Armin van Buuren is a happy man, and with good reason. Holding firm at Number 3 in the prestigious public-voted DJ Top 100, he’s making the transition from talented young upstart to leading light in the echelons of trance – and beyond.
2005 has brought two new significant awards (Best Radio Show, and Best Compilation for A State of Trance 2004 at the Miami Winter Music Conference Awards), and a stunning new artist album, Shivers, showcasing his debut as a songwriter.

Affronted by the cheesy tag that dogged it for a brief time real trance has continued to grow unabated, and the WMC awards reflect Armin’s success in producing and playing quality tunes that both excite existing fans and bring new people to the scene.
“I think trance is becoming a broader term for a lot of different genres; it’s no longer a specific kind of music within the dance scene,” says Armin, widely credited with creating the blueprint track for the genre, Blue Fear, at the tender age of 19,. “Trance has elements of all different types of music.

I play a lot of tracks that are labelled as progressive, tribal progressive, techno, trance, euphoric trance, vocal trance, melodic progressive… These days it’s really hard to label a specific sound. Styles are mutating and evolving into this all-over new sound, which is basically dance music going back to its roots. There’s so much good music out there and I don’t want to limit myself to just one style.”

Born in Leiden, Holland (on December 25, 1976) to a musical family – his dad had a serious penchant for a diverse range of genres including punk and electronica “to get rid of the stress of everyday life”, while his brother is a prodigious guitar player – Armin indulged his passion for music from a young age, blowing all the money from his paper round on records.His mum won a computer when he was 10, “So as a little nerdy kid I was writing my own Basic programmes, and learnt about the technology from there.”

He progressed from making the usual tapes for his friends, put together on a cheap set of decks that he wore out learning to mix, after discovering his uncle experimenting with different sequences on his computer. “I was so amazed at what he was doing, since that moment I’ve been addicted to creating music!”

In the early 90s, Holland’s upfront dance scene meant that although Armin was too young to go clubbing, he knew the music inside out from listening to the radio. “I loved dance music immediately – this great rebellious sound that was so different to the ‘beautiful’ songs of the 80s”.

Citing electronic pioneer Jean Michel Jarre as a major influence (famed for his awesome visuals as well as his groundbreaking synth sounds), as well as Dutch producer Ben Liebrand, who later mentored him in his mixing and producing, Armin was soon cracking out consistently stand-out tunes that graced compilations across the globe, and his DJ bookings were looking pretty healthy to boot. But despite his music career taking off at such an early age, Armin thought it was wise to have something extra in case the DJing didn’t work out, and studied for a law degree.

He actually got a job offer with a law firm but says it’s not really his thing, though he does acknowledge he'd look good in a suit…

The final year of his course was inevitably stretched as he juggled his studies with his increasingly hectic schedule; his meteoric rise to fame included a slew of acclaimed productions and remixes, as well as playing out to packed clubs every weekend resonating with the vibe of thousands of happy party people. He took three years to graduate, but with typical determination saw it out to the end.

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