Speaking of your stylistic range, here in the U.S. our media always makes Australia’s wildlife to be utterly terrifying. On a scale from Dash Berlin to Vini Vici, how scary is it in reality?
MaRLo: (Laughs) It’s about on the MaRLo point of the scale. Now look, it’s not actually that scary, but we have a lot of deadly spiders and stuff – so do you guys here in America – but nobody’s died of a spider bite since the early ‘90s or something. The anti-venom is very readily available. Yeah, you can get a nasty bite; I’ve been bitten by a white tip [or white-tailed spider] once and I got a rash, but that’s about as bad as it got.
So it’s exaggerated by the media a little bit?
MaRLo: Oh, 100%! I mean, the sharks are real. They’re really dangerous, especially in Western Australia, but a lot of the public beaches will have shark nets or electric deterrents, so I don’t reckon there are more wildlife deaths in Australia than in America.
While we’re comparing the two, you mentioned that all of your Altitude shows sold out. Now that the Dreamstate events have proven that more classic trance styles have a home Stateside, are you thinking of bringing Altitude here in 2017?
MaRLo: Absolutely, yeah. It was mind blowing to see how well it was received. We really didn’t expect it, and the venues were massive. They were really high-capacity venues, so to sell them all out took everyone on my team and me by surprise. Now that we’ve done this and seen that there is a market for it and people are interested in doing it, we are 100% bringing them to America.
I understand that you’ve also got a baby on the way! Do you think that might hamper any of these big plans by cutting into your studio or touring schedule?
MaRLo: I don’t think it will cut into any of my studio time. From what I’ve been told by other DJ daddies, you feel more focused and hungry because you feel like, “Okay, I’ve got six hours,” and you’re fully in the zone because you feel like you’re doing it for more of a purpose.
I guess you don’t really know until you’re in the moment, but I’m gonna be more selective – not tour less, but just tour smarter, in a way. I used to do six or seven-week-straight tours, and a lot of club shows. Now I’ll do less of those and be a bit more selective about which shows I do and don’t accept in order to have more time in the studio and with my baby.
In addition to your signature tech energy sound, you’re known for mixing it up a lot in live sets. How do you determine whether you’re going to do more of a tech energy, uplifting or psytrance set?
MaRLo: I’ve been DJ’ing a long time, and I think a lot of my early skills came from when I had to play recovery parties. They would run from 5:00-11:00 in the morning, so the after party sort of thing. I played there every week for a couple of years, and that really teaches you how to keep people awake, how to keep people interested, and how to read a crowd really well and figure out what they’re feeling, whether they’re more chilled out or if they wanna really dance like crazy.
I’ve been playing a long time, and in a lot of different kinds of venues. I’ve played the beach bar type of things, I’ve played festivals, clubs, warehouses, whatever. Each one has a totally different feeling, and at the end of the day, the crowd ends up determining more of what I’m playing. I really feed off of what they’re vibing on. If I see that they’re responding to a certain type of sound, I’ll go down that path with them.
If you played really dark and hard at a daytime beach club in Ibiza, it wouldn’t fit or make sense. Even though that might be your most recent release or whatever you have to adapt to the vibe that you’re booked for.
The Sequence stage here at this year’s edition of Dreamstate SoCal has proven that psytrance is one sub genre that is seeing a lot of new innovations while trance as a whole moves forward. What do you suppose some others might be?
MaRLo: I don’t know. I don’t really watch what other people are doing, to be honest. I don’t really pay attention to that stuff. I’m really focused on what I’m doing in the studio and where I play. Of course I hear other DJs play and I think a lot of DJs are doing interesting stuff, but I don’t watch what the trends are or what the hot sound is.
It’s never worked for me in the past to try and join a trend or whatever, so I don’t really see why I would do it now – and it doesn’t make me happy to do that. It makes me happy to make exactly what I like to make.
Well, what what have you made recently that your fans might not know about yet?
MaRLo: Yeah, I’ll be playing a few of them [during my Dreamstate SoCal 2016 set]: “ID” and “ID.” (Laughs) They’re by me.
This concludes our interview, but we would like to thank MaRLo for his time. If you think you can identify any of the IDs he mentioned while watching this recording of his performance at Dreamstate Socal 2016, let us know by commenting below.
Photos from #DreamstateSoCal by @
