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Image credit: Kitty Su, Mumbai
Arriving in India in style, with his first ever International Club Tour around the country, Unicorn Slayer and Trance champion Markus Schulz set audiences into a frenzy of nostalgia and dancefloor-goodness. The iconic and legendary DJ-Producer carefully composed sets of authentic Progressive Trance music aimed straight for his adoring dancefloor demographic. We had a chance to catch up with the mighty producer at the turn of his tour as he expressed his views on Dance Music, his ‘rules’ for extended DJ sets and updates over his Dakota alias!
TBB: Namaste Markus! Welcome to thebanginbeats.com once agan! It’s a pleasure as always to speak with you! How does it feel to have returned to India again in such a short span of time?!
Markus Schulz: Hey guys, nice to speak to you again. I was delighted to be coming back so soon after playing EVC in December.
The past couple of visits have been on the short side, but I’m really happy that for the first time in four years I could undertake a proper tour of the country, and play for the fans in the more intimate settings of a club.
TBB: The last time we spoke, you told us how you loved the passion among Indian fans. Do you think this quality makes India one of the go-to destinations for most DJs & artists?
Markus Schulz: Absolutely. You can always tell by your social media where the most passionate fans are located, because their enthusiasm doesn’t dwindle even if there is a long gap between your tours.
Every time I come back, I can see the growth of the scene in India with my own eyes. Having important festivals like Sunburn and EVC is only going to help focus eyeballs on the Indian scene. And hopefully from that, the clubs around the country can flourish as demand to bring international artists increases.
Image credit: Kitty Su, Mumbai
TBB: Your touring schedule is inspiringly exhaustive! With so much of travelling, how do you manage with things like meals, sleep, fighting jet lag etc? What are the points to note in the Markus Schulz’s rule-book?
Markus Schulz: The two most important things are being dedicated and disciplined.
Discipline – you have to look after your body. Eat healthily, try to rest when possible, go to the gym and work on cardio. When you get to a certain level of touring, there’s no way you can afford to take on a life of drink and drugs, because quite simply your body and career won’t survive. The travel is the hardest element of the job by far. But regardless of everything, the fans are paying their hard earned money to expect you to deliver a professional performance. You owe that to them.
Dedication – it’s a life’s undertaking. There is always the next project on the horizon – the next gig, the next production, the next radio show. So you have to go in with the mindset that you have these various tasks to complete, with nearly all of them on short-term deadlines.
Once every few months however I’ll take a single day to decompress. Switch off the phone and the computer and do some relaxing things. It’s helpful for me to recharge and start the process all over again.
TBB: Your 12-hour DJ sets are something of a rewarding experience for any Dance Music fan! You’ve spoken about peaks and valleys in sets of that duration. What kind of preparation does it take, as a DJ, to perform a set of that length? How do you manage to endure physically during the longer haul?
Markus Schulz: Physically, it’s a huge challenge. For the longer sets, I actually don’t eat much beforehand, and don’t drink any alcohol at all. This way, you basically sweat everything out of your system while you are jumping around on stage; and it makes a bathroom break less of a necessity.
For the solo sets, I try to imagine the overall night as three sets combined – you have the opening portion, where you play the deeper progressive grooves and keep the mood low; allowing the ambiance to slowly build as the crowd assembles on the dancefloor. Then you have the main portion which is the usual peak hour chaos and lighting, with the big tracks and hits. And finally, when you have the room grooving in unison, then you enter the afterhours, or the rabbithole, where things get weird and trippy with various techno tracks and classics.
You know, it’s actually really difficult to mentally switch off after playing a set that long. It goes back to what I said earlier about the art of DJing – when you are up there on stage, you are constantly reading the room, trying to figure out the next track that will best match the vibe. So when the set ends and you go back to the hotel, it takes quite a while for the brain to chill.
If the schedule allows, then sometimes it’s cool to maybe stay in the city for an extra day afterwards. Getting on a plane to have to go again after a long set is tough going.
Image credit: Kitty Su, Mumbai
TBB: Also, how important is the mentality of the crowd for an extended set?
