Armand: Nah! Why should I be disappointed? I made the album I wanted to make.
Mixmag: Just hip hop?
Armand: Hip hop's where I'm from. I've been down with that shit since time. I'm in a constant battle with myself. I'm, like, 'why the fuck am I making house music?' It's not that I don't love house because I do. But I know that I have a passion for hip hop and the technical skills to do it well.
Mixmag: Is the new album hip hop?
Armand: No. This is pure house. With a twist. Pure house to blow up the spot. You know, some people may be able to see some speed garage flavours in there or whatever. To me, it's house music. Like the first track - my favourite track - is called 'Mother Earth'. The vocalist is Tektiha from Wu Tang and it's on a more spiritual vibe, like my personal philosophy.
Mixmag: Which is?
Armand: You can't take without having to give back. Not just from the earth but in life too. I don't know, maybe that one's not for the dancefloor because it's not an 'up' vibe. But who knows? In the right setting? On another track I work with Common Sense, on another I sample a wood saw. It's lots of different sounds but all good house music. '2Future4U'. That's what it's called.
Mixmag: Sounds like a diss to producers who've copied your style.
Armand: It's not a diss. It's about an attitude, a state of mind. What I'm saying is 'this music is 2Future4U. I am 2Future4U.' That's why I want the company to put it out around September-October time; so it still sounds fresh. Then the next album a couple of months later.
Mixmag: The next album?
Armand: We cut like 24 tracks so the next album's already finished. I hadn't been in the studio making my music for, like, more than a year so there was a lot of creativity there. But the next album's some crazy shit. Like me and Junior (Sanchez) are rhyming on one joint.
Mixmag: So are you going to be an MC?
Armand: I don't know. I've got the dope lyrics but maybe not that distinctive style. We'll see how the track is received. Maybe it'll give me some confidence. At the moment I don't have the confidence to get up on stage.' When we walk into King Size it seems hard to believe that Armand could ever protest a lack of confidence. The dressy Athenian crowd may or may not recognise him, but they part as he crosses the dancefloor. Maybe it's his B-boy style, maybe it's the Latino good looks (probably not, since they're two-a-penny in Athens), but mostly it's that easy swagger that only New York B-boys can muster. He lopes behind the DJ booth where Vasilis is trying to kill any atmosphere with a patchy set of sombre trance and bizarre Hellenic melodies, repeatedly punctuated by infuriating effects box whistles (well, I guess it is his club). At the sight of his star performer, Vasilis nods conspicuously to two statuesque blondes who approach Armand and begin to whisper in his ear. He listens for a second, looks them up and down and turns to me. 'This is a terrible record,' he says.
When Armand gets behind the turntables, the mood is immediately lifted, the dancefloor fills and the crowd starts moving. He eases into his set with some happy handclap vocals, before shifting up a gear to those familiar rolling basslines and funky breaks. A couple of hours in and he's happy to drop bomb after bomb after bomb - 'Horny', 'Gusto's Revenge' and 'Belo Horizonte' - sliding the basslines in and out with the dextrous fingertips of an expert lover. Best of all, Stardust gets a seemingly endless workout, cutting from deck to deck in an ongoing series of peaks. Even the beautiful people of Athens who seem to dance with the clothes rod of fashion firmly up their arse begin to boogie with something approaching freedom. He listens to his new tracks on the headphones but his suspicions were well-founded; the quality's poor, not worth the acetate they're pressed on.
Armand's set sounds like it has been lovingly crafted, practised and rehearsed in hours spent bent over the Technics. At the end of his set, therefore, it is something of a surprise when he reminds me that he wasn't able to pick up his own records in New York.
'I hadn't played some of that shit before,' he admits. 'I was, like, putting it on the turntables and going 'Yeah. This is dope!'
So does he still enjoy DJing?
'Of course. When you're a DJ, you're always a DJ. But my favourite time now is, like, every weekend when I'm over at my house with a pretty large sum of people and we'll party 'till the break of dawn. My big thing at the moment personally is 70s and 80s rock. Shit you would not believe - The Blue Oyster Cult, Bryan Adams, Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, Steve Miller. We play that shit back to back for hours. Junior, Roger (Sanchez) and me. Just killing it.' Seriously?
'Of course! That's the trouble with you in England. You don't know where you're going 'cos you don't know where you've been.' It's that whole observer, perspective, big picture thing again. Armand knows where he's been (all round the world, all round the dance music spectrum) and he sure knows where he's heading. It reminds me of the last thing Armand said as we were standing on the beach outside Privilege.
'My new philosophy is to be a humble hustler. How can you hustle with ethics? How can you hustle without upsetting the karma? You can do it. You just don't burn bridges and you don't fuck people because what goes around comes around. Humble is the light side, the hustler is the dark side. It's about balance. Light and dark. If every day's a sunny day then what's a sunny day?' With that, Armand heads back up the beach and into the club. When we rejoin Vasilis, the owner, we find that he's replaced the bright yellow lights with some dark, moody red gels. Armand was right. It looks a lot better.