With only a week to go before the world’s #1 DJ returns to Australia for a national tour, the Sydney Morning Herald decided today to make a rather embarrassing foray into covering dance culture, by dissing the Dutch DJ – for not playing Vangelis in his sets! See if you’re able to make any sense of the article.
“The hullabaloo surrounding trance DJ Armin Van Buuren’s eighth visit to Sydney may just rival World Youth Day,” claimed the Sydney broadsheet. “As hard as that may be to imagine, the more difficult thing to contemplate is nine hours of trance. It’s a repetitive style of euphoric dance music that could make even the most resolutely lapsed Catholic opt for a nine-hour final damnation sermon instead.” Wow! So the SMH obviously isn’t down with extended sets. Keep it to a more palatable 1.5 hour festival-style set next time, thanks Armin. And try to keep those repetitive ‘doof doof’ beats to a minimum too.
“Van Buuren likens his extensive sets to family Christmas dinners spread over numerous courses and hours of feasting. He prefers these to the short ‘hamburger at McDonald’s’ sets that festivals sometimes contract him to do. Somewhere in that food analogy is the promise of variety. That is not a quality trance is revered for.” Ouch. Journalist Paris Pompor obviously aint much of a trance fan – so hold the lasers, euphoric breakdowns and definitely no PLUR please.
And one last thing – the SMH aren’t buying Armin’s claims that he’ll be mixing it up with a little bit of variety, and just won’t be leaving ‘Armin Only’ happy unless he drops at least one tune from a certain German electronic composer. “He says ‘any kind of music’, but the qualifiers arrive once he’s asked if a Vangelis record might spin in his set. We’ve heard he’s a fan of the Greek composer.” When Armin points out that it’s not then type of “dance music” that would really slot well into one of his sets, the SMH hits back with this doozy. “Either Van Buuren hasn’t heard Vangelis’s disco forays, or his definition of ‘dance music’ is quite narrow.”
Here at ITM we love electronic music of all shapes and flavour, but we can’t really imagine a time when it would be appropriate for Armin to drop one of Vangelis’s ‘disco forays’ into his set – and neither Dubfire, Steve Lawler, Derrick Carter or any of the other big-hitter DJs touring Australia for the long weekend. While it’s a given that an article in a daily broadsheet newspaper needs to be written for the broadest audience possible, come on guys: if you’re gonna throw a few punches, at least make sure your writer has a basic understanding of dance culture to begin with!
For those who are excited about Armin’s return to Australia, the Dutch DJ/producer has the following message for his Australian fans. “If we can only do half of what we did last year then I’ll be very happy, because what happened was just magic. I’ve been talking that performance for a year to everybody, that was definitely one of my best gigs last year. I really hope I can do it again this year!”
Check out our recent interview with Armin, and stay tuned for part 2 which will hit ITM next week. He’ll be playing at the following shows around the country…
Friday 6th June – ‘Armin Only’: Hordern Pavillion, Sydney
Sunday 8th June – ‘Armin Only’: Melbourne Park, Melbourne
Friday 13th June – Metro City, Perth
Saturday 14th June – Commerce Building, Brisbane
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