Trance
Trance was named in Frankfurt around 1990, when a handful of producers working out of Eye Q and Harthouse found that a single arpeggio held long enough stopped being a riff and became something else. It spent the nineties turning into the biggest dance music on earth: Robert Miles slowing it down, Oakenfold and Sasha carrying it through the superclubs, Gatecrasher and Cream and Amnesia filling every weekend, and a run of records, Café del Mar, For An Angel, Out Of The Blue, Sandstorm, 9pm, that a generation can still hum. By 2003 a Dutch DJ filled a football stadium on his own and then played the Olympics. Then it crashed, split into uplifting and progressive and tech, lost the mainstream to electro house, and kept going anyway, on the festival circuit and the radio show that never stopped. This is the whole arc: the records, the sets, the clubs and the people.
A chronological documentary of 771 moments spanning 1984–2026 on Loreline.
Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-08-22
Eras
- Frankfurt and the First Records, Where the word came from. Dance 2 Trance, Age Of Love, Jam & Spoon and Sven Väth working out of Frankfurt at the turn of the nineties, the Eye Q and Harthouse catalogue, and the records that were called trance before anyone was sure what that meant.
- Classics, The canon, the records that still get played. Café del Mar, Children, For An Angel, Greece 2000, Out Of The Blue, 9pm, Sandstorm, Silence. Some were underground twelve-inches and some went to number one, and the scene has never entirely agreed about which of those is the compliment.
- Uplifting, The euphoric strand: the long build, the breakdown, the drop that the whole room is waiting for. Armin van Buuren, Aly & Fila, Ferry Tayle and the producers who kept the 138 BPM faith through every year it was unfashionable.
- Progressive, The patient branch. Sasha and Digweed, Above & Beyond and Anjunabeats, the deeper and slower end that traded the drop for the long arc, and which is where most of trance quietly went after 2004.
- Sets, Nights that people still watch back. Tiësto alone in the GelreDome on 10 May 2003, the first time a solo DJ headlined a stadium, and the Athens Olympic ceremony fifteen months later. Above & Beyond at Madison Square Garden for Group Therapy 100 in October 2014. The ASOT milestone broadcasts, the Essential Mixes, and the long Ibiza sets, kept at the length they were actually played.
- Clubs and Festivals, Where it happened. Gatecrasher in Sheffield and Cream in Liverpool, Amnesia and Privilege on Ibiza, Trance Energy and Sensation in the Netherlands, the Love Parade at its peak, and the festival circuit, ASOT, Luminosity, Transmission, Dreamstate, that the music moved onto when the superclubs faded.
- Radio and the Labels, A State of Trance began as a radio show on 1 June 2001, became a record label in 2003 and a touring festival in 2012, three different things that share a name and get conflated constantly. Around it: Armada, Anjunabeats and Anjunadeep, Black Hole, Vandit and Perfecto, the compilation series that taught people the canon, and the DJ Mag poll that everyone claims not to care about.
- Scene, How it was reported, argued over and remembered, the television coverage, the documentaries, the interviews, the long argument about whether trance was ever any good, and the 2010 Love Parade disaster that ended the parade for good.
…and 771 more moments. Full text archive: /loreline-text/trance.md
