funky balearic percussion, almost like it’s trying to be Nalin & Kane “Beachball” (1997). But then there’s those banging whoosh missile sounds and then suddenly, it drops into this untz-untz offbeat trance bassline. It’s just so unsubtle, isn’t it.

Vincent: The melody on those strings is also just infantile, it’s not even good in a campy way.

Jack: Just terrible, terrible (laughs). I don’t know how this became one of the biggest trance classics ever. And again, you can say that Ferry Corsten knew that he was doing cheeky pop music, but this takes itself very seriously, doesn’t it. People very quickly started taking the tongue out of the cheek with this kind of stuff, and that’s when things got bad.

Vincent: I guess ‘99/2000 was really the peak of that brief moment where trance went ultra-mainstream in Europe and it was everywhere for a minute. But then all that also collapsed just as quickly — you know, that whole “Superclub crash” leading into the early 2000s progressive house scene. I’m thinking of that one line from Ishkur here that goes something like “like rats from the sinking ship”:

“Like rats scrambling from a sinking ship, Progressive Trance and Anthem Trance producers escaped the banality of the builds, breakdowns and chorus melodies when it was declared by the genre’s elite (read: Sasha and Digweed) as being thoroughly uncool to keep playing the stuff. So they latched onto the other genres as a way to stay ahead of the pack.”

Jack: On that point: while Superclubs did die around 2002 — if you go back in the archives and read the music press, you’ll find that it was around the end of 2001 that ticket sales and record sales started to decline — I feel like the impact that actually had on the music that has been a bit exaggerated by people like Ishkur. Because, I mean, the tribal progressive sound that followed was already bubbling up well before the crash, and it wasn’t like the Rank 1s of the world just stopped making big trance records, there’s twenty more years of this stuff (laughs). But what did happen was that people like Sasha and Digweed and the other progressive DJs that had been playing stuff that was really not that far off from “Airwave” —

Vincent: (laughs)

Jack: — you had tracks like Sasha “Xpander” (1999), Bedrock “Heaven Scent” (1999) and Sander Kleinenberg “My Lexicon” (2000) … and while these tracks are a lot better than “Airwave” obviously, they’re still quite fast and trance-y, they have that big hands-in-the-air melody. And so I do think the progressive DJs eventually did sort of recoil in horror and made a shift in sound, but that wasn’t necessarily directly related to the Superclub crash, which was more of a systemic crash of what was essentially its own separate scene.

Vincent: There was also a bit of a dance music crash in general around that time, that 2002-2003 period really marked the end of rave as pop culture in Europe. Something particular to continental Europe in that respect that I don’t think many people in the Anglosphere are aware of is that this was also when the localized, native-language versions of American gangster rap that had been bubbling up for a while finally hit the charts.

And as soon as that hit, rave as mass culture was just instantly over, because for a teenager trying to look hard and act tough, I guess there’s probably nothing more embarrassing than the idea of sucking on a pacifier and hugging people on MDMA (laughs). And obviously, the underground never really stopped, but in terms of visible youth culture, it was really all gangster rap and maybe a little bit of indie here in Berlin when I was a young teenager in the mid-2000s. And that only really changed with things like Berlin Calling (2008) that made people outside the underground go oh right, this music still exists, it’s not just some short-lived Beanie Babies fad that died out in the 90s.

Jack: I remember there was an article about the “death of dance music” in the Guardian somewhere around 2004, and it had this really funny line that went something like “you can either wear jeans and listen to The Strokes and maybe have a chance of getting laid, or go to Gatecrasher, dress up, and look like an imbecile” (laughs).

Vincent: Trance definitely went back underground for a while — which also had its upsides of course, as we will see with the next few tracks.

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Trance II: The Fugitives. The 2000s.

2000: Solid Sessions - Janeiro

Jack: I don’t know if there’s so much I want to say about this track specifically — and I don’t think it necessarily signifies any particular evolution in the genre — but I just wanted to pick something that’s a straight up trance classic from this era that’s a bit more classy. I don’t want to make it seem like every trance anthem from this point on was just “Airwave” (laughs). If you dig around, there’s a lot of little gems like this that are doing the trance formula, but in a proper way.

Vincent: Now that I think of it, we also haven’t really talked about the progressive trance side of things so much, but there’s obviously also a ton of big progressive⁸ trance tracks from that turn of the millennium era that have held up really well — you know, your Cass & Slide “Perception” (2000), Narcotik “Blue” (1998), Max Graham, Starecase, early Silver Planet, and so on. There’s definitely a lot of great trance from this era that isn’t "Airwave” (laughs).

2000: Breeder - Tyrantanic (Evolution Dub)

Vincent: Now we’re past that millennium Dutch trance moment and onto the early 2000s Bedrock progressive house era … this one’s a real TranceAddict classic.

Jack: I think the mix that most people were familiar with was actually the Slacker Remix, whereas I don’t think the Evolution Dub I picked has been played as much, which is why I thought it might be a more interesting choice maybe. And of course you also have Breeder and Evolution on one track here, who between them were two of the most important producers in that early 00s progressive house scene.

Vincent: I think it’s interesting how little cultural crossover resonance this prog sound has had compared to the y2k eurotrance stuff — like, I don’t think anyone that’s not a real trance and progressive head knows who Breeder and Evolution are today.

Jack: For me, this sound, that Bedrock, that Global Underground early 2000s prog sound — especially the early, more trance-y iteration of it before it went more dark and percussive — this was always the peak of trance to me. This is the peak of genre, of the trance and progressive scene.

