About
Armand van Helden (born February 16, 1970) is an American DJ and producer of electro house music from Boston, Massachusetts. He was one of the main proponents of the genre Speed Garage, remixing various artists such as Janet Jackson, Juliet Roberts, KRS One, and Sneaker Pimps among others with this musical style. He is closely linked to the electronic music scene of New York.
Van Helden often remixes and uses samples of funk, soul, rhythm, blues and rap. He also uses filters and dub progressions, as in NYC beat, dancehall and reggae samples.
Van Helden was born to an Indo (Dutch-Indonesian) father and a French-Lebanese mother but traveled around the world as a child, spending time in the Netherlands, Latvia, Turkey, and Italy as his father was a member of the U.S. Air Force. At the age of 13, he bought a drum machine and started DJing two years later.
He returned to Boston in 1988, moonlighting as a DJ in Boston clubs. He attended college in Boston. He quit his legal-review job in 1991 to work as a remixer under the management of Neil Petricone and X-Mix. He took up a DJ residency at the Loft, a top Boston nightclub at the time. He released his first official single, a mix of Dee…