I handed out demos to djs and sent them to labels in Finland. One night I was listening to Jaakko Salovaara aka JS16 dj at a club in my home town Turku. I handed him a demo (for the third time!) and the cd had Sandstorm on it — at that point still untitled. A week later he got back to me and asked if I was interested in working on it with him. He signed me to his 16 Inch Records as the first artist and we started our relationship, which obviously was mentor and the nobody but soon turned into a great friendship and — of course — a production and business relationship as well.

Why name it Sandstorm? It’s quite a boring story. We had a blank piece of paper and started filling it with names we thought were cool. Then we looked at the Roland JP-8080 and the sound that we used as a pad was called Sandstorm. The first version I made of this originally had a different name. I’ll never play anyone that version [laughs]. It had a vocal that I’d done myself. It was called Back In The Time, or something like that. I was humming or chanting on top of it.

Sandstorm spent 17 weeks on top of the Finnish Dance Chart. It’s hard to know the total sales this song had. The first year, I think Sandstorm sold about two million copies. I think it was the most sold vinyl of 2000. It was signed and released by Neo Records in the UK in June 2000 and went to #3 on the UK singles chart. By that time I guess it is fair to say I wasn’t exactly an unknown bedroom musician. It all happened so suddenly. I was very quickly pulled out of my old life being a student and a part time worker at an Apple store, but obviously I wasn’t and I still am not complaining!

Then it went on to sell four million, or more, after we reissued it in 2006.

Burning, composition-wise, is more Jaakko’s doing than mine. All the sessions were done together, but he’s the mastermind with the chords, definitely, on this one.

The vocal is by a guy called Rummy Nanji. I met him in Finland, but he’d been in the music business for a while. Jaakko and me had this melodic idea and needed a vocal, so we had him come over and work on it. I’m not sure where the lyrics came from, but they just came out of him. We recorded a couple of takes of him and it just added really nicely to the instrumental of the track.

Burning uses a lot of the same basic drum loops from elsewhere on the album, and the same arpeggiated basslines and stuff. The kick in the tune is from the 909, which was a real one, and an interesting thing to work with because I’d only seen those as software plugins.

I went to Jaakko’s studio and he was playing with this arpeggiated sound, but couldn’t get any further and was going to trash it. I asked if I could take it, and began working on the samples in the same way and bpm that I had been working on with Sandstorm, and it just came together.

As we were making this, Sandstorm wasn’t a big international success, but it felt natural to continue that vibe across; but when it was released I received criticism from people who said, “You’ve just tried to make a copycat record”. I understand where that comes from, but it wasn’t like that because we had no idea that Sandstorm would have such success when we were making Feel the Beat. We just had the same tools in the studio and the same vibe going on.

Time went by a little bit before we started making Out of Control, so there was a conscious decision to not use the same kind of underlying drum loops as the earlier stuff. I wanted a percussion vibe on it — the groove here relies on that. We wanted to change up the normal straight-up hi-hat pattern too. I think it’s about 137bpm, as well, which added a new flavour.

The first version was an instrumental, but then we added Tammy Marie and called it Out of Control (Back for More). That was a good move, commercially. We were worried it might be too cheesy, but I think it hit a really good market. I get asked for this track a lot when I DJ.

Besides the chords, overall slow vibe of the track, and the arpeggiated melody of the piano that comes in later, what I really like about this track is the actual vocal bit — it’s really cool.

We used the Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler, and added a female vocal sample that goes, Touch Me, Feel Me really quickly. When you put it in the sampler and create a tiny loop, then lock the loop length and assign it to a mod wheel, then scan through the vocal, it lets you advance slowly like a DJ CD player. I’d never seen that ever before. I was so excited when Jaakko showed me that. The Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler was the only way to do that back then.