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It's one of Finlands finest - Darude Reported by Agnes Klos / Submitted 04-05-11 10:27 Ville Virtanen aka Darude is a Finnish DJ/artist/producer whose name has become synonymous with driving beats coupled with passionate and energetic DJ sets. Darude has sold over 5 million records to date worldwide and is recognised by many as one of the most influential artists to emerge from the dance scene in the last decade. His DJ style is a mix of progressive and uplifting trance but he is not too shy to throw in some tech, breaks and house flavors with even the occasional heavy metal samples. Having set the benchmark for a generation of EDM artists with his seminal release 'Sandstorm', the ever modest professional is a strong supporter of new talent and music, so much so that he took the decision to set up his own imprint to push not just his own music but also that of artists' whom he believes in. When Darude voiced his ideas to his friend Randy Boyer, who has had several releases on all of the biggest EDM labels in the world (ASOT, Ultra, Flashover and Vandit, just to name a few), he found out that Randy had similar thoughts of his own and so the idea of a record company partnership, now realised as EnMass Music, was born. The new record label is used as a platform for Darude and Randy's own productions, as well as a channel to nurture a breed of new emerging artists in the electronic dance music industry. With the recent releases on the market, Agnes Klos met Darude for a cup of coffee to discuss his cooperation with Randy and the beginning of a beckoning record company. Thank you for finding time to answer some questions for HarderFaster. At the beginning, could you introduce yourself to our readers please? My name is Ville Virtanen aka Darude. I originally come from small town in Finland called Hinnerjoki. After that I lived in Turku, Finland for 13 years and the last couple of years in addition to that I've lived part of the year near Atlanta, GA, USA. Take us through your journey of becoming a DJ. It all started when you slipped a demo CD to one of your idols, acclaimed Finnish dance producer, Jaakko ‘JS16’ Salovaara in 1999... In August 1999 I gave a demo CD to JS16 and asked for his professional opinion. He called me a week later asking me to meet him and talk about my music. In the meeting we agreed on trying what we could do together with this one track of mine he liked a lot - 'Sandstorm' it was. About a week later we had the track redone with some new sounds and better arrangement and started playing it for the local DJs and before we knew it it was charting in Finland and later elsewhere too. Originally I was a noise-maker, not really even a producer, and when 'Sandstorm' took off, I started doing live shows with synths and samplers and other gadgets, live visuals, plus an MC and occasional singers, guitarists and percussionists. I started DJing in 2004 and soon after that, it changed almost totally to DJ shows. These days I do live shows only for special occasions. The success of your first two singles: 'Sandstorm' and 'Feel The Beat' led to the release of your debut album, 'Before The Storm'. Then in 2003, your second artist album, 'Rush' was released, followed by 'Label This!' in 2007. What kind of music can people expect when they buy your albums? And how has your music changed over the years? I still make trance, but on maybe wider scale and it's hard to put music in just one genre. I like to call my music just electronic dance music, or dancefloor-aimed music. My latest album 'Label This!' is an artist album consisting of my own tracks mixed together like a DJ mix. I did it this way instead of separate tracks because while I am an artist and a producer I also wanted show my DJ side too. The DJing has affected my production a lot, it’s given me a whole new angle to it and also an invaluable chance to field-test my productions. I mean, nothing tells you better whether a track works or not than playing it to a live audience. I think my new productions definitely have the same kind of energy, simple beautiful melodies, breakdowns and builds that the earlier albums have, but there is more variation in styles and sounds. The 'Label This!' album starts with lower bpm tracks with some rocky elements like distorted electric guitars and some real drums and advances to higher tempos and uplifting trance towards the end. There's a chillout track in the end also and throughout the album there are more vocals than on the previous albums. A lot of the old fans have been really excited about that album, with new but still somewhat recognisable sound, and that's of course something that I've been really happy to hear. The first single from your album 'Rush' is titled 'Music'. The track conquered the Number 1 position on the Finnish Singles Chart, Finnish Dance Chart and also on the Polish Dance Chart. I can see that you have a growing fan base in the country where I am from. Have you ever played in Poland and what do you think of the Polish dance scene? I've played in Poland many times! I remember gigs at least in Poznan, Krakow, Torun, Katowice, Bytow . . . I can be honest and say that I don't know much about the actual Polish dance scene, but those parties have been huge and the reception for my sets and dance music in general has always been great! Also, you have just recently started a record company, called EnMass Music, with fellow DJ/producer Randy Boyer. How did you guys meet and how did the collaboration start? Tell us all the exciting news and juicy insight information. Randy and I go back several years and we’ve talked about music and production and business stuff a lot and we’ve realised that