Sandra Collins: Tranceport 3 : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Arena trance is music for getting in touch with your inner flower child. But the toughest trance DJ in that game may be the Las Vegas-born blonde Sandra Collins. As Collins drops the electro-gliding "F.U.B.A.R.," by Think Tank, into this mix CD, she almost immediately gets into the Giorgio Moroder-influenced groove that runs through the best trance. She steers her set away from epic sentimentality, though, and toward hard symphonies of electronic angst, from the ominous synth thunder of "Rush (Echo's Wave Dub)," by Bradley, to the eerie migraine throb of Mara's "Desanitize." As the set progresses, Collins uses driving, twenty-third-century riffs to morph the mood from urgency into stormy Wagnerian chaos, climaxing with the thumping, swirling "C'est Muzique," by Shane. Unlike British trance superstars such as Paul Oakenfold, Sasha and John Digweed, whose music evokes a dreamy bliss, Collins weaves the records she spins into a set of nervously dystopian techno funk. Nightmares on wax have rarely sounded so seductive. (RS 847)

PAT BLASHILL