- Aug 23, 2022
- 301 Posts
- 286 Thanked
"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).
Euphoria
For more than three decades, there has been remarkably little serious effort to establish a coherent framework for what trance music actually is. That helps explain why Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music called it the second most misunderstood electronic genre in history (though I beg to differ: it’s the first). As Mark Reeder implied more than three decades ago, the name itself may have sent us down a conceptually false rabbit hole that set the wrong expectations about what this genre should aim to convey, so, it should never have been called trance in the first place.
Beyond the early attempt made by Berliner Trance, the genre has largely been defined through vague one-liners over the past 35 years. Armin van Buuren's famous "it's about the melody" is a perfect example: it is simultaneously a fitting encapsulation of trance's spirit and, almost paradoxically, such a broad and vague statement that it could just as easily be used to describe dozens of other genres as well. And statements like the one made by Paul van Dyk (one of the genre's founding figures) don't exactly help either. He has argued in a recent interview that all electronic music is trance music, effectively dissolving the genre's conceptual boundaries and stripping the term of much of its meaning in a single sentence. That was probably less an attempt to deconstruct the genre than an unfortunate way of distancing himself from a label whose reputation had already seen better days. But whatever the intention, statements like these only make it harder to establish what "trance" actually means.
And when the words we use to describe something have no precise meaning, eventually the thing itself begins to lose its meaning too, as rightfully pointed out by many great thinkers of the past. It is therefore hardly surprising that, without a clearly defined identity, intent, philosophy and set of boundaries to serve as a foundation, “trance” gradually lost touch with what made it distinct in the first place, resulting in some of the most respected producers slowly distancing themselves from the label. This is not the failure of any one person, nor can the responsibility be placed on a single individual artist/producer. It is, rather, a collective failure of the scene as a whole: a failure to establish the healthy conceptual framework the genre needed in order to evolve, mature and survive without losing its identity.
—
Rebooting Trance
Thus, this project is an attempt to do something that, in my view, should have been done decades ago: to give the genre a real framework, informed by some of the foundational principles laid out in the Berliner Trance documentary 33 years ago, and based on my current understanding of the genre, shaped by roughly 20 years of listening and the examination of more than 40,000 trance tracks. To finally define the artistic, compositional and structural philosophy inherent to the genre: in detail, precisely and coherently. To reboot it and restore some of the credibility, identity and vitality that the word “trance” once had, or, more ambitiously, to retroactively distinguish the trance that emerged in the early 1990s from what is commonly marketed as “trance” today, and, moving forward, define that original musical philosophy under the name it should have had all along: Euphoria.
That being said, this is not merely an academic exercise. It is an attempt to celebrate the genre, commemorate and immortalize its greatest achievements, and showcase what trance/euphoria truly is through the best music ever produced within it. Tracks selected not by fleeting popularity, nostalgia, or association with certain labels and the algorithms that promote them, but by their actual artistic merit, and ranked through a deep and multilayered weighted rating system that has gone through roughly 200 iterations in an effort to perfect it. It takes numerous aspects of a track into account: its sense of progression and development, atmospheric and spatial qualities, pacing and energy, its hypnotic power and euphoric effect, and many others. And I'm doing that by going through every single trance track I can find, catalogued up to 2007. I'm currently around 40,000 tracks in, with roughly 140,000 still to go, and have selected around 300–400 tracks so far (roughly the top 1% of everything I've examined to this point).
But the project isn't just about ranking music, it’s also about examining the tracks themselves in detail: their artistic philosophy, mood, structure, development, production, or the ideas behind them. The site is also about documenting the artists, labels, clubs, events and scenes that shaped the genre, while exploring its history, technology, cultural impact, and the many places where trance crossed over into the wider world. The website will become both a living historical archive and a music streaming platform: a place where the music can be explored and listened to, while every track is accompanied by original writing about its creation, musical ideas, philosophy and historical context.
—
About Me & The Larger Scope Of The Project
For some context on who I am: I'm Koncz Dávid (Dávid Koncz for non-Hungarian speakers) 32 years old, with more than 10 years of experience in video game & tech journalism in Hungary. I'm also a frequent contributor to Trancefix.nl (articles, track reviews), and the creator of the world's largest classic trance database, a project that even DJ Mag covered in an article.
The database was the first stage of this journey. The website is the natural next step. But the ultimate destination is a book I'm currently writing, which will be the culmination of everything I learn throughout this process: listening to the music, analysing thousands upon thousands of tracks, reading old magazines and articles, researching the people and events behind the genre, and piecing together its history. A book intended to physically commemorate and immortalize the history of trance/euphoria music.
This is, first and foremost, a human project, driven by the passion, curiosity and obsession of a single person: me. I've already invested thousands of hours of my free time into it when taking everything together: the database, the tens of thousands of tracks I've checked and analysed, the book, the website, the rating system, the research, and everything else surrounding the project.
Every written word is my own. The overwhelming majority of the design ideas behind the website are my own but I got some valuable feedback from a few friends as well. The rating system, its methodology and calculations are my own. The way I evaluate tracks, decide what belongs in the database, select the tracks that deserve recognition, and ultimately interpret the genre, all of that is my own work.
I do use AI, but only as a tool for a handful of very specific tasks. I built a small application to make the enormous process of going through tracks more efficient, allowing me to browse YouTube and take structured notes in a workflow that essentially combines YouTube browsing with the functionality of Google Sheets. I also use AI to help develop the website through Cursor, because I have little formal programming background. I've also used Midjourney to generate seven landing-page images, and I use ChatGPT to proofread my English because I'm Hungarian, not a native English speaker. And that's about it.
I hope you enjoy what you're seeing here, and I genuinely can't wait to finally make the project public. The public launch will also be accompanied by a series of videos on my YouTube channel, where I'll be able to go into much more detail about the project, the ideas behind it, the music, and the journey that led to this point. I hope the planned 2027 launch will be a fitting way to commemorate the 40th anniversary of trance, as 1987 saw the release of A Split Second's Flesh (Remix) — a track that can be considered not only one of the earliest manifestations of New Beat, but also the first direct precursor to trance / the earliest proto-trance track, preceding The KLF’s classic What Time Is Love by a whole year. If this project can contribute, even in a small way, to preserving, understanding and celebrating four decades of this music, then it will have achieved its purpose.
And for those who are curious about the process itself, I've included a few extra glimpses behind the scenes. A small, old excerpt from the book I'm writing (the 1991 chapter), giving you a taste of how I'm approaching the history of the genre in written form. A glimpse of the music-listening application I built for the project that is designed to make going through 180,000 tracks as efficient and structured as possible. And a few public livestreams from the first pass, which is the initial, rapid screening stage of the process. At this point I'm not doing the detailed analysis yet; I'm essentially filtering out tracks that don't actually belong in trance, identifying miscategorized or incorrectly labelled releases, and adding a handful of basic tags and notes to make the subsequent, proper listening passes more focused and purposeful.
So there's a ridiculous amount of work behind what you're seeing here, and this is only the beginning. By the time the website officially launches, I expect it to cover virtually every standout trance track up to at least 1995, with a handful of early picks from the following years already making their way in as well.
