DMb | Dance Music blog & Podcast

Gareth Emery: The Sound of Garuda Chapter 2 is a hard-hitting compilation of new club anthems and EDM hits from Gareth’s record label. Not only does the album contain new tracks from one of the biggest frontrunners young EDM producers, but it also features plenty of tunes from others on the label that range from moody and dark to fast and adrenaline-pumping. First up, Gareth Emery has two new tracks on this album that he collaborated on with other producers. The first was a project with Ashley Wallbridge, and is called Mansion. It is a club-mover, with a huge build-up that leads to some intense drops and drum sounds, and quickly falls back down after that to soothing sounds that remind me of Ashley’s remix of Arrival from the Re-lit Northern Lights album. It’s a great combination of sounds that I’ve come to expect from both Ashley Wallbridge and Gareth Emergy; electric quick beats mixed with synth and an overall tone that makes the track great for the dance floor.

Mansion moves into Craig Connelly’s Manchester Am, which has a fade back from a banging initial tune into a synth-guided drop, guided by sounds that remind me of Sander van Doorn. The track sounds like a combination of Sander’s electro sounds and Citadel overall. Damien William’s Astrolove takes this Garuda album into a housier direction, and is followed up by some standard uplifting fare from Filo and Peri with The Hardest Thing featuring Sara Crockett and Goodbye Pluto.

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Following the release of Allure’s ‘Kiss From The Past’ album on June 13th, the internet rumour mill went into overdrive. Allure was back… and how! An entire artist album, distributed in over 30 countries with no less than 14 new trance tracks featuring familiar Allure vocalists, including Christian Burns, JES and Emma Hewitt.

Tiësto’s tweet “Listen to my @allurelive project which I am involved in” further fuelled the already piping hot forums. As hinted at the legendary producer – who has been involved with Allure since day one – was passing the torch to another.

Now serving as the project’s Executive Producer, Tiësto will be taking a backseat as the project moves into a new, exciting phase. On the 8th of August 2011, 10.000 party peoplewere lucky enough to get tickets for Tiësto’s Club Life night and saw ‘Kiss From The Past’ become not its swansong, but its transitional baton pass. At Privilege, Ibiza a silhouette stepped out from behind the curtain into the DJ-booth and spotlights introduced a new face to the crowd. That DJ proceeded to fill the biggest club in the world with rapturous trance music. Allure – a new live-act – had been born and his debut at Privilege was his ‘Hello’ to trance devotees all around the globe… For those that weren’t there, you can see exactly how that went down by checking the special video of the moment here: http://www.youtube.com/allurelive For those that were, time to relive the excitement of the night again!

Ever since the very first release in 1998, Tijs Verwest along with others have been involved in the project. But as his artist career has evolved taking him in new exciting directions, he wanted to thank all those who had supported the Allure project, and step aside and allow a new generation to emerge. The guy behind the decks is the one to watch from now on. Stepping out from thedark into the bright laser lights, he is ready to conquer the world and allure you into his world of angelic sounds, mesmerizing melodies and captivating beats. You will see and hear more of him soon. Very soon! Sealed with a kiss from the past and with the future at his feet: trance family, please welcome Allure!

ElectroHouse superstar, Wolfgang Gartner, has just put together his debut artist album with 11 tracks on the CD plus 2 bonus tracks for those purchasing online. Weekend in America is out today at all the usual outlets.

Tracklisting
1. Get Em feat Eve
2. Space Junk
3. Menage A Trois
4. Circus Freaks feat Jim Jones and Cam ron
5. 818
6. Forever feat will.i.am
7. The Way It Was
8. Shrunken Heads
9. Still my baby feat Omarion
10. Illmerica
11. The Champ

“I have to make something that’s never been made before; have to make the best thing that I’ve ever done in my life – otherwise it gets stagnant or worse,” says producer/DJ Wolfgang Gartner. Whether or not his progressively more maximilist take on electro-house is your bag or not, you have to respect his exponentially steep rise through the electro-house ranks. And Lord knows, you’ve heard it — or about it: flipping Beethoven’s 5th for the 4 am crowd; eight #1 tracks on Beatport; remix/collabs with Britney Spears, Timbaland and Black Eyed Peas; festival-highlight performances at Coachella ‘10 and Electric Daisy Carnival’s ‘10 and ‘11.

Where Joey Youngman, the one-time party kid from San Luis Obispo, CA and another-time househead old soul, has been electro-house’s dark (work) horse, Weekend in America, his debut full-length for Ultra Music, is Wolfgang Gartner becoming dance music’s one-man parallel universe, outpacing electro-house and outdoing himself.

