1999: the golden age of trance

I was watching the conclusion of the Tour de France last week, and it reminded me of my trip to France and England 10 years ago. As this blog is intended to discuss how music affects my life, I won't bore you with my trip to the Louvre or a cricket match.

House music seemed to rule in France at the time. Already I had become a fan of French house music, through artists like Alex Gopher and Rinocerose. Although I didn’t have an opportunity to hit any clubs, house music could be heard in the shops of the Champs Elysses and in certain hip restaurants. One evening, at the insistence of my then-wife’s friend, we stumbled into a Chicago style pizza restaurant. Even in this American style restaurant, house music was blaring as we munched on brie cheese deep dish pizza as a life size Michael Jordan mannequin stared down at us. Weird.

The trip to England provided more defined musical memories for me, however. The car always had BBC Radio 1 on, and I was amazed to discover that terrestrial radio could actually be good. I took home a cassette of one of the weekend shows that was broadcasting live on Radio 1 from a club in northern Ireland. It was from that tape that I became familiar with what were the trance anthems at the time: ATB’s “9 PM Till I Come”, Art of Trance’s “Madagascar”, Chicane’s “Saltwater”, to name a few. These were the songs that would be defined as "classics", the ones that generate cheers and hands in the air at a nightclub.

The trip ended with a chunnel ride back to Paris to catch my flight. The ride was spent listening to “A Deeper Shade of Hooj, volume 3”, a CD I had picked up while in England. I was familiar with the Hooj Choons label. I had previously picked up music from that label, although a lot of it had been much gayer and housier. This compilation was completely different, especially the first disc in the set. It started dark and spooky, slowly culminating into swirling anthemic trance. The CD quickly became my favorite of the year, and I argue that it is one of the best trance compilations ever. I became a huge fan of Hooj as a result.

Trance is still going strong, with many of those classics recently being remade...the Richard Durand mix of Madagascar and Saltwater to name a couple. I don’t listen with the same fervor as that year or the first few years following, however. Instead, I followed the wave of progressive house, tech house, electroclash and electro house. Ten years later I look back at the trip with bittersweet memories. Still, every time I hear an old Paul van Dyk song it takes me back 10 years to the “golden age of trance.”