It is right around this time every year that a ripple of sorts rolls through the fabric of electronic dance. In the same way as it’s the green-light time for Hollywood to start unleashing its block-busters, so it’s also the ‘all-clear’ for EDM to start 'talking summer'. One of the first big-hitters off the blocks will be ’10 Years of VANDIT’ - Paul van Dyk’s summation of the first decade of his epoch-making record label… After a pair of killer warm-up/ sell-out nights at Space in Miami in March, this month he’ll be weighing anchor a-proper on the goliath 10th Anniversary summer tour. On Saturday the 29th he’ll be playng the Kulturhaus Astra in home-city Berlin, ably supported by Giuseppe Ottaviani, Filo and Peri and Alex M.O.R.P.H. The following night on Sunday May 30th (yes, don’t panic, the Bank Holiday!), Paul, Giuseppe and others will shift their attentions to the magnificent art deco confines of London's O2 Academy in Brixton. With a capacity of close to 5,000, the Academy (a must-play for artists as much as it's a must-visit for music lovers) will pound to the sound of VANDIT as never before. If you're in either Berlin or London on the May Bank Holiday weekend and are in anyway serious about your trance, they will not be nights to miss! We’ll be back to tell you more about the 10 Years CD in July. In the meantime though keep a close eye on www.vandit.com, www.paulvandyk.com and Paul’s Twitter for all the breaking news!

Picture the scene: its 11.59 on the 25th of December 2009, the last (official) crumbs of festive gluttony have been swallowed and clubbers, audio lovers and generally right-minded people around the world’s minds are fast returning to what we spend most of the rest of the year thinking about! Trance music! If you’re in central Europe on Boxing Day, therapy, as the saying goes, will be close at hand as Leon Bolier throws open the doors of the very lovely Club Poema in Utrecht for his Streamlined – The Event. A man who’s had quite a bit to celebrate of late (a whopping, righteous jump up the DJ Mag chart for one), he will be trucking in some very special spinners to lend close support to the night. Aly & Fila, Marcus Schössow, W&W and Misja Helsloot will all be assisting in the clubbing, calorie-reducing event and spinning some of the finest tunage around. If you think you’ve already seen the album event of the year, well, you might have thought too soon! If all this sounds like its right up your straat and you don’t want to miss out, you can grab your tickets now through Timoco.com, priced at a very reasonable 15.00 Euros a pop (or a still pretty darn good 20.00 on the door). C’mon and Club It Christmas 09 style! Tickets For Streamlined // Leon's Website

2009 will very likely go down as the year that the Enhanced stable (including of course its Progressive & Digital Society flavours) reached the major leagues. Hitting that critical axis of quality & quality, they’ve set more than one future star in motion and that in turn has brought a vastly increased supply of weapons-grade tracks to our doors. This coming Friday they’re going to sign the year that almost was off with a final club extravaganza that will again bring Enhanced sound to the famed confines of the MyHouse club in Leeds. Marking the UK debuts of many of their international cast of DJ/producers, Ferry Tayle, M6, Sequentia & Joni Ljungqvist will join the big boss Will Holland and Sergeant at Arms Temple One in a concerted effort to rip the club’s roof clean off its supporting bricks. If you like the sound of 3 rooms, a fairly staggering 30 DJs and an attempt at some euphoric structural re-engineering then hit the Leeds trail on the night of the 11th of December and watch it all come right!

