As the last pale amber rays of sun fade into soft twilight, the woods awaken. Above the tall pines of a Norwegian forest, the stars begin to shine—cosmic sentinels standing guard. On this night they will play witness as trance finds her salvation.
With the steady beat of loudspeakers echoing through the trees, a meditation on trance begins. With every beat, trance is reborn. With every bar, she is cleansed. With each note temporal perception shifts, time distorts, and for a fleeting moment, dimensions collapse into one. Sound decorates time as they swirl together in blissful harmony. Every note hanging momentarily on the damp air and then vanishing into the pitch of night.
After years of abuse, here in the cool summer night of Norway, trance has found a new home. It is authenticity that makes the Norway scene so unique. In the dramatic landscape of Scandinavia, trance is not trying to be anything else; there is no need. The crowd gathering in the mossy forests have come to this place so that they may follow as she leads them into the meditative state.
As the second decade of the 21st century drew to a close, the label Ute was founded in Norway. Combining long-form sets, outdoor forest raves, and hypnotic sound Ute established an aesthetic true to the trance ethos and built a community around it.
Ute, literally “outside” in Norwegian, became the main outlet for the group’s music releases, simultaneously becoming one of the best examples of original trance sound with modern production values. The music is equally at home in dark forests or dark clubs. The “trance scene” is dead, and yet trance is thriving. EDM was a victim of COVID-19. So was whatever was passing for trance in the late 2010s.
The Pandemic
The world came to a halt in the early months of 2020. With it, clubs sat empty, festivals were canceled, and people moved on. Across genres, the pandemic marked the death knell for the era of EDM. It’s not as though people stopped going to big festivals like Tomorrowland and EDC after the pandemic, they remain popular to this day. And many DJs like Armin and Tiesto still chase relevance with whatever is trending…some things never change.
But the EDM scene isn’t the cultural phenomenon it once was. It turned out that without the crowds, the visuals, the large sound-systems, and the drugs, EDM wasn’t as appealing to people stuck at home listening to music by themselves on small speakers. The more euphoric, hands up in the air anthemic sounds of EDM and Uplifting no longer fit in a world gone dark. Without the trappings of community and collective euphoria, the music was exposed in a way that it couldn’t easily survive.
During the pandemic, progressive had a moment in both progressive house/trance. A progressive offshoot known as melodic techno also had a moment. But, when the pandemic was over and people were free to go back to their lives, they were in a darker place. After losing more than a year of their life to COVID, they wanted music to match the mood.
It wasn’t just the music that changed. The nightlife scene emerged from COVID finding itself in a new world than the one that had existed when clubs shuttered. People were no longer looking to clubs to fulfill their nightlife needs in the way that they once were. In the UK about 31% of nightclubs closed between February 2020 and December 2023. This trend only intensified in 2024, with an average of 5 nightclubs per week closing in the first quarter of the year.
In Berlin, the beating heart of club culture, they have faced similar pressures. Several historic clubs in Berlin have declared bankruptcy, closed, or warned of closure, citing, in part, declining income and shifts in social habits. Despite its status as the “techno capital,” roughly 50% of the city’s clubs are considered at risk of closing due to rising costs, gentrification, and declining tourism. In San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Hong Kong, Dublin, Sydney all experienced rapidly declining nightlife scenes.
In many ways this has been a tale of two cities, the mainstream festival scene cannibalizing the smaller club scene that can’t compete with the outrageous fees that festivals can afford to pay well-known DJs. The club scene had turned itself into something hollow—it was a music scene unconcerned with music. With some exceptions the club scene catered to pretense. For years clubs had become crowded with people looking for a good time and too many drinks. Dancing and music gave way to VIP and bottle service. Losing some of that is not altogether a bad thing. And with the decline of clubs, something interesting has been happening—more DIY events are happening. People are throwing renegades, underground events are popping up as people look for an experience that is more authentic and less contrived.
Whether music is commercially successful is irrelevant to whether it is good or bad. Just as it is irrelevant to whether music is “underground.” What is important and true: music should not made for the purpose of commercial success. It must be made because there is a composition that can no longer hide in obscurity. The true artist has a right to creative liberty and an obligation to artistic integrity. Trance at its best never tries to be anything else. It tries to induce a hypnotic state. And that is all.
Very few people find trance through the underground. Most probably take the path of mainstream to underground, there’s nothing wrong with that, in fact that is as it should be. But the genre does a disservice to itself by having a mainstream that is so far removed from its underground.
Art must be made for art’s sake, as Oscar Wilde pointed out. Trance, perhaps more than any other musical genre, can claim this as its inheritance. An artist cannot live without integrity and remain whole. To preserve the surface while shirking the substance, is not preservation at all. Lies cannot hide in music.
Many people have written trance off as dead over the years—abused, maligned and forgotten. A fire that had burned too hot and then flamed out thanks to the betrayal of commercial DJs who made their name by their willingness to chase fame and fortune at all costs. By the time of the pandemic, it was unclear whether trance truly even still existed in any recognizable form. But, sometimes a spark travels across decades and catches fire again. So, it was with trance.
Exciting things are happening these days in Scandinavia where labels like Ute.rec, Flux Collective, and Navigare Audio create some of the best trance music in a generation. But, the trance renaissance is not limited to Norway. German labels Space Trax, Amniote Editions, V.A.L.I.S. Records, 10 Pills Mate; France’s Union Trance Mission, even the Netherlands with releases on Delsin Records.
For those that fall in love with trance, the spell the music casts often creates a lifelong obsession. Among the pantheon of important electronic genres, none have been so misunderstood—and yet its mystic chords have persisted in underground scenes even when the genre was discarded in the mainstream.
All dance music should induce movement. Great dance music should induce surrender. All Trance music should induce hypnosis. Great trance music should induce transcendence, a journey of mind and body. It should move your feet not just raise your arms.
As Jimi Hendrix once said, “You can hypnotize people with the music and when you get them at their weakest point, you can preach into the subconscious what you want to say.”Paul van Dyk once said that music should either move your feet or move your heart. No disrespect to PvD, but trance music should move both your feet and your spirit.
For those that understand it, trance music can be transformative. It can provide an escape and open our mind. It can move our feet and transport our mind. There is something beautiful and pure about a music that exists for no purpose other than to hypnotize its listeners. And so, her beat goes on, forever carried into the future by the human need for escape, for inspiration, and a belief in the cosmic power of sound.