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It’s a battle of the club music heavyweights in downtown Miami this Saturday. While Sander van Doorn is at Space, the producer born Brian Transeau — better known as BT — takes over the Pawn Shop Lounge a couple of blocks away. Growing up in Washington, D.C., in the Eighties, BT soaked up two major influences that would seriously mark his sound. First, of course, there was the New Wave dance music of the time. But then there was classical music — he began piano lessons at the tender age of two.
These divergent schools of musical thought would merge in BT’s first forays into production, which were mostly categorized as “dream house.” It was a pretty short-lived but wildly popular offshoot of European-style house music, all electronic and uplifting, with almost orchestral layering but delicate melodies. The most well-known example of the genre is Robert Miles’s piano-driven smash “Children,” and BT’s most well-known contribution to it is his massive 1996 remix of Tori Amos’s “Blue Skies.”
But while many of his peers would later delve into more commercial trance, BT steered clear. Instead he dabbled in mainstream music production, producing hits for even — gasp — Britney Spears and *Nsync, as well as film scores (Monster). Still, he has never abandoned his own music, even if it has morphed into something more organic and less straight-up thumping. But Saturday, performing as his Audiotherapy project, BT takes it back with a live PA focusing on his old-school hits.
