Johan de Leeuw
In 1998 I started remixing and producing dance music together with Jef Buter, after we decided to start a project together called 2-Trance. In the years following we progressed to an outstanding professional standard, after many devoted years to the craft of remixing and producing tracks; as well as some of our own compositions. At the beginning of 2003, Jef and I achieved a breakthrough with articles in the National Press, radio coverage, and TV appearances (like SBS 6 show nieuws, Telegraaf, Noord hollands dagblad) praising our efforts for producing our first 2-Trance single “In My Dreams”.
‘In My Dreams’ caught the attention of Woody Van Eyden who immediately signed the track to ClubbGroove Records ( germany) in 2003, a record label that was partly owned by one of the artists of ‘ATB’. ‘In My Dreams’ was subsequently used in the first ‘ATB – The DJ (In The Mix)’ released in 2003 and got a full commercial release world wide in February 2006 on vinyl. This brought 2-Trance to attention of various dj’s and trance fans throughout Europe and beyond.
Alas Jef and I have now parted company. I had decided to leave the project after joining the team at “Crowd Studio”; a professional music studio owned by Marco Leeuwis a.k.a. DJ Galaga. I’ve worked at Crowd studio for 4 years (untill 2008), where I did a lot of commercial dance/pop music. One of the biggest and most successful songs that I’ve produced to date is “Henkie – Lief Klein Konijntje”; a Dutch song about a rabbit with a fly on his nose.
This song has been given a lot of television, newspaper and radio publicity in Holland and Belgium, and conquered the charts in both countries, reaching number 26 in the official top 40 chart in Holland. It also appeared on a lot of big compilation CD’s such as Hitzone 36 and Jetix kids top 20. But it is in Belgium that this song has seen its most success. It was the summer hit of 2006; the single spent 6 weeks at number 1 in their official hit chart – Ultratop 50. We’ve sold more than 20.000 records so we have an official gold record!
During the summer of 2006 I produced together with Mental Theo the Bazzheadz track “Now you’re gone” for Sony BMG, which is the English version of “Basshunter – Boten Anna”. 2007 was also a good year; Henkie – Lief Klein Konijntje (Liebes Kleines Kaninchen) was released in Germany, Austria & Switzerland with Kontor Records and I produced a track with T-spoon singer Linda Estelle for the Dutch reality television show De Gouden Kooi (The Golden Cage). The track titled “This Is My House” entered the Dutch single charts at number 26. New projects coming up soon!
