Ralphie B

Ralphie B is the trance alias of Ralph Barendse, a Dutch DJ and producer born 6 April 1977. His route into electronic music ran through the demoscene — he made his first digital music with music tracker software in the early 1990s and released tracks via the tracker group "Explizit" from 1996 under the aliases "Mad Max" / "Mekx". His first commercial records arrived in 1999 under the name Alpha Breed on Deal Records, and the Ralphie B and Midway aliases followed shortly after. His defining release is "Massive", signed to Tiësto's In Trance We Trust sub-label of Black Hole Recordings and released on 13 September 2003. The track was supported across the upper tier of the early-2000s trance scene and — significantly — was one of the tracks Armin van Buuren played in the very first episode of A State of Trance, placing it among the genuine charter records of the ASOT brand. As Midway he continued on In Trance We Trust through "Monkey Forest", "Inca", and "Amazon", and his remix portfolio across the same period covered Armin van Buuren, Tiësto, Solarstone, Dario G and 4 Strings. Within the early-2000s Dutch trance ecosystem Barendse sits one tier below the Tiësto / Ferry Corsten / Armin headline trio but inside the same In Trance We Trust / Black Hole editorial network that drove the era's peak-time output. He has continued releasing — including the 2025 Collide1 project with Frank Waanders ("Gravitation", In Trance We Trust) — keeping a presence in the modern label catalogue more than two decades after "Massive".