After starting his career at just 13-years-old, Andrei Rata is producing the sound of the future. Although, you might know him better as Andrew Rayel. This Moldovan producer is a frequent feature on Armada Music, Armind, and A State Of Trance, and now he even hosts his own radio show titled after his debut album, Find Your Harmony. Now, at 23, he doesn’t show any signs of slowing down, and although Rayel is dubbed by many as “the future of trance,” he’s something else entirely.
After enduring a mud stricken journey to the Chattahoochee Hills, we were fortunate enough sit down with Andrew Rayel before his performance at TomorrowWorld. Apart from being one of the most kind-hearted DJs out there, he has a genuine ear for music, and truly believes in the power of dance.
Read on to hear how Rayel got his start in trance, his love for Hanz Zimmer, and what he has in store for 2016.
WGTC: What do you think is going to be the biggest track of the weekend? What’s your favorite track of the year?
Andrew Rayel: Well, I’m going to have to say… I know it’s silly, but one of my recent tracks with Mark Sixma, it’s called “Chased.” It’s absolutely incredible! It’s doing so well on the dance floor; it’s an absolute killer. It’s a very acid, electro melody, and it’s got this trancy EDM house with an acid drop, so it kicks really hard. Every time it kicks in, people are just going mad! So that’s my favorite of the moment.
I know Armin plays it all the time – I think he plays on Sunday? He’s been playing it for the past two months in all his sets, so I hope he’s going to play it. It’s got the support of Hardwell, Dmitri Vegas & Like Mike, W&W, and so many other guys, so I hope they’re going to play it!
So when you’re producing, how do you go about creating such a kicking track?
Rayel: Well, it took me a while to get there, to find the perfect balance between a fat kick and a fat bassline. I mean, you can’t really actually do both in the same track. So if you want to have a really fat bassline, you have a short kick, and vice versa. But there is an exception. Sometimes it works out where you can do both of them, but then, it takes up so much space you can’t really put so much on top of it. So you just have to have some percussion or something, you can’t really use lots of leads because they take a lot of space. You don’t have to compress it so much to limit it, you’ve got to let it breathe.
You’ve said before that you learned piano when you were younger. How did you move from classical music to electronic?
Rayel: While I was studying in a musical school, I’d never been a big fan of learning how to play other people’s music, like Mozart. Even though I love their music, I didn’t like to play their music, I always wanted to create my own music. But I never knew where this music was going to go, which style I was going to choose. And at some point I heard on the radio Armin’s tracks, ATB’s tracks, all Tiësto’s tracks, and I fell in love with this music, and I felt like there was a big connection between the music I was creating on the piano and the music they were playing on the radio. I thought, “this is the music I want to create!”
So I went to – actually I didn’t go to a studio… I had a computer with some weird program, that’s where I started. But it took me years to get out there. But that’s the start! I heard this music on the radio and I fell in love with it.