Vincent: Yes, yes, I agree, one hundred percent.

Jack: I’ve always said that when prog is at its best, it’s got a bit of everything you want in electronic music, especially on a dancefloor — it’s quite hard and banging, there’s energy, but it’s not a stupid nosebleed bashing, it’s got melody, but it’s not cheesy. It’s really got a good mix of all the right ingredients, and I think this track is a good example of it. It’s not fluffy, it’s got a bite to it, but it’s also not just stupidly banging and it’s also quite euphoric. This is just as good as it gets, for me personally.

Vincent: Were you into these kinds of tracks when they were coming out, since this was around the same time you started getting into trance?

Jack: I was probably a bit too young for this kind of stuff at the time. It takes you a bit to find the more underground stuff. I think I became aware of the more progressive side of things through remixes — you’d buy these CDs of big trance anthems and there’d often also be a deeper prog mix of that tune on there. I remember the Way Out West mix of Tiesto’s “Suburban Train” (2001) on the second CD of In My Memory specifically was a big lightbulb moment for me, like “oh, you don’t actually need to have a massive breakdown” (laughs). But I was really too young to ever have gone clubbing to this stuff.

Vincent: In retrospect, it’s fascinating how short-lived that whole scene really was — by 2005, we’re already in the peak minimal era, so it really only ever lasted for less than five years.

Jack: And if you think about it, we’ve only really talked about nine years of music so far. We’ve gone through all this history, all these developments and reactions and backlashes, and it’s only been nine years. Nine years ago was twenty-sixteen!

Vincent: (laughs) Oh God.

Jack: And obviously, there have been changes in dance music since 2016, but back then everything just developed so much more quickly. Like, when we talk about the “epic house era” of Sasha and Digweed, that only really lasted for about eighteen months and then it was already onto the next thing. So yeah, I think a lot of younger clubbers probably aren’t aware of just how short-lived so many of these styles and sounds actually were.

2001: Bill & Seb - Into the Light

Vincent: This one was new to me, I had never heard of this track.

Jack: I wanted to also pick something a bit more obscure that you maybe wouldn’t know (laughs)! This is a progressive psy-trance track, it came out on Dragonfly which is this legendary psy label. I’ll tell you how I found out about it — do you remember how there was this massive mystery of people on TranceAddict spending years trying to find out who was behind this mislabeled 2005 set that was supposedly Digweed playing at Fabric?⁹

Vincent: Yeah, I remember that (laughs)!

Jack: It was on that mix that had this massive mystery of whether it was Digweed or not. I think what settled it ultimately that it definitely wasn’t Digweed was that there was wall-to-wall progressive psytrance in the middle of it, and he had just done his actual 2005 Fabric Mix which was pretty much just electro, so there’s just no way he was playing an hour of psy at that point. You know, we’ve not talked about psy at all so far … and I don’t know if you even want to go down that psy rabbit hole (laughs) because it is very much its own scene.¹⁰

Vincent: No way, let’s not get into psy here (laughs).

Jack: But yeah, there were a lot of tracks from this era that were in the psy scene that had a bit of a prog sound to it. And I’ve noticed that a lot of the younger DJs that are playing proper trance again now are digging back through this old prog-psy stuff, trying to find something a bit more obscure — so something like this one is really expensive on Discogs now, it’s like 50 Euros.

Vincent: Right.

Jack: The other thing that’s interesting to me about this track is that when I heard one of the new wave trance DJs — this guy called Spray — play it … he didn’t even play the breakdown, he just played the first four minutes. And that relates to something we haven’t really talked about yet, and that’s how these records are being played by DJs. Because back when these records were actually coming out, it was still very much an A-to-B style of mixing.

Vincent: Yeah. I feel like that’s one thing that sounds kind of dated about these old prog records from today’s perspective — they always have these massively long intros and outros where it’s just a kick and one drum sound for a minute and a half. People don’t really produce like that anymore, tracks generally start much more in-the-middle now. I think that was really a product of that prog style of DJing where you had people doing these massively long blends, and that’s why all these old prog records have like three or four minutes of runtime that are basically just pointless unless you are mixing them (laughs).

Jack: Exactly. And I think the big difference with these new Gen Z DJs is that they really almost play it more like techno now; a lot of fast mixing, playing tracks only for two or three minutes.

Vincent: Do you like that approach to it?

Jack: Hmm … to be honest, for me, if a track’s good, I want to hear it (laughs). You know, when Spray played it, I was like oh my God it’s Bill & Seb, I’d never thought I’d hear that in a club. And so I told my friend next to me, just wait for it, this track’s got a brilliant breakdown — and then he just mixed out of it before it even got to the breakdown, and I was just like aw come on, what’s the point (laughs)!

That said, this new more techno style of DJing these records definitely does change the energy on the dancefloor. I guess that also has been part of the “rehabilitation” of trance — playing these tracks with a bit more of a punk touch to it, not being too respectful to them. It’s a very deliberate recontextualization, so even when it’s these old tracks being played, it’s a very different kind of presentation, which is interesting. But I do miss hearing eight-minute records smoothly blended, that was the style back in the day, and I do think that quite naturally fits the genre.

Vincent: I think that style of prog DJing was also really a product of it still being the vinyl era — the fact that doing these very long blends on turntables isn’t trivial like it is now with digital DJing.

Jack: You think they were showing off in a way?

Vincent: Yeah, I think that was definitely a part of it. You know, I think anyone can learn how to do basic beatmatching on vinyl with enough practice, but being able to smoothly keep two drifting records in sync for two minutes without audibly nudging the platter all the time is just on a whole different level of technique, that’s not something your average bedroom DJ can do. So I do think it was a bit of a status thing, what separated the top-tier professionals like Sasha and Digweed from the rest.