“One of my mantras is that I have a responsibility to advance the genre. If I’m capable of doing something I’ve never done before, I feel like I have to use that ability, because there are not many people who do – or can. I have to push myself real real hard to do it. That’s something that’s really surfaced with this record,” he admits. Gartner’s work ethic is mythical amongst even his most storied contemporaries: Make music all week. Play it out all weekend. His DJ sets – and this speaks to a combination of prolificness, personal taste and a proven track record – are almost entirely made up of edits of his own work. Then again, when you spend 20 hours a day working on music…
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Seems everyone is rushing to get their live shows announced with some creative way of doing a video show to hide the fact that a one-man band just physically cannot be playing all of the instruments in a song live. With a few exceptions there haven’t really been many Electronic Musicians that have put on good live shows, and the word “live” is generally used to indicate that the artist may be triggering patterns or muting and unmuting tracks on the fly but generally not actually playing any instruments live. Personally I have nothing against this, what else can really be expected of one person? One man standing in front a few pieces of equipment, generally with a laptop in tow, doing a “live” show seems to generate less excitement than a DJ behind a pair of decks playing other people’s music.

The Solution
Stand in front of some mysterious piece of gear with lots of really cool looking synchronized 3D graphics and flashing lights to distract and hypnotize the crowd while bobbing your head to the music and moving your hands around like a conductor pushing buttons and occasionally pointing to the space above the crowd.

Underworld has always been one of the top Electronic Dance Music acts to put on a great live show. They always had the visuals provided by Tomato and an energetic vocalist jumping around the stage with a guitar.

Daft Punk pretty much set the stage for the current formula being used by many artists in the Electronic Music world with their Pyramid of lights and visuals. They also didn’t really play an instruments live it was more like they were tour guides through a mash-up of their entire discography. Entertaining, no doubt.

Etienne de Crecy did in next with his Visual Cube, taking the same formula as Daft Punk and the anonymous equipment in front of him. Etienne recently released a compilation available on Dim Mak Records called Beats n’ Cubes which contains some of the music from his show.

Then came Amon Tobin with Isam and the bar was raised. Incorporating perfectly synced 3D visuals projected onto a stack of boxes, Amon and his team created a show that has left people with their jaws on the floor. He’s still touring if you (more…)

3 Days left to vote for your favorites in the 2011 Top 100 DJ List. Go Vote Now!

Bonus Video: One of our favorites, Markus Schulz, in a interview with FluxCity during his recent stop in LA talks about the Dance scene in the US.

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Niki Belucci is the symbol of beauty, charm, eroticism, freedom, sexuality and energy. Growing up, Niki had a promising background in gymnastics collecting 21 gold, 12 silver and 8 bronze medals and countless other awards. Years later, after several months in the adult industry she began to focusing on a different hobby, DJing. By then she had been performing in small clubs with her vinyl plates entertaining club goers around the country. In a real professional sense, Niki entered the club life in the fall of 2003. Thanks to her talent and ability to perform well under pressure, she had about 160 performances during her first year in Hungary and in the neighboring countries altogether. More and more new gates opened up to her in the upcoming years mainly Austria, Germany and Russia, while she also continued to perform in her homeland.

After several years of playing gigs and touring the world she signed to Unlimited Sounds, home of the D.O.N.S and only a short while later her hit album was co-produced by D.O.N.S. & DBN, the widely recognized DJ and producer Jerry Ropero and vocals were performed on it by Charles Salter (the voice of Axwell). And Niki’s success story continued…

Niki as a resident DJ has acquired increasing recognition during 2010 and following her previous success in France and Italy, she is asked to become resident at the true home of House music at Amnesia in Ibiza. With that her new home on Wednesdays is now the party island of the Mediterranean, where she is headed straight from Gabicce, Italy, her other home of the past two years.

We have been getting lots of hits on DMb from people searching for more info on Niki Belucci and now we finally have a DJ mix for our loyal podcast listeners that covers the spectrum of Techno, House, and Club music.

Enjoy!

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:02:25 — 71.5MB)

Mix Info & Tracklisting (more…)

When I first started listening to this mix I didn’t realize how long it was (5 Hours 47 Minutes to be more precise) and before long I was 3 hours in and completely lost in the rhythm. This is an amazing and flawless DJ Mix from one of Techno’s finest!

Download it now.

More about Speedy J
Jochem Paap is the Rotterdam artist Speedy J, early on in his career he was given the moniker to note his adept skills in his DJ performances. He is unanimously considered to be one of the first techno producers to come from the Benelux. Together with people like Laurent Garnier, Aphex Twin and Richie Hawtin he helped in pushing the genre on just after it had escaped the Detroit delivery room.

Since the early nineties, Speedy J has released his music on Plus 8, Warp and Novamute, while techno developed into a dominating force on many dance floors worldwide. After his seminal albums Ginger (1993) and G Spot (1995), Jochem turned left and headed for other exciting sounds.
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Electric Zoo festival is now over, and their already in the process of the 2012 festival!. Over the course of three days, there were ton’s of tracks old, new, mashups, edits, and remixes, But over here at USTM HQ we have our Top 5 tracks that just did it for us. Check out our Top 5 Tracks below. Ferry Corsten VS Armin Van Buuren – Brute Brute is a new track from Ferry Corsten & Armin Van Buuren, a