Markus Schulz: It’s crucial to be honest. There are only certain cities in my schedule where I can play a solo set – cities with a rich musical history and a well educated audience that appreciates the journey.
What I’ve really loved about the solo sets is that they have become destination points for fans of neighboring cities or countries to travel to. It’s nice that fans are meeting each other and forming real-life friendships because of their interest in me.
TBB: Interestingly, this happens to be your first “club tour” in India in 4 years. How different would you say your club sets are from your festival sets, given that you’ve played festivals in India recently over the years?
Markus Schulz: Festival sets are very much a shop window mentality. You’re playing with all the other big names, you have a short set time, and essentially you have to play safe and showcase your signature tracks. One programming mistake in a festival set and you’re in big trouble.
However, with the clubs, you have the opportunity to branch out a lot more and dictate the journey, depending on how you read the room. If you make a programming mistake, then you can correct it within a few tracks.
I love the settings of both for different reasons, but the clubs are the backbone of our scene.
Image credit: Kitty Su, Mumbai
TBB: You just released your latest single ‘Destiny’. What was your inspiration behind the whole track, and getting Delaney on the vocals, seeing that her voice fits perfectly with the track?
Markus Schulz: You know, after all the touring of last summer, I really felt the itch to undertake some songwriting. I love the art of creating, and I have a blast working in the studio alone on instrumentals, but there’s something very gratifying about writing.
Sometimes during the process of an album, you might make a music bed for a vocalist to add a topline, or you might receive a song from a vocalist and weave the music around it. But with Destiny, I was involved with the songwriting from the very beginning, and was able to envisage the music in small increments.
With my recent vocal tracks, hopefully the fans are able to feel the passion and soul I am pouring into them. Winter Kills Me with Lady V was like that, and Destiny follows the same path.
However, what I wanted to do with Destiny in particular was to present more of an old-school musical arrangement. Nowadays everyone is producing tracks where the extended mix is barely passing four or five minutes in length, but with Destiny I wanted to present the aspect of a journey within a journey – much like Perception was. So the extended mix clocks in past the ten minute mark.
I can’t express enough how incredible the response from the fans has been. And I’m delighted that everyone has been so complimentary of Delacey too.
TBB: Trance “purists” hailed you as a messiah when you released ‘Remember This’ last year. What do you say to the general criticism, that Trance music has perhaps evolved too much, and perhaps lost some of its sacred elements?
Markus Schulz: That’s very kind. To me, trance will always be defined by the melodies. If you examine how much influence the EDM / big room genre has borrowed from the melodies in trance, it’s incredible really.
What I will say is that even in the last twelve months, there are still some incredible melodies that exist within the trance genre. If a listener can emotionally connect with a melody and appreciates the soul within a track, then that is trance at its most beautiful, regardless of the other elements weaved around it.
If you take Remember This, it has the modern day basslines and percussion, but the melody probably wouldn’t sound out of place in the millennium trance era. What I’ve always tried to do is somehow present my soul and feelings into all of my tracks, and hopefully it’s something that resonates.
A lot of the Scream 2 instrumentals were like that – In the Shadows, Destino, Reloaded and so on.
TBB: This is a personal question from so many members of the team! We absolutely adore the Dakota sound! What has been the inspiration behind that alias? With two beautiful studio albums released, are we going to be blessed with a ‘Thoughts Become Things Part 3”?!
Markus Schulz: Dakota started out as an alter ego in the late 90s, and the name came from the street I lived on in Arizona.
It had a bit of a sabbatical in the mid 2000s, but came back full time in 2009, when I just wanted to spend some time alone in the studio and produce the cool, clubby instrumentals. To be honest with you, I never intended at all to produce a Dakota album of any description, so for there to be two albums already isn’t bad going!
As for a third album, I don’t know. I’d definitely like to at some point, especially if there was enough demand from the fans for it. There are quite a few projects I’ve worked on with the intention of making them Dakota tracks, but I never got round to finishing. So maybe if time permits I could revisit those.