2001: Tiesto & Junkie XL - Obsession

Vincent: Tijs Verwest (laughs)! Tiesto!¹¹ I think this one’s actually a great track, I still love it — do you like it?

Jack: Oh yeah, I do. There’s actually a few decent tracks on that album. It also had that Way Out West remix on the second CD I was talking about earlier. I think I actually only really got into this track a few years later, maybe because it’s a very techy track. You know, when this came out when I was a teenager I had really awful headphones with absolutely no bass, and of course that influenced what sounded good to me — all those borderline ambient BT tracks covered in shiny pianos sounded great (laughs), but something like this probably just sounded flat and boring to me at the time.

Vincent: The beginning is very techy, but then once the breakdown hits it also gets very airy and almost euphoric.

Jack: Right! We also talked about L.S.G. “Netherworld” earlier, and I think that has a similar thing going on where it starts out really filthy and then gets really floaty in the breakdown. You know, one of my maxims as a DJ and clubber has always been that when you are on MDMA, there are really two things you want from the music — you want it to be really hard and filthy so that you can do that twisted gurning motion with your face (laughs), but then you also want those really tingly pretty moments. And those two things combined just absolutely sound fantastic on MDMA, which is why I think trance at its best is such fantastic Ecstasy music and really captured that whole late 90s Mitsubishi wave.

Vincent: I really love the arpeggio on this track. To me, it’s almost like the ideal of a trance arp, this lush and euphorically sweeping, but also slightly melancholic, thing. It’s a bit grand, but also not comically over the top, there’s a sense of fragility, you can still take it seriously on an emotional level. That’s something that really bothers me a lot about this pseudo-trance stuff that’s big in that TikTok techno sphere now — they’re trying to do trance, but it’s like none of these people can write a fucking trance arp to save their life. It’s like someone with five hours of painting lessons trying to do Michelangelo (laughs). There’s just no understanding of the kind of deep craft and knowledge of the genre that carries a tune like this.

Jack: That’s Junkie XL for you, isn’t it? This is the kind of tune that’s just made with a different level of craft. Actually, a lot of the big tracks from this era have very unique sound design. They put a lot of work into making something that will sound unique and stand out. I sometimes almost feel like that kind of tune craftsmanship of trying to build the biggest possible anthem is a bit of a lost art now. Like, even with these new underground trance records that are coming out now, they tend to be a lot more stripped down, whereas with these old trance anthems, there’s just a lot of music in them; they’re not a techno track that’s just a loop with four sounds in it (laughs).

Vincent: I guess that leads us to “Mass Schizophrenia”, which is basically six or seven tracks rolled into one (laughs).

2003: Yunus Güvenen - Mass Schizophrenia

Jack: This is just — it’s, what, twelve or thirteen minutes long, and the breakdown must be at least half of that.

Vincent: Yeah, but that one breakdown is actually four different breakdowns!

Jack: Right (laughs). You know, it actually starts out quite dark, but then there’s that riff that comes in which has a very balearic, uplifting feel to it. And then it goes into this breakbeat section — and you think it’s going to drop, but it doesn’t, and actually just segues into yet another breakdown section. It’s definitely not your average filler tune, it’s really a 2003 Digweed, end-of-an-eight-hour-set climax track. I remember you being really fond of this one, right?

Vincent: Yeah, it’s in my top five trance and prog tracks ever for sure. But it’s also a bit frustrating in a way — because that part in the middle breakbeat section where that second riff comes in is like my favourite two minutes of music ever, but then it just pulls a 180 and goes into a totally different direction … and to me it’s like, you fucking had it, why didn’t you just loop that for another five minutes (laughs).

Jack: That’s really the techno head in you talking, isn’t it, you just want the best bit to be the whole record (laughs).

Vincent: Exactly!

Jack: You could definitely stretch out just that section into its own full track, but like we’ve said, here it’s just one part of the breakdown. They were really throwing the kitchen sink — enough material for two or three perfectly good club records — into these massive tracks. You know, I almost think of these tracks as dinosaurs, these gigantic tunes that used to roam the earth, but are now extinct (laughs) … this kind of tune really doesn’t exist anymore, does it.

Vincent: Yeah, it’s definitely a bit of a lost art. Do you know that Yunus Güvenen Mix of “Heaven Scent”? I also really love that one.

Jack: I don’t think I do actually.

Vincent: It’s a great remix, he takes that famous riff from the original but then also goes and does his own thing with it. Güvenen is a really interesting figure to me because he really only released maybe ten records ever, but they’re some of the best trance and prog ever written — he really understood the progressive thing better than anyone else basically. So to me, he’s almost like the Basic Channel of prog (laughs), where he did it perfectly for ten records and then he was done, because there was just nothing else left to say.

Jack: That’s the way to do it! If only John Digweed had done that with Bedrock (laughs). You know, the tracks Digweed did with Nick Muir as Bedrock, that’s a great canon of work and they rarely put a foot wrong. But ever since they started putting “John Digweed & Nick Muir” on the sleeve, everything’s just been really boring.

Vincent: What kind of stuff does Digweed play these days? I’ve never seen him, he very rarely plays in Germany.

Jack: He’s got his own sound with Bedrock for sure, but I guess you could call it “melodic techno”, it’s really only one street away from Tale Of Us and that sort of thing, which to me is just unbelievably boring.

Vincent: Oh God, yeah, that does sound very dull (laughs).

