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I'm thinking of tracks that are artistically meaningful and genuinely enjoyable to listen to, yet never received a dedicated 12" vinyl release of their own. Instead, they only appeared on compilation vinyl/CD releases, or perhaps exclusively on an artist CD. Here are a few examples that come to...

The story of The Orange Theme dates all the way back to the early 1980s. As a schoolboy, Hoffmann saw Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, whose musical world — and particularly its opening theme — made a profound impression on him. The melody then remained dormant in his mind for more than ten...

Android, produced by fellow Italians Gianluca Cavicchi and Max Ricci, was picked up and reworked by several local DJs and producers in the same year of its release, resulting in the Space Remix and Positive Remix. But it was only Gigi D’Agostino’s interpretation that ultimately managed to...

Hymn was released on Mute Records in 1994 and would later serve as the opening track of Moby’s third studio album, Everything Is Wrong. Upon its release, the track received considerable critical acclaim. Billboard’s Larry Flick described it as “a brain-tugging effort that combines an insistent...

Before Ben Watkins became better known through his Juno Reactor project, he established Electrotete in 1991, releasing the Sonar 12-inch in France, on which I Love You first appeared. The track gained wider distribution and considerable success in 1992. According to some sources, however, after...

"You gain something from it [...] it’s a feeling of euphoria [...] rather than being trance music, it should be called euphoria." — Mark Reeder, founder of MFS, from the 1993 documentary Berliner Trance (who is also often credited with coining the term "trance" as a genre name in 1991)...

Released in 1992, Stellar Supreme by Cosmic Baby blended a wide spectrum of contemporary electronic genres into something genuinely innovative. One of the album’s standout tracks, Heaven's Tears, was reportedly a club hit in its time. The following year, it received a remixed version by Cosmic...

To complete the pairing of Touch Me and Blue Planet, this dream/italo trance track also deserves mention. Considerably more melancholic than its companions, it likewise features a vocal sample similar to Touch Me, though here it is far more elusive — subtly woven into the melodic texture and...

Touch Me is by far the most widely known entry in this small trio of closely related tracks I just posted about, which also includes Blue Planet and Planetarium. For me, an additional point of interest lies in the fact that a fellow countryman — Hungarian producer Lajos Mészáros — was involved...

This track flows within the same musical current as Robert Miles’ Children, and notably originates from the very same year. The gentle, warm, swirling synthetizers, create a meditative and hypnotic atmosphere. Naturally, 1995 saw the release of many similar works — such as Blue Ocean’s Touch Me...

The German duo Dance 2 Trance played a significant role in shaping trance during the early 1990s, and in my view, their experimental trajectory arguably reached its finest expression in their remix of Do You See The Light. Beyond being one of the earliest trance tracks to prominently feature...

German producer Pete Kuhlmann was present in the trance world from its very beginnings. Many know him under the aliases Pete Namlook or 4 Voice — the latter being the name under which he released Eternal Spirit in 1992, widely regarded as one of the most important trance tracks of the early...

Kenny Sharp first made a name for himself in the early 1990s as a DJ within the Northern English rave scene. He later transitioned into producing his own tracks, with his first notable attempt being Missing You (1996), which received an outstanding remix the following year. The emotional core of...

As famously stated in Star Trek, space is the final frontier, the realm where no human has gone before. One of the defining works of Detroit techno’s second wave, The Final Frontier was released by the Underground Resistance collective, with this particular track produced by Mike Banks. True to...

In my previous post about Northern Lights as a discovery of the month, I somehow completely overlooked Psichometria, even though it just as rightfully competes for that title in my eyes. By 1995, the dream/Italo-trance wave was clearly accelerating, although the lack of precise release dates...

This track has been my biggest discovery of January 2026. Released in 1995 in the UK, Northern Lights balances on the border between progressive and tech-leaning trance. As I move forward chronologically through the years, more and more trance tracks with a tech-oriented architecture begin to...

2025 has come and gone, and my personal musical discovery of the year was undoubtedly a deep dive into the Italian wave of trance that emerged and peaked in the mid-1990s. This movement is commonly referred to as Dream Trance, Italo Trance, Mediterranian Progressive, Italian Progressive, Dream...

Today I went through the first 600 tracks out of the roughly 12,000 trance releases from 1995, and among them this one clearly stood out the most. It’s a quintessential early German hard trance track, at times flavored with a touch of that happy hardcore / rave sensibility through the use of a...

Although the term and recognizable form of trance did not fully emerge until the early 1990s, it would be inaccurate to describe the genre as something that simply crystallized out of the club styles of its time. While it is true that the early electronic dance scene had begun to express a...

German-born DJ Hell has been spinning records since 1978 and has performed at some of Berlin’s most iconic venues, including E-Werk and Tresor. In 1992, he released the aptly titled My Definition Of House Music, featuring the title track on the A-side and, on the B-side, a remix by Resistance...