Not long ago Deep House London caught up with a good friend of our sister site, Deep House Amsterdam, one half of the mighty Detroit Swindle – Lars Vegas. A few weeks back we reviewed his latest effort with fellow Dutchmen Cleavage, which came out on Toolroom – and, so we decided to grab a quick chat with the globetrotting DJ/producer to find out what he’s been up to…
You’re on your own today, is this something you guys do quite often?
No, not often. Maarten’s a family man, so he needs time with his wife and kids – this job takes a lot out of your social life and I’m single again so for me it’s easier. For him it’s a bit more difficult, he’s on holiday in the Caribbean for a week and a half, so I’m doing this weekend by myself, but normally we do it together.
How is it being alone?
A bit strange, I mean I’ve been DJing solo for many years anyway so I’m used to it but it’s a lot more fun together, always. With the DJ sets, I never know what record he’s going to play next and now I have to select all my own records, which is also fun you know, it’s a change of pace.
You have more control I guess.
Yeah, but I think we’re a better combo together than we are when we’re separate.
Great. And how is everything going production-wise at the moment?
Good, we’re a bit slower at the moment because we’re touring a lot and we’re also working on our live set. We’re still working really hard, just not a lot on new releases. I mean, we’re always making tracks, we take our laptops with us on the plane every flight we have. But we’re working on our live set and we have our first live gig this month, with another six over the coming year. The guys from Roland decided to give us the new Aira line so that’s going to be a big part of our show.
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How are you finding it?
Really good man, really good. Before we had the new Maschine from Native Instruments, both the big and the small one, and that really became an important part of our workflow but this is a new kind of vibe, really cool.
How long have you had it for now?
Just a week, so we’ve been jamming on it a lot already.
The new toy!
Yeah [laughs].
Tell me about your track on Toolroom?
I knew the guys from Cleavage for a while already. One of them, Rubix, we had the same vibe in Amsterdam, we were playing a lot of the same parties together. He started a new project with a friend, a bit like what Maarten and I did, and they have a lot of success now – it’s a bit more pumping than what we do so I decided to work with him under my Lars Vegas monicker and the track’s really cool man.
Yeah, we reviewed it here on Deep House London actually! Do you have any residencies booked in over the summer?
No we don’t usually do residencies, because Holland is a different market for us. We’re bigger abroad than we are in our own country, but we host our own party in Amsterdam at Studio 80, it’s called The Great Escape. For the rest… we have the usual crew of friendly promoters who book us all the time.
Do you have any places that are high up on your list of favourites?
We went to South Africa recently, that was amazing. I’ve never dreamed of how it was… I can’t even explain. There were 1,200 people singing every one of our tracks, they knew everything! We went to Cape Town and Johannesbourg and we go back in October this year, I can’t wait.
Did you have much time to see much outside of the clubs you played at?
Yeah, we tried to go up Table Mountain but the winds were too strong so it wasn’t safe for them to operate the cable cars. We went to the beach and some amazing viewpoints. In Johnnaesbourg we stayed at the promoter’s house and he showed us around a little bit. Next time we’re going to stay for a week though…
How about London, what’s your experience of the city so far?
Last time we were in town we played at Plan B in Brixton, that was really good. We played in the basement with Citizen, that was a really good night. We’re doing another Plan B gig soon and then we’re doing a seven-hour all-nighter at Autumn Studios.
You must be love doing long sets? Do you get to do many of those?
Yeah, always. It depends, some promoters are cool with it, especially if you’re the only headliner they might let you go ahead and play for a long time, but if there’s more than one ‘headliner’ then it’s harder because everyone has to get their turn. But yeah, if we can we’ll play for longer.
Lastly, apart from your own music, which track are you playing in almost every set at the moment?
We rediscovered the Sunburst Band – ‘Journey To The Sun (Dennis Ferrer Mix)’ and.. it goes off man, Jesus Christ! Every time! That’s a favourite of mine at the moment. We’ve been playing a lot of stuff from a Dutch label called Outplay. All the Max Graef stuff is really good, his album is so good. I’m glad he’s making this kind of stuff. We have a new Frits Wentink record on our own label, we’ve been rinsing that; four f****** amazing tracks! That’s out at the beginning of July, so we’ve been road testing them for a while now and they go off.