Jack: Going back to “Mass Schizophrenia” — I guess this track really kind of is this grand finale to the early 00s prog era. Because by 2004/2005, so within just a year of this record coming out, all the big prog DJs basically abandoned it for a more minimal and electro sound. And the thing with Sasha and Digweed is that up to that point, they were really always the ones pushing the direction of the progressive scene. They were the leaders, if they went epic, everyone went epic, when they went tribal everyone went tribal. And then right after that point, they became followers, chasing these minimal and electro sounds that people in Germany were doing. I’ve really never known any pair of artists that have had such a clean and total break between being at their creative peak and being total has-beens.

Vincent: That’s really true. But then again, I’ve also always felt that with most DJs, even the important ones, you have a period of maybe six or seven years at most where they are really at the cutting edge of something. And you know, what happened to Sasha and Digweed around that time also happened to a lot of techno guys, where if you look at their discography up to 2004/2005 it’s this 140 BPM banging techno, and then within six months they’re all doing this really boring 120bpm minimal techno that they clearly had no real aptitude or passion for, just totally losing the plot basically.

Jack: It was a real sea change for sure. Which also goes back to what I was talking about earlier, that in the early 2000s, I was a teenager buying these trance CDs and imagining what they would sound like in a club. But then by the time I turned eighteen in 2006 and was able to legally go to a night club, it was all just fucking gone basically … the whole aesthetic, the whole ethos of dance music had radically shifted, and not for the better in my opinion.

Vincent: Yeah, things definitely got worse for a while across all of dance music. Even in techno, nobody really is fond of that mnml era.

Jack: That’s good to hear — you know with this 90s trance revival we’re having right now I’m really having a lot of fun as a clubber, but if that minimal and electro sound ever comes back again, that’s when I’ll be officially retiring from clubbing (laughs).

Vincent: I’m not sure that sound will ever come back in a big way. I mean, even the modern minimal scene has a sound that’s very different to that mid-2000s M-nus thing.

Jack: I also just don’t know if it has the same cultural cache as those y2k trance records — outside of electro stuff like Justice that’s maybe tied to indie history in some way, I just don’t think mid-2000s dance music has any wider cultural connotations. You didn’t hear it in video game soundtracks or movies, or the pop charts, and that Bush-era period between the start of the Iraq war and the financial crisis also just doesn’t have that appealing naive PS1 hopefulness of the late 90s.

Vincent: You know, I think in retrospect, part of what drew me to trance in the mid-late 2000s was also just … what else was there that was accessible? There was the indie electro thing, which I was never into because I had no background in guitar music, and then you had these really bad minimal tracks that rinsed some annoying bleep-bloop pitch-bend bassline for eight minutes. That was pretty much it, dance music as a whole was just very anaemic around that time unless you were into some super underground stuff — so trance it was it then, I guess (laughs).

Jack: I suppose that leads us to the mid-2000s era then.

2004: Austin Leeds & Kobbe - Fusing Love

Jack: By this point, trance was really going out of fashion and out of the mainstream, it wasn’t the hot club sound anymore, you weren’t seeing CDs in the supermarket anymore. But you know, this 2004-2006 sidechain prog sound really wasn’t that bad in the grand scheme of things.

Vincent: The McProg sound (laughs)!

Jack: If we call it that, nobody will know what we mean (laughs).¹² I do like this track more than the one you had in there originally [Progresia “A Little Hazy Morning” (2006)], I definitely didn’t like that one. This one’s fine to me, I wouldn’t object to it —

Vincent: (laughs) — you know, the thing about that Coldharbour progressive sound is … it’s really just that I love that PQM, Luke Chable, thing of combining these melancholic twinkly arps with a massive brooding reese bassline, it’s such a nice synergistic contrast of light and dark to me.

Jack: I think that sound also owes a lot to early James Holden.

Vincent: Oh yeah, for sure, “I have Put Out The Light” (2002)! I don’t know why, but it’s just always been a sound that really hits a special kind of spot for me. But that’s also really all there is to a lot of these records — they’re one trick-ponies in that sense, it’s not the kitchen sink approach we were talking about with some of those earlier records where there’s twenty different ideas in one track.

Jack: I think trance becoming sonically narrower and more of a one-trick thing really was related to the fading relevance of the scene, in that you no longer had crossover appeal that drew in people from the mainstream and other dance genres. So over time, it became increasingly insular, with the people still listening all being trance die-hards that just wanted to hear these very specific things over and over again. So there was really nothing stopping these producers just repeatedly from churning out the same kind of track … and this sound went on for quite a while, didn’t it?

Vincent: Actually, I don’t think it really was around for all that long. That classic Mcprog sound only lasted for maybe three or four years, because by 2007-2008, things were already getting a lot more electro-y, which I think was basically an attempt by this increasingly insular scene to do something, anything, new with trance — and I suppose incorporating electro house influences just seemed like the logical step given how massive electro¹³ was at the time.

Jack: Right.

Vincent: The scene also really shifted a lot on a kind of infrastructure level around this time, where it became more of an internet thing rather than traditional clubbing experience. I think a lot of people today don’t know this, but trance played a massive role in pioneering streaming music over the internet in the 2000s with these weekly radio shows like Armin’s A State Of Trance and Above & Beyond’s Trance Around The World. So it quickly became something very different to the traditional social landscape of the night club — and that of course also affects the music, because what actually works on a dancefloor is much less important at that point.

