Paul Oakenfold Bridges Trance’s Past and Future on new Mission Underground Album

Paul Oakenfold’s career has been intertwined with the evolution of trance for more than three decades and as a key architect and one of the pioneers, he has little interest in treating the genre as a museum piece.

His new album, Mission Underground, may draw deeply from electronic music history, revisiting records that helped soundtrack trance’s formative years, but its purpose is not simply to look backwards. Instead, Paul sees the project as a meeting point between eras, generations and genres: the euphoric scale and emotional pull of trance colliding with the darker, tougher energy of contemporary techno. “It’s a cross between trance and techno, leaning onto the underground side of techno and the big moments of trance, hence why we’ve called it Mission Underground” he explains.

It is a simple description of an album built around a much broader idea. As the second instalment in Oakenfold’s Mission series, the long player arrives more than a decade after Trance Mission and brings together an unusually wide cast of collaborators and remixers, including Armin van Buuren, Carl Cox, Ferry Corsten, Markus Schulz, Infected Mushroom and Marie Vaunt among others. Across its 16 tracks are new collaborations alongside reworked pieces of dance music history, from “Not Over Yet” and “Bullet In The Gun” to “Southern Sun,” “ResuRection” and Binary Finary’s “1998.” 

However, the word mission has a meaning beyond the album series itself. “Mission represents to me bringing different genres together and sharing them with clubbers” he says.

That philosophy runs throughout the record. Trance and techno may occupy different territories within contemporary electronic music, but Paul sees far more overlap than separation. In fact, he believes trance’s musical DNA has quietly spread almost everywhere. “I think that the essence of trance is in a lot of music,” he says. “I hear melodic trance in a lot of other genres like techno, house and progressive.” He goes further, describing trance as “the most sampled form of music in dance, sampled in every other genre.”

That influence feels particularly visible now. The sounds and aesthetics associated with late-’90s and early-2000s trance have returned to clubs and festivals, while a younger generation of techno and electronic producers increasingly draws upon the melodies, emotional peaks and euphoric structures that defined the genre.

Paul believes some younger producers may not even realise how deep those roots go. Asked whether they are rediscovering trance because of genuine inspiration or because audiences are craving melody and emotion again, his answer is straightforward: “Both, and some of them don’t even know it is original trance music.”

For someone who played a central role in bringing those sounds to international audiences, the renewed interest is more than theoretical. He is experiencing it directly from the dancefloor. “I think we are definitely going into another golden era,” he says. “I’m getting asked to play a lot of the original classics.”

Yet Oakenfold’s relationship with nostalgia is complicated. Mission Underground embraces records from his past, but he is adamant that reverence for dance music history should not become creative paralysis. “It’s important that you move with the times,” he says. “With Mission Underground, I’ve taken some of the classics that I used to play from back in the day, giving them a modern twist with a techno edge.”

His affection for the era itself, however, remains undiminished and his assessment of how it compares with contemporary electronic music is characteristically uncompromising. Why are audiences reconnecting so strongly with the late ’90s? “Because it was the best time for electronic music,” Paul says. “It was much more creative studio-wise in my opinion, and not everyone was copying everyone, which is what they do now.” Then comes the sharper observation. “Technology has made everything super easy and that’s why we are inundated with so much crap.”

It is an interesting tension at the centre of Mission Underground. Oakenfold is using contemporary production possibilities to modernise music from an era he considers more creatively adventurous, while collaborating with producers who were shaped by a completely different technological landscape.

Rather than seeing that contradiction as a problem, he appears to use it as the point of the project. One of the clearest examples is a new interpretation of Binary Finary’s “1998,” created with techno producer Marie Vaunt. The original holds particular significance for Paul. “The original was massive for me,” he recalls. “I helped break the original, as I had it months before its release date and it was a special record for me.”

Returning to a track carrying that kind of personal history could easily have resulted in an overly reverential remake. Instead, Paul deliberately chose a collaborator from another generation and another corner of electronic music. “I’m a fan of what she does,” he says of Vaunt. “I thought her sound would work very well as a collaboration. This was a big record for me back in the day. Perfect fit.”

Her techno background provided precisely the contrast he wanted. More importantly, Paul did not bring collaborators into Mission Underground simply to execute a predetermined vision. His approach was to give them room to leave their own fingerprints on the music. “It’s important to give all collaborators the freedom to do what they do, otherwise, what is the point of working with them?” he says. “You work back and forth until everything is organized and sorted.”

That collaborative philosophy helps explain the breadth of names attached to the album. Oakie could easily have assembled a nostalgic gathering of artists synonymous with trance’s established history. Instead, he deliberately sought a mixture. “I wanted a cross-section of artists that I respect and am a fan of, with some younger names along with the established names.”

The resulting track list makes that generational exchange explicit. Alongside new collaborations such as “Metaverse” with Ferry Corsten and “Orange” with Markus Schulz sit reinterpretations and combinations involving artists from different corners and eras of electronic music. The album includes Oakenfold alongside Marie Vaunt and Binary Finary on “1998,” Carl Cox on “Concentrate,” and ARGY and Planet Perfecto Knights on “ResuRection.” 

Working with younger producers has not fundamentally changed Paul’s own production style, he says, although it has exposed him to more efficient ways of working. “It has made me aware of how to do things a lot easier” he admits.

Efficiency, though, is clearly not what he considers the defining ingredient of great electronic music. When asked what the original pioneers of trance understood that contemporary producers should never lose, Oakenfold reduces it to three essentials: “Emotion, melody, and rhythm.” Those three words arguably provide the clearest key to understanding Mission Underground.

For all its techno weight, modern production and cross-generational collaborations, the album remains connected to the qualities that made trance resonate in the first place. The aim is not to recreate a supposedly perfect past, but to preserve its emotional architecture while changing the machinery around it.

That distinction matters for an artist with a legacy as substantial as Oakenfold’s. After more than three decades at the centre of electronic music culture, almost any project that revisits formative records could be framed as a retrospective. He does not seem especially interested in viewing it that way. “Mission Underground is an album that I really enjoyed making and collaborating with some wonderful names,” he says.

And rather than closing a circle that began with Trance Mission, he is already leaving open the possibility that the mission could continue. “Who knows, maybe we will do volume 3 next year” he teases.

For now, though, Mission Underground occupies a space between what trance was and what it might become: old records in new forms, established figures working alongside younger artists, melody meeting harder-edged production. “10 years ago, I released my album Trance Mission,” Paul says. “This is volume 2, Mission Underground. Hope you all enjoy.”

For a producer who believes electronic music must “move with the times,” perhaps that is the real mission: not choosing between the past and the future but finding the underground point where the two can meet.

Paul Oakenfold – Mission Underground is out now on Perfecto Records. Grab it on Beatport HERE.