- published: 11 Jan 2008
- views: 1115435
William Orbit (born William Mark Wainwright, 15 December 1956) is an English musician, composer and record producer, perhaps best known to most for his work on Madonna's album Ray of Light. He has won three Grammy Awards for his work with Madonna. He produced 13 by Blur and remixed some of the songs on the album.
William Orbit was born William Wainwright in London's East End in 1956. His mother, of Italian and Swedish descent, and his father, from Yorkshire, were both schoolteachers.
He does not have a formal education, having left school at 15 and being entirely self taught. Aged 16, and living in a squat in Norwich and working as a strawberry picker in the summer, he started to devote himself to guitar playing.
Living in squats around Europe and working at various jobs, hotel kitchen worker, motorbike messenger, at a ladies shoes factory, as an accounts clerk (in the days before computers), a night shift worker at the old Heineken Brewery in Amsterdam, junior draftsman at a North Sea oil rig design company (he was 'creative' with his CV') and so on.
Ferry Corsten, also known under the alias System F, (born 4 December 1973) is a Dutch producer of trance music, in addition to being a DJ and remixer. He also hosts his own weekly radio show, Corsten's Countdown. He routinely plays at events all over the world with crowds in excess of tens of thousands. In 2009 Ferry Corsten ranked #7 on DJ Magazine's annual Top 100 DJ Poll, dropping to #9 and #18 in subsequent years.
Ferry Corsten was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands. He has produced and remixed under many aliases since the release of his first record at the age of sixteen, but he officially started to work as a musician when he was 17 years old. As a teenager he saved money to buy his first keyboard by washing cars, and selling mix tapes to kids in his neighbourhood. He later began to perform live performances with a friend and won his first award "De Grote Prijs van Nederland" at Holland in 1989. He eventually released a record with a couple of friends when he was just sixteen years old and later began releasing self-made productions while he grew up in Rotterdam in the 1990s, producing underground hardcore gabber tracks, later expanding into club-house and trance music. His first single to reach a chart position was "Don't Be Afraid" under the alias Moonman, which was only the start for becoming a composer as well. In 1997 Corsten and his partner Robert Smit established a dance label named Tsunami with the Dutch based dance company Purple Eye Entertainment b.v., this junction made the creation of another label possible; Polar State. Ferry Corsten was studying to become an Electrical Engineer, so he went to the Technical Training School and after that Higher Technical Education.