MIAMI 2013 ESSENTIALLY
HARDWELL Check below for five of his own tunes that he’s most proud of…
“A
01. ‘Encoded’ “There’s something about that track I still really love. It was my first solo track that went really big worldwide.”
fter I do a gig, if I’m in a party mood, it’s my tour manager’s job to remind me that this is my job,” says
25-year-old megastar DJ Hardwell. “Even though when I DJ and travel it doesn’t feel like a job. It feels like a dream come true.” Living the dream, for the Dutch DJing dynamo, involved doing 250 gigs last year. This year, he says, he’s got as many lined up. And that includes his very first “solo concert” tour that he’s calling I Am Hardwell. It’ll start in Amsterdam, at the Heineken Music Hall, on 27th April. “It’s the next step in my career,” says Hardwell, whose CV, so far, includes his own solid-gold big room house hits, co-productions with Tiësto, an Essential Mix and hitting No.6 in DJ Mag’s Top 100 poll last year. “It’s going to be my own show, with my own stage. We’re going to announce the dates one by one and, at the moment, that’s about as good as it gets for me!”
ROCKING THE CROWD Before he starts his I Am Hardwell bid for world domination, the Dutch star is due to DJ in Miami, for the Ultra festival (16th March on the Main Stage), and for DJ Mag’s annual Miami Music Week pool party (20th), at the South Beach-based temple of opulence known as Delano. “I was at the DJ Mag party last year,” says Hardwell. “I never expected that I’d be on the line-up this year!” And then he’s off, talking about his latest re-edits, the original productions he’s going to test out for the show and the tunes he’s A&Red for his own Revealed Recordings label (make sure you reach his Revealed Recordings party at Mansion on the 21st), that he’ll play too. “I never play the same set twice,” he says. “I couldn’t do that. My main goal is always to entertain the crowd. That’s why I use CDJs when I DJ. I would never, ever, use a MacBook. I use a Mac and Logic Pro to make music, but I think it’s awful when you see a DJ standing there, fiddling with their laptop on stage, looking like they’re checking their emails instead of engaging with people. I want to interact with the crowd. I want to feed off their energy and for them to respond to mine.”
MAGIK MUZIK STORE That ethos has been the same since the beginning, since Hardwell first started DJing, aged 13, playing everything from salsa to hip-hop, early house tunes and pop at a local dance school (where kids learned to tango) in his home town Breda. “I bought my decks when I was 12,” he says. “They were a set of Reloops that I got from the local record shop Magik Muzik Store.”
That shop, just a few minutes from where he grew up, isn’t there any more. But, back in the days when Hardwell was better known as Robbert van de Corput, the shop was owned and run by Tiësto. “I used to go
in there and buy records and I’d sometimes see him working behind the counter, when he wasn’t touring or away DJing,” recalls Hardwell. “When I finally did meet him properly, 10 years later, I never mentioned that I’d met him before, when I was a teenager that no-one knew.”
Hardwell’s long-running affair with electronic music started way before he was a teenager. He started playing the piano aged six. As an only child, he spent a lot of time listening to the music his mum and dad would play at home. And, when they weren’t playing music, he’d turn on the radio. “I think the tune that really made things click into place for me, in terms of electronic music, was 2 Unlimited ‘No Limit’,” he remembers. “It was after I first heard that on the radio that I went onto my dad’s computer and downloaded a program to make music.” Using this program — Magix Music Maker — Hardwell put together his first rudimentary tunes. And, at that stage, he was only nine-years-old. “It was weird because none of my friends were interested, so I did spend a lot of time alone on the computer. It seemed like all the other kids my age were more interested in playing with Lego.”
MAIN STAGE MASTERY From those early production building blocks, Hardwell has gone on to carve out a career that many people spend a lifetime and more trying to achieve. By the time he was 19-years-old he’d played at every major stadium gig and festival in Holland. At that age, he says, he remembers playing the main stage at Dutch festival Dance Valley. “I was DJing to 20,000 people,” he remembers. “I was so nervous but, more than that, I was excited.” It’s Hardwell’s irrepressible excitement — he can’t stand still or stop grinning when he’s behind the decks — that makes him impossible to resist. Using just CDJs, his DJing isn’t just flawless, it’s clever too. And within the parameters of his big room, progressive house sound — playing everything from Porter Robinson, to his own tracks such as ‘Spaceman’ and re-edits (always his own) of rock tunes such as Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and Linkin Park’s ‘Numb’, he’ll tease the crowd with a cheeky acapella that he’ll weave in and out across a few tracks. “I’d get bored if I just had to stand in the DJ booth waiting for one record to nearly finish before I brought the other one in,” he reveals. “That’s why I’ll always add acapellas and make weird cuts. I’ve always wanted to be a really energetic DJ. That’s something I had in mind since I first started DJing. I’ve always wanted to entertain the crowd instead of just playing records.”
BIG ROOM SOUND This full throttle, flawless approach to his art is probably what draws gargantuan crowds to see Hardwell every time he plays. At his gigs there’ll be at least half a dozen people in the crowd holding banners with his name on them. “The big room, progressive sound I play is ideal when it’s played to bigger crowds,” he says. “And when I first
61
02. ‘Spaceman’ “It’s my biggest solo production so far. I’m really proud of it.”
03. ‘Zero 76’ “It’s my collaboration with Tiësto, and it was our first together. I still play it now.”
04. ‘Apollo’ “It’s my latest release and it’s a collaboration with Australian singer Amba Shepherd. It’s a totally different track to tracks I’ve made before. It’s a Beatport No.1 and I really like the atmosphere of it.”
05. ‘Move It 2 The Drum’ “It’s the collaboration I did with Chuckie. That was also a kind of eye-opener for me. It was more the dirty Dutch sound — that’s the bleepy stuff, like Afrojack, that’s the typical Dutch house sound.”
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98