Ville Virtanen, known best by his moniker Darude, is a trance DJ and producer born on the 17th of July 1975 in Eura, Hinnerjoki, Finland. He began creating songs in ’96 and he unveiled the hit song “Sandstorm” at the end of ’99 and succeeding record Before the Storm in the year 2000. His sound is defined by its uplifting and progressive fashion.
Virtanen began his vocation as a novice musician when studying at Turku Polytechnic, generating tunes working with his PC’s tracker applications. As his fascination with music creation fast developed, he shifted to more significant generation methods.
When attending a classmate’s social gathering, Virtanen performed the tune “Rude Boy” (composed by Swedish musician Leila K) a number of times back to back. This attained him the moniker “Rude Boy,” which slowly transformed into “Da Rude”, which thus prompted the label “Darude”.
Virtanen carried on creating tunes, sometimes delivering demos to stations starting in ’97, and providing his songs for free on the website mp3.com.
In ’99, he offered a demonstration for “Sandstorm” to his music producer, JS16 (whose actual name is Jaakko Salovaara). Virtanen settled with JS16’s 16 Inch Records music label and soon afterwards, “Sandstorm” premiered as a single track.
“Sandstorm” would be a runaway success attaining the 3rd spot in the charts in Finland and Britain, reaching platinum record status and possessing the number one position on the Dance Charts of Finland for 17 successive weeks.
Word swiftly propagated about the song, which got worldwide accomplishment. “Sandstorm” ultimately distributed two million copies around the world, and ended up being the earth’s largest retailing 12-inch track back in the year 2000.
Soon afterwards, Darude launched his very first record, Before the Storm, retailing 800K copies globally, leading the Finnish record graphs, and winning him 3 Finnish Grammy awards.
Darude’s 2nd track, “Feel the Beat,” succeeded the prosperity of “Sandstorm”, attaining number one in Finland for two weeks and number five on the United Kingdom Singles Graph. Unfortunately, subsequent singles failed to match the success of the first two releases.
In ’03, Darude launched his next record entitled, ‘Rush’, together with tracks “Next to You” and “Music”. The 3 had small achievement, with Rush achieving number four in weekly Finnish record sales and “Next to You” being usually showcased in DJ combinations.
The track “Tell Me” premiered in Finland on April 11th of 2007 as well as “My Game” on September 19th of 2007. The Finnish launch time for the album, “Label This!” was October 24th of 2007. The “Label This!” collection is a manifestation of his namesake radio combination show, and comprises ten of his latest remix productions and eight of his much-played favorites by his local Finnish musicians and music makers.
