background. Prydz grew up in Stockholm, Sweden, under the eye of a disco-loving mother, and gravitated to conventional instruments such as piano, drums and the guitar. When he wrapped his ears around electronic music, however, he was hooked. “I got really swept away when breakdance got really popular,” he says. “It absolutely blew me away.”
From there, he went backwards, delving into the discographies of electronic pioneers such as Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode and Alphaville. More than anything, the prepubescent Prydz wanted a synthesizer so he could perhaps recreate the music of his new heroes, begging his parents for one. “I nagged them for a year and a half, and they gave in and bought me one for Christmas. After that,” he says, “I was hooked.”
As for proper DJing, that came a bit later on. “I must have been thirteen or fourteen when I got my first decks,” he says. At first, DJing was just another hobby for Prydz, who found time for weekend gigs at a local youth center. “Then I started skateboarding, and it was all about that,” he says.
He took a break from DJing, only to pick it back up on a whim a few years later. “I started DJing at friends’ parties in Stockholm, and then I landed my first residency at a very legendary club called The Rainbow Room.” Located within a larger club called Sturecompagniet, The Rainbow Room functioned as something of a “gay VIP bar”, as Prydz puts it. “It was very small,” he says. It held maybe a hundred to two hundred and fifty people. The atmosphere was just out of this world.” It was there that Prydz cut his teeth DJing, playing for six hours per night, sometimes with nary an eye on him. “The first record I would put on, the only people I’d be playing for were the bartenders.”
STeVe winwOOD Such an incubatory environment is vital for
the development of any sort of talent, as the long hours and low pressure allowed Prydz to hone his craft. “You can say that’s where I learned how to DJ, program a set, learn how to read the crowd. It set the foundation for me as a DJ. The way people responded to me and my demos kind of formed the way I make music and arrange music.”
These days, The Rainbow Room is no more, having been turned into the ladies bathroom after the club went under new management. “I remember when that happened,” Prydz says wistfully. “I promised myself I’d never set foot in that place again. It was sad, man. It felt like the end of an era.”
These days, it’s easy to see that Prydz has put the hard-earned lessons of The Rainbow Room to good use, having managed to keep it real when he just as easily could have taken the money and made a run for it. Consider the case of ‘Call On Me’, his 2004 massive Steve Winwood-sampling banger and still his biggest commercial hit to date. Its success is due in part to its distinct, ‘80s-inflected video, which features provocatively-spandexed women engaging
in a series of even more provocative aerobic exercises. The video helped propel the song to worldwide renown (it’s the most- downloaded music video in Australian history), but the funny thing about the ‘Call On Me’ music video is that Eric Prydz had no idea that it was going to look like that. Speaking to DJ Mag UK in 2010, he said, “I remember being in Ibiza, and (my label) sent me a clip of the final video on email, and I checked it out in the hotel lobby and was like, “Whoa, what is this?” He would go on to say, “Before the video and all that, ‘Call On Me’ was actually a pretty cool track.”
LIBErATIOn At the same time as he was experiencing
widespread success, Prydz decided to unshackle himself from the chains of his newly big name. He formed a record label, Pryda Recordings, and assumed the moniker of Pryda. “It’s kind of a concept label,” Prydz says, “because you’ve got Pryda Recordings, but the artist name is also Pryda.”
Largely avoiding conventional promotion, Pryda Recordings nevertheless found quick success amongst dance enthusiasts whose gazes were still pointed towards the emergent rather than the established. The idea was to hark back to Prydz’s younger days as another record collector, allowing the good music to organically work its way to the fans. “You start digging, you start searching,” he says. “That’s what was fun for me.”
As for the content of the label itself, well, owning a label on which you’re the sole artist certainly has its merits. “If I want to make a twenty-minute track, I’ll make a twenty-minute track. If I want to put an ugly cow on the record sleeve, I’ll do that,” he says. “I started Pryda for that reason — so I could have a forum to do exactly what I want.”
Hearing Prydz say this, it’s easy to connect the dots between the liberation afforded by the Pryda moniker and the nonsense that Prydz has gone through with instances such as the ‘Call On Me’ video. “I set the label up because I was fed up with record companies telling me how to make music, which track I should release, that the artwork should look like this, or that it should be promoted this way,” he says.
When producing, Prydz doesn’t have much in the way of a formal creative process: “I just sit down and let the inspiration flow.” Depending on the way things turn out, they get tagged under his own name or Pryda’s. “The difference between Pryda and Eric Prydz,” he explains, “is that normally, Prydz has the bigger-sounding records that have kind-of crossed over, whereas the stuff on Pryda is underground music for dancefloors.” There are exceptions to this rule, however. Both ‘Pjanno’ and ‘Proper Education’, two of his larger hits, were released on Pryda Records before making waves on the dancefloors and finding themselves getting picked up by Ministry Of Sound Records and hitting the top of the charts.
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The stories behind both of these tracks are compelling, one speaking to Prydz’s ability to pull off casual brilliance, and the other a testament to his unquestionable status as a “big deal”. Now known as a neo-house anthem, ‘Pjanoo’ was created by Prydz on a whim in 1996 when he’d had a bit too much to drink, and then completely forgotten about. He rediscovered the track in 2008 and played it in a club, where it then took on a life of its own, a fan’s video of the set becoming a YouTube sensation before its release. The track’s timeless, dramatic piano line was later repurposed by Rockstar Games as the theme to the trailer for The Ballad Of Gay Tony, their expansion pack to the massive, music-packed crime videogame Grand Theft Auto IV.
‘Proper Education’, meanwhile, is effectively a remix of the Pink Floyd track ‘Another Brick In The Wall, Part II’, ditching the swing of the original track and replacing it with a driving backbeat. Along with ‘Call On Me’, it helped solidify Prydz’s reputation as the go-to guy for flipping prominent samples into proper dance tracks, which is how many in the mainstream have come to (incorrectly) view Prydz.
Fresh off the heels of his three-disc Pryda album, which collected the best of his work from the last eight years with brand new material, Prydz is on a promotional blitz that involves a summer in America on the ID tour, and then a month-long encampment in Ibiza (we’re jealous too), with plans to release a proper Eric Prydz album, “hopefully at some point during the summer.”
At the end of this musical marathon that demands to be completed at a sprint’s pace, Prydz is simply going to kick back. “I’m just going to clear the calendar, turn off my phone, hang out with my family and do absolutely nothing. I’ll need to reset after the summer.”
For a guy who reigns supreme as one of the world’s top DJs and producers, Prydz aspires merely to the novelty of the mundane. “It’s just those normal, everyday things in life that are a luxury for me,” he says, such as: “Going grocery shopping, hanging out at home with my daughter and going to the playground, normal everyday stuff.” It’s a noble plan, the trailblazer taking time off to just be himself. As with everything else Eric Prydz has done in his career, we bet he’s going to kill it.
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