Riva Starr (real name Stefano Miele) has become one of the most talked about dance producers/DJ in recent years. His releases are always of the highest order and they’ve been coming though thick and fast in 2010 with what seems to be no dip in quality. He’s the name on everyone’s lips this year and drew in a large number of the Big Chill revelers on the Saturday night on the Clash Music stage.
It seemed that most of the crowd had either heard about his head turning releases or wanted to understand what all the hype was about. Like a lot of the great names in dance music the Riva Starr sound is very distinctive; tough beats with a classic house feel made for the modern dance floor, and with fans ranging from Tiesto to Carl Cox and Ricardo Villalobos to Annie Mac, he manages to make high quality accessible house music that unites DJ’s around the world.
What is particularly ground breaking about this Napolitano who up until two years ago was fairly unknown is his invention of ‘Snatch’ music. Riva created the term “Snatch!” as a way of describing his bootleg remix style of various music genres – I expect this comes from his roots in Breaks which is made up of remixes and bootlegs of house, drum and bass and techno hits, so taking that into house and creating a new sub-genre was a wise move.
During his jam-packed Saturday night set at the Big Chill his sound had lots of twists and turns which created a unique dance music experience. The underlying style was a mash up of folk meets Balkan with an element of rock, giving it a gypsy spirit perfect for a festival environment. Two tracks that truly highlighted this style were ‘Bulgarian Chick’ and “Black Cat White Cat’ which both sent the crowd into a gypsy raving frenzy!
This international DJ and producer performed an incredible set on the Clash Music stage at this year’s Big Chill, and probably helped cement a fair few extra notches to his already huge fan base!
Words by Bee Adamic
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