Trance.nu

» see trance.nu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Trance.nu was a scene headquarters written in English out of the Netherlands and Sweden, which meant it was reachable from anywhere and aimed at nobody in particular. The music reached Turkey easily enough. In the internet cafe years the mp3s came off whatever network was working that month, and the tracklists came off compilations, so the machinery that decided which record mattered stayed invisible to me. Sites like this one were that machinery.

Tommie Podzemski bought the domain in October 1999. About a year in, Ralf Elfving and Jezper Söderlund came aboard and the three of them built the thing that ran for the next decade: news, reviews of more or less everything the genre released, interviews with the people making it, and a forum underneath all of it. At its height fifteen volunteers were running the operation and more than seventy thousand people had accounts.

The output over eleven years came to something over three and a half thousand news items and sixteen hundred reviews, plus two hundred interviews that included the DJs whose names carried the genre out of Europe. It put out two compilations of its own on Nordic Records' Green label, Surviving The Chills in November 2002 and.nu Trance Generation the year after, which is an unusual move for a website and tells you how much the label side of the scene took it seriously.

The clearest measure of its position is a radio segment. Armin van Buuren's A State of Trance ran a weekly Future Favorite slot in which the record was chosen by a vote on trance.nu, in front of an audience the show counted in the millions. A volunteer forum was picking the record that millions of listeners heard next.

~ the record ~

~ what a genre site actually did ~

Before streaming services took over the job of telling people what to listen to, a genre needed somewhere its own arguments could happen. Trance.nu reviewed the releases nobody else was going to touch and sorted the good from the disposable in public, which meant producers had a place where a weak record got said out loud. That work does not survive as a catalog or a playlist. It survives as a shared sense of what counted, held by people who were there and by nobody else.

It was also volunteer labor, all of it, for eleven years. Fifteen people writing reviews after work is a functioning publication only for as long as those fifteen people keep having evenings.

~ how it ended ~

The closing note on 9 October 2010 was honest in a way that shutdown notices usually are not. There was no buyout to announce and no lawsuit to blame. The people running it did not have the time to maintain it any more, and getting it back to what it had been would have meant a complete restart, which was a job too big to take on. Eleven years, tens of millions of visitors, then a decision made by tired people.

The genre kept going and the conversation moved onto Facebook groups and forums that the labels ran themselves. What went with the site was the archive of an argument: eleven years of a scene deciding, in writing, what it thought was good.

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