MP3 Exclusives New Arrivals   Alt-Country Alternative Blues Electronic Jambands Jazz Metal Pop Punk R&B Rap/Hip Hop Reggae Rock   Top Downloads Features Archive Contests Control Panel MUSICBLITZ Alert!   METALBLITZ REGGAEBLITZ BLUESBLITZ Musician's Friend   Alt-Country Alternative Blues Electronic Jambands Jazz Hip Hop Metal Pop Punk R&B Reggae Rock   Getting Started Free Players	Welcome !  Trance music is the dance world's latest craze, replacing house, big beat and even drum 'n' bass as the sound to spin. A fusion of four-to-the-floor beats and swirling melodies, trance booms from the all-night raves going down in Puerto Rico, Tel Aviv and even the California desert. And with superstar trance DJs spinning regularly at venues around the world, the genre's sweeping the club scene as well. Born in 1992, thanks to a group of tracks cascading out of Berlin and Frankfurt, trance has since splintered into a number of sub-genres. Psychedelic trance, one of the more popular styles, pads its beats with jarring noises, powering the ravers who dance to the music til dawn. But it's progressive trance, psy-trance's more transcendent and melodic counterpart, that's the most club-centric, favored by world-renowned DJs like Sasha and Digweed, Paul Oakenfold, and Paul van Dyk. The latter DJ's history with trance stretches all the way back to his 1992 collaboration with Cosmic Baby on "Visions of Shiva," cited by some as the first trance track. The German-born van Dyk later went on to record two full-lengths, 1994's 45 RPM and 1996's Seven Ways, released together in the States as Seven Ways last year. Those albums serve as a sweet appetizer to van Dyk's third full-length, Out There and Back, released this summer on Mute. The record is one long, euphoric trip, like a hit of E without any of the morning-after jaw lock. Trance is often lambasted by techno and drum 'n' bass purists for its "cheesiness," its ethereal keyboard builds, its floating female vocals, but van Dyk avoids this bad rap by plumbing the emotional depths of his music. He celebrates the brighter side of trance on "Another Way," lighting the track with gleaming keyboard arpeggios, only to dip into the darker side of things on "Avenue," as he dislodges unsettling emotions with his whooshing bass sounds. Such theorizing stands for little, however, when compared to van Dyk's actual music. Just check out "Face to Face," a track so uplifting it's almost spiritual. Trance just doesn't get any better than this. BT has also been involved with trance since its formative days, releasing his first two singles, "A Moment of Truth" and "Relativity," back in 1993. But the Washington, D.C. native went largely unnoticed in his home country -- despite the fact that British DJs regularly worked his tracks into their sets -- until he burst onto the American club scene with his Tori Amos collaboration, "Blue Skies." The song went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 1996, making BT one of the only trance artists to enjoy crossover success in America. SEND THIS FEATURE TO A FRIEND! 1 2
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