Above & Beyond and Gareth Emery grew up in the same genre but came at it from opposite ends of the room. The trio of Jono Grant, Tony McGuinness, and Paavo Siljamäki founded Anjunabeats in 2000 as an outlet for their own productions, building it from early vinyl releases into one of the defining labels in electronic music. Gareth Emery, born in Southampton and classically trained on piano, was playing guitar in a punk band in the mid-nineties before electronic music pulled him sideways. Both of them arrived at the same conclusion from different directions: that trance, at its most powerful, is a songwriting form. The long build, the soaring vocal, the melodic peak that detonates somewhere around the seven-minute mark, that architecture only works if the song underneath it is worth the wait. Everything else in their careers follows from that shared conviction.
Emery's first moves confirmed the instinct. Classically trained and technically precise, he built tracks that moved through tension the way a well-constructed piece of writing moves through argument. He founded his own label, Garuda, and released his debut album "Northern Lights" on September 23, 2010. The record opens with "Stars," featuring Jerome Isma-Ae, and moves through "Too Dark Tonight" with his sister Roxanne Emery on vocals, "Sanctuary" and "Fight The Sunrise" both featuring Lucy Saunders, and closes with "All Is Now" alongside Activa. Every vocal track is built around a relationship between the production and the singer. The synth work creates the emotional pressure, and the voice releases it. "Sanctuary" became one of his most successful tracks, voted the second biggest track of 2010 by listeners of Armin van Buuren's A State of Trance radio show. Emery peaked at number seven on the DJ Mag Top 100 that same year, and has won the A State of Trance Tune of the Year award three times across his career.
Above & Beyond were running the same experiment at a larger scale. Their debut album "Tri-State," released on March 6, 2006, earned a five-star Album of the Month from Mixmag and established their core vocabulary: long arrangements, carefully chosen vocalists, the sense that each track is a contained emotional event. The album features collaborations with Zoë Johnston, Richard Bedford, and progressive trance producer Andy Moor. By 2004 they had launched Trance Around The World, their weekly radio show, which ran for 450 episodes before becoming Group Therapy Radio on November 10, 2012, broadcast live from Jayamahal Palace in Bangalore, India.
The second album, "Group Therapy," released on June 6, 2011, is where the songwriting argument became undeniable. "Sun & Moon," featuring Richard Bedford, became one of the defining vocal trance anthems of the decade. Billboard later named it the saddest dance music song of all time. The album also features Zoë Johnston across six tracks: "Alchemy," "You Got To Go," "Giving It Out," "Love Is Not Enough," "Sweetest Heart," and "Only A Few Things." That density of collaboration is the point. Johnston is not a guest on this record. She is a structural element of it, the voice the arrangements are built to carry. The record is a sequence of vocal collaborations, each one a discrete piece of writing before it becomes a piece of production. Mixmag named it Artist Album of the Year.
The moment that most clearly shows how these two acts understood each other is "On A Good Day (Metropolis)," a collaboration credited to Gareth Emery and Above & Beyond presenting OceanLab, included as a bonus track on the digital edition of "Northern Lights" in 2010. OceanLab was Above & Beyond's vocal project with singer Justine Suissa, and their 2008 album "Sirens Of The Sea" had already extended the trance-as-songwriting thesis into full album form. Putting both names on the same track, and landing it on both artists' catalogues, was a statement of shared values. These were two acts making the same argument about what trance could be.
The commercial results followed from the artistic ones. Above & Beyond sold out Madison Square Garden, becoming the first British DJs to do so, and their 2018 album "Common Ground" debuted at number three on the Billboard 200, the highest chart position ever reached by a British electronic group. Emery's peak at number seven in the DJ Mag Top 100 in 2010 came in the same year "Northern Lights" landed. Both of those trajectories are unusual in a genre that tends to celebrate its biggest DJs as selectors first and songwriters second. The dancefloor test and the emotional test are the same test when the writing is strong enough.
What makes the Above & Beyond and Gareth Emery conversation worth having now is the model they built. The Anjunabeats label has nurtured decades of artists, from Mat Zo to Ilan Bluestone to Andrew Bayer, all working variations on the same thesis. Gareth Emery's Garuda label, and his later work including "Saving Light" with Standerwick and Haliene in 2017, kept extending the same principle: find the vocalist, build the architecture around what they can do, and trust the melody to carry the weight. Two British acts, both convinced that the arrangement is in service of the song. That strand of trance has outlasted every trend that tried to replace it, because it was never really about the trend. It was about whether the song held up at midnight in headphones, after the room had emptied and the lasers had gone dark.
