Sied Van Riel - The Riel Deal
Sied Van Riel has had an extremely rapid rise to fame in the three years he’s been on the scene. Playing Australia for the first time at Trance Energy, 3D’s Nina Bertok got to know the latest Dutch star.
Despite only arriving on Europe’s trance scene three years ago, Dutch DJ/producer Sied Van Riel is already an award-winning artist after taking out the Best New Face category at last year’s Trance Awards in London. Not bad at all for a bloke who didn’t own a single piece of studio equipment merely a few years ago.
“They asked me to play at the Trance Awards and only a day before the event my PR manager called me and said that I’d actually won one of the awards,” Van Riel recalls. “When you’re pretty much still new and starting out, like me, you don’t expect to win anything because the awards usually got to people that have been in the scene a lot longer than three years. There were a lot of bigger people than me nominated but I got the award. It’s really strange when people write about you now and call you ‘an award-winning’ so-and-so.”
Taking into account Van Riel’s recent success, the quicker he gets used to it, the better.
“It’s been a madhouse when I look back at 2008,” he says. “I’m very surprised at how much happened so quickly and how many really cool people I got to meet and the places I visited. I also released my Dedication EP at the start of 2009 so I couldn’t have asked for a better beginning of the year. MME came out as part of the EP and has been doing so well, it got to number two in the Dutch dance charts and will be going to national radio in England. I also ended up doing a remix of Cosmic Gate’s single Not Enough Time, which features Emma Hewett, who is an amazing vocalist. I’ve just been locked up in the studio and I’ll be pushing out a lot more new tracks over the next eight or nine months.”
Van Riel will get at least a bit of a break when he visits Australia for the first time in April, though not before trekking off to Canada and playing sets around Europe.
“A lot of it has to do with the fact that I have changed management companies,” he confesses. “I wanted to come to Australia earlier but I couldn’t. I was with a Dutch company until recently but now things have changed for the better, I’m getting gigs every month and things are just blowing up. One thing I have definitely learned is that you need to have the right people behind you if one thing is going to lead to another. It still feels a little bit unbelievable that I will be travelling to your country for the first time because I’ve heard so many stories about the great venues over there. I definitely expect there to be a lot of partying, I don’t think Australia will let me down.”
WHO: Sied Van Riel
WHAT: Plays Trance Energy at Hordern Pavilion
WHEN: Thursday 9 April
MORE: trance-energy.com.au / myspace.com/siedvanriel