Rank 1

Rank 1 is the Dutch production duo of Piet Bervoets and Benno de Goeij. The two had been working together since 1997, but the Rank 1 name was launched in 1999 — and "Airwave," released that year, is the track that defined them. Built around a clean, ascending plucked-synth lead over a euphoric four-bar build, "Airwave" became the first Dutch dance track to top the European Dance Chart, reached the UK top ten, and was licensed in over forty countries within twelve months. It has been re-voted as the all-time #1 track in multiple subsequent Trance Top 1000 community polls, and it remains the textbook example of the Dutch Anthem Trance template. The rest of the catalogue sits in close orbit around festival event-anthem commissions. "Sensation Anthem 2003" was the official theme for ID&T's flagship event that year; "Beats At Rank-1 Dotcom" — a deliberate move toward a harder, more tech-trance register — was picked up as Trance Energy's 2005 theme; "L.E.D. There Be Light" became the Trance Energy 2009 anthem and was used in EDC's 2009 advertising; "Symfo" followed five months later as the Sunrise Festival 2009 theme. The duo released across Tiësto's Black Hole catalogue and the Magik Muzik / High Contrast imprints throughout the 2000s, and they were a recurring booking on A State of Trance Year-Mix tours and ASOT festival editions. Benno de Goeij's parallel career adds another layer of context. From the late 2000s onward he became Armin van Buuren's principal in-studio co-producer, and from 2012 he was the second half of Armin's Gaia alias — a partnership that ran through the 2019 Moons of Jupiter album and continued until roughly 2023-24 (after which de Goeij stops appearing in the Armin singles credits). That means Rank 1's productions and Armin's mid-period studio output share half a brain, which goes a long way toward explaining the family resemblance between the two catalogues' melodic instinct.