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more electronic music guides from audiogalaxy
Acid Jazz:
Acid Jazz is, for the most part, Soul Jazz with turntables. Basically kids who grew up in the Hip Hop/Techno DJ culture started trying to recreate the Soul Jazz records they'd been sampling and remixing for years. DJ/ Genius, Gilles Peterson spurred the development and popularity of this music in the early ‘90s with acts like The Brand New Heavies and Incognito.
Ambient:
Ambient music is environmental. It is meant to mimic or enhance the sounds of everyday life, not to necessarily be rhythmic, melodic or any other thing traditionally associated with music. Ambient can, of course, contain any of those elements, but it does not necessarily have to. Everything from the groovy sounds of Global Communications to the frightening and cacophonous sounds of Darkwave is ambient. Brian Eno was a pioneer in this genre. Recently, Bill Laswell has made some critically acclaimed ambient records.
Dark Ambient:
Dark Ambient seeks not to soothe but to disturb with its environmental background sounds.
Ambient Pop:
Ambient Pop combines elements of the two distinct styles which lend the blissed-out genre its name — while the music possesses a shape and form common to conventional pop, its electronic textures and atmospheres mirror the hypnotic, meditative qualities of ambient. The mesmerizing lock-groove melodies of Krautrock are a clear influence as well, although ambient pop is typically much less abrasive. Essentially an extension of the dream pop that emerged in the wake of the shoegazer movement, it's set apart from its antecedents by its absorption of contemporary electronic idioms, including sampling, although for the most part live instruments continue to define the sound. Prominent bands include Air, Hooverphonic, Laika and Spiritualized.
Big Beat:
Big Beat is a late ‘90s phenomenon combining Hip Hop and breakbeats with rock vocals and guitars, all within a techno aesthetic. The Chemical Brothers and Fat Boy Slim are successful purveyors of this popular music.
Breakbeat:
Breakbeat music is DJ/turntable based music built upon Disco and Funk breakbeats. (James Brown’s "Funky Drummer" is a prime and overused example). These drum-tracks are looped and often sped up while obligatory bleeps and bloops provide the instrumentation. Breakbeat music is, for obvious reasons, ideally suited to… break-dance to. Cirrus and Omar Santana are fairly big names in this genre dominated by anonymous DJs.
Nu Breaks:
A hard-edged dance style developed late in the '90s with the convergence of techno and drum'n'bass as well as a few elements of the earlier rave scenes, Nu Breaks was led by artists and DJs including Brits Adam Freeland, Dylan Rhymes, Beber, Freq Nasty, and Rennie Pilgrem plus a bare few Americans like BT . From drum'n'bass the style borrowed two-step breakbeats and chilling effects, from techno its smooth flow and machine percussion, and from early-'90s rave/hardcore some of the crowd-pleasing bells and whistles (figuratively as well as literally) that in some cases had not been heard for years. Freeland was probably the best-known of the nu breaks crew (especially since most producers concentrated on singles output), as rock-steady mix sets like Coastal Breaks and Tectonics earned acclaim with dance fans around the world.
Ambient Breakbeat:
Ambient Breakbeat refers to a narrow subgenre of electronic acts with less energy than the trip-hop or funky breaks, but with a pronounced hip-hop influence to their music. Some of the more downtempo works on British labels like Mo' Wax and Ninja Tune paved the way for New York's DJ Wally (of the Liquid Sky Records brigade) and British artists such as Req, each good examples of the style.
Club/Dance:
Club/Dance music comes in many different forms, from disco to hip-hop. Though there have been various dance crazes throughout the history of popular music, club/dance music became its own genre in the mid-'70s, as soul mutated into disco and whole clubs were devoted to dancing. In the late '70s, dance clubs played disco, but by the end of the decade, disco was mutating into a number of different genres. All of the genres were collected under the catch-all term "dance," though there were distinct differences between dance-pop, hip-hop, house, and techno, among other subgenres. What tied them all together was their emphasis on rhythm -- in each dance subgenre, the beat remains all-important.
