very relaxed. He has a very nice set-up, and he’s very good in the studio too, he really knows what he’s doing, so at the start we just showed each other some new material and got started. We actually made the whole basic set-up of the track in one day, and then the week after we finished everything on Skype.”
Looking towards your gigs over the summer, I think the fact you’re playing the Privilege opening party in the main room alongside Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike shows how versatile your sound is, and how much it goes beyond appealing to a purist trance audience... “I think we’ve never done the real uplifting trance, we’ve always done something different. We don’t avoid trance at all, we still always use a lot of trance elements, but we also love electro-house, progressive, even hardstyle and dubstep… we listen to everything, and get inspired by everything. Right now we can do what we want, and we can create whatever we want, and when we’re in the studio we feel that freedom. So far it’s really worked out for us. Right now we’re making a bit of the harder progressive house style, but maybe in a year it will sound completely different, it’s just whatever we want to make. We don’t try to limit ourselves to one genre.”
Earlier this year you were asked which artists influence you the most. Alongside Armin, you also listed Tiësto, Hardwell and Showtek. This says a lot I think, because they’re all artists that exist outside the trance paradigm... “Those are definitely a few of the names that really inspire us. But also, like I say, we listen to a bit of dubstep, and a bit of hardstyle, a bit of everything. If you just take the best from all those genres and blend it into your own thing, that’s the best way to come up with original stuff. Otherwise you get stuck in a certain genre, and that’s what we want to avoid.”
There’s even an element of the energy of hardstyle in your sound sometimes... “What we like about hardstyle is the harsh sounds. It sounds very aggressive, and then at the same time it’s also very clean and punchy. That’s what we like about it, it has a lot of energy, and that’s what we try to create in our tracks as well.”
The W&W sound has always been quite a recognizable one... “Even though we might have a distinct sound, we’d argue that most of the tracks we’ve put out actually sound different from the previous ones, and we don’t try and use the same formula. We have a certain view of how our tracks should work on the dancefloor, of course, maybe some techniques that we use. But we always try and do something different every time.”
The fact that you guys met at Trance Energy in 2007 is a reflection of the strong background you’ve got in trance. How long have you been listening to that sound? “We started listening to trance way back when we were both 13 and 14-years-old. Back then it was actually being played on Dutch radio, because in Holland we have Armin, Tiësto, Ferry Corsten, they were all being played. So it was kinda easy to get into that kind of music in Holland, it was very accessible. So we’ve been listening to it for around 10 years already.”
Are you still finding the trance scene exciting? “What we like about trance is the emotion, it’s in the melodies, so that’s what we try and bring to our breakdowns. I think trance is definitely one of
the most dynamic genres, because it is influenced by so many other different genres, and all the producers are so open-minded about different genres as well.”
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djmag.com
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