Jack: I think if they had to have gotten people in a club every Friday night, the trance scene definitely wouldn’t have survived at that point. But like you said, it went mostly online and then you had these massive arena shows with ten or twenty thousand people a few times a year where this very geographically disparate scene then came together, with absolutely no one outside that scene knowing or caring that it was happening.

Vincent: Yeah, I remember listening to Trance Around The World every week and posting about it on the forums, but I didn’t know a single other person that was into trance in real life.

Jack: What I think is interesting in that respect is that while most dance music today is not that insular, we’ve overall definitely moved more and more towards having these micro-scenes where you have nights and labels exclusively dedicated to these very specific strands of dance music that have a loyal following, but that nobody outside of scene really cares about. There’s just so many of these little micro-scenes now, and I think that’s also why we don’t have as many crossover club classics anymore, because it’s just far less likely for a track to get picked up by different scenes — so this 2000s internet trance scene was really ahead of its time in that sense (laughs).

Vincent: And it’s still going! You can still listen to the new A State Of Trance every week. You know, in preparation for this I actually listened to some new episodes and it’s a really weird mix of things, where some of it is still doing the EDM thing, some of it is more 140 BPM epic trance, and then other parts of it are almost like Charlotte de Witte style business techno or Tale Of Us style “melodic techno”. And what really cracked up was that whenever I looked at the comments, they were all like “why are you playing this garbage instead of the real classic trance” — by which they of course meant the late 2000s Anjunabeats style stuff (laughs).

Jack: So we’re really back at this idea we’ve had all along trance history, where people think that it’s lost its Platonic ideal — it’s just that nobody can agree on what that Platonic ideal actually is (laughs)! And I know that dance music tends to be a but nostalgic in general, but I don’t know if other scenes are like this … like, are people in the Berghain dark room going “oh man, I miss that 2008 sound” (laughs)?

Vincent: Oh yeah, for sure (laughs). But I don’t think techno has ever had an identity crisis like trance has had, because it’s always mostly stayed much closer to it’s core form and ideals, whereas trance has really shifted radically so many times over its history.

Jack: Right.

Vincent: Another thing that I guess is somewhat unique to trance is that — at least back in the 2000s — people tended to go through this almost this cult-like experience, where when you get into it it’s the best music that’s ever existed and it’s all you listen to and nothing else compares, and then eventually you kind of get disillusioned with it and almost look back in horror at the stuff you used to listen to (laughs) — at least for a while until you’ve had some more distance to it. Like, I remember when I signed up on Tranceaddict in 2009 as a fresh-faced trance lover, people like you were already quite jaded about the trance scene, and that was actually a bit of a shock to me at the time — like oh no, why do all these people on this trance forum hate trance so much (laughs).

Jack: You know, I think I’m quite uniquely positioned in trance history, in that I really saw the collapse of the scene happen in real time. I bought my first trance CDs in 2001-2002 and it was everywhere. And then just two or three years later, you really couldn’t hear it anywhere anymore. So even setting aside the quality of the music, there was a very clear collapse of it happening right in front of my eyes almost as soon as I started listening to it basically. By the time I was old enough to go clubbing there was this real sense of oh, this has died, I’ll never to get to listen to this in a club, like I had arrived at the party just as the lights were going on (laughs).

So what I did as a listener was really just going back in time to the older stuff. I remember at that time in the early 00s in the UK, they had shows on MTV stuff like “Back To The Oldschool” running late at night, and I would stay up all night during the summer holidays watching them play these old rave records — mostly these big British artists like Leftfield or Orbital that I could actually find on CD in local high street shops. And you know, it’s funny to me in retrospect that I was buying BT albums from 1995 in 2002, and it really felt like this relic from another age, but it was actually only seven years old at that point … and I’ve had that album for over twenty years now!

So yeah, I think I grew out of the fluffy stuff pretty quickly, and then was really just going backwards in time almost as soon as I got into it. And certainly, by the time you got into it in the later 2000s I had very little to do with the trance scene, and you can also see that in the tracks I picked where literally the only track I have listed for fourteen years is this Solar Field track (laughs).

2007: Solar Fields - Black Arrow

Vincent: This one’s a great track, but it’s also coming from a quite different scene than the other tracks on our list. But I’ve always been quite fond of that mid-2000s Ultimae sound, it’s very unique.

Jack: Yeah, he’s really mostly a psy-chill producer that did this one-off trance album. As you know, there was a kind of small underground scene centred around John ‘00’ Fleming where people were turning to psy in search for a more underground trance sound.

Vincent: There’s also that Oliver Prime Mix of Netherworld from the mid-2000s that feels very psy influenced — you know what mix I mean?

Jack: Yeah! And whatever you might think of John Fleming today and the bollocks¹⁴ he talks, he really for a couple of years was the only place you could go to hear deeper, progressive-y trance music. But he was really struggling to put together a set — he was playing techno, he was playing psy, he was getting people like Airwave to make him the odd throwback progressive record because there just weren’t enough underground trance records being made. And you know, he was always optimistically talking about how he was going to bring back “real trance”, but there really just wasn’t enough music coming out in that vein. You couldn’t stand out as a DJ, because there were maybe five or ten tracks coming out every few months that actually fit this underground trance ethos.

So this Solar Fields album is very unique in that sense; but it’s one album, there just wasn’t a scene there. And while I do have fond memories of following around the gigs of this John Fleming micro-scene around the UK for a few years, after a while I just got bored with it because it was just so obvious it wasn’t going to go anywhere. So I think after about 2013 I really just stopped paying attention to anything related to trance for a long time.