Downbeat:
Downbeat is a generic term sometimes used to replace ambient-house and ambient-techno, considering that the amount and complexity of electronic listening music described under the "ambient" umbrella had made the terms practically useless by the mid-'90s. It often implies the use of moderate breakbeats instead of the steady four-four beats of most ambient-house or ambient-techno. The style also breaches territory claimed by trip-hop, ambient-techno, and electro-techno. In its widest possible definition, downbeat is any form of electronic music created for the living room instead of the dance floor.
Dub Techno:
Dub takes its name and its aesthetic from ‘70s Jamaican Dub-Reggae pioneers like King Tubby, Lee Perry and others. Dub is downtempo, thick and echo-drenched techno, but it does not necessarily contain the signature reggae "One-drop."
Trip-Hop:
Yet another in a long line of plastic placeholders to attach itself to one arm or another of the U.K. post-acid house dance scene's rapidly mutating experimental underground, Trip-Hop was coined by the English music press in an attempt to characterize a new style of downtempo, jazz-, funk-, and soul-inflected experimental breakbeat music which began to emerge around in 1993 in association with labels such as Mo'Wax, Ninja Tune, Cup of Tea, and Wall of Sound. Similar to (though largely vocal-less) American hip-hop in its use of sampled drum breaks, typically more experimental, and infused with a high index of ambient-leaning and apparently psychotropic atmospherics (hence "trip"), the term quickly caught on to describe everything from Portishead and Tricky, to DJ Shadow and U.N.K.L.E., to Coldcut, Wagon Christ, and Depth Charge -- much to the chagrin of many of these musicians, who saw their music largely as an extension of hip-hop proper, not a gimmicky offshoot. One of the first commercially significant hybrids of dance-based listening music to crossover to a more mainstream audience, trip-hop full-length releases routinely topped indie charts in the U.K. and, in artists such as Shadow, Tricky, Morcheeba, the Sneaker Pimps, and Massive Attack, account for a substantial portion of the first wave of "electronica" acts to reach Stateside audiences.
Drum 'n' Bass/Jungle:
Based almost entirely in England, Jungle (also known as drum'n'bass) is a permutation of hardcore techno that emerged in the early '90s. Jungle is the most rhythmically complex of all forms of techno, relying on extremely fast polyrhythms and breakbeats. Usually, it's entirely instrumental -- it is among the hardest of all hardcore techno, consisting of nothing but fast drum machines and deep bass. As its name implies, jungle does have more overt reggae, dub, and R&B influences than most hardcore -- and that is why some critics claimed that the music was the sound of black techno musicians and DJs reclaiming it from the white musicians and DJs who dominated the hardcore scene. Nevertheless, jungle never slows down to develop a groove -- it just speeds along. Like most techno genres, jungle is primarily a singles genre designed for a small, dedicated audience, although the crossover success of Goldie and his 1995 debut Timeless suggested a broader appeal and more musical possibilities than other forms of techno. Dozens of respected artists followed in their wake, fusing breakbeats with influences lifted from jazz, film music, ambient, and trip-hop.
Drill 'n' Bass:
Soon after album-based British techno producers like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher got their hands on drum'n'bass during the mid-'90s, they naturally twisted it to their own ends. The result was Drill'n'bass, a spastic form of breakbeat jungle that relied on powerful audio software and patient programming to warp old midtempo beats and breaks into a frenzied, experimental potpourri of low-attention-span electronic music. Beginning in mid-1995, three figures led the charge with pioneering EPs: Aphex Twin (Hangable Auto Bulb), Luke Vibert's Plug project (Plug 1), and Squarepusher (Conumber). The following year, drill'n'bass went overground with full-length releases by each of the above, most notably Plug's Drum'n'bass for Papa and Squarepusher's debut album Feed Me Weird Things. Soon the rush was on, and a group of artists emerged with immediately identifiable ties to drill'n'bass, including Animals on Wheels, Amon Tobin, Mung, and Plasmalamp. Drill'n'bass receded into the deep underground by 1998, an unsurprising event given the style's extreme nature.
