It's a sad fact that the electronic music scene is, for the most part, an international boys' club. It's an oddly Anglo-centric club to boot, dominated by Brits (John Digweed, Sasha, Paul Oakenfold) and Germans (Paul van Dyk, Sven Vath). These two realities make Las Vegas-born Sandra Collins -- an American female DJ -- doubly novel. Triply, if you consider her show business lineage: Her uncle is television producer Hall Collins (All in the Family); her godfather is king of comedy Milton Berle; and her mother once kept time with Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. Collins herself has even taken some bit parts in films (Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey).
Novelty carries about as much weight as a dead mule in the hard-core dance scene, but Tranceport III, the latest installment in the Kinetic Records' series (Vols. 1 and 2 were mixed by Oakenfold and Dave Ralph, respectively), amply demonstrates why Collins has garnered global acclaim and several top-notch DJ residencies (currently Crobar in Chicago and Utopia in Las Vegas) in her 11-year career. Her skills -- not her gender nor her lineage nor her nationality -- have earned her distinction as one of the world's top jocks. And no, it hasn't hurt that she's drop-dead gorgeous, her Barbie-doll good looks having earned her near pinup status in a scene that's rigidly anti-image. But again, that's just the fluff of PR; when the lights go down and the sound system cranks up, all anybody really cares about is what records the DJ drops a needle to.
And what Collins spins on her Tranceport album is a set of tracks that have not only proven to get dance floors around the world bumping but that also define Collins' unique identity among her peers. While Digweed and Sasha seamlessly blend deep and epic trance tracks into monstrous 8-hour sets and while van Dyk and Oakenfold favor strongly melodic anthems (almost to a cheesy fault), Collins dominates the space between. She favors tracks that, like LSG's club standard "I'm Not Existing" and Astral Projection's "Liquid Sun," combine tough beats with a hint of synthesized melody, and she mixes them in such a way as to tug at the heart strings while coaxing an enthusiastic head bob.
Thanks in great part to Collins' reputation, tracks in this style are tops on dance floors right now, which makes it easy for Sandra to live up to the Tranceport reputation for bringing together top DJs with popular tunes to set a benchmark for trance music at a particular point in time. And Collins sets the mark very close to what the series' title hints at: Trance as the catalyst for both inward and outward journeys, with momentum playing as crucial a role in the journey as scenery. So while she's not above slowing down to check out a breathtaking view (Ultra Violet's "Heaven," for example), for the most part, her Tranceport set moves along at a crisp pace. It steers out of dry dock with an original dark-ambient introduction (which Collins claims to have snuck into the final mix down just before presenting it to the folks at Kinetic), the BPMs soon jutting up with Think Tank's "F.U.B.A.R." The set steadily builds toward a climax, reaching terminal velocity about three quarters of the way through the mix with Deep Cover's "Deeper Inside," and then segues into the triumphant denouement of Voyager's moody "C'Est Muzique."
Throughout, Collins's roots in Arizona's industrial underground, where she first cut her teeth on electronic music, mesh with her admitted fondness for moody music, producing a mix CD that's as easy to dance or stomp to in a club as it is to peacefully groove along with on a set of headphones. Collins creates mixes that move, not just physically but emotionally -- so much so that she's known to occasionally get so swept up in her sets that she'll step away from the decks to dance along with the crowd. It's a contagious energy, and Tranceport III is its latest vector of transmission. It'll take some serious inoculation to keep you from getting swept away with it too.
Sean Flinn | June 20, 2000
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