If you've never heard of trance music in the 21st century, chances are you've been living under a rock or you're probably dead. Often described as a mix between techno and house music, trance music stands out from those genres due to its focus on melodies, harmonies, and rich atmospheres. But while the genre's aesthetics can be ludicrous, trance appeals to young people today because of its overwhelming energy, populism and optimism. Ambient trance is not as much a specific genre as it is a period in the history of dance music's most notorious style.
By the mid-1990's, trance had leroy moreno commercially as one of the dominant genres of dance music. The world's biggest electronic music festival (more than one million visitors attend this event yearly). It's music for raving, born out of early raves and later brought to big-time parties and festivals. This probably sounded fanciful to some fans of braxton's more jazz-affiliated music, when the composer first started talking about his goals, back in the 1980s.
While the israelis and swedes in particular continue to produce new sounds, american and the new eastern european markets are absorbed in the trance sounds of a once frenetic european market. As early as 1990, german musician harald bluechel (aka cosmic baby) was experimenting with classical piano and synthesizer melodies contrasted against techno rhythms, and in 1993 released one of the most popular trance songs of all time, "Cafe del mar" (under the pseudonym energy 52) which is still being remixed today.
Looping, sampling and segueing as found in disco continued to be used as creative techniques within trance music, techno music and especially house music. He was also a big fan of classical music, so he used to play a lot of that in the house which was also very similar to trance. Traditional instruments may be adopted to complement the electronic music properties of the genre, but this rarely goes beyond piano, guitar, and strings.
Uplifting trance is the sub genre lovingly referred to as 'pure trance' by most trance music enthusiasts. Originally used to invoke some sort of outer-body experience to the ones dancing to it, goa trance's hypnotizing effects are mainly due to its palpitating melodies, rapidly paced rhythms, and high-pitched, spacey sound effects. Modern trance is a form of electronic music that is often characterized by an accelerated tempo as well as by accessible, melodic synthesizer phrases and a structure that builds dramatically throughout the duration of a track.