Industrial Drum 'n' Bass:
Reacting against industrial music's increasing obsession with heavy metal, a few artists began blending industrial shock-terrorism with the breakbeat programming of jungle and techno. In line with past industrial pioneers -- Front 242, Cabaret Voltaire, Skinny Puppy -- who kept up with developments in electronic dance, these bands kept ahead of the rest of the industrial pack, continually experimenting with song structure.
Electro Funk:
Electro Funk combined ‘70s Funk with the synths and beats emerging in the fledgling Hip Hop culture. This stuff can sound dated now, but it was ridiculously influential on Hip Hop, bass music, techno R&B and everything in between. Afrika Bambataa and Mantronix made great Electro Funk as did Herbie Hancock and Bill Laswell on their surprise hit "Rocket." Electro Funk is what the kid in "Beat Street" was trying to make when he made that silly water-drop crap in his bedroom.
Electronic:
Electronic is a broad designation that could be construed to cover many different styles of music -- after all, electronic instrumentation has become commonplace, and much dance-oriented music from the late '80s on is primarily, often exclusively, electronic. However, in this case, it refers mostly to electronic music as it took shape early on, when artists were still exploring the unique possibilities of electronically generated sound, as well as more recent music strongly indebted to those initial experiments. Avant-garde composers had long been fascinated with the ways technology could be used to produce previously unheard textures and combinations of sounds. French composer Edgard Varèse was a pioneer in this field, building his own electronic instruments as early as the 1920s and experimenting with tape loops during the '50s. Varèse's work was hugely influential on American avant-gardist John Cage and German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, both of whom greatly expanded the compositional structures in which electronic devices could be incorporated. But electronic music didn't really begin to enter the wider consciousness until around the 1970s, when sequencers and synthesizers became more affordable and easier to obtain. Wendy Carlos' 1968 Switched-On Bach album, a selection of Bach pieces performed on the Moog synthesizer, had ignited tremendous public attention, and Stockhausen's teachings had begun to inspire a burgeoning experimental music scene in Germany. Krautrock groups such as Can and Neu! integrated synthesizers and tape manipulations into their rabid experimentalism, but the two most important electronic artists to emerge from the scene were Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. Kraftwerk pioneered the concept of pop music performed exclusively on synthesizers, and their robotic, mechanical, hypnotic style had a tremendous impact on nearly all electronic pop produced in the remainder of the 20th century. Tangerine Dream, meanwhile, was indebted to minimalist classical composition, crafting an atmospheric, slowly shifting, trance-inducing sound that helped invent the genre known as space music. Other crucial figures included Klaus Schulze, who explored a droning variation on space music that was even more trancelike than Tangerine Dream, and Brian Eno, whose inventive production and experiments with electronics in a pop context eventually gave way to his creation of ambient music, which aimed to blend thoroughly into its environment and often relied heavily on synthesizers. Ambient and space music helped give rise to new age, which emphasized the peaceful, soothing, and meditative qualities of those influences while adding greater melodicism; the progressive electronic branch of new age crafted a more dramatic, lushly orchestrated style that broke with electronic music's roots in minimalism. Synth-pop, techno, and its artier companion electronica all owed a great deal to the basic innovations of early electronic artists as well.
House:
House music grew out of Disco. It is easily identifiable by its insistent, pulsing four/four beat, on top of which all sorts of music and sounds are added, all with one purpose in mind: to make you dance. House has managed to go mainstream from time to time (with artists like Madonna and Soul II Soul) while still maintaining a core, underground audience of DJs and fans.
Acid House:
The style of dance that exploded American house music around the world, Acid House first appeared in the mid-'80s in the work of Chicago producers like DJ Pierre, Adonis, Farley Jackmaster Funk, and Phuture (the latter of whom coined the term in their classic single, "Acid Trax"). Mixing elements of the house music that was already up and running in Chicago (as well as New York) with the squelchy sounds and deep bassline of the Roland TB-303 synthesizer, acid house was strictly a Chicago phenomenon until stacks of singles began to cross the Atlantic, arriving in the hands of eager young Brits. The sound jelled in small warehouse parties held in London in 1986-87, and then went overground during 1988's infamous Summer of Love, when thousands of clubgoers traveled to the hinterlands for the massive events later known as raves. Acid house hit the British pop charts quite quickly, with M/A/R/R/S, S'Express, and Technotronic landing huge hits before the dawn of the '90s. By that time, the acid house phenomenon had largely passed in England and was replaced by rave music. New-school U.S. producers from Cajmere to Armand Van Helden to Felix Da Housecat kept the sound alive and well during the '90s.
