Origin: United States
Genres: Uplifting Trance, Progressive Trance, Ambient Electronic
Roles: Photographer, Visual Artist, DJ, Producer, Mentor
Labels: AquaFire Recordings, AVA Recordings (AVA White), Black Hole Recordings, Nocturnal Knights, Reverie Sounds
Support From: Armin van Buuren, Aly & Fila, Andrew Rayel, Solarstone, Somna, ReOrder
ASOT Features: Episodes 1185 and 1238
Two Disciplines, One Vision
There are artists who move between disciplines as a matter of career convenience — producing music because photography reached a ceiling, or picking up a camera because the studio felt limiting. Alan Fullmer is not that kind of artist. His photography and his music are not adjacent pursuits that happen to share an owner. They are expressions of the same sensibility: a man born into a lineage of artists, trained by proximity to two different visual traditions, who has spent the better part of four decades finding ways to communicate something that resists being captured in any single medium.
That sensibility — part inherited, part cultivated, entirely personal — is what makes his recent emergence within the trance world something more than a late-career experiment. When the music of Alan appears on Black Hole Recordings or AVA White, when Armin van Buuren selects a track for A State of Trance, what is being recognised is not simply a competent production. It is the output of someone who has been thinking seriously about art, composition, and emotional communication for over thirty years — and who brought all of that to the studio when he finally arrived there.
A Family of Artists: The Foundation (Early Life)
Alan did not choose to become an artist so much as he was shaped into one by the environment he was born into. His father was a skilled portrait photographer — a discipline that demands not only technical command of light, exposure, and composition, but the far more elusive ability to find the truth in a human face and fix it in a single frame. His grandfather worked in landscape oil painting, a tradition with entirely different demands: the patience of accumulated marks, the translation of three-dimensional space and atmosphere into pigment on canvas, the long dialogue between observation and interpretation that painting requires.
Between those two influences — the precision and immediacy of the photographic moment, the depth and deliberation of fine painting — Alan absorbed a way of thinking about images that would define his artistic practice for decades. The precision of the camera and the emotional depth of the painted canvas became, in his own description, two threads he would spend his career weaving together. That both of these traditions are about capturing something transient — a shaft of light, a human expression, the mood of a landscape at a particular hour — and making it permanent, is not incidental to understanding what drives his work.
He began photographing seriously in his early years and has now pursued the discipline for over three decades. His work has been recognised across institutions, acquired by collectors, and respected by peers in a field where both technical and artistic standards are demanding. His photography is held in premier galleries and stores internationally — a distribution that reflects not only the quality of the work itself but the sustained commitment of someone who has treated the craft with the seriousness it requires across a very long career.
Mentor and Custodian of the Tradition
One of the defining characteristics of Alan Fullmer’s artistic identity is the degree to which he has directed his accumulated knowledge outward rather than keeping it proprietary. For a significant portion of his career, alongside his own creative practice, he has worked as a mentor to emerging photographers and artists — generously sharing the experience, technical understanding, and artistic philosophy that his decades in the field have produced.
This commitment to the next generation is not peripheral to who he is as an artist. It reflects a particular understanding of what artistic traditions are for — not the private property of those who develop them, but a living inheritance that must be actively passed on if it is to survive and evolve. His grandfather’s landscape painting, his father’s portrait photography, and his own synthesis of those two legacies form a chain of transmission that he has chosen to extend forward rather than allow to end with himself.
The mentors and students in that chain do not simply learn technique. They absorb a way of seeing — the understanding that a photograph is not a record of what was in front of the lens but a statement about what the photographer noticed, valued, and chose to preserve. That is the lesson Alan Fullmer received from his family, and it is the lesson he continues to pass on.
The Electronic Music Beginning: 1980s and the Long Road to the Studio
Alan’s relationship with electronic music began in the 1980s — the decade that invented the sonic vocabulary that trance, in many respects, inherited and transformed. The intricate rhythms of techno and the mesmerising qualities of sequenced electronic music captured his attention at a formative moment, and what began as fascination deepened over the following decades into what he describes as a boundless love for electronic music in its full range — from ambient textures at one end to the hardest-hitting dance forms at the other.
