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Tell us about yourself and how your music career began.
I began when I was 15 with messing around with sequencers. I gave my parents a lot of headaches during that time! In 2001 I had my first release, in 2007 I got picked up by Tiësto when I was a duo as “Progression”, and he asked us to do an album and a warmup tour for his In Search Of Sunrise compilation.
Tiesto took you under his wing, what is it like to work with such a big name and be in the eyes of a vast worldwide fanbase?
That was absolutely amazing, he is a very friendly guy and I can’t thank him enough for what he did for me. 2007 was very different from now without much social media, besides Myspace, so the interaction was a lot less, but the gigs were amazing! It was always sold out, of course they come for Tiësto, but I always had amazing response on the gigs I did during the tour.
You are first a producer and then a DJ, what would you say are the key skills to
getting the right balance?
Yes I learned to produce first, after my releases came out I got requests to play in clubs and on events, so that was the next step. Learn to DJ. It was not so hard to be honest, since you understand the music from producing and you know how to count the beats etc. I am glad I learned to play with vinyls in the beginning, that was a whole other level than nowadays. I think if your music is good, people come to the party to see you and hear your music, so they would like to hear the tracks you produced in combination with other good tracks. A DJ always has to adapt to the audience, to give them a great night.
Your new track "Paradise" with Ad Brown & Ghost Wars is a summer banger..
How did you come up with the ideas for this track and tell us about the process of creation.
I know Ad already for years since we both released a lot on Black Hole recordings. He asked me to do a collab for his recent album in the first place, so we started a song and finished it later. We kept on improving it and in the meantime his album already got released. After that we finished the track we asked Chris from Ghost Wars to sing on it.