Deep House:
Deep House, whether vocal or not, stays away from the poppiness of some mainstream House music and backs up its 4/4 sound with layer upon layer of synths and samples.
Disco House:
This music never strayed too far from its Disco roots. House’s 4/4 electro-beat is backed by familiar and funky Disco sounds.
Garage:
Garage is sped-up Deep House music. The name comes from the Paradise Garage club in New Jersey where the sound was pioneered. Garage was an important step in the development of Drum 'n' Bass.
Happy Hardcore:
Gradually evolving from the English rave scene of the late '80s and early '90s, Happy Hardcore featured many of the same elements that characterized rave: impossibly high beats per minute, similarly fast synthesizer/piano runs, and vocal samples altered to make the most soulful diva sound like a warbling chipmunk. The jungle/drum'n'bass movement had also emerged from rave, but the two scenes split and grew quite anathemic. The positive vibes of happy hardcore were criticized by most clubgoers as music for the drugged-out youth, but just as the hardcore-into-jungle scene found favor with critics later in the decade, a certain amount of respect for happy hardcore appeared as well. The work of combination DJ/producers such as Slipmatt, Hixxy & Sharkey, Force & Styles, and DJ Dougal produced innumerable compilations, as well as the inevitable solo production LPs.
Gabba:
Most popular in the Netherlands and Scotland, Gabba is the hardest form of hardcore techno, frequently exceeding speeds of over 200 BPM. Popular DJs and producers like Paul Elstak and the Mover categorized gabba's early evolution from German trance and British rave. By the mid-'90s, the music had acquired some rather unsavory connotations with neo-fascism and the skinhead movement, though much of the scene was free from it. Surprisingly, gabba made a rather successful attempt at the Dutch pop charts, with Elstak producing several hits. Many producers and fans proclaimed him a sell-out, and soon there appeared a divide in the scene between the hardcore and the really hardcore.
Rave:
Rave is more of an event than a genre of music. Raves were underground parties where acid house and hardcore records were played and large quantities of drugs -- particularly ecstasy -- were consumed. Most of the music played at raves had a psychedelic quality, even before drugs became a major element of the scene. DJs played at the raves, mixing stacks of house and techno singles; the DJs, not the recording artists themselves, became the most recognizable names in the scene. Raves were primarily an English phenomenon during the late '80s and early '90s. They were conducted in large venues, particularly abandoned warehouses and open fields. Eventually, the British government became concerned that raves were a dangerous, antisocial phenomenon that had to be shut down, but the parties never disappeared, especially since word of the events were usually passed through word of mouth and handmade fliers. In the States, raves began to make some inroads in the early '90s, but they never gained a large audience, even by underground standards. Throughout the '90s, bands that were directly influenced by rave culture -- particularly "baggy" bands like the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, and Charlatans; Britpop acts like Pulp and Oasis; and techno artists like the Prodigy -- made their way into the mainstream, and the culture continued to capture the attention of British youth into the late '90s.
Hi-NRG:
Hi-NRG is a fast variation of disco that evolved in the '80s. Driven by a fast drum machine and synthesizers, Hi-NRG was essentially a dance-oriented music with only slight hints of pop. There would be a few hooks -- generally sung by disembodied vocalists wailing in the background -- but the emphasis of the music, like most dance music, was in the beat. Hi-NRG was a predecessor to techno and house, which drew from its beats in decidedly different ways. House had a funkier, soulful rhythm, while techno expanded with the mechanical beats of Hi-NRG.
Organic House:
Organic House uses layers of live "organic" instrumentation and percussion to augment the patented 4/4 Electro House beat.
