A few days ago VICE released an interesting documentary about one of the most iconic songs of all time, Sandstorm. It’s only about 15 minutes long, but it’s a pretty fascinating look at how a song created by a no-name producer from Helsinki Finland became a global hit. Darude (AKA Ville Virtanen) takes you through how his iconic song came into existence, his rise to fame, and how pop culture continues to keep the legend of Sandstorm alive.
Sandstorm was produced with Cubase on an Atari SD (with a classic black-and-white screen). All filter sweeps/level fades, build ups and drums were all manually done. This instrument rack literally had 4 hands on it to produce the final song live and in real time. If anyone ever tells you that electronic music producers aren’t real musicians, just think about how that had to be done back in the day.
The part of this video that really stood out to us was the story behind the legendary ‘NA NA NA NA’ lead. This iconic 16th note melody was something Darude dug up an old file from his archives nearly two years after he had created it. He loaded it up, added some distortion and the Sandstorm lead was born. It just goes to show that even the best ideas have to sit on the back burner for a while until the time is just right.
As the documentary rolls along, People close to Darude talk about his rapid rise to fame and how it took two weeks to go from a total hobbyist, to seeing his music being played by DJs around the world. During this segment it highlights the gatekeeping that often occurs within the music production scene. A lot of the local DJs in Helsenke were pretty bitter about Sandstorm’s initial success and didn’t feel that Darude ‘paid his dues’ so to speak. “Darude was a little of an outsider in that DJ scene, he wasn’t a DJ in the beginning. He started DJ’ing after that success that he had. All that thing was very new for him in the beginning, but he learned very quickly… as it was very important to him – to find a way how to do it…that he had to prove something very quickly…” Since Darude wasn’t a part of this “Inner Circle” of well-known Djs in the city, he felt that there was a lot of people striving to keep him on the outside as he didn’t rise up through their ranks to achieve his success.
There was also an interesting discussion in regards to Sandstorm and it’s existence within pop culture. There was a strong resurgence of the song via memeification through a popular League of Legends player. Sandstorm was being played on his stream while thousands of people watched. Many of these viewers spammed the chat asking what the song was. At that moment, the response of “Sandstorm by Darude” anytime a viewer asked a question (regardless of the tune playing), was born.
The next resurgence of the song was on April Fool’s day in 2015. YouTube’s ‘prank’ that year was the addition of a small button the lower right side of all videos on the platform, “add music.” This button (once pressed) would instantly add sandstorm to EVERY SINGLE VIDEO you’re watching.
The short-form documentary ends with the most pressing question on all of your minds, “How did the name of Sandstorm come about?” In a pretty hilarious fashion, Darude explains that there wasn’t any moment of clarity or deep, passionate story behind the name. It was simply a startup message on the LED screen of his Roland JP-8080. “When you pull it out of the box and turn it on, the screen reads “Sandstorm.” Boom.
Not a super in-depth documentary from a music production standpoint, but it’s pretty entertaining glimpse into the Sandstorm phenomenon. As this is a part of the Vice a series called “The Story of,” it’s produced in a way that gives a high-level look into this world to appeal to a much wider audience beyond producers.
Let us know what you think below.