And just like that, trance is important again! For the last two years or so, Germany’s Alexander Kowalski has been carefully pumping out singles and an album, Progress, that flow straight into the brackish waters of trance and techno polluted by the SashaVanOakenweeds of this world. Now he partners with househeads Diego Hostettler and Dennis DeSantis for an album made entirely with Propellerhead’s Reason 2.0 software-and it works. From the blistering pace of “Hybrid Minds” (featuring Heiko Laux) to the rapacious “Optometry” to “Int A,” it’s all about those long trance/techno builds that meant so much four or five years ago, when artists like Omid Nourizadeh (16B), Speedy J and Underworld were laying a soulful techno/trance blueprint through soft melodic components over climactic percussion sequences. Reasons therefore borders on timelessness.