Trance is not cool. Trance doesn’t dabble in irony or metaphor. Trance is extremely cheesy, therefore easily dismissable. Trance asks you to believe that the glass is half-full; that this melody is not something you’ve heard hundreds of times before; that amid the ocean of human failure in our age, the best of intentions are still present within us. “One family,” read slogans displayed at trance events, where fans greet each other through a type of secret handshake that spells out “peace,” “love,” “unity,” and “respect.”
A trance song often starts with a kick drum, encased in a gauzy atmosphere with just enough reverb to alert a listener that Something Very Important is about to happen. It could just as easily begin naked, with synths that move and swell like an orchestra, and arpeggiations that climb and fall at a pace few humans can play with their fingers. If vocals are present, they most definitely come with all the sincerity of a high school diary, or a bad romance novel, or a religious tract: calls for unity, declarations of undying love, the melancholy of the perpetually misunderstood.
These templates always lead to the Breakdown: that piece of sonic architecture that lets you breathe for a minute as your heart rate settles before reaching its digitally enforced orgasm at the Drop.
But we’re talking about trance here. Unlike its parents, house and techno, trance uses the Breakdown and the Drop differently. With trance, that combination is not aimed at your hips; they can’t swing that fast. It’s aimed at your heart.
This type of sincerity makes trance an easy target. There’s something shocking about its disregard for subtle gestures, its bear-hug embrace of the synthetic as a way to convey fragility. It is not relaxing music. It makes my cat incredibly uncomfortable. But no matter how you define trance—within which there are at least a dozen subgenres, spread across three decades and several oceans—it makes millions of people around the world happy.
That global reach, however, has its roots in Europe, where trance was born in the early 1990s, around the same time as the European Union. Both entities have changed drastically since. Europe is a fabric of very old cultures that became aligned as a currency union and has started to unravel. The face of the Continent is changing, as are the values that once defined it. And the soundtrack to many of those changes has been the reverb-drenched pounding of trance anthems.
After the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended, leaps in technology and shifts in expendable income shattered social norms in Europe, enabling trance to spread like a mutating virus. Its DNA lurked in the New Beat scene of early-’90s Belgium and the coastal warehouses of València, Spain’s makina and bacalao parties; it emerged from techno in the clubs of Frankfurt and the squats of East Berlin, and was carried to the genre polygamy of Ibiza’s club scene; it flew back on cheap flights to the parties of Conservative-era England and the slick bombast of the Netherlands. For much of the ’90s, trance was the logical evolution of the club cultures born in Detroit and Chicago—to that era’s listeners, it was the future.
But the rise of EDM earlier this decade coincided with trance’s fall from the heights it reached in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Many of the clubs in Europe that nurtured trance have since closed, and expensive festivals are now the primary venues for the full trance experience. The aesthetic may have turned it into a niche market relative to the crossover success EDM has had in pop and hip-hop, but it is a very large niche.
The EU has also experienced an identity shift in the last decade. There have been a series of currency crises; a rise in nationalist, far-right political movements; a wave of immigrants fleeing violence in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East; and a collapse of local economies as cities pull young people into globalized marketplaces. Now Starbucks and Subway, Zara, and H&M, sit like fake teeth in the jawlines of old city centers, wandered by tourists whose Airbnb bookings contribute to a new type of gentrification.
Europe created trance, and trance in turn has soundtracked Europe’s recent evolution—it is a modern European folk music with all the trappings of a religion, and a refuge to millions of people who find common ground in its sonic language of capitalism.
The boutique hotel in Ibiza called Ushuaïa is located on a stretch of the beach that is less a tribute to the Mediterranean island’s storied dance history and more a feudal system of investment properties. Competing bass kicks from the poolside bars of adjacent hotels ping-pong between buildings, creating syncopations of privilege. Packs of day drinkers lounge a few yards away from African immigrants in knockoff Yankees caps, standing just far enough away in the sand to avoid being seen as interlopers. There are waist-high red ceramic cats holding serving trays in the entrance to the lobby, and chairs that look like well-toned butts. And up on the rooftop bar, Armin van Buuren is ushering in the sunset with a short DJ set.
Van Buuren, a Dutch man who is perhaps the world’s most famous trance ambassador, had just flown in from China, where he appeared in a stadium in front of 13,000 people; a few days later, he’s set to fly to the pyramids in Egypt for a gig. This is a typical work week for him. When he makes his way to a small platform of mixers on the rooftop, women in bikini tops seek his attention; boyfriends hold up smartphones; someone sets an inflatable alien doll loose.