Illbient:
Centered in New York City (Brooklyn in particular), illbient is a distinctly and consciously urban form of electronic music, aiming to express both the cultural variety and grimy decay of its surroundings. So dubbed by DJ Spooky (the style's defining artist), Illbient's eclectic, atmospheric pastiches are rooted foremost in ambient music, but may incorporate (in particular) dub, hip-hop, and drum'n'bass, plus occasional ethnic musics that blend well with whatever is already in the musical stew pot. In keeping with the moods suggested by its environment, illbient can be eerie and a little dark, or unpredictable and cloaked in noise, but nearly always retains its deliberate pace and nocturnal vibes. Performance venues for illbient are often selected for how well they evoke the atmosphere of a city's dirty underbelly, which speaks to the music's underlying conceptual (and intellectual) nature. The Brooklyn scene is also marked by a sense of cooperation and community that leads to frequent collaborations, both on an individual and group basis, and fluidly shifting commitments. The Asphodel and WordSound record labels provide the settings for most illbient scene projects; the former is home to the excellent introductory compilation Incursions in Illbient, which features DJ Spooky, We, Byzar, and Sub Dub. Other major illbient artists include Tipsy, Spectre, Rob Swift, and Badawi.
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Industrial:
Industrial is harsh, pessimistic electro-rock with a sonic palette of abrasive, mechanical sounds. The genre takes its name from Industrial Records, the label that hosted Industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle. Nine Inch Nails’ “Pretty Hate Machine” is a masterpiece of the genre, and other Industrial bands include Ministry, Coil, Einstürzende Neubauten, Front 242, and Skinny Puppy.
Intelligent Dance Music:
Though it embraces a wide stylistic range, all Intelligent Dance Music (or IDM) holds the common goal of extending the role of dance/electronic musics beyond the dancefloor. IDM artists use the rhythms, breaks and synths of more mainstream artists in new ways, frustrating attempts to dance and forcing listeners to focus on the music. Prominent artists in the genre include Aphex Twin, Autechre, Mouse on Mars, Plastikman, and To Rococo Rot.
Techno:
Techno, arguably (along with House) the most prominent and recognizable form of Electronica, grew out of German experimental synth music (Kraftwerk) and early Hip Hop and Electro Funk. Its earliest incarnation was in Detroit with soulful pioneers like Juan Atkins and later Carl Craig. It has gone international, sprouting a huge number of different subgenres.
Detroit Techno:
Early Detroit techno is characterized by, alternately, a dark, detached, mechanistic vibe, and a smooth, bright, soulful feel (the latter deriving in part from the Motown legacy and the stock-in-trade between early techno and the Chicago-style house developing simultaneously to the South). While essentially designed as dance music meant to uplift, the stark, melancholy edge of early tracks by {Cybotron,} {Model 500,} {Rhyhm Is Rhythm,} and {Reese} also spoke to Detroit's economic collapse in the late '70s following the city's prosperous heyday as the focal point of the American automobile industry. The music's oft-copied ruddy production and stripped-down aesthetic were largely a function of the limited technology available to the early innovators (records were often mastered from two-track onto cassette); the increasingly sophisticated arrangements of much contemporary techno (on through to hardcore and jungle), conversely, has much to do with the growth and increasing affordability of MIDI-encoded equipment and desktop digital audio. Second- and third-wave Detroit techno, too, has gained considerably in production, although artists such as {Derrick May,} {Juan Atkins,} and {Kenny Larkin} have sought to combine the pearless sheen of the digital arena with the compositional minimalism of their Detroit origins. No longer simply contained within the 313 area code, Detroit techno has become a global phenomenon (partly as a result of the more widespread acclaim many of the original Detroit artists have found in other countries), buoyed by the fact that many of the classic early tracks remain in print (available through Submerge, at www.submerge.com). Today, Detroit's third wave are re-exploring the aesthetic commitment of the music's early period, with hard-hitting beats ({Underground Resistance,} {Jeff Mills}), soulful grooves ({Kenny Larkin,} {Stacey Pullen}), and a renewed interest in techno's breakbeat roots ({Aux 88,} {Drexciya,} {"Mad" Mike,} {Dopplereffekt}). Although numerous documents of Detroit techno past and present exist, the best introduction to the Motor City sound is undoubtedly True People: A Detroit Techno Compilation, a sprawling two-CD set released on React Records in 1995.