Out Now on Enhanced:
Solarity’s ‘Laika’ (Ashley Wallbridge, Ad Brown & Arty Mixes)
Temple One’s ‘Sahara Nights’ (Steve Brian & The Flyers & Mike Sonar Mixes)
Forthcoming from Enhanced:
Will’s own ‘Things That Happen’ (Temple One & Mystery Island Mixes)
XGenic – ‘Around Me’ (Steve Brian,
The Flyers & Mike Sonar, Maarten Hercules Mixes)
Estiva & Temple One’s ‘November Lovely’ (Estiva & Temple One mixes)

From its reasonably humble beginnings, just 5 years ago, Track It Down.net’s Trance Awards have burgeoned into the definitive year-on-year picture of what & who are hot in trance. Polling in the ‘09's poll has just gotten underway through the dedicated site and this year it’s an open ballot again (so you can vote for whoever you jolly well please!). So… land o’ trance, it is, as they say on Saturday night TV: make-your-mind-up-time! Put your thinking caps on, focus those grey cells back and think which artist, DJ, remixer, radio presenter, club event and festival has made your last 12 musical months pop!

Then get over to www.tranceawards.com anytime before the 29th of this month and pop your e-ballot down the wire. Remember, as those politicos say: if you don’t vote, you can’t moan about the outcome! The Trance Awards come to a big conclusion on the 9th of October at the Ministry of Sound where winners will win… and winners will play (well some of them at least!). This year though it could also be you behind those world-famous turntables! In conjunction with The Gallery, TrackItDown.net will be giving 4 DJ knights their chance to shine. If you think that’s sounding sort of like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, you’re probably right!

All you need to do to enter the running is put your latest (and very preferably greatest!) DJ Mix in the post to: Trance Awards DJ Mix Competition, Trackitdown Ltd, Tower Bridge Business Complex, K304, 100 Clements Road, London, SE16 4DG. Don’t forget your full contact details (including your name, e-mail address and day & night time telephone numbers) along with your entry. Winners will be judged on mixing and presentation and will be contacted shortly after the close of the poll. Full details are on the website.

Best of luck to you all!

Like Sasha & Digweed, Venus & Serena and Vodka & Coke, parties & beaches are one of the best combos ever thought up! After all, the only thing better than throwing shapes inside a club after dark is throwing them outside, during the day, looking at the sea, with the sun on your face! That’s a concept far from lost on Menno de Jong as he puts the finishing touches to 2009’s Intuition Summer Festival. Now one of Holland’s most anticipated dance all-dayers, this year’s event will go off like a bloody great big trance rocket on the 8th of August. Featuring 13 pulse-pounding hours of dance energy, it takes place in The Netherlands at Bloemendaal on the Beach.

Geographically positioned, with brilliant strategy, just 25km from the central hub of Schiphol Airport, it’s providing phenomenal access from Germany, France, Britain, Belgium and beyond. The line-up for ’09 is just as tempting a proposition too, with (in strictly alphabetical order) Activa, Andy Moor, Alex MORPH, Cosmic Gate, Inpetto, Menno, Myon & Shane 54, Ruben de Ronde, Topher Jones and Wippenberg all currently centring themselves for the big day. If you can find a better trance line-up anywhere in the western hemisphere (or the eastern one for that matter) on the second Saturday in August, we’ll eat our collective hats!

The presale has already kicked off in earnest and with over 70% of the allocation already sold the time to secure your golden sandy ticket is NOW.Priced are a highly economical € 17.50 (that’s €1.59 per DJ or if you prefer €1.34 per hour’s entertainment!), you can get hold of them via www.intuitionevents.com and www.aldaevents.com, as well as in all Primera stores around The Netherlands. Ever the gent, Menno has given us 2x2 sets of Intuition Summer Festival tickets to give away. If you fancy walking through the door for gratis, enter our draw by clicking here and simple tell Trance International the name of your favourite Intuition, Intuition Deep or Stellar release!