Trance is a type of sonic balm, and van Buuren is adored not as much for his output as a musician, but for his status as a type of healer. The boyish 41-year-old has a law degree and a family, but he made a decision early on in life to dedicate himself to a new sound emerging from Europe. When he started his online radio show, “A State of Trance,” there was no such programming. Now it claims to draw 42 million listeners from 84 different countries each week.
“For a lot of people, trance is more than just a type of music they love—it’s almost a religious experience,” he says over dinner after his rooftop set and before a 2 a.m. set across the street. “And it’s also about that feeling of unity that we miss in ordinary life.”
In the ’80s, van Buuren’s father, a doctor in Amsterdam, relaxed in the evenings by listening—at extreme volumes—to records by Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis, artists who were developing synthesizer music into something commercial. Their application of these new sounds became blueprints for the lofty aspirations of trance, which the younger van Buuren has used to create an empire.
By the time Detroit techno and Chicago house crossed the ocean and hit thousands of ears who had grown up under (or at least near) the restrictive culture of Communism in the ’80s, European composers had already spent much of the 20th century pushing the boundaries of harmony and timbre. And the development of ambient music in the ’70s created a new type of functionality: a sound world in which to escape. Trance took that concept onto the dancefloor.
“One of the main functions of trance music is to simulate a space,” says Heinrich Deisl, a music journalist and radio producer in Vienna. “In Germany, we call this fluchtpunkt, a space in nowhere that can be filled with all your ideas, projections, dreams, hopes, imaginations. It’s not connected to reality at all. A simulation.”
New, cheaper synths and sequencers democratized the creation of those spaces in societies that had previously only been consumers of them. So by the ’90s, a Continent still grappling with a postwar identity crisis also had a particular interest in redefining itself with sawtooth waves and icy reverb.
Techno and acid house and hard house and spiritual house were all limbs in the same skeleton of European dance music by the time something known specifically as trance emerged in the early ’90s. Those early trance experiments are nothing like the genre today; many of them are primitive in comparison. But at the time, a particular combination of velocity and melody, wielded by DJs with a growing sense of authority over Europe’s dancefloor, turned trance anthems into big hits, like the remix of Binary Finary’s “1998” by the trance supergroup Gouryella, or “Saltwater” by Chicane. This sound proved to work well on the masses in England, especially masses that were downtrodden.
“There was a lot of violence at on the terraces of football games, there was a lot of depression in terms of the young generation because they couldn’t get jobs, and there was Margaret Thatcher, who was relentless with her policies that didn’t work for the younger generation. And they wanted to speak out, and it was a revolt,” explains Paul Oakenfold, the British DJ whose career exploded in the early ’90s after he threaded together strains of trance that had percolated for years in the sonic laboratories of Ibiza. “People would come together in a nightclub, worship the DJ as if it was a church.”
By the late ’90s, trance had become quite distinct from house, having absorbed a number of influences: New Beat and EBM (electronic body music) from Belgium; the all-inclusive approach of Balearic; the sleek synth developments from Germany. Then it began to fracture into microgenres, and by the early 2000s, Dutch artists like van Buuren, Tiësto, and Ferry Corsten had turned it into a muscular commercial sound. And like any form of music birthed from club culture, a community had grown around it—albeit one whose ideals would get left behind by the reality of geopolitics.
“All of these different European countries actually felt the same way about trance,” says Geert Sermon, a Belgian music historian based in Brussels. “The ’90s were a period where things changed mostly in a positive sense, not like nowadays when you feel like, ‘What’s going to happen when I leave my home?’ Then it was like, ‘We’re gonna have a party, we’re gonna meet lots of people, we’re gonna have a lot of fun, and then from there we’ll change the world.’”
The inside of a port-a-potty is one of the most resonant places one can experience trance at peak volume—every flimsy surface begins conducting sound. Earlier this year, behind one of five stages at the cavernous Jaarbeurs venue in Utrecht, the Netherlands, Jorn van Deynhoven’s relentless set turns a structure made of molded plastic into a buzzing subwoofer.
Van Deynhoven is a former police officer in Germany who got bored with the job and found trance more appealing as a career path in the early ’90s. His appearance in Utrecht, at van Buuren’s ASOT 850 event (celebrating his 850th episode of “A State of Trance”), was on a stage titled “Who’s Afraid of 138?,” a reference to the speed that many trance purists consider to be essential to the genre. It was one of five stages visited by an estimated 30,000 people from at least 90 countries in a 12-hour period. The building itself takes 10 minutes to fully walk around, and once inside, getting from stage to stage takes just as long.
