Trance. Your average trance track does so much more than songs from other genres can do inside the space of just three minutes. Each trance tune is an epic emotional odyssey of soaring highs and plummeting lows. It’s like an entire film contained in the span of one banging track. Usually, there is a singer explaining that they’re living in a state of lovelorn turmoil. Yet the music is relentlessly euphoric. It’s a strange, bittersweet and exhilarating combo. And the home of trance of this ecstatic contradiction in London? Ministry of Sound.
Trance. Each track is a temple of shimmering arpeggio, heartbroken vocal, and jack-hammer kick drum erected in eternal, elegiac tribute to the sacred drop. Or, to put it more plainly, trance is arguably the best music on Earth to surrender your mind (and your body and heart) to while at a packed trance event sharing the effects of altered blood chemistry with throngs of dancing strangers. Someone call forensics. Lock off the event. Because ‘1999’ by Binary Finary (Kaycee Remix) just dropped and 500 people’s souls just burst out of their chests.
Can you imagine how many liquid ounces of serotonin trance music has been responsible for depleting since people started listening to it in the late ‘80s? You could fill the world’s oceans three times over. In the hands of its greatest DJs, trance is so much more than a style of electronic dance music. Trance gives euphoria to people whose everyday lives might not be overflowing with it. It’s a gateway to heaven that electricians and plumbers and overworked nurses are able to find at 6PM on a Friday in flat-roof pubs across the nation.
It’s the sound of a thousand million teenagers making first-time forays into late-night hedonism. It was there in the background of ten million first kisses. It’s the music you’ll hear on the fairground waltzers when you’re a kid realising what losing control is like for the first time. It’s music that is precision engineered for the lasers and the light rigs and the powerful sound systems that night clubs use to bludgeon you into a state of pure sensory overload.
All of which is why trance is perfect for Ministry of Sound. It’s been pummelling people into blissful submission on our dancefloors more or less since we opened in 1991. We’ve hosted sets from trance legends like Armin Van Buuren, Paul Van Dyk, Tiësto and Ferry Corsten, and in 2024 regularly put on shows from the hottest up-and-coming names on the trance scene. DJs like
