Armin van Buuren: Yes. Well, basically it was an old track of theirs and we wanted to create something new but they felt well, it was a number one hit in Holland, the pop version, and they weren't happy with the vocal arrangement. So they had wanted to re-do the vocal arrangement and we ended up putting them on the album, so it's something different.
DJ Ron: You work with both male and female vocalists - do you find one gender works better with your style of music or are you open to anything?
Armin van Buuren: I'm open to anything really.
DJ Ron: Is there anyone out there like artist-wise, that you would like to work with in the studio?
Armin van Buuren: Yes, several people. I mean, of non-trance people I would still love to work with, Enya. It might be a weird choice but she has such a beautiful voice and I'm really into her sound. Of course, some old rock band artists, perhaps Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, I don't know. I would like to work with vocalists who have inspired me a lot and who I look up to.
DJ Ron: How do you approach a vocal remix, like say a Madison Avenue or Wamdue Project, as opposed to a more instrumental-edged remix?
Armin van Buuren: I don't have a particular way of working, it's not that I always start with the vocal and then put drums underneath it and stuff like that. Nowadays I just tend to create an instrumental and hope that the acapella would sit on top, and if it doesn't I'll create a different instrumental. Sometimes when the vocal's very difficult, has a lot of harmonies and a lot of difficult chords, I try to put chords underneath it and then do a total separate drum programming and then try to fit that underneath the track. I see it as a painting, you know you have to use the sun in your painting but the rest is not defined yet, so you can basically paint anything you want. But it takes a lot of time to just set it up.
DJ Ron: How did you approach reworking your debut record "Blue Fear" for the album?
Armin van Buuren: A lot of people asked me to rework "Blue Fear" because it sounded a bit out of date. When I created that in 1996, the only thing I could use back then was a Akai S-2800 sampler. That whole track had been made in one sampler without any EQ and the only effect on the whole track is a delay.
DJ Ron: Wow.
Armin van Buuren: So it was a big surprise to me that that track became such a huge hit, because actually it was written as a B side to "X Marks the Spot" which ended up being the B-side of "Blue Fear". So what I wanted to do for the album is just to keep the original vibe of "Blue Fear", the freshness, and I didn't want to change a lot. So I did the whole track in audio and basically bounced that. All the samples you hear are the original samples of "Blue Fear", the original sounds, but recreated with an updated and fresher sound. I've tried to remix "Blue Fear" but it's just such a personal track and it has been of enormous influence for my career that it was really difficult to remix. I know in the UK they're currently looking at some big names to remix the track and I'm really looking forward to hear those mixes because I think it's a unique track, especially for the building of the trance scene in general. So it's very hard to remix such a track.
DJ Ron: Speaking about trance in general, it's been around for a while now, where do you feel the future is going with trance and dance music in general?
Armin van Buuren: Well, I think it's unfortunate and a bit of a pity the people call the music that Lasgo and DJ Sammy make trance. No disrespect to those artists because I think they are great artists, but that's not trance - it's not the trance that I call trance.