Armin van Buuren

"Armin van Buuren (born December 25, 1976) is a trance music producer. He was born in Leiden, Netherlands, but who grew up in Koudekerk aan den Rijn. In 2007, he was voted number one DJ in DJ Mag's annual Top 100 vote.

Armin van Buuren pursued his career as a professional musician despite the promise of a career in law in his native country, the Netherlands, where he completed his law degree in 2004. Armin started working as a DJ in a local night club called Nexus, finished high school in 1995 and went on to university to study law.

He hosts a weekly radio show A State of Trance, which mostly consist of progressive and other genres rather than trance. The show completed its 350th episode in May 2008, running for over 7 years.

Van Buuren began his DJ career at club Nexus in Leiden, where he learned to play long DJ sets, which were regularly six to seven hours per set. During school holidays he played more than four times a week. In 1999, he met Dave Lewis who introduced him as a DJ in England and the United States.His DJ career accelerated, entering the DJ magazine Top-100 in November of 2001 at Number 27.

On November 11, 2006 he had a live performance called Armin Only in Ahoy Rotterdam for the second time (after Nov 12, 2005) with a 9 hour solo set, where he performed to over 11,000 fans.

In the summer of 2007, van Buuren recorded and released a live set at Amnesia, Ibiza. "Universal Religion 2008" was released as a mix compilation on Ultra Records on December 4th 2007.

On January 12th, 2008, van Buuren was given the “Buma Cultuur Pop Award”, the most prestigious Dutch music award".

Extract from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armin_van_buuren

Armin in action

See Armins profile on Myspace
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=41447782

Liquidfunk Dnb

Image via Wikipedia

"In 2000, Fabio began championing a new form of drum and bass he called "Liquid funk", with a compilation release of the same name on his Creative Source label.^[1] This was characterised by influences from disco and house music, and widespread use of vocals. Although slow to catch on at first, the style grew massively in popularity around 2003-2004, and by 2005 it was established as one of the biggest-selling subgenres in drum and bass, with labels like Good Looking Records (although this label is strongly cross-genred with atmospheric drum and bass), Hospital Records, Liquid V, Shogun Limited, Fokuz Recordings, State of the Art Recordings and artists like Calibre, High Contrast, Logistics, London Elektricity, Nu:Tone and Solid State among its main proponents.<sup>[2] "

Text from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_funk</sup>

The history of House

The following link gives you a comprehensive history of housemusic and its roots in the early 80´s

http://music.hyperreal.org/library/history_of_house.html

The text is written byPhil Cheeseman for DJ magazine