Heading down under for the Good Vibrations Festival in early 2010, Armand Van Helden is presently riding high on the success of his disco-house collab with A-Trak under the Duck Sauce moniker, Anyway. The track is something of a throwback for Armand, who famously made his name in the funkier side of house but had been dabbling in the harder edged sounds of electro and fidget in recent years.

“I’m happy with all the things that have happened in the past couple of years,” he told American website LAist.com this week. “Around 2002 and 2003 all the indie rock kids started to incorporate dance music into their sound and now every rapper in the world is doing the same. It’s been exciting that all these people have put dance music back into the cool pages.”

Other than expressing satisfaction with where dance music presently stands in the greater scheme of things, Armand also showed there were no signs of his notoriously outspoken nature waning. Asked pointblank if he still thought trance ‘sucked’ (he’s had it in for the genre for years now!), his reply was blunt to say the least. “Yes,” he remarked. “I had a lot more fire in my younger days so I was more adamant about vocalizing it, nowadays I’m more of a lover than a hater. It’s just that it’s soulless.”

Before trance fans set about tying Armand to a stake for crucifixion, he was sure to qualify the statement. “Soul might be the wrong word cause it’s got soul to the people that want to hear it, but it doesn’t mix people, it doesn’t bring different kinds of people together, it separates people more than it brings them together.” We’re not sure that’s going to calm any Armin van Buuren fans down though.

You can catch Armand Van Helden on the 2010 Good Vibrations Festival tour, proudly supported by inthemix:

Sat 13 Feb – Centennial Park, Sydney
Sun 14 Feb – Claremont Showground, Perth
Sat 20 Feb – Parklands Showgrounds, Gold Coast
Sun 21 Feb – The Nursery, Flemington Racecourse, Melbourne