Club Genre: Progressive
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Progressive house has its origins in Great Britain in the early 1990s, with the output of Guerrilla Records and Leftfield's first singles (particularly "Song of Life"). Mixmag editor Dom Phillips coined the term to describe this type of music. In 1992, the dance club Renaissance opened in Mansfield. Its DJs - particularly Sasha and John Digweed - were instrumental in popularizing its early sound. The music itself consisted of the 4-to-4 beat of house music with deeper, dub -influenced basslines and a more melancholic, emotional edge. Often, it featured elements from many different genres mixed together. Song of Life, for instance, has a trip-hop like down-pitched breakbeat and a high-energy Roland TB-303 riff at various stages.
Progressive trance is a popular sub-genre in trance music and contains elements of house, techno, and ambient music. Trance became more focused on the anthemic qualities and melodies, moving away from arpeggiated analog synth patterns. Acoustic elements and spacey pads became popular with compositions leaned towards incremental changes à la progressive structures. Progressive trance contains distinctive sounds in many tracks, such as unusual basslines or original synthesized sounds, which generally makes it more "catchy". Phrases are usually a power of two number of bars in most typical progressive trance tracks. Phrases usually begin with the introduction of a new or different melody or rhythm.
Progressive electronic music (often referred to as just progressive) usually refers to a style of predominantly instrumental music played with synthesizers which draws on the influence of progressive rock, classical music and/or ambient music. In this sense, it has been used to describe artists such as Klaus Schulze, Vangelis, Jean Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream. The "progressiveness" of this style stems from the use of contrapuntal melodies, unusual or shifting time signatures, offbeat sound effects and a general tendency to create music as different as possible from mainstream pop.
However, more recently, the term "progressive" has been used to differentiate various offshoot styles of electronic dance music from their parent styles that are not affiliated with progressive music, i.e. progressive trance, progressive house and progressive breaks. These types of music might be referred to as "progressive electronic dance music" to differentiate them from the above use where the slow or varying beat prevents the label of "dance" from being applied. The rest of this article focuses principally on this second meaning.
Since about 2000, progressive house and progressive trance have mostly converged. While the faster (130-140bpm) records are usually described as progressive trance, most producers from both styles have moved towards a slower (110-130bpm) tempo and are thus typically classified as progressive house. Many psychedelic trance artists have also moved to a slower (125-138bpm) range branding their style as progressive trance.