If trance is your tipple, you’re going to have a very busy Stereosonic in 2011. With the sound’s #1 ambassador Armin van Buuren in the headline slot and a fleet of leading names like Ferry Corsten, Arty and Dash Berlin also on the line-up, you won’t be short of hands-in-the-air moments. One of the outliers of that contingent is BT, a producer who’s closely linked with progressive trance but has never fit neatly within genre lines.

If you keep up with BT’s Laptop Symphony radio show, you’ll know his current tastes run from M83 to SBTRKT to Shockone to Porter Robinson to Pryda. At Stereosonic, his sets are going to have it all. Always an impassioned guy, BT got on the phone to inthemix to talk about why he’s more inspired than ever. The bottom line being: don’t come expecting a 90-minute trance set.

“There’s been an explosion of this new music and it’s really divided along age lines,” BT mused to inthemix. “I’ve noticed that your 30, 35 year olds want to get a babysitter and go to a club with bottle service and the girlfriend wants to put on pretty shoes. They want to listen to trance all night. Then your 18 to 25s, they want you to rip their fucking faces off. They don’t care how you do it. They don’t care if it’s 108-BPM Moombahton or 184-BPM drumstep; they just want pure energy. They want to absolutely cut loose.

“This reminds me of the early days of rave culture when there were no limitations other than self-imposed ones,” he continued. “Music ranged from 90 beats per minute all the way up to 170. In the same night you’d hear [L.A. Style’s 1992 anthem] James Brown is Dead, early jungle tracks, Chicago house and acid jazz. People expected different tempos throughout a night.

“Honestly it bores me playing for a crowd that wants to hear the same thing all night long. There really is a line in the sand now between audiences that want to hear raw, pure energy and just go off and then your bottle service, middle-of-the-road crowd that wants to hear, like, proggy stuff.”

And according to BT, Australia gets what he’s all about. “What’s so awesome about Australia is that for years it has been ahead of the curve. You guys have understood breaks culture probably better than any other country in the world.

“I did a Trance Energy tour there, and quite frankly it was making me crazy. Stylistically, most of the guys on that tour were playing things unrelated to anything I would listen to or play. Then I would come on and play dubstep for half an hour as a palette cleanser. And even though people were at an event called Trance Energy, they went for it.

“At Stereosonic, I’ll play 132-BPM proggy tracks like Armin’s mix of Every Other Way and take it up to 170 and play Aliens by Figure. It really ranges all over the place tonally and in terms of energy.”