TRANCE MUSIC

In the early and mid-‘90s, after history shows a brief and localized surge of hardcore and “gabber” music coming from the Netherlands, trance music slowly crept to the surface as a minor sub genre within the house spectrum. It shared traits with house, techno, new age and synthesizer pop, of which the latter two gave it most of its dreamy ambience.

It wasn’t a tremendous success off the bat, mostly because there wasn’t enough new material being made to warrant complete trance sets or devoted trance nights. But that all changed when tracks from the likes of Robert Miles (‘Children’), BBE (‘Seven Days And One Week’) and Sash (‘Encore Une Fois’) transcended those limitations. As these records became huge club hits and crossed over into the mainstream charts, more and more producers began to deep-dive into the world of trance, helping the genre claim a spot alongside the other great dance music styles of that time.

Spurred onward by the melodic tendencies of Ferry Corsten, DJ Tiësto and later Armin van Buuren, trance music gradually developed into the newest dominant style of dance music. Armin van Buuren became the first of the three to fully exploit the reach of the Internet. His A State Of Trance radio show, which was launched in 2001 and remained a mostly national show for its first four years, suddenly rose to global importance when a U.K. company called Radio Department snatched up the show and started broadcasting it worldwide. The globalization of dance music, and in particular trance, proved a huge turning point.