Early Detroit Techno:
A sense for complex beatbox percussion and techno-soul melodies, together with optimistic visions of otherworldly black science fiction in the midst of an urban wasteland, inspires the crucial innovators of Motor City techno during the 1980.
Later Detroit Techno:
The second and third waves of Detroit producers continue the adoration which many Europeans feel for the home of techno.
Minimal Techno:
When house and techno first came on the scene in the mid-'80s, productions were minimal out of necessity. As the art of sampling and programming developed, the music became more layered and professional sounding -- a progression according to some, but an unnecessary crossover move to others. Reacting against these increasingly dense productions, Minimalist Techno figures cleared their productions of most everything except pointed drum programs and stark sequencer or synthesizer patterns. Detroit figures like Rob Hood, Jeff Mills, and Plastikman led the way, with later figures including Surgeon, Oliver Ho, and Stewart Walker also contributing to the new idiom.
Glitch:
As computer-aided composition slowly eclipsed the traditional analog approach to crafting electronica, the palette of possible sounds soon widened immensely, resulting in the advent of the clicks + cuts style in the late '90s. No longer was the artist confined to sequenced percussion, synth, and samples, but rather any imaginable sound, including the uncanny realm of digital glitches -- a possibility that was quickly exploited by a generation of youths with the means to create entire albums in their bedroom with only a computer and the right software. Where early-'90s analog-toting pioneers such as Aphex Twin and Autechre had envisioned the quickly diminishing areas of electronica that had not yet been explored, and, simultaneously, another insular group of pioneers led by Robert Hood and Basic Channel stripped away the elements of electronica that had ultimately become little more than ineffective cliché, a second wave of computer-armed protégés studied these aesthetics and used software to create microscopically intricate compositions harking back to these pioneers. First championed by the ideological German techno figure Achim Szepanski and his stable of record labels -- Force Inc, Mille Plateaux, Force Tracks, Ritornell -- this tight-knit scene of experimental artists creating cerebral hybrids of experimental techno, minimalism, digital collage, and noise glitches soon found themselves being assembled into a community. Though artists such as Oval, Pole, and Vladislav Delay, among others, had initially been singled out by critics beforehand, Mille Plateaux's epic Clicks_+_Cuts compilation first defined the underground movement, exploring not only a broad roster of artists but also a wide scope of approaches. The artists on the compilation, along with a small community of visionary artists in the software-savvy San Francisco/Silicon Valley area of California led by the Cytrax label, soon found themselves as the critically hailed leaders of yet another electronica movement. It wasn't long before the clicks + cuts aesthetic began being bred with existing genres, resulting in endless variations on the aesthetic such as MRI's click-driven house and Kid-606's glitch remix of N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton."
Digital Hardcore:
DHC or Gabber, is, primarily, Hardcore Punk/Noise made digitally. This stuff is very noisy and aggressive, yet vaguely catchy. EC8OR and Alec Empire's Atari Teenage Riot are prime examples.
Trance:
Breaking out of the German techno and hardcore scene of the early '90s, Trance emphasized brief synthesizer lines repeated endlessly throughout tracks, with only the addition of minimal rhythmic changes and occasional synthesizer atmospherics to distinguish them -- in effect putting listeners into a trance that approached those of religious origin. Despite waning interest in the sound during the mid-'90s, trance made a big comeback later in the decade, even supplanting house as the most popular dance music of choice around the globe.
Inspired by acid house and Detroit techno, trance coalesced with the opening of R&S Records in Ghent, Belgium and Harthouse/Eye Q Records in Frankfurt, Germany. R&S defined the sound early on with singles like "Energy Flash" by Joey Beltram, "The Ravesignal" by CJ Bolland, and others by Robert Leiner, Sun Electric, and Aphex Twin. Harthouse, begun in 1992 by Sven Väth with Heinz Roth & Matthias Hoffman, made the most impact on the sound of trance with Hardfloor's minimal epic "Hardtrance Acperience" and Väth's own "L'Esperanza," plus releases by Arpeggiators, Spicelab, and Barbarella. Artists like Väth, Bolland, Leiner, and many others made the transition to the full-length realm, though without much of an impact on the wider music world.
