Matt Darey is ranked number 51 in DJ Mag Top 100 poll. Having made an impact on major DJ names like Paul Oakenfold, Tiesto, Armin Van Buren, Paul Van Dyk and Above & Beyond, to most he is known as a master trance DJ and producer that has dabbled a little in breaks. More recently he’s been moving into the electro and house genres.

The man himself clocked into for a set at Rise on Friday night, and earlier on in the evening resident Simon Barwood was warming up the crowd nicely as he always does, using trance as his palette on this Friday night. And then in the first hour of Saturday morning Matt Darey kicked off his 3-hour set…

The crowd was ready for some trance that was destined to be ‘beautiful’. But from the first track we got massive trance build ups that climaxed instead to an electro beat, slow and uninspiring. And so it was with most of Matt Darey’s set, each track had a long, powerful trance build up worthy of Sensation White that then bottomed out and fell into electro or house. Think of Tiesto’s epic build up of Adagio For Strings anti-climaxing with Put Your Hands Up For Detroit. Honestly it wasn’t quite this bad, but it’ll give you an idea of what we were hearing that night

Perhaps I’m being slightly too harsh but we were all waiting for our trance fix, especially those who missed out on Armin Van Buuren a few weeks ago. It wasn’t all bad and everyone was dancing and having a good time, and some decent trance tracks did make their way into the speakers. But all in all, it wasn’t the powerhouse set I was expecting from such a massive name in trance.
Nato followed with an hour set and Steven Tranzor finished the night off afterwards. I certainly heard a lot of genres over the course of the evening night and everybody heard at least one song they could dance their socks off too. For me personally, perhaps in the future it might pay to check out recent sets from artists who I haven’t heard in a while.