Origin: Nottingham, England, UK
Genres: Power Trance, Tech Trance, Uplifting Trance, Hard House
Roles: DJ, Producer
Years Active: 2010s–present
Signature Series: Not Below 1-4-0
Where It All Began
Some DJs find trance through a record collection, a late-night radio broadcast, or a recommendation from a friend. James Hogg found it the way the best ones usually do — completely by accident, and at an age when the music hits with a force that never fully leaves.
Growing up in Nottingham, he was around six years old when he heard music playing outside his house. That music was DJ Hype performing at the old rave event Dreamscape. He was immediately and completely hooked. From that single moment, electronic music became the defining thread of his life.
By ten, he was asking for a copy of Rave Generation on CD. That opened the door wider — the Prodigy, Altern8, and Acen all followed, forming the early fabric of a musical education built entirely on the raw energy of early British rave culture.
The Road to Trance
In his early teens, Hogg began buying vinyl and teaching himself to DJ. His tastes at this stage were broader than trance — early house music drew him in heavily, and the names that shaped him during this period were Brandon Block, Alex P, and Carl Cox. These weren’t minor influences. They were foundational, and the energy, instinct, and musicality those DJs embodied would find their way into everything Hogg would later produce.
The decisive moment came when he discovered OceanLab, the project by Above & Beyond featuring vocalist Justine Suissa. By his own account, it was a complete game changer. Trance music — its emotional scale, its ability to carry both euphoria and melancholy within the same record — became his focus from that point forward.
What makes Hogg\’s background unusual within the trance world is the breadth of what came before. Rave, hard house, Balearic, funky house — none of it was discarded when trance took centre stage. Instead, it became raw material, a palette of rhythmic and textural ideas that he would bring to bear on his productions, drawing from different decades of dance music to build something that didn\’t sound like anyone else\’s version of the genre.
Nottingham and the Underground
Nottingham has its own relationship with electronic music — a city with genuine underground heritage, shaped by venues like Venus in the early 1990s that brought hardcore and acid house to audiences who went on to define the next generation of the scene. It is not a city that produces passive music fans. The culture there runs deep, and the producers and DJs it generates tend to carry that seriousness with them.
Hogg is very much a product of that environment. His trance is not the polished, radio-ready variety. It is built for rooms and for people who know what a record is supposed to do to a dancefloor — with power, intent, and momentum that doesn\’t let up.
Not Below 1-4-0
The series that has become the defining document of Hogg\’s DJ identity is Not Below 1-4-0 — a long-running mix series hosted on SoundCloud that, by 2025, had reached its fortieth volume. The title is a statement of philosophy as much as a tempo specification. Below 140 BPM is simply not where Hogg operates.
The series showcases the full range of what power trance and tech trance can do in the hands of someone who has spent years studying the architecture of a DJ set. Each volume moves with purpose — driving basslines, relentless forward momentum, and the kind of melodic peaks that only land with real impact when the tension has been properly built. Running to forty-plus editions, it is one of the more committed and consistent underground mix series currently active in the UK trance world, and it has built Hogg a dedicated following among listeners who seek out exactly this kind of uncompromising material.
Production and Sound
As a producer, Hogg brings the same cross-genre sensibility to the studio that shaped him as a DJ. His own description of his approach is unusually self-aware for an underground artist: he actively draws on elements from Balearic house, funky house, hard house, and trance, using different musical eras as source material rather than staying strictly within genre lines. The objective is always to make his tracks stand out — to bring something into a trance record that a purely trance-focused producer might not think to reach for.
His main production focus sits firmly in power trance and tech trance. The energy is high, the structures are direct, and the intent is always dancefloor-first. Original productions including tracks like \”Escape\” sit alongside reworks — his rework of Smith & Pledger\’s \”Hi Jack\” being a notable example — and demonstrate a producer comfortable moving between original composition and creative reinterpretation.
He has appeared on Beatport compilations alongside fellow UK underground trance artists, placing him within a broader community of producers working at the harder, faster end of the trance spectrum in Britain.
What He Represents
James Hogg is a particular and valuable kind of figure in trance — the producer and DJ rooted not in the commercial mainstream but in the lived experience of the music, from childhood raves to vinyl crates to a studio practice built patiently over years. His influences span three decades of British electronic music, and the trance he makes carries all of that history without feeling nostalgic or backward-looking.
The Not Below 1-4-0 series is ultimately the clearest expression of who he is: an artist with a point of view, a standard he holds himself to, and no interest in dropping below it.