Ron Trent: the protector of house music’s original spirit.
The legendary pioneer of house music has cemented his name in music history through his unique ability to blend deep, spiritual sounds with the pulse of the dancefloor. On Sunday June 29, he will deliver an extraordinary two-hour afternoon set on our mighty Forest Stage. This performance is not just an opportunity to see the DJ and producer in action but a moment to experience the deeper philosophy behind his music — a journey that blurs the line between art and ritual, transforming the dancefloor into a sacred space for collective liberation.
In the flickering twilight of a South Side Chicago basement in the late 1980s, a teenage Ron Trent sat over a drum machine, coaxing spirit and rhythm out of its knobs and buttons. He didn’t know then that a raw, hypnotic track he called Altered States would reverberate far beyond the city’s sweaty warehouse walls — becoming an anthem for a movement and the opening chapter of a lifelong quest to turn dancefloors into sacred spaces. “I wasn’t trying to make a hit,” Trent would later reflect, “I was just trying to translate a feeling I couldn’t say out loud.”
More than three decades later, Ron Trent remains a vital, shape-shifting force in electronic music — not just as a house music originator, but as a visionary who has continually expanded the very idea of what Black electronic music can sound like, stand for, and reach toward. As he prepares for another string of DJ sets in Europe this summer, Trent stands as both elder and futurist: a connector of histories, cultures, and higher frequencies.
The Chicago Code
Born and raised in Chicago, Ron Trent grew up amid the fertile musical chaos of a city that birthed electric blues, gospel, and the revolutionary pulse of house. His father, a DJ and jazz collector, filled the family home with records that spanned the Black diaspora — from John Coltrane to Fela Kuti. That eclecticism left a deep impression. But it was the teenage discovery of Chicago’s underground house scene — the cathartic chaos of parties thrown by the likes of Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy — that lit the fuse.
By age 14, Trent was already experimenting with drum machines and turntables. He pressed up his first record, Altered States, with no roadmap and little guidance, at just 15. Released on Armando’s Warehouse Records in 1990, the track was an eerie, acidic meditation that didn’t fit neatly into house, techno, or ambient. DJs from Chicago to Berlin couldn’t get enough. A new voice had emerged — unpolished, restless, and unmistakably his own.
Crafting a Cosmology
If Altered States was the spark, the ’90s were the fire. Trent relocated to New York in the mid-90s and co-founded Prescription Records with Chez Damier — a seminal imprint that blended deep house’s sensuality with Afrocentric consciousness, dub atmospherics, and spiritual overtones. Their collaborations, especially tracks like Morning Factory and Sometimes I Feel Like, became sacred texts in the deep house canon. Trent’s output during this era was remarkable not just for its volume but its purpose. He wasn’t chasing charts — he was building a sonic philosophy. “It’s about intention,” he told Red Bull Music Academy in a 2013 interview. “You can use music as a vehicle for healing, for education, for elevation.”
He backed up that vision with relentless experimentation. Moving between solo work and aliases like R.T. Factor and Ron Trent presents Warm, his productions grew increasingly expansive — weaving in Brazilian percussion, dub textures, and jazz improvisation. Collaborations with artists like Peven Everett, Trinidadian Deep, and Anthony Nicholson further blurred genre lines while deepening cultural resonance.
Spreading the message
As house music fragmented into subgenres and splinter scenes, Trent doubled down on his mission to connect, not divide. A tireless traveller, he became a key figure in building bridges between North America, Europe, and Africa’s electronic communities. He was a fixture at Berlin’s Panorama Bar, Tokyo’s Club Yellow, and Johannesburg’s thriving deep house scene.
In each city, he approached DJing not as entertainment but as a ritual. Sets often spanned hours, even all night, shifting from floor-filling grooves to transcendental passages. “The dancefloor is a church. It’s a place where people come to release, commune, and remember who they are,” he once said in a Resident Advisor interview. He also became a mentor, hosting workshops and mentoring younger artists seeking a deeper understanding of house beyond the four-on-the-floor. His guidance often emphasised lineage, tracing the genre’s spiritual and diasporic roots rather than its commercialised surface.
The Eternal Return
In 2022, Trent released What Do the Stars Say to You, his most ambitious and cinematic project yet. Crafted with analogue gear and a galaxy of collaborators — including Ivan Conti and Alex Malheiros of Azymuth, violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, and ambient pioneer Gigi Masin — the album felt less like a club record than a soul voyage. Critics praised its genre-defying elegance, and fans hailed it as a culmination of his lifelong search for cosmic connection through music. “This album was about tuning into a deeper conversation,” Trent said in a recent Bandcamp feature. “Something beyond the noise — the silence behind the beat.” The release didn’t just signal an artistic high point, it marked a kind of spiritual full circle. The teen who had once chopped up drum loops in his basement had become a composer of timeless, borderless tone poems — music equally suited for headphones, temples, and turntables.
Legacy in motion
Ron Trent resists easy canonisation. He doesn’t dwell on legacy, preferring to keep moving. Still, his influence is undeniable. From the resurgence of vinyl-only deep house to the ambient-jazz blends of artists like Kaidi Tatham and Theo Parrish, his fingerprints are everywhere. Yet he remains, paradoxically, under-recognised in the mainstream — perhaps because his work so often lives between genres, between trends, between what is and what could be.
But for those who know — DJs, dancers, crate-diggers, seekers — Ron Trent is something rarer: a torchbearer of integrity in a culture often obsessed with immediacy. His work reminds us that music is more than product. It is memory. It is intention. It is resistance and release.
As Trent continues to tour and hint at new studio projects, one can sense that his journey is far from over. He often speaks of sound as a form of meditation and rhythm as a carrier wave for ancestral knowledge. “We are vibrations. Music is just a reflection of what’s already inside us,” he said recently on his Worldwide FM show. In a musical world that often feels disposable, Ron Trent builds cathedrals out of groove and grace. Not for accolades. Not for ego. But for the healing. For the remembering. For the future.
We are thrilled to have Ron Trent at 10 Years of Paradise City for an exclusive afternoon DJ set at the Forest Stage on Sunday June 29, right before Laurent Garnier and Avalon Emerson. We encourage long-time fans and newcomers alike to come and enjoy the ride, wherever he may take us.
Interested in diving deeper into the world of Ron Trent? Follow the links below:
