Interview with Illumination

So tell us a bit about yourself, your name, where do you come from? My name is Amir Dvir, Age 22 and I live in Tel Aviv, Israel. How did you start producing psychedelic trance? It all started when I was 15 and was playing guitar for a few years. I found some cool program for the PC called Impulse Tracker. It was actually a computer based sampler with a sequencer and I started playing with it. Back then (I feel like an old man talking :), I had no computer synthesizers like today and to raise a studio would cost a lot of money, so there was a scene of people that used these programs that also exchanged sounds between them and help each other to succeed. That's how I found trance. Actually, to my first trance party I came as an artist already, at the age of 16. What equipment do you use? Through the years, I've built my own studio with various synthesizers and instruments, there I produced my 3 first albums as Luminus and many other tracks for compilations. Nowadays, my studio is combined together with Xerox's studio. We have too many synths to mention here, but we mainly use the JP8000, Nordlead, MS2000, NordModular and Waldorf XT. Working on Cubase SX2 with a lot of vst plug-ins and instruments. Where does the inspiration come from when building a track? When we are working we mostly have a destination for this track, let's say, party, country, label, track for album or what ever and we try to get into this head. A lot of times it comes after a good party when you still have the vibes of the party. How would you describe your style? Intelligent Psychedelic Dancefloor Music. You have an album ready I heard ? Please tell us more about it. Yes, I've finished an album with Xerox (Moshe Keinan) it's called "Temporary Insanity" and it's going to be released in Hommega by the end of March. The music in it is a new wave of full on music in our opinion. Tell a little about how and why you started to work with Moshe, and how do you think this combination works and why? Moshe and I are working together for more then a year and a half now. It started from a track we made together called In & Out for his last album Frequency Drive. We enjoyed working together and we felt we complete each other. He brings his long years experience as a producer and a DJ and I bring my knowledge in composing music, computer & sound engineering. Moshe have done 5 albums already, and for me it's my 4th, we like the same style of music, we like tracks with a story and that's why we find our music interesting and full with colors. Any other projects? Would you like to make tracks with some other artists? Lately we made some tracks together with some oldies of the trance scene :) We made a track with Sandman (the track will be released in our album), a track with Chakra (will be released in Chakra's upcoming EP) and a track with Passanger (ex MFG), for his album. All of the tracks will be released with Hommega. In my short free time I still sit by myself and produce music alone, hope that one day there will be an Illumination solo album. I hope in the future to make tracks with more talented people you can learn so much from it. Whats your favorite Illumination track? Thats a really hard question, I would go for Marley On Acid Part 1+2, a track by me and Xerox that was a hit so we decided to make a second part for it in the new album. I like both parts but they are different stories. What do you think of the Psy-scene at the moment? I think the Psy-scene today has developed more then expected in the last few years. In parties, organization became more professional and bigger, as trance became more excepted by larger part of the community, more serious people entered to the organization part of the scene and the level of the production became much bigger. also trance music has reached many new countries where its still very fresh like, Brazil, Mexico, Russia and more. That attracts many new audience to the parties. Also the artists are happy now because of so many labels today, and good ones, that stand behind the artists and promote them as well. I still enjoy the vibes and the crowd of the parties very much, I still go out a lot every time I can. As to the music, you can easily notice the difference between psytrance few years ago to the music today. Few years ago the scene was smaller, more underground and more experimental and the artists felt more free to flow with the music to any direction possible because people didn't really know where this music is going to. Nowadays, music is going in one direction, more commercial, more dancefloor, much better produced and with better sound. It's simpler and has less sophisticated patterns. Thanks very much and we wish you good luck for the future!

Interview by Jeto