Vincent: For my part, I went through a bit of a ridiculous transition where I was into big-time Anjuna epic trance up to some point in 2009, then I got really into dubstep for a bit via the more melodic end of it, then I got into techno through some of the post-dubstep stuff, and then by late 2010 — so only a year later basically — I was pretty much only listening to Marcel Dettmann records (laughs). I guess I then also had a real break with trance for a while, although I’ve never really stopped liking those teenage epic trance tracks, they still give me that feeling. But yeah, I remember in the early 2010s, at least in the techno scene, having been into that kind of trance was definitely something you didn’t just tell anyone, it was like this shameful little secret you carried around with you (laughs).

Jack: I think in the early 2010s, we millennials were definitely much more preoccupied with being cool, with not being cheesy. Like, I remember reading this RA review of this Dorisburg record — this techno record with an arpeggio — and the comments were like “ew, sounds like a dated progressive house track”, and it was literally just techno track that had an arpeggio (laughs). I feel like Gen Z is generally a lot less concerned with being cool, they coat everything in this playful irony and silliness, and I think that is a part of what has allowed for this music to come back.

Vincent: I think for the millennial generation, there was definitely a kind of delayed impact though, where people like me went into other genres but they kept carrying that trance influence with them in some way. Like, for me, I got into some of the very purist Detroit stuff, your Vince Watsons and Convextions and Delsins, very early on — even though that was quite different than the trendy dark techno sound of the moment — just because it had those melodies and emotions, and that felt very familiar to me because of my trance background.

Jack: I definitely also started looking for stuff that gave me a similar feeling to trance in other genres. But there was just a real general lack of that early 90s euphoria and energy in dance music at that time — it was really hard for me to find anything that hit the same spot that 90s trance and prog do for me. I think you had it easier in a way, since you got really into techno, which had a very vibrant scene that you were also living in the epicenter of in Berlin. Whereas for my part, I think I was basically a musical nomad (laughs) for a long time.

2008: Ronski Speed - All The Way

Vincent: So this is where I got into trance, 2007-2008. And I didn’t even really like music before I got into trance, I wasn’t a music kid. I guess what hooked me was just this element of repetition, of melodic repetition. I remember whenever there was a pop tune on the charts I maybe liked a bit, it just frustrated me that you’d have a good part, and then 20 seconds later it would go into the bridge or something — I guess I was looking for the loop, I just didn’t know it at the time (laughs). And once I found that that was basically it; it was trance all day, every day.

You know, what’s interesting to me about this track in particular goes back to something I was talking about earlier, which is that trance producers started incorporating these electro house influences, and you can hear that quite clearly here. There’s actually a lot of records from this era that sort of switch between being a massive epic trance track and a more stripped down electro house track. And looking at it now, it seems quite obvious to me that this was basically the foundation for that commercial stadium EDM formula of the early 2010s — if you look at the big EDM stars of that era like Avicii or W&W, so many of them started out making this electro-y tech trance around 2007-2009. And then it eventually morphed into something that wasn’t quite trance anymore.

Jack: I’ve never heard this track before … I’m going to be honest, it’s not very good, is it (laughs).

Vincent: I know that (laughs)! I do still love it though. Honestly, that is something that kind of annoys me about this weird poptimism fallout we are living in now — that people will be listening to 150 BPM hardtechno with Kindergarden melodies or something, and instead of just admitting that it’s goofy carnival music, they’ll desperately try to come up with some kind of post-hoc justification for why it’s actually very serious music and just as good as more underground records. And it’s like … it’s okay to listen to bad music sometimes; I like my Ronski Speed and I can admit it’s not very serious music, and that’s okay. Nobody’s going to come to my house and take it away from me (laughs).

Jack: You know, the thing with tracks like this for me is that when you listen to the first minute or two, I’m like “this sounds okay actually” … but I just know where it’s going, I know that breakdown is coming (laughs). It’s also just so homogeneous rhythmically, there’s so little groove, it’s just boring as dance music.

Vincent: Like I said earlier, it was mostly just internet music at this point, and producers were making tracks to be on these radio shows — so the “dance” aspect wasn’t really the focus anymore, it was music for nerds like me to listen to while playing World Of Warcraft (laughs).

Jack: Do you know where that whole Armin scene is at now?

Vincent: The impression I get is that in the West, that core trance fanbase really started to dwindle once things like EDM became the new accessible entry point into dance music. So all these big guys like Armin and Above & Beyond then really started pushing into markets in the Global South that had less of a history with dance music, that were more of a blank slate. Like, I’ve talked to people from India that are into more harsh and experimental stuff, and they’re always complaining about how big that kind of trance is over there (laughs).

Jack: So we’ve now got a few years with basically nothing on the list — I guess we both just checked out of trance for a while in the early 2010s. The next thing I have is the Bicep track from 2015.

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Trance III: Trance Regained. The 2010s and 2020s.

2015: Bicep - Back 2 U (Tranz Dub)

Vincent: Were you like “trance is back” when this dropped?

Jack: I don’t think this track is trance, actually. But it’s got the word in the title and I think that was a part of the sea change that ultimately brought us back to trance. So it definitely wasn’t back per se, but things were starting to shift. Like, there was this trend around this time in the mid-2010s where underground DJs started to kind of ironically drop trance classics at the end of techno and house sets — there was that infamous Space Dimension Controller Boiler Room set where he dropped the Taucher “Ayla” Mix (1996) for example. In that sense, I think the title of this is quite telling — it’s not “trance”, it’s “tranz”. So while the tune is quite beautiful and serious, the packaging is a bit playful, and I think that made it easier to get to people in a way, to rehabilitate these sounds in the underground.

