Tiësto & Sneaky Sound System – I Will Be Here

I’m guessing everyone here has heard of Sensation? It’s a giant international rave party franchise; enormous one-off events characterised by their all-white dress code. Click through the Sensation site and — whether it be Vienna, Amsterdam or Riga — you’re confronted by image libraries of countless thousands of luvved-up recent grads of Supermodel High wearing scraps of white tissue paper and Dunlop Volleys.
Powering all these shape-throwing, laser-lit all-nighters, is Trance — Trance music is like some four-on-the-floor sub-atomic strong force binding together Sensation’s hi-glam, unblemished vitamin-water world. Trance is all about no-nonsense synth stabs, wobbly strings and endless snare rolls, and it’s been the same equation since Robert Miles went to No. 1 with his tinkly Euro instrumental masterpiece in the mid ’90s. Its longevity says one thing: this stuff sounds amazing through big club systems, so why mess with the formula?
If you’re a venue into its electronica then I’m preaching to the choir. If you’re not, then you’re hardly going to have Tiësto pumping through the PA post the footy broadcast. But, you’re missing out.
Tiësto is big — arguably the world’s most sought after DJ — but not so big as to miss out on this interesting dalliance with Aussie disco warriors, Sneaky Sound System. And, as a song, I Will Be Here has everything… everything that every other trance hit of the last 10 years has had, that is. But it’s a bloody brilliant bass bin buster nonetheless.
The visuals are something else. I Will Be Here finds a lone Japanese office worker downloading a Tiësto cut from his Mac. Oddly, the music-to-go medium of choice is a Sony cassette which he pops into his retro Sony Walkman (no guessing who Tiësto’s signed to). There’s no need for headphones because, conveniently, office geezer has a white Tiësto-customised woofer he straps to his back, like a long-excursion, 18-inch industrial vacuum cleaner. Then Whammo! Office geezer is turned into a strobing automaton… I mean, this bloke takes ‘doing the robot’ to a whole knew cyber-dimension. One suspects he must have servos in his joints and surely must clean up as an entertainer at kids’ parties.
Japanese Robot Dude’s rear-firing dance piston pumps out the world’s finest trance into the streets of a dozing Tokyo, turning the lights of Asia’s original megatropolis into real-time spectrum analyser — the buildings throbbing away like giant LED bars.
I Will Be Here is four minutes of you-beaut euphoria, but I could watch Japanese Cyber Guy all day – oil his joints, wind him up and give him a VIP pass to the next Sensation I say. In the meantime, I’ll be looking for the extended club mix so I can experience the missing two-minute snare roll. — CH.