our thoughts about a lot of stuff are very similar. While our tastes in music are maybe a little different, there’s still a lot of overlapping in our track selection and production ideas and styles. When I told Randy that I was going to start my own label, he told me he’d been thinking about the same thing and we just decided to combine forces. We thought that it’d lighten the workload a little and that we’d benefit from each others networks and fan bases and of course learn things from each others' practical experiences. The idea was out there for a while and when we were on the road together in 2008 we got to know each other face to face, you know, not just via email or chats, and felt comfortable with everything and that's when we really got things rolling. To me, Randy Boyer is the hardest working and the most humble guy in the business and I'm delighted to start this adventure with him. In addition to our own music, we'll both be looking for and giving production support, where needed, to prime artists and tracks to release on our label and play in our sets (which is a requirement for any EMM release, by the way). Both of us being actively touring DJs gives us the opportunity to test play EMM’s unreleased material in the real world while staying in touch with the listeners and keeping up with the new sounds and styles out there. We now have two tracks out, 'Randy Boyer feat. Cari Golden - Fragile' and 'Paul Corson - Midnight Train' and both those have gotten loads of support from the biggest names and local resident DJs alike, which we're really happy about. Our third release, 'Boyan & Boyer - Brain Dysfunction / Monster EP' came out on April 5th, and it seems that this release is going to be HUGE among club DJs. The original versions are pretty proggy and dirty, the remixes (by myself and Randy) are trancier, still keeping much of the original harder vibe. We've just started to promo EMM003, the easiest way to check out our current and future releases is to go to www.enmassmusic.com or www.youtube.com/enmassmusic. We have heard that you played a set at WMC 2011 on 11th March 2011 to celebrate the launch of EnMass Music, was the event a success? How was your new music perceived by the crowd? Yeah, the event was a great success, we had the place packed wall-to-wall all night. The cool Miami crowd stayed on the dancefloor all night and I saw gazillions of smiling faces and sweaty bodies, hands up in the air, and wild screaming from time to time, so my deduction is that the music was very well perceived! I am very interested to know how you got involved with producing in the first place and whether you prefer DJing or producing at the moment. I've loved dance music as long as I can remember, I've recorded it on the radio and bought CDs, I've gone clubbing and to concerts, but it wasn't until I was around 20 when I started making music of my own after I saw some of my class mates making music with just a PC and a tracker program. I wanted to try that so I bought a PC, and I got hooked, really bad . . . It still took me a good couple of years to realise that this would become my profession and that I’d get my living out of it. I love both performing and producing equally, they're just different sides of the coin, really. Being able to test my own productions at my gigs is the best and most direct way to get feedback, you see the true reactions that way. What is your favourite piece of equipment in the studio and what are your studio habits like? My US studio, where I've mostly worked for the last three years, is purely software-based, the only hardware is a Novation midicontroller, Genelec monitors, MoTU audio interface and a Mac Pro. I have to say that Logic Pro is definitely my favourite tool. It has everything; great midi and audio editing, awesome software sampler, synths and effect plug-ins, I can do a track in it from start to finish, even on a laptop. In my Finnish studio I have a good bit of beloved hardware, like Korg Triton, MS2000, Access Virus C, Roland JP8080, which all are awesome but which I can do without these days. You have just produced two new tracks, one is called 'Midnight Train', for EnMass Music artist Paul Corson and the other is 'Crazy World' with 2AM feat. Georgia Haege. How did you come up with the ideas for these tracks and is there an interesting story behind them? I found Paul through a mutual friend who recommended me taking a listen to Paul's music. I fell in love with 'Midnight Train', it's just such a nice song and I felt that it could be a great club record in addition to it being really catchy pop-rock record. The dance thing was all pretty new to Paul, so he just let me do what I wanted with the track (brave man!) and he got very excited about the genre. While the rock singer-songwriter stuff is more Paul's own field, we're most definitely going to do more work together in the future as well. In 'Crazy World' I liked the bitter-sweetness of the whole thing, like the music itself is not that dark at all, yet a little melancholic and summer vibey, and the lyrics are kind of sad or at least not the happiest, like someone is stuck in a rut, thinking of what to do next, what to do in life etc. I'm not a lyrics guy really, but more so I listen to sounds and melodies, but somehow this production made me notice the "message" as well. Is it deep or not, that’s up to everyone listening to the song. A fun bit of info is that I haven't actually met neither 2AM or Georgia in person yet, all the co-production was done over the internet in our separate studios. Since 2004 you took your music around the world. What aspects of touring as a DJ do you like the most? Since 2000 actually, first I did live shows for a couple of years and