John Dahlback has just fi nished up a tour which saw him hit North America’s big- gest cities including Toronto, Edmonton, Miami, Vegas, and LA as he brought his Mutant sound stateside to school this new generation of ravers in a wide range of quality house music. Being in the scene for over a decade, John has become a veteran of quality production work and continues to throw down amazing sets. Throughout his career, John has had the opportunity to work with plenty of the industry’s top talents like Sebastian Ingrosso, Da Fresh, Mark knight, Dirty South, Dennis Ferrer and Tim Berg. It was an honour to have a chat with him.
We started off by talking about sources of inspiration, and for John it’s all about studio time: “I have been working my ass off in the studio lately and am pretty much set for the year to be honest. It’s been really good, I have been fi nding new stuff in the studio and getting inspiration from a lot of music that’s out there now and I feel like I’m in a really good place.” Having the industry grow so rapidly all over the globe, there are things that certain DJ’s would love to see change or growth in. John’s opinion didn’t differ very much from my own. “House music is so big now and it’s great. I think as a whole that if only a percentage of people who went to the more commercial shows, went home and searched for other artists in the house scene it would be amazing for them to explore music more. This popular- ity boost has allowed me to see a rise in ticket sales so that’s really great.”
Many artists are now collaborating with more mainstream acts to push their sound into a new demographic, and there has always been a debate over how that helps grow and expand things for artists and the scene as a whole. On the subject of John’s work with Lady Gaga he had this to say: “for me when I decide to remix that sort of stuff it’s more of out of a personal interest. I don’t bother so much for it in a sense of making my career bigger. It’s an honour to make a remix for such a big artist like that, but most of all it’s for the pure production nerd in me. I love seeing how people mix and write their stuff. Getting parts for a lady gaga track gives me the chance to be like ‘oh ok they do it like that.’ It’s really great and I have a lot of fun doing it.” It is great to hear that the top acts like John still take pleasure in learning new and interesting techniques from any genre or style of music, just for their own personal curiosity. John goes on to describe how he approaches that style of music when walking into the studio. “I change from day to day. Sometimes I can say ‘ok I’m going to do a tech house track’. Then other days, I’m going to do a really big track and it’s because I get bored easily. I can’t make the same sound for a long time because I would get bored and basically not go to the studio. However if I change sounds it is more inspiring to me. I did a sort of Indie/ambient album last year and it’s because I wanted to make something completely different, and I’m always going to be like that. I have so many weird sort of Indie stuff just lying around in the studio for when I’m not feeling funky house”