January 5, 2026 · 7 min read
In Search Of Sunrise: How Tiësto Built The Sunset-Trance Canon
Fifteen volumes, twelve years, one Balearic-adjacent template — and the compilation series that defined the melodic-progressive wing of classic trance.
Tiësto launched In Search Of Sunrise in 1999 on Black Hole Recordings — the label he co-founded with Arny Bink in 1997 — as a two-disc mix compilation aimed at what he called "the moments either side of peak time". Where his contemporaries were making records for 1am, Tiësto was making mixes for 6pm and 6am: sunset sets, warm-ups, morning cool-downs. It was the first serious commercial argument that the Balearic thread inside trance deserved its own canon.
The template settled quickly. A typical ISOS volume runs 130–134 BPM, mixes progressive-trance twelve-inches with vocal-trance edits and the occasional ambient / downtempo interlude, and is sequenced across two discs as one continuous emotional arc — a warmer, less-clenched cousin of the Sasha & Digweed Northern Exposure template. Volume 3, 'Panama' (2002), is generally regarded as the peak: Andain's 'Summer Calling', Solarstone's 'Solarcoaster', Gabriel & Dresden's remix of Tiësto's own 'In My Memory'. It is the volume that convinced the trance mainstream that "sunset" and "peak-time" were two distinct product categories worth stocking separately.
ISOS did three things for the classic era. First, it turned Black Hole from a small Dutch label into a global operation — by 2003 the label had a US office and a UK distribution deal that most independents would have killed for. Second, it created the compilation template that Anjunabeats (with Anjunabeats Volume One in 2003), Above & Beyond and later Anjunadeep would all borrow: DJ-mixed, artist-led, released annually, sequenced as a single arc rather than a hits collection. Third, it gave the vocal-progressive wing of trance a permanent home. The Delerium 'Silence' remix, still Tiësto's biggest single, was road-tested on ISOS 3 before it broke mainstream.
Tiësto handed the series off after volume 7 (2008); Richard Durand mixed volumes 8–11; more recent volumes have been curated by other Black Hole artists. But the first four Tiësto-mixed editions (1999–2005) are the ones that defined the sound — and, together with ASOT and Anjunabeats, they are one of the three institutional pillars that kept classic-era trance a living genre after the peak commercial moment had passed.
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