You guys shouldn’t worry though; I’ll be keeping the alias active. I gave away the 22 minute track Doors Open on my Soundcloud a few months ago, and I can tell you that I made a brand new one to open my solo sets for 2015.
TBB: Since you’ve teamed up with Ferry Corsten on New World Punx, we imagine the studio time and touring schedules to have doubled up. How do you juggle a solo DJ career + solo music production + family time, alongside NWP?
Markus Schulz: Not necessarily. For both Ferry and I, our intentions with New World Punx are that the project will never be at the expense of our solo careers, rather a compliment. We probably only do around 15-20 shows a year, so it’s still around 10% of my shows across a calendar.
We are continually in contact by email and on the phone, and we can send each other little bounces of melody ideas to ponder. When we have a stretch of NWP shows upcoming, that is when we will get together in the studio and begin to flesh the project out.
It’s a nice change of pace, and we have a lot of fun on the road together. Ferry is fantastic company.
TBB: Your epic DJ show, Global DJ Broadcast has completed a staggering 13 years! How significant has that been in your growth as an artist and connecting with fans?
Markus Schulz: One of my babies! I am incredibly proud of the show.
It started on Party 93.1, an FM station in Miami back in 2002. The programming director had known of my Edge Factor show that I did when living in Phoenix, and he had three days of shows to fill during Winter Music Conference that year.
Where I was very fortunate was that there were internet stations relaying the FM feed, so people started tuning in from all over the world. During that period, there wasn’t the saturation of radio shows compared to now, so it was much easier for fans to seek out. Along with word of mouth about my residency at Space in Miami, they were among the most important factors for me to start being booked internationally.
Now it’s syndicated to over 80 FM, satellite and online stations worldwide, and available as a free weekly download through the podcast.
GDJB has been an amazing platform for me to break new music, and based on the reaction from the fans listening online, and relaying it through social media, the tracks which connect the most gravitate towards your livesets. You could debut a track on Thursday, and everyone in the club would be chanting or singing along in the club to it within 24 hours.
A lot of people get a little frustrated with me sometimes, because I play lots of unidentified tracks and they want to know the name right away. I actually think it helps build anticipation and increase the shelf life of a track if you have time to let it simmer into the consciousness of fans listening.
TBB: The Schulz Music Group has given us some extraordinary rising talents through KhoMha, Mr. Pit, Grube & Hovsepian and Adina Butar. What are the broader goals for this venture?
Markus Schulz: SMG was set up simply as a management and booking agency, to help promote upcoming talent and providing them with a platform for their skills to blossom.
I think it’s really important as part of your lasting legacy to the scene, to take people under your wing and guide them. The guys at SMG are continually developing and learning – dealing with life on the road and all of the aspects associated with it.
The Coldharbour Nights are continuing to expand and I’m really happy to see the guys doing well. The goal is to keep expanding and have the nights running on a weekly basis in various locations worldwide.
TBB: A plethora of artists make your DJ playlists and radio show tracklists. Who are your three favourite producers at the moment and why?
Markus Schulz: Nifra – I’m so proud of her development in the past year in particular. Her remix of my track Erase You was essential for my livesets from late summer of last year. She’s teamed up with Artisan for a track called Rampage which will be huge this year. She will be a big name to watch at the Coldharbour Nights for those lucky to see her play.
Eric Prydz – he has just been sensational this year again, and delivered two anthems already with Tether and Generate. My attention is always raised when he has a new release pop into Beatport.
Fisherman & Hawkins – or the Apache Warriors as many people call them! They are knocking out anthem after anthem this past while, and they did a great job remixing Winter Kills Me. They will be featuring on plenty of the Coldharbour Nights into the summer.
TBB: It is customary here at thebanginbeats.com, that we conclude our interviews by asking you to share with us, your #Top3BanginTracks of the moment.
Markus Schulz: Alright, a little Coldharbour trifecta:
– Markus Schulz featuring Delacey – Destiny
– Dave Neven – Drifter
– Nifra & Artisan – Rampage
Thank you very much to Markus Schulz for this great heart-to-heart interview! Looking forward to having you down in India again very soon!
Image Credits: Kitty Su, Mumbai
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