A Story That Was Always There
The mainstream narrative of trance — the names on festival posters, the DJ Mag rankings, the bookings at A State of Trance — has historically been heavily male. The producer history, behind the studio door, has always been more diverse than the booking landscape implied. From the late 1990s onward, women have been writing, producing, vocalising, and engineering the records that the public-facing male DJs played out. To tell trance's production history honestly is to tell a story in which women have been central all along, even when the industry forgot to name them.
Vocalists Who Were Also Authors
Trance's vocal tradition — established by tracks like Robert Miles' "Children" and consolidated through the early-2000s vocal era — was substantially built by women who were not just session singers but co-writers and co-producers. Justine Suissa's collaborations with Above & Beyond on the OceanLab project, Jaren Cerf's work across multiple Anjuna releases, and Christina Novelli's body of work with Gareth Emery and others are creative partnerships, not vocal-for-hire arrangements. The records bear their compositional fingerprints as clearly as their voices, and the genre's vocal-led canon would not exist in its current shape without them.
Studio Producers in Plain Sight
The 2010s saw women move from vocal-and-co-write credits into headline production. Nifra, the Slovak producer signed to Coldharbour Recordings, has built one of the most consistent uplifting catalogues of the era. Maor Levi's long-running collaborator HALIENE — who is also a producer in her own right — has shaped some of Anjunabeats' biggest vocal hits of the late 2010s. Miss Monique's Siona series has put her at the centre of the modern progressive-house scene. None of these are vocal-and-feature credits; they are full production careers, and their visibility now makes the earlier invisibility of women producers harder to explain by anything except industry inattention.
The Anjuna Backroom and the Pattern It Set
Above & Beyond's Anjunabeats has been a particularly significant venue for women producers and writers because the label's editorial bias has historically been toward song-led, vocal-rich production rather than peak-time instrumentals. That preference has surfaced female creative talent that other label rosters left underdeveloped. Listening to the Group Therapy radio show across any given month reveals a roster substantially more diverse than the headline DJ-Mag stage would suggest, and the influence of that programming on listener taste has done quiet work toward broadening the visible scene over time.
What Producer-Focused History Reveals
Reframing trance's history around the studio rather than the DJ booth changes the picture in important ways. Many of the genre's most enduring records — the ones that get played fifteen years later at A State of Trance year-end shows — turn out to have substantial female creative input that a DJ-centric history obscures. Acknowledging this is not a retrospective rewrite; it is reading the credits that were always there. The genre's health going forward depends in part on whether the next generation of listeners and aspiring producers can see this history clearly.
Where to Listen If You Want to Hear It
For listeners who want to explore the producer side of women in trance, a small starting playlist: OceanLab's "Sirens of the Sea" album (Justine Suissa with Above & Beyond), any Christina Novelli vocal-led record from 2013 onward, Nifra's "Renegade" album on Coldharbour, HALIENE's "Heavenly Bodies" and her work with STANDERWICK and Gareth Emery, and Miss Monique's Siona Records output from 2022 forward. Listened in sequence, this material plays a different version of trance history than the festival-stage version — one in which women have always been writing the songs, even when only the male DJ names ended up on the marquee.