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Features Introducing NEM3SI$’s new label Infinite Resistance! Mindbenderz talk ‘Lord of the Rings’ and fishing, as well as the creation of their new album ‘Celestial Gateway’! Iono-Music artists One Function, Eliyahu, Invisible Reality and Dual Vision talk Robert Miles, kids, dogs and vinyl, while we chat about their current releases! Luke&Flex talk influences, the Irish rave scene, why Flex wears a mask and Play Hard, their new EP out now on Onhcet Repbulik Xtreme! Lyktum expands on his new album ‘Home’ – talking about his love of storytelling, creating new harmonies and the concept behind his musical works. Pan talks getting caught short crossing the Sahara, acid eyeballs and tells us Trance is the Answer, plus shares his thoughts on his latest release 'Beyond the Horizon' - all from a beach in Spain! Miss C chats about living with the KLF, DJing in a huge cat’s mouth, training her brain and the upcoming super-duper Superfreq Grande party at LDN East this Saturday, 16th September! NEM3SI$ - I Live for the Night – talks superficiality, psychopaths, and bittersweet success, ahead of a plethora of evocative, emotional, and passionate upcoming melodic techno releases! Psy-Sisters Spring Blast Off! We talk to DJ competition winner ROEN along with other super talents on the lineup! Blasting towards summer festivals with Bahar Canca ahead of Psy-Sisters Spring Blast! Shyisma talks parties, UFO's, and Shotokan Karate ahead of his upcoming album 'Particles' on Iono-Music! SOME1 talks family, acid, stage fright and wolves - ahead of his upcoming album release ‘Voyager’ on Iono-Music in February 2023! The Transmission Crew tell all and talk about their first London event on 24th February 2023! NIXIRO talks body, mind and music production ahead of his release 'Planet Impulse' on Static Movement's label - Sol Music! Turning the world into a fairy tale with Ivy Orth ahead of Tribal Village’s 10th Birthday Anniversary Presents: The World Lounge Project The Psy-Sisters chat about music, achievements, aspirations and the 10-Year Anniversary Party - 18/12/22! A decade of dance music with Daniel Lesden Earth Needs a Rebirth! Discussions with Psy-Trance Artist Numayma Taking a Journey Through Time with Domino New Techno Rising Star DKLUB talks about his debut release White Rock on Onhcet Republik! PAN expands on many things including his new album 'Hyperbolic Oxymoron' due for release on the 14th April 2022 on PsyWorld Records! Psibindi talks all things music including her new collaborative EP 'Sentient Rays' on Aphid Records, her band Sentience Machine and 10 years of Psy-Sisters!

Darude's whirlwind decade Reported by SunnyAli / Submitted 01-06-10 07:12 It's every DJ's dream: make a track of such cult status that everyone in the world knows the tune. But what happens after that? Ten years ago, Finn Ville Virtanen, better known as Darude, shot to fame by making one of the biggest-selling anthems in dance music history. Released in June 2000, Sandstorm went platinum and became the world best selling 12” vinyl of the year. It has since sold more than two million units, featured on more than 200 compilations and been used in the soundtracks of everything from Hollywood films and Playstation games to sports broadcasts like the Ice Hockey World Championships, Wimbledon, Euro 2000 and the 2006 Winter Olympics. How do you follow such huge overnight success? His second single, “Feel The Beat,” also went straight to the top of the global dance charts; his debut album “Before The Storm,” sold nearly a million units. And in the decade since, he's toured every conceivable club, beach party and festival worldwide from Amsterdam to Indonesia and released two further albums: Rush, in 2003 and Label This in 2006/07. Today, Darude is quietly spoken, good humoured and humble about his career so far. He hasn't crashed and burned and remains immensely popular in the US and across Europe. He now spends his time working with producers on both sides of the Atlantic, releasing an edgier style of trance that fuses uplifting melodies with elements of punk and rock, electro and breaks. Harderfaster caught up with him to ask what life is like ten years after the storm broke. You hit success so early with Sandstorm – what has the past ten years been like? I've gotten uglier!! I was 24/25 years' old when Sandstorm went big, and yes that was young, but I'm incredibly grateful that I wasn't 17 because I'd probably be dead or in a nuthouse by now. I've matured as a person and have opened my eyes a lot. I've had so many weird and crazy and cool and lovely but also shitty experiences from this, that have made me see the world differently Obviously seeing a lot of different cultures gives you a new perspective on your own, that's been a really good thing. And my music has matured a lot too – when Sandstorm came out, I did not appreciate that I was now going to have a career as a DJ and producer. Music was a hobby on the side – but all of a sudden I was pulled into this business. I was pretty inexperienced. Luckily I've had really good people around me. What did you originally think you'd do as a career? Telecommunications! I studied what's called production economics in Turka, Finland: its the project management side of telecoms, as opposed to the hands-on building phones or networks. For the first year or two after Sandstorm came out I didn't have a chance to stop and think about it – I just went from gig to gig and interview to interview. I spent all the in-between time in the studio with my producer coming up with new tracks and getting the new album out and so on. What music are you making now? People still categorise me as a trance DJ, which is completely fine, but I'm definitely not only a trance DJ. I like punk rock, metal, pop, a lot of things, so I'm also making electro, house, some breakbeat stuff, and am including stuff like more rocky guitars and male vocals in a couple of tracks now. My latest album, Label This, has a couple of tracks like that, which aren't very typical for trance. How much do you travel? I'm based both in Atlanta, US, and Finland, going back and forth based on my work. I play maybe 40-60 gigs a year, a lot of which are in the US. I've then got about six or seven dates coming up in India, and after that I'll spend the summer in Finland, playing the summer festivals and some clubs; and then I'll be back in the US for the fall. I've had several requests from clubs in Africa, too, although the continent is so huge it is hard to tour there, its logistically quite complex. How regularly do you play in the UK? Honestly, not too regularly at all at the moment, but that is going to change. My third album and a couple of singles from it are available on iTunes now, so I'm planning some gigs on the back of those. I've got a ton of requests; we just need to organise something. Later this year I have more releases coming out, so hopefully those will bring me back to the UK as well. A lot of dance producers in the UK are setting up their own record label. Have you considered it? I don't have an active label right now but I'm preparing to, I'm working with the US trance producer Randy Boyer (www.randyboyer.com), who I've know for a very long time and is a great friend. The label will be called enMASS Music, and we have our first four or five releases lined up already. We're still just working on stuff like the website and distribution now. The music will be just the kind of stuff we play – about 128-138 bpm, progressing to uplifting trance. And I don't think, in the long run, we'll shy away from more commercial stuff either. We both have quite similar tastes in trance, quite vocal, so anything that could be played in a club but also made into a radio edit, is good. When will it go live? We plan to make a launch announcement within the next month or two. It will be digital downloads – if something hits really big, then we may consider releasing something on physical (CD or vinyl) but I don't see why we'd do that often because it just doesn't make any sense these days; there's nothing more than loss in those. Singles are nice business cards – that's about it. Your 2008 releases have a load of male vocals and more edgy sounds: unusual for trance. What's the thought behind these? My first two albums I produced with JS16 (Finnish musician Jaakko Salovaara; www.js16.com) – he's a total genius – but by the time I went to make the third album the way we interacted had changed. I was by that point an artist who had matured a little more,I'd got about 6-7 years of experience by this time, and had my own studio and had been producing my own stuff – so we decided I'd do it on my own. Producing alone has just been amazing: I found that with nobody else in the studio I could go at it with a really open mind. So for instance, one track, My Game, which has a load of rock drums, guitar and male vocals, started off as a bass guitar sample from a library – but then I sang a melody myself. At the time, quite a few people were sampling and re-releasing old 80s tracks, and I figured that I'd make an 80s-sounding punk record myself, sample it and make it into a dance record. So once I'd written the melody and lyrics, I sent it to a rocker friend to record into a proper punk-sounding record. He returned it in 2-3 days; he'd sung the vocals and everything – and I got to work. So it was a completely new way of working for me – but it opened my eyes and ears to new stuff – if you listen to any of the three albums, they're not musically that far apart from one another, but the variety of sounds is much wider. The energy is still there, but its not as narrowly trancey. What studio setup do you use? I'm on a mac and my main sequencer is Logic Pro; I use Melodyne and Ableton Live quite a lot – those are invaluable for tweaking sounds, vocals, tuning and so on. Do you