Is Trance a style of music, or is it all in our heads?

I think trance is just a convenient word for what has evolved into a particular style. That being said I really find nothing trance inducing about most Tietso style music. I was really into ebm and goa/psy trance for ages and that stuff was generally not so much about the massive build ups and releases but rather the repetative killer kick drum and the swirling top sounds.

I imagine that jungle could be trance inducing but generally it requires me to concentate too much on it so that the "trance" never happens.

I think the drug tie in is important too. My friends and I all had a particular style we were known for some played more to the mdma crowd and thus had more build up and releases while i played more to the acid crowd. Long hard tracks that occasionally swirled up with arpeggios and then pulsed on.

Native music always seemed the best example. Drum circles, pygmy music, goto monks, the propensity to focus on the eternal rather than the now.

Later on, the genre focused more on getting to the breakdown and throwing your hands in the air, and the mental effect was lost.

My premise is that the word has several meanings concerning what it has been and what it is today. Some are micro (sounds) and some macro (narratives). What it will become is the fibre of another thread, but it's interesting to note that the myriad definitions of trance are by now as fluid and fuzzy as the 'experience' itself.

I think my question is one of linguistics. If stigmatised images of new-agey Goa, euro-rave and UK club-trance now effectively 'own' Trance in the vernacular, has the word defined itself into a narrowing corner, reaching the stage where it can no longer be used to describe trance-inducing elements in trancey music that isn't quite Trance?

I think your view of trance in general is kinda odd though. What do you aspire to pin it to, or are you just saddened that you don't agree with the many versions of trance that are out there?

I can't really listen to all the goa stuff I used to enjoy anymore cause it fills me with dread, but I dont think it devalues the experiences that I had.

I remember driving down an interstate earlier in the year during a horrible snowstorm in the middle of the afternoon. Basically this interstate was out in the country and there was no real estate development to speak of. The snow was coming down so hard and so fast that you could only see about 30 yards out of your windows in any direction. The only visual imput you had was the twin car tracks in front of you that you used to stay on the road, the breaklights of the car ahead(which were just faint crimson circles in the distance, you could not actually see the car), and an occasional clutch of snow covered trees. Everything was covered in snow, so you had an environment that was a completely penetraiting ultra-vivid whiteout, there was maybe 5% of the usual visual stimulus that you would expect from a drive. This was combined with the hyper-concentration of trying to stay on the road and not end up in a ditch and still maintain pace with traffic.

I threw on a cdr comp of the best parts of these two albums and started driving before the snow storm really hit. The tracks are these super-minimal rhymic affairs, just the raw geometry of chord stabs, a bassline and some rumble and hiss in the background. Something about the tension and the lack of stimulus threw me into a genuine trance state during the car ride. I objectively know that I was in the car for 30 minutes, but subjectively I felt like the car ride took about three hours. I have no real memory of the ride, other than getting a feeling of the music turning into these huge physical colums and pillars of sound. I can remember seeing them as geometry and and my mind was disconnected from my body and was moving around visually in the music.

I remember parking and getting out of the car and not knowing how I got there. I remember throwing on the cd and the blizzard starting, and it was a blank after that. I walked away from the car feeling stunned. I swear that is the closest I have ever come to a religious experience while listening to music. I was completely sober at the time and had been for a long time previously; which is why the whole experience was so strange. If I was whacked out chemicals I would just chalk it up to the drugs, but I was completely clean and sober when this happened.

I've lost interest in Trance as a genre, for sure, but what's REALLY odd is how the anti-trance massive pretend none of their favourite grooves have ANY tropes of trance ancestry running through them at all.

i think the fact that techno itself during this point (94?) took a turn to the harsher side (hawtin, mills becoming v popular round this time in europe), it made the split more pronounced, and trance pretty much began to split off as a new genre, ironically losing the the very thing that made it trancey, and concentrating on these maximalist wagnerian bombastic build ups, to the point where it is, as people have said, weirdly the opposite of trance, and more about breakdown and contrast.

jones and stephenson - the first rebirth, this is the record where i think you can see the changes happening, i think this was something of an unusual record when it came out, but it became the blueprint, in a way, of a new style

of course, you could argue that the first rebirth is really just applying the peaking hardfloor logic to trance sounds rather than to 303s

Of course, Psytrance still works as bona fide 'trance' music - music specifically constructed for hallucinating. Most of today's minimal looptechno also works that way, as does most of the (much reviled) progressive house of the Steve Lawler/John Digweed kind - proper "trance" music is inherently boring.

Bingo.

and yes, i can see how it was used as a blueprint for many things, including gabba

Trance effect of Vainqueur - Elevations >> anything else on Chain Reaction

However, that "time stretching" effect that you spoke about has happened to me with other records (certainly not "trance music" in the usual sense of the phrase). The Tindersticks first album, most notably.

That mid 90's Harthouse stuff was great too.