Sander van Doorn – ‘Eleve11′
No one does ‘different’ like Van Doorn… However it’s only stridently different if you perceive Sander as a trance artist. Many of course don’t. Viewed from our side of the floor-fence though he’s Mr. Diverse, Mr. Original and Mr. Burn The Rulebook. The artist you never quite know what you’re going to get from. For every super-strung festival-incinerator like ‘Koko’, there’s something darker, more scene-subversive – the OMD-nodding ‘Love is Darkness’ exemplifying that. Those tracks, by no coincidence whatsoever, are the first two station stops on his sophomore album, ‘Eleve11′.
‘Koko’ was one of Trance International’s summer ’11 high spots, sporting a truly original take on the euphoric trance track. Displaying the same set of convictions is ‘Nano’, whose wonderfully nuanced production (impressively packing in at least 3 floor-gripping moments in its runtime) is the album’s second trance lightning strike.
As the listener delves deeper, ‘Eleve11′s music-without-borders appeal unsurprisingly stretches much further afield. The Tom Helsen sung ‘Believe’ seemingly ducks under the EDM perimeter altogether, roaming onto Coldplay-ish terrain. Actual production team-ups don’t seem to be ‘Eleve11′s priority, but when they hit, they hit hard. ‘Rollin’ The Dice’ is Van Doorn’s hard-rocking collab with Sidney Samson and adding further weight to it, it features intriguing story-tell lyrics and no-nonsense vocals from Grammy-nommed Nadia Ali. On Sander’s Laidback Luke co-production, you’d not unreasonably expect to find the House card being played some. Surprising then that there’s not much more than a whiff of it on ‘Who’s Wearing The Cap’. What you do get is a cyclonic monster that builds inexorably, finally blazing into a tech-trancer TKO post the break. Given Sander and Luke’s much-remarked-upon, could-be-twins resemblance, it does make you wonder if they’ve ever been photographed together! The video to the single should be interesting!
Keeping that techier angle in the spotlight is ‘Drink To Get Drunk’ – a title that may well have resonance for the seasoned Doornians among you. The track was originally sung by SiA (who featured in remix form on ‘Supernaturalistic’, with Sander’s rejack of her similarly addiction-themed, ‘The Girl You Lost To Cocaine’) back around the turn of the millennium. Jenny Lindfors was tasked with covering SiA’s introspective lyrics and Sander has turned up the power on the synths, injecting the track with plenty of big room wallop and giving it a cheeky Prodigy nod in the process. Not, it has to be said, quite a cheeky as ‘Slap My Pitch Up’, whose snapping percussion and all-round dirty-distrotion sound set-up make it one of the most avant-garde tracks on the album.
sandervandoorn.com
spinninrecords.com
Few would go into a listening experience like ‘Eleve11′ expecting convention, but the flexibility of the sound-design is what makes it what it is. ‘Imaginative’, ‘Creative’ and ‘Polished’ are the keywords and in those respects if delivers!
Spinnin have given us the nod on 11 (natch!) signed copies of Eleve11 to giveaway. All you have to to do to be in with a chance of bagging and tagging one is tell us which of the following ISN’T a Sander track?!
1) Punk’d
2) Apple
3) Born Slippy
You can get Sander van Doorn’s ‘Eleve11′ now thru the following links:
iTunes // Beatport // Amazon //
Audiojelly // Trackitdown // Juno Download //