The massive scale of the event is now the way that most trance fans—at least the ones who can afford it—get their live fix. Festivals in Hungary, Portugal, Germany, and the Czech Republic routinely draw massive crowds. The internet may have democratized the listening experience, but economic reality has winnowed access to the live trance experience.
“The young generation save their money the whole year to pay 500 euros for a weekend,” van Deynhoven says. “It’s so different from the club scene in the ’90s, when for 10 euros you’d have fun the whole weekend.”
But Europe is not a homogenous society; trance did not evolve uniformly. Eastern Europe’s response to the genre is very much tied to how trance is seen as a trapping of capitalism, a relatively new development in some countries. It’s in this arena that economic value depends on sonic aesthetics.
“When I was a young guy, I used to love trance music, but now I can’t listen to those anthems anymore, it’s superficial music for me,” says Attila Bátorfy, a journalist in Budapest. “Sometimes when we go out to party with a very hip DJ, they play trance, but just to laugh about trance music, because of course, for those people, it’s also cheap—something for the lower class, for people in the countryside.”
“In Poland, the urban kids aren’t gonna go to those bigger trance events,” says Linda Lee, a Polish DJ who lives and works in Berlin. She explains that the less populated industrial areas of a country like Poland, with an economy that pales in comparison to Germany or Britain, are fertile ground for trance. “A lot of the people who go those trance parties these days are a bit older, they’re not teenagers,” she adds. “This is the last generation that can afford to pay those kind of fees for a trance party.”
A week before ASOT 850, a domed auditorium in Wroclaw, Poland, a small university city near the German border, was the site of another all-night gathering dubbed Tranceformations 2018. There were very few people doing the type of dancing you’d see in a club. The pace of trance tends to hinder that action, so a lot of these crowds appear to be going through the motions of worship: arms outstretched, hands curled into heart symbols, reverent prayer. Coupled with the scale of the events, it makes the experience feel at times like a megachurch, not a concert.
“People want the music that they’re listening to be super loud, getting lost in the moment,” says Andrew Bayer, one of America’s biggest trance artists, sitting in the green room in Wroclaw after a set. “In trance especially, you do get that a lot—there’s a hell of a lot of tracks that have the same chord progressions, but, like religion, it’s a comfort.”
Bayer worked quite closely for years with the British trio Above & Beyond, one of contemporary trance’s biggest names. Their arena-anthem approach to the genre has put them in front of arena-sized crowds. In January, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, a similar scene unfolded, with Above & Beyond operating more as conductors of the audience than as vassals of the music. And Bayer’s performance in Poland held the same weight: by physically acting out the peaks and valleys of the music, the artist carries the emotional burden of their audience.
“Yes, this makes it easy to make fun of,” says Deisl, the Viennese journalist. “But how do you want to reach as many people as possible? Not with 12-tone Schoenberg counterpoint. But by making them happy. Going to a trance party, more than a regular techno party, is really like a psychological catharsis—to get rid of your life full of burden and of uncertainty and of having no money.”
In order to provide that catharsis, producers must create a sense of space. Reverb is the tool that allows such a space—and there is traditionally a staggering amount of reverb in trance. But a new generation is disposing of old traditions.
Lorenzo Senni is an Italian producer who grew up straight-edge, playing in punk and hardcore bands in the town of Cesena, Italy, on the Adriatic coast. It’s a tourist destination, full of clubs with glass pyramids that stay open until dawn. In the late ’90s, when Senni was a teenager in skinny jeans, those clubs were pounding with trance.
Senni, who is 35, studied musicology in college, so he understands how to analyze a genre clinically; his punk background allows him a certain irreverence for those rules. On his most recent single, “The Shape of Trance to Come,” he strips away most of the fat from the genre. His songs plant a flag in trance’s concept of the buildup, but by removing the reverb, he leaves a sharp, brittle attack.
“I always experienced this music without taking any drugs or drinking any alcohol, being the only sober one,” Senni says. “So I tried to replicate and describe this approach in the music too—how would this music sound without that context around?”
Senni’s relationship to trance is based on nostalgia, but his generation’s experience with the sound is different from the millions of people who follow the strains of trance that are worshiped at festivals. They are dismantling its structure, examining it like an artifact. How do utopian sounds from late capitalism work in a Europe wobbling from economic and political changes?
Much of Senni’s early work is experimental, but when he started revisiting trance, he spliced buildups from trance songs into one long composition that he would perform live (he’s been building an archive of breakdowns for years). This enraged people.