Vincent: I think I saw Bicep at Panorama Bar around 2013 and they were basically still just playing pure classic garage house at that point.

Jack: Right, but I think they then were really the first to bring back those sunrise records — those blissful early 90s sounds going back to that proto-trance of “Dance 2 Trance” — in a big way with tracks like “Just” (2015) and this one.

Vincent: I guess “Glue” (2017) was also a really big track.

Jack: “Glue” is the rare tune I would call a modern classic actually, in that lots of DJs across different scenes played it.

Vincent: I just looked it up, and 2016/2017 was also when the first Trance Wax 12”s came out. I never thought these were very good, but it was definitely indicative of a major shift — that you could now do a hip vinyl-only white label series that was half-ironically appropriating classic trance records. That really would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.

Jack: Exactly. And the thing is, I really do think these DJs were initially playing these trance tracks ironically, but then they started noticing that these tracks were actually getting genuine big crowd reactions. And so over time, there eventually was this realization of oh wow, this is actually genuinely effective dance music, it’s just not some throwback fad thing I’m playing for a laugh. I guess some of it was also just the passage of time — you know, when something is ten years old it’s “dated”, when it’s twenty years old, it’s now a “classic” (laughs).

Another factor that is worth mentioning is that the drugs got good again around this time, basically. There was this massive seizing of MDMA precursors in the mid-2000s and then for years and years, you pretty much couldn’t find decent real MDMA in Europe, so people shifted to less euphoric drugs like ketamine and amphetamines. And when that changed and suddenly you could easily get really strong high-quality MDMA again — I think that definitely had a real influence on dance music getting more melodic and euphoric again, you really shouldn’t underestimate the effect these changes in the drug landscape have on musical trends, for better or worse.

2021: Jamie Leather - Back in Time

Vincent: What I’m really curious about is … what you used to refer to as “Bandcamp trance”¹⁵ — these serious 90s trance revival records coming from young producers previously unaffiliated with trance — would you place the beginning of that before or after the pandemic? Like, do you think it had something to do with the pandemic landscape? Because for me, I don’t think I was really taking notice of this kind of stuff until around 2021/2022, and I don’t think it was until the Maara album in 2023 that I was really like yeah, it’s back.

Jack: So what happened was that I did a mix in February 2020, about a month before lockdowns in the UK started, and I called that mix “A secondhand Sunrise”. Basically, I was noticing that I was buying a bunch of these blissful early 90s sounding — trance-ish but not really full-on trance — tracks and I thought I’d put them together into a mix. But that was a slower, 123 BPM mix, and at that point I had really just scraped together enough of these tracks to do one mix with them — and then we came out of lockdown, and people were suddenly pumping out these 136 BPM pure progressive trance tracks (laughs).

So I definitely think the pandemic had something to do with it — the fact that when everything is a livestream and you’re not actually playing to crowds you don’t risk something dying on its feet and killing the dancefloor. So producers suddenly had much more freedom in a sense. And it’s funny, because if you look at the Discogs of a lot of these new school trance producers, so many of them were making 120s lo-fi house before 2020, and then over the pandemic their productions just shot up massively in energy. I guess because they suddenly had the time to do a real deep-dive into the early 90s stuff they were already mining, and now they also had the freedom to just say fuck it, why not try making a banging 90s progressive trance track.

Vincent: Right, that makes a lot of sense.

Jack: I think for me the pivotal moment where I was really like trance is back was when I saw Adam Pits — probably the most prominent figure in this new underground trance scene — in September of 2021, which was just a month or two after clubs had reopened in the UK. And the thing is that around that time, you’d generally have these producers make EPs where one track was really full-on trance, but then you’d also have a breakbeat track, and an ambient track and a more house-y track all on that same EP. So at that point the sound wasn’t necessarily just trance, it was a big mix of things, and so I really thought that he would play all this different early 90s melting pot stuff basically.

But then what he actually played was very different, it literally was just a straight up three hour set of nothing but slamming 90s-style progressive trance (laughs). And it was like … you know, I’d been waiting twenty years to hear that exact set; I was finally hearing the set I always wanted to hear as a fourteen year old, but never got to because the whole trance scene fell apart right in front of my eyes and you could no longer hear this music anywhere. And the thing is, the club was full of twenty-year old kids, it wasn’t just the forty-somethings coming out for their 90s retro fill. I think that was really what made me go okay, this is actually happening, the realization that there was an actual crowd of dedicated young people to fuel this scene.

And this track is something that he played during that set, I stole it off him by taking a picture of the CDJ screen (laughs). You know, to me it almost feels like this could have been the B-side of that Chris Domingo track we talked about earlier. So in a sense it’s really doing nothing new — but as we were saying earlier, so many of these trance sounds were just so short-lived. So for me, it would just be a tragedy to bin this music and go “okay, we’re never doing mid-90s tribal prog again” (laughs) when it really only ever got like eighteen months of actual play in the 1990s because things were moving so fast.

Vincent: Exactly, there’s definitely a lot of territory left to explore because they never really stuck with any sound for very long back then.

Jack: There’s just so much great dance music from the past, so why not go back — especially with trance music, which had been away from the forefront of underground dance music for so long. So I think it really does sound fresh now, because this 90s trance sound is so different to anything else we’ve had in club music for the last fifteen or twenty years.

Vincent: Additionally, I also feel like with a lot of these new trance records, they are bringing some new things to it … like, there are people making tracks that literally just sound like a 1995 techno record, but this is not a 1:1 thing, they are actually doing new things with trance that were not done in the 90s.

