Women in Trance — Pioneers, Producers & Modern Stars Complete Guide

Discussion of women in electronic music tends to focus on absence — on the underrepresentation of women in lineups and behind decks, the work yet to be done on access and equity. That conversation is real and important. But it is also incomplete, because it sometimes obscures the women who have been at the centre of trance music since the genre began. From the vocalists whose performances defined era-defining records, to the producers and DJs who built scenes and labels alongside their male counterparts, women have been integral to trance from the start. The story below is not exhaustive — it could not be — but it is meant as a corrective to anyone who has internalised the idea that trance is, or was ever, a music made by men alone.

Trance's reliance on vocal performance — particularly in the late 1990s and 2000s — gave women a load-bearing role in the genre that often went underacknowledged in DJ-focused discourse. JES (Jes Brieden) wrote and sang on classic records with Tiësto and Motorcycle. Justine Suissa appeared on Armin van Buuren's "Burned with Desire" and a generation of OceanLab records. Tiff Lacey contributed to BT and Solarstone among many others. Christina Novelli's vocal on Gareth Emery's "Concrete Angel" is part of the architecture of that record. Zoë Johnston has been the voice of Above & Beyond's most enduring material since the early 2000s.

These women were not session vocalists hired for a single track. They were collaborators whose musical sensibility shaped the records they appeared on, and whose work is woven into the canon as durably as any producer's.

Behind the decks and in the studio, women have been present in trance from its earliest days. DJ Rap (Charissa Saverio) bridged jungle and trance-adjacent territory in the 1990s. Anne Savage was a fixture of the UK hard house / hard dance scene from the mid-1990s onward, part of the original Tidy Girls line-up. Vocal-trance specialist Zara Taylor pushed the sound forward in the 2000s through collaborations with Roger Shah / Sunlounger and Sultan + Shepard. Lisa Lashes commanded UK hard-house crowds across two decades. The "trance is a male genre" framing flattens a more interesting reality, in which women were often the first to push into harder or more experimental territory.

The contemporary trance scene has been substantially reshaped by a generation of women operating at the highest level of the genre. Nifra has been one of the most respected hard-trance and tech-trance DJs and producers for over a decade — a Coldharbour Recordings mainstay whose mixes reset crowd expectations whenever she plays. Miss Monique has built one of the largest progressive-house followings on YouTube and has translated that into a touring career that draws Anjunadeep-style audiences.

Beyond those two, names including Susana (vocal trance), Anna Lee, Linda Lifa, and many others are central to the touring and recording landscape. The modern roster is not a token gesture toward representation — it is the actual scene, and any list of the most exciting current trance acts that does not include several women is simply inaccurate to the music.

The question for the next decade is not whether women will be in trance — they always have been — but whether the structural barriers that have made representation harder in some corners of the scene will be addressed. Festival lineups, magazine covers, year-end lists, and producer credits are all surfaces where gender imbalance is still visible. Several scene initiatives — mentorship programmes, women-led showcase nights, dedicated production workshops — have made measurable progress in recent years. The work is not finished, but the foundation is solid: this is a music that has always had women shaping it, and the next generation is arriving with a clearer view of the lineage they are part of.

The thing the article describes most clearly from outside the production world is the vocal lineage. From inside weekly ASOT listening, what becomes audible over time is how continuous the line is between JES on a 2003 Motorcycle record, Justine Suissa on "Burned with Desire," Zoë Johnston on Above & Beyond material in the 2010s, and Christina Novelli's contemporary work. Those vocal performances are often what a newer listener remembers most clearly from a first encounter with a vocal-trance record — the topline survives the production decisions around it, and the names listed above are the ones still being reached for when current ASOT episodes pull a classic-cut sequence.

That continuity is also what the article is doing, structurally: it puts the 1990s pioneers and the modern stars in the same frame because the listener's experience already places them in the same frame. A Zoë Johnston vocal arriving in a 2024 Above & Beyond set sits comfortably next to a Suissa vocal pulled from 2003. The article's claim that women have been integral from the start is, from a listener side, simply what the rotation already plays — once the framing is offered, the ear retroactively notices that it had been hearing the same lineage all along.