Push

Mike Dierickx — best known as Push and M.I.K.E. Push, born Dirk Dierickx in Antwerp on 20 February 1973 and legally renamed Mike Dierickx in 2000 — is one of the most prolific producers in Belgian trance history. He has released under more than eighty-five aliases across three decades, including Push, M.I.K.E., Plastic Boy, Absolute, Solar Factor, Return of the Native, and Cosmo Kid, with the Push alias reserved for his most anthemic uplifting work and M.I.K.E. for darker, more techno-leaning material. His career changed in 1998 with "Universal Nation" on Bonzai Records — a 138 BPM melodic-build trance record whose plucked-lead motif became one of the most-played peak-time anthems in the genre's history and earned multiple dance music awards and became one of the most widely distributed trance records of the era. "Strange World" followed on Bonzai in 2000, "The Legacy" charted at #22 in the UK in 2001, and "Tranceformation" with Globe in 2003 closed out his early canonical period. He has remixed Sinéad O'Connor, Moby, Armin van Buuren, Bomfunk MC's and Ayumi Hamasaki across the catalogue, sat as a key figure in the Bonzai Trance Progressive editorial line through the 2000s, and released across labels including ID&T-High Contrast, Avex (Japan), Atom, Filth on Acid, FSOE, and Armada Music. The 2020s have been productive rather than nostalgic. The Push Forward imprint became his primary label home, releasing the Neon Life album (2020), the Scope album (2022), and the Mark Sherry collaboration "Big Things Have Small Beginnings" (2022). His March 2026 single "Back When We Believed" on Solarstone's Pure Trance NEON sub-label marked a return to the long-form melodic-build template that defined the Universal Nation era, and is the lead single for the Known Universe album scheduled for summer 2026.