intentionally always do that. I over-think things anyway, and that can tend to come out with regards to the feelings you get from the tracks that I make. It’s not always intentional, but no matter how I start a track, it never ends up that way.”
The trend in trance at the moment has seen the genre steering down the path of the more progressive, groove-driven stuff. “Yeah, these records are working extremely well in DJ sets. It’s difficult to see what other direction it could have gone in, because it couldn’t really have gone any faster in terms of tempo. I think a lot of DJs are realising that if you bring the tempo down a little bit, you’re gonna make a lot more people happy, especially in a nightclub environment. “The contrast that’s developed, though, is that this rocking club sound does work. It works with a vaster audience and it can connect with more people at the same time, whereas the more traditional, emotional trance connects purely with the trance fans. And I think those trance fans have been left to suffer a little lately; a lot of the producers who were making good trance are now making good progressive trance, which is working for the clubs, probably more than it’s working for your emotions and feelings. So it would be nice to hear a little bit more thought, soul, melody and emotion in these tracks, because I think these people deserve it.”
How do you balance the need for tradition with that sense of adventure that you try and bring to your work? “That’s a good question, because that’s one of the hardest things to do. To try and fulfill certain criteria; to try and combine some unique and different sounds, while still keeping it grounded in some of the genre’s conventions, but also keeping the groove, which has always been an important part of my music. Trying to fit all of those into the one track is hard enough in itself, and to get them all working together on an album was one of the hardest things.”
What do you see yourself as first, a DJ or a producer? “That’s a question that everybody asks, but to be honest it goes totally hand-in-hand with
VOCAL ACCORDS Andy Moor’s vocal techniques
One of Andy Moor’s signature production techniques over the years has been his twisted take on one of the trance genre’s equally loved, and derided, conventions — the female vocal. Things are never straightforward in an Andy Moor record, and the vocals in particular are often chopped up, time-twisted and otherwise electronically altered to offer them a strangely alluring and otherworldly feel. You can hear these distortions across nearly all of his tracks; from his heavy-duty collabs with Above & Beyond, to his solo singles like ‘Fake Awake’, across to his haunting remix that Armin van Buuren curated on his classic ‘Universal Religion’ mix way back in 2004. The iconic female vocalists have lined up to work with him on ‘Zero Point One’ — Betsie Larkin, Gabriela, Carrie Skipper and various others who have whispered sweetly over trance records in recent years. “I think I possibly used too many vocals in the end,” Moor concedes. “But that ended up being more of a challenge for me, to make the album work in that manner, as if it was a collection of tracks, and without creating a mix of some sort.” Whichever way you look at it, that’s a lot of different voices on ‘Zero Point One’ that have been stretched, reversed, pitched up, toned down or passed through an FX unit; and Moor has found a stack of different ways to turn tradition on its head.
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me. I pretty much enjoy doing both at the same time, and I think I would be a worse DJ if I wasn’t producing, and I’d be a worse producer if I wasn’t DJing. So they compliment each other.”
How do you see your future as a DJ and producer, are you committed to the progressive trance sound? “Yes, definitively. If I had time I’d like to dabble in other genres, especially to just experiment with new things, but my real heart is in this music, because I like the combination of the different elements. You’ve got the groove, you can up the power and the energy, but you can also include a lot of emotion in there. When you combine them
all together, it’s a very interesting genre to be in. For the foreseeable future, this is definitely it. As long as I can sustain it, I’m here.”
Do you still see a lot of space within trance to continue to innovate and do new things? “Yes. And there is more now than there used
to be. Before, I might have been producing one particular sound, and then another producer would release a track that might be tagged with a completely different sub-genre, though it was something that was quite similar really. Now it can all just be classed as ‘trance’. As long as people don’t criticise me for doing that, then I’d like to continue doing what I’m doing.”
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