Will Atkinson

Will Atkinson grew up on Orkney, the remote archipelago off the north coast of Scotland — a roughly 22,000-person islands group that has produced exactly one internationally booked trance DJ, and he is it. He has said in multiple interviews that he was mixing records at age eight and producing at age eleven, and his self-released debut "Cloud Surfing" travelled to UK trance shows entirely on the strength of MySpace and SoundCloud uploads from a teenager working alone on an island. The Subculture-era breakthrough came with "Victims," released on John O'Callaghan's Subculture label on 4 August 2014 — a 138 BPM uplifting track with BBC Radio 1 plays and direct support from Subculture's full headline rotation (O'Callaghan, Patterson, Kearney). The follow-up "Numb the Pain" landed on Subculture on 16 March 2015 (often miscredited as a Christina Novelli collaboration; her "Numb" is a separate 2020 release). He completed a BBC Radio 1 Residency in 2017, founded the Victims Helpline label in 2018, and released his debut album Last King of Scotland through Black Hole Recordings on 6 November 2020 — a seventeen-track set featuring Paul van Dyk ("Awakening"), JES, Gary Go, and Cari Golden. Atkinson's catalogue spans Subculture, FSOE, Black Hole, Perfecto Fluoro, Armada, and the Victims Helpline imprint, and his touring profile covers Dreamstate, A State of Trance, Luminosity, and Subculture's international rotation. The sound has shifted across the decade toward what he calls "trance and funky techno" — peak-time uplifting fused with techno's percussive discipline.