“I had very, very weird responses, like people coming to me, saying like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ The middle finger—very angry people. ‘Man, where is the drop? Play some music!’” Senni recalls, laughing. “My relation to trance is always this expectation, the way it builds up: When the kick arrives, you are exploding with euphoria, but then you get bored again. That’s why EDM put this to an extreme: You need a buildup and a drop every 30 seconds. It’s globalization, you know?”
The starker version of trance that Senni and his peers have explored are now like sonic austerity measures—a market correction. In Stockholm, Cristian Dinamarca has been splicing those melodies into Latin rhythms. Dinamarca, 32, moved to Sweden with his family from Chile when he was 2, and grew up in the city’s outskirts, where pockets of immigrants lived. Hip-hop and trance were the sounds of those neighborhoods, and when Dinamarca was 13, he was in an afterschool program that taught kids how to DJ. The instructor used trance to help the kids learn, and the bug caught Dinamarca and his friends, who would run home from school at lunch to check on the songs they were downloading on slow connections.
The late ’90s were the early years of Love Parade, the wildly popular German dance music festival that drew audiences from across Europe. For Dinamarca and his friends, it was akin to a pilgrimage to Mecca. “But when I was 18, I realized that maybe that festival was kind of corny,” he says, laughing. “Like, you grow up.”
A few years ago, Dinamarca started sifting through YouTube, looking for the anthems of his childhood. He had been trying to fit the originals into his DJ sets, but the aesthetics weren’t working.
“The melodies fit, but the drops and the beat didn’t. It’s really straightforward music. What I play now usually has a lot more rhythm,” he says. “I always try to play for your lower body, not for your upper body. And I feel like trance music is just for your upper body. You stand like this [extends arms upward]—you’re not dancing sexy or anything.”
Himnos, an EP of Dinamarca’s trance hybrids, is a lusher examination of the sound than Senni’s work. Dinamarca keeps many of the ornaments but imagines them on a different dancefloor. (There’s a link to trance’s roots in the sample of a sample of Vangelis’ score for Blade Runner, which Oakenfold featured prominently in his 1994 “Goa mix” for BBC’s Radio 1, one of the most significant moments in the genre.)
This younger European generation’s relationship to trance is an inevitable step in the progression of electronic dance music. Trance is now in the part of a cultural cycle where it is discovered and used as a springboard for an entire subset of Europe’s population.
“Vinyl DJs and a lot of serious techno guys are not gonna touch trance because they find it tacky,” says Linda Lee. “But you see this open-minded young wave of people who just take what they want out of it.”
Lee mixes trance into her sets full of hip-hop and trap, but, like Senni, she sees the potential of playing with the form: She likes to slow trance songs way down and unleash them on audiences who may not have any idea what they are listening to. And like Dinamarca, she is part of a generation of Europeans who can look past the stigma of trance and explore the parts of it that may contain value to them.
Last week, van Buuren hosted his 865th episode of “A State of Trance.” The show is broadcast live on YouTube and Facebook, and there are emoji-laden messages in the comment feeds from Canada, India, Holland, Hungary, Ukraine, Greece, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Northern Ireland, France, Mexico, Japan, Bulgaria, Dagestan, Colombia, Turkey.
Each show contains a segment called “Service for Dreamers,” in which van Buuren features a listener who has been flown in to the show to talk about a particular trance song that holds a special memory for them. For his 850th episode, van Buuren presented a show picked entirely by “Dreamers.” A woman from Syria chose a song she listened to in 2013 that “helped me escape the ugly reality” of the country’s civil war.
Back in Ibiza, as the ocean breeze competes with a Balearic remix of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” at a beachside restaurant, van Buuren turns wistful about “Service for Dreamers.” “Maybe it was a bit selfish—I wanted to hear those stories, because it makes me feel good about the fact that I made this choice in life, to do this radio show and to go into trance full-on, starting a company based on trance music and focusing my life on trance,” he says before his 11 p.m. pre-gig nap.
His father, van Buuren explains, went into medicine to help people, but he ended up feeling more like a member of the clergy than a doctor. Patients just wanted someone to listen to their problems. The elder van Buuren saw himself as a modern priest, not a healer. His son has become both.
“Children have been born named after my songs. People got married to my songs. A couple of my tracks have been played at funerals,” van Buuren says, speaking slower, shaking his head. “It gives me a great rewarding feeling: You made a difference. I guess that’s why we’re on earth, maybe?”
A few hours later, the club is so packed that few have room to dance. But they don’t seem to mind. Amid jets of flame, costumed dancers, glow-in-the-dark necklaces, and the tang of Red Bull in the air, they worship at van Buuren’s altar. And as they plead for more, their priest, a skinny blonde Dutchman with a buoyant grin, keeps giving it to them.
