Illumination - "This is Illumination"
Acid House and Detroit Techno entered my life a couple of years before I myself entered the nineties, but I still feel that the 1990's are the true decade of dance music.
These are the years when post-disco electronic club music grew up and became both a mainstream and global phenomenon, and thereby made a difference in the world.
In 1990 I released my debut EP under the name Mental Overdrive on the now legendary (and recently re-launched) Belgian label R&S Records.
My EP consisted of 5 tracks, of which 2 of them were variations on the same tune, and my sound at the time was quite hard and noisy.
Everything went very fast back then. As we were sitting in the car approaching the cutting room; myself, label boss Renaat Vandepapeliere and stable-mates Joey Beltram and Ceejay Bolland, I was being pressed for an artist name for the record I was about to cut by Renaat, who had the sleeve designer on his oversized mobile phone while driving at more than 200 km/h.
All I could think of was "Mental Overdrive".
And so it has stuck with me as one of my most frequently used monikers, whenever I put on my dancing shoes and attempt to make some music to move a crowd.
But the very idea of me making dance music wasn't as inevitable as it might seem.
There was an "incident" when I was younger, you see.
I was about eleven, and had made my way down to the local youth club.
I danced, like any other kid, and as I was grooving along nicely to some dire chart disco that I can't remember the name of, I suddenly felt a bit too "free" on the floor, and started to get quite animated, and thereby in demand for more physical space.
This led to a sudden spastic swing of my left arm, which resulted in me knocking a bottle of coke out of the hand of the no.1 school bully, making his recently aquired refreshment relocate to floor level with a crash.
Time froze.
As if by magic, I managed to talk myself out of the situation.
As I swiftly left the club before anything more catastrophic happened, I decided that disco and dancing, separate or in combination, was a total waste of time and energy.
It would take years and years to heal this wound on my boogie muscle, and more than an adolescence - including a large music collection of bands like Einstürzende Neubauten - later, I was eventually cured by Acid House in the late eighties, and would finally dance once again.
And so - in the nineties - I found myself in the middle of the dancefloor recurrently, and had even ended up devoting my musical career mostly to create music for clubs.
The album I've selected, "This is Illumination", by the production duo of Nicholas Sillitoe and myself, seem to be a sum-up of this long journey back to the dancefloor.
The club scene in the city of Oslo, where I lived throughout the nineties, was peaking around 1998/99, with clubs like Skansen and Jazid being the places to spin, hang out and try out our new productions and remixes on the crowd.
Other producers and Dj's, like the greatly missed Erot, Those Norwegians, Bjørn Torske, Strangefruit and DJ Abstract, as well as up-and-coming kids like Prins Thomas and Hans-Peter Lindstrøm were all part in contributing to this vibrant scene.
Nick and I had a great time making this album, and as I look back at it now I can understand why dance music now has become part of our system, and will stay part of it, even as I move forward.
Much like I once learned to ride a bicycle, I seem to have let dance music into my DNA structure permanently by opening up to it in the first place.
Of course I can never re-experience the joy and thrill of getting the balance right the first time. But I still ride my bike regularly, and enjoy it a lot.
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