Rui Da Silva  - Touch Me (Billy Gillies Rework)

🇬🇧🎶DaaannyDaaanyRooohil🎶🇬🇧

To listen to Billy Gillies is to capture true joy, because every song he produces and DJ set he performs radiates pure passion and vibrant spirit.

 

The Northern Irishman’s blend of quirky Eurodance synths, uplifting trance grandeur and hard-hitting bass rhythms goes beyond catchy melodies and expert timing, as breakout hits “Lagoon” and “Youth” tap into the very essence of what makes a night spent on the dancefloor with your best mates such a special experience.

 

That’s why he’s earned more than 145 million views on TikTok, filled a Creamfields tent with thousands of ravers at 1 p.m. on a Sunday, and why he’s managed to get an official remix of Madison Avenue’s 1999 hit “Don’t Call Me Baby” after ripping the iconic vocal off the internet.

 

Crowds chant his name from Taiwan to Texas because Billy Gillies dares to do something different; something unique to himself. Now, Billy Gillies is the next superstar-DJ-in-the-making, poised to take over the world.

 

Billy’s musical obsession started in the 2000s when his older sister started buying Clubland compilation CDs and dating a local DJ. One night, the boyfriend came over and brought his decks, but when the couple left to go dancing, 11-year-old Billy snuck into his sister’s room and started playing with the turntables.

 

“I was like, ‘what is this music? I love this,’” he laughs. “On the Christmas list for that year was a set of decks.”

 

His mom delivered with his first set of Kam belt drives, and Billy’s been mad for mixing ever since. Each Saturday, he’d head out of the house with a five Pound note and spend it on a new record (Tiesto’s Traffic being particularly influential). In turn, he’d spend the next week learning to mix that record in and out of his steadily growing collection.

 

When he was 17, he got his first taste of true Clubland. A year underaged, he caught an hour-long bus from Belfast to Banbridge and talked his way into a club called Coach. Japanese DJ Yoji Biomehanika and the UK’s own Lisa Lashes dropped heavy hard-house records all night, and Billy started dreaming of his own chance to rock a crowd, proper.

 

He knew that if he wanted to be an in-demand DJ, he’d have to come up with some original songs. In 2011, he locked himself in his bedroom with a copy of Ableton Live and didn’t come out until he’d mastered the basic trance sound.

 

He fell in love with music production and started sending his tracks to BBC Radio 1 DJ Judge Jules, who played them on his show every Friday night. For 19-year-old Billy, there was nothing better.

 

After spending much of his 20s as a self-described “party animal,” 28-year-old Billy once again locked himself inside his bedroom and churned out a ton of original tunes. The result? A spot on the lineup of Luminosity 2019 alongside major trance legends Paul Van Dyk, Ferry Corsten, Gareth Emery and more. He played a set of all-original material, and when a recording was posted to Soundcloud, it earned more plays than any of the headliners.

 

“I’d brung a fresh sound into the trance scene,” Gillies says. “Everyone was making the same type of thing, where I just look back at my influences growing up and crammed it into the main trance style.”

 

International booking requests flooded in, sending him to Argentina to Australia—and then COVID struck. Many of his peers saw no point releasing music to a locked-down crowd, but Billy saw a chance to experiment.

 

“People need music in hard times, not just for clubs,” he says. “The music I was making around that time was proper emotional melodies, and it was resonating with everyone.”

 

He’d share each tune in a rough clip to Facebook or TikTok, and every post brought shares in the thousands. His fan base wasn’t just growing, it was ballooning, due in part not only to his masterful skills in the studio but also his effervescent personality that spills into each tune.

I mostly enjoy trance, but also appreciate techno, hard-house, EDM, Indie/alt, and most genres (Should Have just said 'eclectic' here, really :D). Pretty much, what I listen to is very mood/emotion-dependent.

The Northern Irish club scene has spawned many talents over the years, but nothing quite as intimate as CODE2.

DJ duos are a plenty in trance, but husband and wife DJ's are certainly not the norm as this awesome twosome bring their own kind of energy to the forefront of every track and live performance.

The CODE2 project was born in 2020 but Andy and Barbara Irvine are no strangers to the DJ life having served their time in and around the NI club scene for many years. This dedicated duo first appeared under their MR&MRS DJ alias in the hard dance/hardstyle scene, playing and running nights at huge events and clubs such as Q Dance, Planetlove, TFI Fridays, The Coach, Precious, La Lea, Coast, Bar 7, Beach, as well as gigs in Ibiza, spinning at world famous white isle superclubs Es Paradis and Eden. When it comes to trance, supporting artists such as Bryan Kearney, Solarstone, Giuseppe Ottiviani, Simon Patterson, Jordan Suckley, Sean Tyas etc has been this 'work hard party hard' couples bread and butter. Andy & Barbara first fell in love with trance in the late 90s/early 2000's explosion, frequenting clubs such as The Coach in Banbridge and The Network, the infamous allnighter in Belfast.

On the production front the pair signed their debut track “WHO” to Aria Digital and have the support of a true UK legend of the genre. With influences ranging from Giuseppe Ottiviani to fellow Northern Irishmen Simon Patterson and Sneijder (especially the Afterdark sound), you will come to recognise the CODE2 stand out production ability and should brace yourself for the uplifting, psy, tech trance and hard trance bombs to drop!

CODE2 say " After 10 years away from the DJ and promoting side of the industry we always stayed in touch with the music as clubbers and we really caught the modern trance bug. The new generation of NI artists, promoters and clubbers built up such a good scene again and created a big buzz and making the scene the biggest its ever been here before the pandemic hit. During the first lockdown we put the heads into producing, it's something we always dabbled in but wanted to learn more about, now we're addicted to the DAW! People might think we're mad launching a new project when the club scene is in such trouble but the passion and drive is back for us. Making music and mixing again has been a welcomed distraction from the current state of the world, we both started off in trance, we first got speaking through our love of a trance track, we raved and DJed together for years and now we find ourselves back full circle and ready to bring CODE2 to an even wider audience "