Despite a long nascent period when it appeared trance had disappeared, replaced by breakbeat dance (trip-hop and jungle), the style's increasing impact on Britain's dance scene finally crested in the late '90s. The classic German sound had changed somewhat though, and the term "progressive" trance gained favor to describe influences from the smoother end of house and Euro dance. By 1998, most of the country's best-known DJs -- Paul Oakenfold, Pete Tong, Tony De Vit, Danny Rampling, Sasha, Judge Jules -- were playing trance in Britain's superclubs. Even America turned on to the sound (eventually), led by its own cast of excellent DJs, including Christopher Lawrence and Kimball Collins.
Progressive Trance:
Though progressive house led the increasingly mainstream-sounding house from the charts back to the dance floors, the progressive wing of the trance crowd led directly to a more commercial, chart-oriented sound, since trance had never enjoyed much chart action in the first place. Emphasizing the smoother sound of Eurodance or house (and occasionally more reminiscent of Jean-Michel Jarre than Basement Jaxx ), Progressive Trance became the sound of the world's dance floors by the end of the millennium. Critics ridiculed its focus on predictable breakdowns and relative lack of skill to beat-mix, but progressive trance was caned by the hottest DJs (Oakenfold, Tong, Sasha) and spotlighted in the main rooms of Britain's largest clubs (Gatecrasher, Cream, Ministry of Sound, Home). Though progressive trance producers rarely focused on much more than getting their singles on Tong's radio show or Sasha's latest mix album, a few acts (most notably, Paul Van Dyk and Hybrid) soon began translating the sound into the full-length realm.
Progressive House:
House music had reached the mainstream by the late '80s (more so in Britain than anywhere else), and while several early house hits were by genuine pioneers, they were later overwhelmed by the novelty acts and one-hit wonders dominating the charts around the turn of the decade. As well, ambient, techno, and trance made gains early in the '90s as electronic styles with both street cred and a group of young artists making intelligent music. A generation of house producers soon emerged, weaned on the first wave of house and anxious to reapply the more soulful elements of the music. With a balance of sublime techno and a house sound more focused on New York garage than Chicago acid house, groups like Leftfield, the Drum Club, Spooky, and Faithless hit the dance charts (and occasionally Britain's singles charts). Though critically acclaimed full-lengths were never quite as important as devastating club tracks, several Progressive House LPs were stellar works, including Leftfield's Leftism, Spooky's Gargantuan, and the Drum Club's Everything Is Now. By the mid-'90s, the innovations of progressive house had become the mainstream of house music around the world.
Goa Trance:
Named after a region on the coast of southwestern India famed as a clubbing and drugging paradise ever since the '60s, Goa Trance broke away from the Teutonic bent of European trance during the early '90s and carried the torch for trance during the rest of the decade. The presence of LSD on the Goa scene -- instead of the ubiquitous club drug Ecstasy -- translated the music into an appropriately psychedelic version of trance that embraced the mystical properties of Indian music and culture. Traditional Indian instruments such as the sitar and sarod (or electronic near-equivalents) often made appearances in the music, pushed along by the driving, hypnotic sequencer music that trance had always been known for. The style is considerably less turntable-oriented than other electronic dance styles, especially since vinyl tends to melt in the heat (DATs are often used instead). As a consequence, Goa had comparatively few DJs to recommend it worldwide until the late '90s. Labels like Dragonfly, Blue Room Released, Flying Rhino, Platipus, and Paul Oakenfold's Perfecto Fluoro became important sources for the sound. Oakenfold , Britain's most popular DJ, finally gave Goa trance the cache it had lacked in the past by caning it on the radio and in clubs across the country. The British sound system known as Return to the Source also brought Goa trance to the mainstream hordes, releasing three volumes in a compilation series of the best trance music on the scene.
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