By Ben Wener,The Orange County Register

I’m a dabbler when it comes to dance music.

I recognize that the genre remains a viable market force, even if its share of the commercial pie seems to be sliced slimmer and slimmer year after year. (No first-week chart-toppers from this lot.) But whenever I plop into Tower Records the techno section is still there and fairly dust-free, boasting the latest droning what-not from Armin Van Buuren or Carl Cox or Junkie XL.

And already I’m coming off like a hater.

And now that I just used the word “hater,” never mind the dated term “techno,” I’m coming off even more out of touch than I seemed five seconds ago.

Here’s another thing I’ve repeated like a stuck record since the electronica boom of the 90s: There’s a vast difference between experiencing this stuff in its native environment (in a club, as a gigantic tent attraction) and kicking back with it at home.

I can take in hours of even the most mind-numbing DJ culture at Coachella, say, where the chest-thumping grooves and array of eye candy (lights and flesh) always manages to make me feel alive like few other sensations.

There are exceptions, of course. The triple-disc “GU10” (due June 20) has at the very least yanked my attention away from distractions when I’ve spun it. But I attribute that to construction: A celebration of the 10th anniversary of the “Global Underground” series, it sports so many classic dance tracks that I’d have been shocked if it had bored me. Underworld, Laurent Garnier, Fatboy Sim, Felix Da Housecat, Layo & Bushwacka, Miss Kittin, Sasha, Hybrid – their cuts were good to great then, and they still suck me in now.

Yet the majority of DJ mixes still do little more than make my imagination wander – which isn’t a quality to be dismissed. “There’s something to be said for music that really succeeds as background noise,” Roxanne just insisted over lunch. “I might like a Sarah McLachlan record as wallpaper when I’m feeling quiet, or Paul Oakenfold for something more up.”

She has a point, though it should also be said that she’s much more appreciative of Oakie than I could ever be; she really dug his pre-Madonna Coachella set, whereas I lay down on the grass and nodded off.

But I’ve noticed something as the post-boom years have rolled along: Even trance masters like Oakenfold have been stepping away from amorphous 80-minute epics that feel endless. Nowadays artists strive for something more like traditional songform.

Right, Oakenfold’s been moving in that direction for a while now; “Bunkka,” his last proper studio creation had more than a few sturdy singles. His latest, “A Lively Mind” (Maverick), goes to even greater lengths to walk this tightrope between appealing to pop lovers and the don’t-change demands of move-me-till-dawn die-hards. Right off the bat he leaps into immediate music, enlisting the seductive come-on of Brittany Murphy for the contagious electroclash fun of “Faster Kill Pussycat” and maintaining that rush with a few more winners -“Sex ‘n’ Money,” featuring an almost nonexistent Pharrell Williams, the fuzzed-up stomp of “No Compromise,” the T. Rex sampling that powers the Prodigy-like “Switch On.”

Come to think of it, it’s so far ahead of most anything else, it just might deserve its own subgenre. Not that I’d have any clue what to call that.