Ahead of his label debut on ENPROG this Friday, we had a chat with StanV about his upbringing, favourite tracks and dream collab along with breaking down the main inspirations behind us upcoming track. 'A Little Brighter' is out this Friday.

1. How did you start producing music?

To answer this question I'll take you back to 2003. As an 11-year-old kid, at that point in time, I'd always been a bit of an 'odd one' with my music genres. Listening to Belgian dance acts such as Fiocco or The Mackenzie, most fellow kids usually called me the 'untz-untz-untz guy'. Cue the sudden popularity of a certain track called 'Traffic' by a guy with the name of 'DJ Tiesto' as he was still called back then. After hearing that one, I had to go and find out more about him. I went out and got the DVD of 'Tiesto In Concert'... fast forward to 1 year and about 100 plays later, my parents took me to Tiesto In Concert in Belgium. I can tell you; being 12 years old and seeing that kind of insane solo DJ production left an impression on me that will never fade. I knew I wanted to do something like that, but it did take me a few years of trial and error with a bit of regular DJ'ing on the side before really starting to create actual tracks around 2010. Initially, I went fully into the direction of the EDM-craze back then, trying to make music that would work on a Tomorrowland main stage. In 2011 a bootleg/rework I made of the famous 'Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know' suddenly made it onto Tiesto's radio show Club Life - you can imagine what that meant for me, him being the reason why I started the whole thing years earlier...

After that, however, I kind of burned myself out trying way too hard to fit into a genre for the sake of trying to become popular. With life, love & work taking up the main portion of my days after that, the music went on a bit of a hiatus in my life. It was only around 2018 when things finally clicked and I decided to just make the music that I love... not caring about whether it would 'work' or get played. And here we are.

2. Where are you based - what's the music scene like there?

I'm born and raised in Belgium, more specifically somewhere in the middle between the cities of Brussels and Antwerp. In terms of electronic music, the scene is heavily focused on the darker genres over here, with the likes of Charlotte de Witte, Joyhauser or Amelie Lens being real techno strongholds.

Admittedly, pure trance & progressive is highly underrepresented over here, although I have to say that stuff like CamelPhat or some of Eric Prydz's stuff does manage to break through. Not many people will want to admit it, but to me, a lot of that stuff can also be considered 'trance' in its purest form.

But in general, I find it a bit sad to see the genre in itself being that alienated over here, because our history with it is so rich. Guys like Push (M.I.K.E.), Airwave or Svenson & Gielen and labels like Bonzai Records formed a lot of the people & labels that are currently running the scene. Not even talking about & 'Eurotrance/Dance'; acts like Ian van Dahl or Lasgo that crossed over into the USA, and are recently popping up again in those countries with a great sense of nostalgia to it. I don't know how many people realise that a lot of great trance melodies actually originated in Belgium and that it can have an equal say when talking about the early concepts of trance & progressive when comparing to countries like Holland or Germany.

3. What's a random fact about you?

I cannot read any music, I haven't had any music theory schooling and I can't for the life of me play an instrument.

Apparently, this is a surprising fact for some people because the type of music that I'm putting out is very melodic with lots of layers upon layers, but I really am just... doing something.

Obviously, I have read the odd intro-to-chords-and-scales, but I can honestly say that 95% of what I come up with is purely based on drawing in the notes and trying to 'feel' something.

Sometimes I wish I'd have some sort of skill at playing the piano, for instance, but I guess years of simply listening in detail to music I love has yielded its own type of skill? Don't get me wrong - I'm still beyond jealous of anyone that's able to skill fully make up melodies on a keyboard, and I consider them much more talented than I am!

4. What are your top 3 tracks of all time regardless of the genre?

Oh dear, this changes from day to day, but right now I'd say:

Tiesto - Suburban Train

Push - Strange World (2000 Remake)

Fictivison vs. C-Quence - Symbols

They're all trance from the early 2000's - what a surprise.

While thinking about this I wanted to act diverse and add the odd Daft Punk or Prince song to it, but I'd honestly be lying if I'd put those above these tracks.

5. If you could play any festival main stage in the world which one would it be?

The A State of Trance main stage anywhere would be pretty sweet... But: being from Belgium and having visited almost every year since 2010, playing on an A State of Trance stage, or something 'trancey' in general, at Tomorrowland would be absolutely nuts.

Although I have to say that I'm a producer first and DJ second, so I'd probably pass out from the nerves before hitting play on the first track.

6. What's a moment in your music career that will stick with you for the rest of your life?

Well, that would be the very first time something of mine got played on the A State of Trance radio show, back in August 2020. And to add to that, it was played by Ferry Corsten... together with 'old' Tiesto probably the guy with the biggest influence on anything I make. I've listened to that show so much since about 2006, I've listened to so much of all the projects that Ferry's been involved in... I never would have dreamed to reach enough quality for my work to be featured alongside such incredible talent. Knowing that so much amazing music comes out each week, it's still mind blowing for me to think that something of mine was deemed good enough to feature somewhere in those weekly 2 hours.

7. If you could have a studio session with any musician dead or alive who would it be?

In terms of electronic music, I'd love to see the craft of the guys from Daft Punk at work. Just being in their presence and taking in all the expertise they have in terms of production techniques, sound design, sampling, mixing et cetera.

Going broader than that, I would love to work with film score composers like Hans Zimmer or the late Ennio Morricone to see what kind of melodic ideas could originate there.

I listen to a lot of film scores when not listening to four-to-the-floor type of electronic music, and it's something that I would one day maybe want to try and do myself as well. Although I do know that not having any kind of musical background could become even weirder or more difficult when looking at something like this with its strong link to classical music... but hey, one can try?

8. What DAW do you work off of? And what's your favourite feature of that DAW?

I use Ableton. I had a brief spell with FL Studio right at the very beginning when I was trying out music production, but I quickly switched over.

My favourite element would be the Audio Effect Rack, which makes it possible to quickly combine a bunch of effects such as delays, reverbs & saturation, while also easily creating a controllable dry/wet signal.

It's such an insane help in terms of workflow and getting things sounding good very quickly.

9. What can we expect from StanV in the future?

As someone who has grown up with the sounds of the late 90's and early 2000's trance, and being someone who takes massive inspiration from this era, I really want to bring that sound to the current day with a fresh take on it. Music with carefully placed layers of sometimes very simple melodies, but when combined together creating a palette of atmospheric, hands-in-the-air sounds.

Aside from that more general mission statement, I'm also really looking forward to a bunch of collaborations that I've been working on over the past few months... including a few of them with friends that I've got to know over the past few years, but also some surprising projects with people that I've been looking up to for a long, long time as well. And those may actually even be very closely connected to the Enhanced family...

10. What does 'A Little Brighter' mean to you?

It's an impulse of uplifting, positive vibes. Something we all dearly need these days. The song really came about starting from the dynamic twirling melody, and just came together with the right type of top melody and the perfect vocal sample summarising the whole feeling of this track. I'm beyond excited to see this land on such an iconic label, and I do hope that the Enhanced-fans can also find themselves in the positive vibes being emitted from this track. Let's all go shine A Little Brighter.

You can listen to 'A Little Brighter': Here

Don't forget that you can keep you with all of our latest releases on Spotify:

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