collaborate much with other producers? I haven't done that much, other than working with JS16 on my first album, and with JS16 and and another Finnish producer, Heikki L, on the second. The third album I had two or three singers co-writing, and two of the tracks are co-produced: Tell Me with Heikki L, and My Game with Joonas Hahmo. To be honest, collaborating is something I need to learn as it always seems to lead to great things. But its sometimes so difficult to be in the same room as someone else and come up with something. I tend to take time to tinker around with music; it doesn't happen in the blink of an eye. How long do you take to put tracks together? Decades!! I can come up with the basic track in a matter of hours, but then the tweaking can last weeks. The little tweaks are the last two or five per cent of the track and nobody else but me or another producer who knows me will hear the changes. I try really hard to do it less: it is just minute anal tweaking. Do you get a lot of other producers approaching you to work with you? All the time – both for Djing and producing. It kind of sucks because I can't possibly help everyone, and I know I'll end up missing out on good tracks. So on my website (www.darude.com) I have a forum where people can ask questions and I try to give pointers and help that way. I also have a FAQ on the website where you can see my gear list and so on. But this is one of the reasons I want to start the record label: because there's so much good new music out there that's worth finding and releasing. What would you say are your top five producers at the moment? Joonas Hahmo (www.joonashahmo.com) – a Finnish guy who's co-produced one of my tracks; Gareth Emery (www.garethemery.com) – I look up to him a lot, he's very productive and I'd always recommend his DJ sets. Another Finn is K-System (www.k-system.nu) – Judge Jules has been playing his tracks for the past couple of years; I also play both some of his original tunes but also his remixes, which have been sick for the past few years. Another of my friends, Weirdness, is going to be one of the first releases on enMASS Music. He has a couple of writing credits on my third album – he wrote the track For Those I Love, a beautiful trance record. He has a wide variety of music, from poppy dance stuff to pretty rough banging almost hard trance. Then there's Randy Boyer – I mentioned him earlier; and my friend Heikki L (www.djheikkil.com), also a Finn. Do you mostly play DJ or live sets now? About 95% DJ sets, now – when I started my career I was actually not a DJ, so I did only live shows, I had my keyboards and soundboard and all kinds of gear with me. But it kind of became a factor that stopped me playing in some places, because clubs find DJs so much easier to accommodate, and clubs are often not equipped for live shows. But Djing wasn't technically a huge transition, and in 2004 I started out officially as a DJ. But I still do live shows fairly regularly – it allows more than a DJ set, because when you DJ you tend to need to have a continuous growth and upwards progression to the music, the bpm tends to have to go up. In a live set you can break it up more, you can even stop. What plans or goals do you have for 2010 and beyond? Business-wise we're definitely trying to get the label running and there's a lot more to it than the music, so its going to be a bit of a learning process. I need to shift concentration to different things now, that's the biggest thing. There's a lot of marketing, promotion and legal stuff to know and learn. But I think both Randy and I have come to a place in our careers where we're able to do that, and we've seen and heard enough and are hopefully wise enough to pull it off. Any last messages? Check out my two latest single releases: I Ran (So Far Away) and In the Darkness. They are available pretty much everywhere on digital stores such as iTunes and others. Compared to my earlier tracks, from ten years ago, you'll notice that there isn't that huge a difference – the sounds are more developed and more varied, but the energy and catchy melodies are still there, stuff that works on the dancefloor. That's my goal! Photos courtesy of Darude. Not to be reproduced without permission. Share this :: : : : Follow HarderFaster :: Other Features By SunnyAli: No sleep for Rachel Auburn In the Presence of Carl Nicholson Frantic Timeless 8 – totally worth ruining Valentine's Day for... It's like Origami, but with power tools..... One Awsum Xmas Party reviewed Requiem's Not Quite Halloween Ball: Reviewed The views and opinions expressed in this review are strictly those of the author only for which HarderFaster will not be held responsible or liable. Comments: From: K8-e on 6th Jun 2010 23:28.22 They played Sandstorm at a big corporate conference for work a few years back - THAT'S how ingrained in society that tune is. Interesting interview

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