His engagement with the music was initially that of an informed enthusiast and DJ rather than a producer. With a solid foundation in DJing, he curated and mixed the work of artists who had shaped his own musical understanding, sharing electronic soundscapes with audiences while simultaneously nurturing, as he has described it, a burning desire to create his own compositions. That desire was present for years before the circumstances aligned to make it a reality — a patience entirely consistent with how a photographer thinks, where the right moment to press the shutter is the one that has been understood and waited for, not the one that is simply convenient.
When he finally seized the opportunity to bring his musical ambitions to life, it was with the same deliberateness that has characterised his visual practice. The decision was not impulsive. The foundation in electronic music listening, DJing, and study had been building for decades. What changed was the convergence of readiness, access to the right collaborative relationships, and the recognition that the moment to act had arrived.
Into the Trance World: Labels, Collaborations, and ASOT (Recent Career)
Alan’s productions have found homes on some of the trance world’s most respected labels — a roster that tells its own story about where his sound sits and how it has been received by the gatekeepers of the genre.
AquaFire Recordings provided an early platform. AVA Recordings — the imprint associated with John O’Callaghan, whose AVA White sub-label focuses on the more melodic and progressive end of the trance spectrum — recognised in his work the emotional intelligence and production quality that the label’s aesthetic demands. Black Hole Recordings, one of the oldest and most storied trance labels in the world, the home of the In Trance We Trust series and a catalogue stretching back to the genre’s earliest commercial era, added further institutional weight to his release history. Nocturnal Knights and Reverie Sounds completed a label portfolio that spans different textures within the broader uplifting and progressive trance world.
The collaborations with vocalists that Alan has described as central to his recent creative practice — working alongside exceptional voices, including some of the legendary names and artists who shaped his own artistic journey — bring an additional dimension to his productions that connects directly to his background as a visual storyteller. A vocalist, like a photographic subject, provides the human element that gives the surrounding composition its emotional focus. His ability to work with that element comes not just from production knowledge but from decades of understanding how a face, a gesture, or a voice carries meaning within a larger composition.
The DJ and producer support his releases have attracted represents a significant cross-section of trance’s contemporary establishment. Armin van Buuren, whose A State of Trance radio show and annual Top 1000 listener vote remain the most authoritative measures of a track’s standing within the genre’s global community, selected Alan’s music for both episode 1185 and episode 1238 of ASOT — two features that place his work in front of the show’s tens of millions of weekly listeners and mark it as worthy of the genre’s most prominent weekly platform. Support from Aly & Fila, Andrew Rayel, Solarstone, Somna, and ReOrder adds further breadth to a support network that spans the full range of trance’s contemporary spectrum, from the euphoric and uplifting to the progressive and melodic.
What Connects It All
The thread that runs from Fullmer’s grandfather’s oil paintings through his father’s portrait photography, through three decades of his own photographic practice, and into his current work as a trance producer and collaborator is not immediately obvious from the outside. Photography and electronic music appear to occupy entirely separate artistic territories — one rooted in light and visual composition, one in sound and time. But both, at their most serious, are about the same fundamental challenge: how to take something felt, something perceived, something true about experience, and give it a form that communicates that truth to another person who was not there when you found it.
A great photograph does that with a fraction of a second of captured light. A great trance record does it with six minutes of sound and structure, building to a release that the listener feels in the body as much as they hear with the ears. The tools are different. The ambition is identical.
Fullmer came to trance production later than most of his contemporaries on those AVA White and Black Hole releases. But he came to it with something that early career arrivals rarely possess: a fully formed artistic identity, a philosophy of creative practice developed over thirty years, and the understanding that the patience required to wait for the right moment is not lost time but preparation. The music being recognised by Armin van Buuren, Aly & Fila, and the ASOT audience is the product of all of that. It sounds like someone who knows exactly what they are trying to say.