2021: AK-One - Bushcraft

Jack: So I think this track in particular is a really good example of what you are talking about. I mean, it is mostly classic reference points, but it’s a really weird mashup of jungle and psytrance. I’d say it’s almost a bit too psy for me, but I think it’s an interesting track in that it creates this new kind of mashup of influences that would have been impossible in the 90s — like, I’m pretty sure there was literally zero overlap between the 90s psy and jungle scenes (laughs) — and that kind of reassures me that it’s not just me being hopelessly nostalgic for the stuff I was listening to as a fifteen year old.

Vincent: Are there parties dedicated to playing this kind of new underground trance where you are at in Manchester?

Jack: Yeah, for sure! Although I think the combination of Brexit visa troubles and The Warehouse Project sucking up all the big names means we don’t get a ton of high-profile international DJs, it’s much more of a local DIY thing. But we do have a very vibrant local scene. For example, we have this 300 capacity club here that’s called the White Hotel that’s open quite late — 7am — by UK standards, and after that there’s an afterparty at a nearby pub. It’s really a true underground club, and the crowd is very queer, it’s really full of freaks in a way that reminds me of the Berlin scene quite a bit.

And you know that is a really interesting thing to see as someone that’s been into this music as long as I have — because historically, one of the criticisms that was always made against trance music was that it was this very white, very male music. Like, in Energy Flash, Simon Reynolds has this whole chapter where he’s dealing with progressive and you can tell that he’s really struggling with the fact that there’s just no interesting subculture to latch on to with this music, because the people behind it are all boring blokes from the North of England (laughs). And you know, it was always quite hard to rebuke that sort of criticism because everyone really was called Dave and John and Nick —

Vincent: (laughs)

Jack: — but now so many of these producers and clubbers that are into this new trance sound are queer or female, it’s a very diverse scene. Like, the big gay nights in Manchester are now dominated by pumping trance (laughs)! It’s still not a massive scene, it’s very underground, but basically every month there’s an underground trance night I can go to locally, whereas in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I had to travel the length of the country just to hear the odd progressive record a few times a year.

So, you know, in a way it’s almost like a bit of a private vindication to me (laughs), to see this music be picked up by a much younger and more diverse crowd that just see it as good, effective dance music … and doesn’t care about the fact that fifteen years ago, playing a Lemon8 track in an underground club would have gotten you hounded out of the building by an angry mob. But this music, at least the good stuff (laughs), never actually stopped being good, and it was still good in that long stretch of time where it was the most uncool thing on the planet.

You know, I’m not so young anymore now — I’m thirty-six and rapidly approaching being middle aged (laughs) — and so I am really enjoying this Indian Summer I am having as a clubber right now, finally getting to dance to this music I’d been waiting to hear in a club ever since I was a young teenager back in 2002, twenty-three years ago.

Vincent: That’s a beautiful closing word — the full circle of trance (laughs).

Footnotes.

1. We don’t talk about Belgium much here, but Belgian 80s New Wave and EBM was also an important part of trance’s “primordial soup”.

2. For some reason I never realized this until a few years ago — maybe because there are so many records from that era that were one-offs from people that just disappeared — but “Dance 2 Trance” was actually produced by Jam El Mar (Rolf Ellmer) of Jam & Spoon.

3. Harthouse is generally considered to be one of the most important early trance labels along with Eye Q.

4. This is detailed in Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen’s oral history of early Berlin techno Der Klang der Familie.

5. If you were to map out a graph with an axis of “quality” and an axis of “quantity”, Oliver Lieb would easily come out as the most prolifically reliable 90s trance producer.

6. The term “progressive house“ was originally meant to be analogy to “progressive rock”, a fact that became basically forgotten by the later trance community who generally took it to be sprung from the verb “to progress” — which, while historically wrong, made sense, insofar as progressive records do tend to be about slow build-ups and gradual progressions over many minutes.

7. “Netherworld” probably comes as close to that “Platonic ideal” of trance we were talking about earlier as any track has ever done.

8. If you are now confused about the difference between progressive trance versus progressive house … then you would be justified in your confusion. To be honest, if you just go by BPM — over 135 is progressive trance, under 135 is progressive house — you’ll probably be right most of the time.

9. It took the forum a good 13 years to ID every track in that set.

10. While there was obviously always some degree of overlap, there was a pretty clear distinction between the two scenes historically, in that the psy people thought that “normal” trance was boring and cheesy and very unenlightening, and the trance people thought that psy was weird druggie noise for people who fried their brain on too much acid.

11. We don’t get into the trajectory of his career too much here, but it is hard to overstate just how massive Tiesto was from the release of In My Memory in 2001 to his Olympics opening ceremony performance in 2007 — for many people, including me at one point, he wasn’t just a famous DJ, he was dance music.

12. On the TranceAddict forums, McProg — a portmanteau of “McDonalds” and “progressive” — was a common derogatory term of art for the kind of twinkly progressive trance that was coming out of Markus Schulz’ Coldharbour label in the mid-2000s.

13. In this context, “electro” is referring to electro house in the vein of Justice, not the Drexciya kind of electro.

14. This is in reference to one of Fleming’s Facebook posts that stated that Gen Z don’t like 90s sounds, a patently wrong observation.

15. Traditionally, dance music downloads were always sold on speciality DJ sites like Beatport. So the fact that these new trance records were coming out on Bandcamp — which didn’t even really fully establish itself as a place to buy dance music until the late 2010s — and they often didn’t even bother to release on Beatport marked a pretty significant generational shift.