When you think about it, could he really have named it anything else!? May 29th sees the always-one-step-ahead Sander van Doorn knock down the doors of the Ministry of Sound with his new club concept… Dust Till Doorn. Giving you 3 x the Sander for your folding stuff, he will be playing a troika of bass-bin-busting sets over the course of the night, interspersed by (no-doubt!) killer turns from Simon Patterson, John Rundell and Gallery residents Gavyn Mytchell & The Viceroy. Then, retracing the steps of the first Balearic warriors, D.T.D. will shift its attention from South London to the great White Isle. The Ibizan leg, which goes off at Eden on Sunday 7th of June will have Cosmic Gate, Sean Tyas and that man Patterson again all in close spinning support. Reaching right around the globe over the coming months Dusk Till Doorn nights also feature some highly-sophisticated visual flair. Brought to life by onedotzero-industries who’ve previously created retina-burning audio-visual experiences for Nitin Sawhney, The Pet Shop Boys and Q-Tip, its sounding (and looking) like the next step in in-club entertainment. Tickets for the M.O.S. leg will be available direct from the Ministry website and the Ibizan edition via Eden’s box office. Very likely, we think, not one to miss. STOP PRESS: Following his recent remix of The Killers ‘Spaceman’ and his Top 20 European Robbie Williams hit ‘Close My Eyes’, Van Doorn (in what is regarded as the Holy Grail of dance producer remixes) has just put the finishing touches to remap of the new Depeche Mode single ‘Peace’. Keep a close ear out for that! // www.sandervandoorn.com

It’s January. Bloody January! The month when our waist lines and bank balances are most uncomfortably (and noticeably) heading in opposite directions. Wondering what we could do to bring a ray of sunshine into the Trance International readerships temperature-challenged lives we spotted Mike Koglin had debunked to Australia for a whacking early ‘09 tour. So we thought ' tour report'! Over to you Koggers! G’day from down under! Mike here, reporting from a suitably sunny New Zealand, where I’ve just played at the Auckland-based Oxygen ’09 New Year’s Eve. A top, top night, cracking venue, great people, and boy do they know how to party! Following two dates in India I took the 16-hour flight to Brisbane on Dec 25th, which meant Christmas kinda got cancelled for me this year. My first gig in Australia was at Family in Brisbane; a big club with a stellar sound system, and a ram-packed audience. It was the usual haze of beers and tequilas but I vaguely remember getting back on the decks at around 6am for a back-to-back session with Charlotte Birch, playing at 150 BPM – Jesus! The next morning it was off to Progression in Sydney where I hooked up with all-round top fella Daniel Kandi - playing to a die-hard trance-lovers crowd. The following morning I took the plane to the next gig in Adelaide - ten planes in ten days and god knows how am I ever gonna offset my carbon footprint! The promoters promptly took me to a festival which had Public Enemy headlining, before playing at the club in Adelaide. As it turns out, the whole P.E. crew was on our plane to Auckland. Flavor Flav running up and down the aisles shouting “yeaaaaaah boiiiiiii!” every now and then - great to see he’s still got the energy after all these years! Fellow DJ’s be warned it’s true what they say about NZ immigration. Both me and Kandi got questioned and searched into little pieces on arrival. And they only just stopped short of getting the rubber gloves out. I’ve heard others weren’t so lucky! The first half of my tour done, I’m off now to China for a couple of gigs in Guangzhou and Beijing before returning to Oz for two big Gatecrasher events in Melbourne on Jan 17th and Perth on Jan 23rd, I’m really looking forward to it! And, yes… pop another shrimp on the barbi!

Seemingly no sooner had all that ADE hoopla started to subside than on November 8th Amsterdam was hit by another electronic music shockwave! Menno de Jong, one of the hardest-working, fastest-acheiving men in the electronic dance game, touched his first Menno Solo event down in the Dam.

In the intimate, historic and coolly industrial Westerrunie venue in the city, he positively roadblocked his first standalone night! T.I. was on-hand to witness the eight hour set and Menno took the (golden!) opportunity to debut a great swath of Intuition’s ’09 stash. If you didn’t make it down to the night, well all is not lost!

This month’s Intuition Podcast (set those iTunes auto-downloaders now!) will feature the set in all its melodic, euphoric glory. Menno’s already (apparantly) planning Part 2 in the New Year, so fear not T.I.-ers, we’ll keep you well up to date!