Getting into trance this year, I realised that it had some of the same things I love in early hardcore: choonful melody-fragments, euphoria-inducing effects, and lots of riffs and vamps. And I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit the cheesiness has a purist-annoying trangressive edge which appeals.
Getting into trance... I never dreamed I'd write those words! It's an upshot of being a dance agnostic rather than a card-carrying junglist believer. Going to that London club and having a really good time, I realised the music had actually come along some ways since I last checked it out: it was pleasanter, more sensuous and feminized, than the harsh, monotonous, and coldly cosmic Teutonic trance I remember from 93-94. Going out of curiosity to check out Paul Oakenfold in New York a few weeks later, I was struck by what a great vibe was generated this incredibly cheesy, melodramatic music--scenes of blissed out abandon and orgiastic pan-sensuality the like of which I hadn't seen for years, people stroking each others's arms and faces, stroking their own bodies. It seems that in America, all the kids in the honeymoon stage of Ecstasy use gravitate to trance, cos it's the only dance music around that isn't grimly serious and dark, that's compatible with E. Then Paul Van Dyk DJ-ed in New York a week later and I got a high just off the sheer spangly clean energy of the sound.