The Votes Have Been Counted!

The ballots boxes are closed, the votes have been counted. The most important poll in the world of dance music is set for release!
Strap yourselves in tight and set your expression to shock. This year's poll contains some major surprises. With only three non movers - no position is safe!

DJmag's extended presence in Brazil, Mexico, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine has given the poll an unprecedented level of exposure. New voters, exposed to new sounds, are changing the shape of the competition!

This year's controversial poll contains no less than 25 brand new entries and an incredible 35 climbers! Some big guns have taken massive falls as a wave of youthful talent sweeps through the prize positions. The whole pack has had a massive shake up and makes for fascinating reading.

The full results will be revealed at a star studded bash at London's infamous Ministry of Sound on Wednesday 29th October. The line up is coming together as we go to press, but expect a host of top DJs celebrating their success in the poll, and partying side by side with the people who voted for them!

So book the Thursday of work and come down to the club to be amongst the first to hear the results and to party through the night in an illicit midweek stylee! Tickets are £5 on the door and all profits go to the Royal National Institute for the Deaf - so you can do your bit for charity too!

For those who can't make the party in person - the Top 100 DJs issue goes on sale on the same date - and comes equipped with TWO FREE CDs!

M_nus maestro and technical wizzard Richie Hawtin serves up a dose of completely fresh unreleased techno, mixed in his trademark choppy, energetic, unpredictable style.

PLUS

Jason Herd brings the summer memories flooding back with an uplifting blend of vocal house and dirty electro exclusively for DJmag!

Don't you dare miss it!


www.DJmag.com

Fleet of Foot

Armada announce epic Ibiza plans


This summer season, the White Isle is set to rock like never before. Each Tuesday, Armada will be blasting Ibiza’s Amnesia with their biggest and best line ups so far. Now in their fifth year, the clubbing institution, masterminded by world’s No.1 DJ Armin van Buuren, is set to introduce a house flotilla to its epic trance fleet, with Contact taking over the terrace to bring a funkier element to their groove Armada.

Kicking off on 17th June, each week, a renowned label will be invited to rip up the terrace, with Toolroom and Yoshi Toshi already confirmed. The line up is already looking bananas, with Sharam, Mark Knight, Laidback Luke, Seb Fontaine, Tocadisco, Matthew Dekay, Martijn Ten Velden, Brian Cross, Richard Dinsdale, Cedric Gervais, Mar-T and Kurd Maverick all playing.

Meanwhile in the main room, it’ll be Armin’s first summer as king of the DJs, and accordingly, he’ll be pulling out all the stops, playing an astounding 11 weeks out of the 14 week season. He’ll also be recording a special ‘A State of Trance’ mix at the venue, and hosting one of his infamous Armin Only events – two nights which are guaranteed to raise the roof. Joining him will be Markus Schulz, Marco V, ATB, Hernan Cattaneo, Sharam (Deep Dish), Rank 1, Matthew Dekay, Menno De Jong, Blake Jarrell, John O’Callaghan, Gareth Emery, Glenn Morrison and many more. Ibiza 2008 is looking that much hotter now!

http://www.djmag.com

Back to the Old Pool

3Beat's old skool house extravaganza

The grand cities of Liverpool and Manchester have always enjoyed a simmering, sibling rivalry - always trying to outdo one another, whether with nightclubs or football clubs. Football and house music remain the twin religions of these cities; made manifest in bricks-and-mortar by Anfield and Cream; Old Trafford and the Haçienda.

3Beat is in much the same vein – a record store opened 18 years ago by Jon Barlow (a Mancunian based in Liverpool) to stem the tide of record buyers heading down the M62 to Eastern Bloc in Manchester. A lot has gone on in the intervening 18 years – a lot of reasons to celebrate. Most of us have 18th birthdays, so why not a record store? The party – Back To The Old Pool – involves a lot more than some limp balloons and crumbling cake. 3Beat have taken over the Carling Academy venue, and flown in one of the true originators, Marshall Jefferson, as well as tempting legendary vocalist Ce Ce Rogers to join him on stage for a rare PA. Inside, the venue is big and it’s wall-to-wall wrongness - stripped-down, bare-knuckle raving of the finest order. The main room involves a bar at the back, stage at the front and all manner of weird and wonderful Scousers in-between.

“A lot of people have come through those doors,” says Jon, “and we wanted to give them a reason to come out and have a bit of fun with us again.” They’re having that, Mr Barlow - a mix of old heads who have dusted their dancing trousers for one last waltz with a sprinkling of young bucks who have come out to see what all the fuss is about. Marshall delivers big time, spinning massive classic after classic and it’s rewarding to discover, through the fug of a life spent in discos, that you can still remember the words to ‘Where Love Lives’.

Things really take off when Ce Ce Rogers takes to the stage. In between chats with the crowd about love and life he belts out ‘Someday’, the track he recorded with Jefferson some 20 years ago. They love a good sing song, do the Scousers. There is something in the water of the Mersey, in the genes of Liverpudlians, that makes them impossibly, infectiously melodic. It would seem the Mersey beat is now three-times as strong. 3Beat is the heartbeat of Liverpool, an urbane metronome to which the city ticks.

* The next Back To The Old Pool party is on Saturday 1st March at the Carling Academy in Liverpool, with Alex Paterson (The Orb), the FBI Project from Italy and Voodoo DJs.

Techno

Techno is a form of electronic dance music that had its early beginnings in Western Europe in the late 1970s[citation needed] and later developed and established as a genre in Detroit, Michigan during the 1980s. It was influenced by Chicago house, electro, New Wave, funk and futuristic fiction themes that were prevalent and relative to modern culture during the end of the Cold War in industrial America at that time. Following the initial success of Detroit techno as a musical culture — at the very least on a regional level — an expanded and related subset of genres in the 1990s emerged globally. The popularity of techno in Europe peaked in this decade. Today the popularity of techno is widespread. It may be the most popular genre in Central Europe and Eastern Europe, especially Poland, Germany and Russia.

The term "techno" is derived from the word technology. Music journalists and fans of the genre are generally selective in their use of the term, careful not to conflate it with related but distinct genres, such as house, trance and hardcore. At the same time, "techno" is commonly confused with general terms such as electronic music and dance music. Electronic dance music has many forms, one of which is techno.