Trance music never went away, writes Philip Sherburne, and I agree. But Iโve not progressed with the sound since I first fell for it 25 years ago, when I was a wide-eyed, impressionable teenage raver. Whenever I listen to my โOld School Trance Favoritesโ playlist on Spotify, Iโm whisked back to 1998 โ on some dance floor in some dark warehouse, with a classic track like Three Drivesโ โGreece 2000โ or Veracochaโs โCarte Blancheโ blasting in the room. The trance we danced to in those years was uplifting, life-changing. But as I ventured deeper into this world, the sound was a mere step in a longer journey โ it marked a period of raving with training wheels, of hours-long DJ sets of spoon-fed transcendence.
Still, as some of Sherburneโs sources perfectly put it in the piece, thereโs just something about trance, and listening to a โvintageโ trance anthem from the late โ90s and early โ00s, however schmaltzy it may be, can give me shivers like no other type of music.
Sherburne writes a fun piece about the revival โ or perhaps reimagination โ of trance among a younger generation of producers and DJs who are outside the scene and, thus, more open-minded and experimental.
But where those projects carried a whiff of mischief, the new wave of trance feels like a more earnest and direct homage. Perhaps itโs a generational shift, as artists who first discovered electronic music from their friendsโ stepdadsโ Tiรซsto CDs begin to look back on their own musical upbringing. Maybe itโs just that people are jonesing for all the euphoria they can get right now.
Vestbirk believes that the shift is partly generational. A new wave of clubbers doesnโt have the same prejudices about trance that the old guard did. And the artsier end of the scene is bored with techno, whichโin its overground, festival-filling incarnation, with an emphasis on formulaic structures, identikit sound design, and gaudy spectacleโhas become as stale, commercialized, and ridiculous as mainstream trance once was.