around 2003-2004 I started DJing as well. Touring is very hard physically, the nights are always late and mornings early, but I'm not complaining, I love playing for people, I love partying with them and feeling the awesome vibes the music creates! I love meeting people, my fans or just dance music fans in general, and I also love to be able to represent my music and my name in person. It's an amazing feeling meeting someone that you've talked over the internet at a club, face to face, and shake hands, exchange smiles, hug, grab a drink, whatever! It makes it so much more personal both ways, and I get so much energy and inspiration out of seeing people first hand going nuts over what I play or what I've created. Can you remember the biggest crowd that you played for and where it was? I've played a couple of huge outdoor events over the years, I think the biggest was in UK back in the day, in Middlesborough, like 100,000 people. Your DJing career has also led you to radio. Currently you are a host of a widely followed mixshow, "Salmiakki Sessions" on ETN.fm. Tell us how you got involved with the radio and what do you enjoy about it. When I started touring as a DJ I thought having a DJ mix show was a good way to let people know that I do that in addition to live shows and production. I got in touch with the people behind ETN.fm and they wanted my show, so I just started doing it for them. My show was on regularly Sirius Satellite radio in US too, and these days I have numerous stations around the world, both FM and online, that broadcast it semi-regularly and a couple that have a listed regular show either weekly, bi-weekly or monthly. It's a healthy thing for me to have this radio show, as it makes me go throgh promos every month so I automatically keep up with new sounds and names. It's also a great outlet for those amazing tracks that for whatever reason don't fit my live DJ sets, but are worth playing, as in the radio sets I can play a much broader variety of tracks. 'Salmiakki' is a very popular type of candy in Finland and the whole Nordic area. It’s this black salty liquorice and I love it in its various forms, and I like to eat it while mixing. Also, it fits my show description really well, it’s "salty and sweet" which means that my mixes have several different types of tracks, some darker, some lighter, some instrumental, some vocal track etc. What do you listen to on your Ipod? Ummm, not much . . . Most of my time I spend listening to my own tracks in the studio, making them, mixing them and then test listening in the car, at home on my little boombox and wherever else I can, and then checking out other people's tracks for my DJ sets. So when I get out of the studio or DJ mode, I usually don't really actively listen to anything, but I watch TV, movies, play ice hockey and spend time with my family and friends. I often do listen to whatever radio station happens to on in the car, though, as long as it's dance-ish music. I like top40 stuff in small amounts, and it's nice to clear my head with different stuff from time to time, so I sometime dig out my old metal and punk records too. Your plan for the future is to combine your music with TV, movies and other media avenues. Tell us how it works and how you would like to achieve it. Well, I make music and I hope to find people or companies who either want to license my music, or my label's music to TV, movies and any other media. I'm also interested in making custom music for TV, movies, commercials etc. What can people expect when they come to see Darude performance? I am trying to keep up with the new stuff that comes out, but I don't religiously follow and play anything just because it's new. My sets are a progression from slower stuff to faster stuff and styles between that can vary quite a lot. I'm not particularly afraid to play new and old together, or throw in something completely different every once in a while, if it can be mixed together nicely, if there is something that ties it all together. I like to think that I bring in a lot of energy and I interact with the crowd a lot, too, but it goes both ways, and I get my main joy and inspiration to do all this from the dancing crowds. Finally, what are your plans for the rest of 2011? Will we be seeing lots more of you? A Darude release or two, a couple of EnMass Music releases, some Darude remixes on them, an EnMass Music tour with Randy Boyer and hopefully some quality time with my family as well. Thank you Darude for your time. To close things out I have got a few quick questions for you: Your greatest pleasure in life? Downtime with my family. Music is often still tied to that but not everything revolves around it, or not professionally at least. And your greatest annoyance? People stating opinionated hear-say as facts, which is very common these days, because losers and haters can do that behind the anonymity of the internet. Five deadliest weapons in the DJ box right now? Ferry Corsten - Punk (MaRLo Remix) Nadia Ali - Rapture (Gareth Emery Remix) Prodigy vs. Darude - Smack My Bitch Up In The Darkness (mash-up) Boyan & Boyer - Brain Dysfunction (Original Mix) Alex Kunnari - New Life (Weirdness Remix) All photos courtesy of Urban Rebel PR. Not to be reproduced without permission. Share this :: : : : Follow HarderFaster :: Other Features By Agnes Klos: Back2Basics - 10 Years of Party Productions & Tomorrowland Stage Hosts Atmosphere Records - The opening of IBIZA 1936 Entering the world of Waldfrieden in Germany with DJoanna Piracy is not a crime – sail away with Feestgedruis! Progressive flavours with DJ R'Deem ahead of Neelix party 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:

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