Very few artists have gone beyond their own style, sounds or to put it simply in a word this artist hates – ‘Genre’. His production style is a fusion of trance, progressive and house, but he admits he hasn’t played trance in a while, meaning his live sets feature more of uplifting house music. His imprint goes by the name ‘Garuda’, the mythological bird he came to know about while visiting Indonesia, and he’s the man behind amazing tunes like ‘Sanctuary’, ‘Mistral’, ‘More Than Anything’, and ‘Concrete Angel’. Yes! It’s the British legend Gareth Emery.
One of the few artists who promoted the podcast culture from the early stages, he launched ‘The Gareth Emery Podcast’ in 2006, a one-hour long weekly podcast where he plays 15 tracks across genres and has been nominated for Best Podcast at the WMC Awards thrice. He also launched a syndicated radio show in North America called ‘Gareth Emery Presents’ and co-owned a label called 5AM between 2003 and 2008 before launching his own imprint ‘Garuda’ a year later.
Gareth Emery entered the DJMag Top 100 poll at #34 in 2006, breaking into the top 10 in 2009 at #9, and peaking at #7 in 2010. Last year, he campaigned against fellow DJ’s rigging the game by spending obscene amounts of money on publicity to gain votes for the poll. Instead, he gave fans a list of charities and asked them to vote for charities that they wanted him to donate money to, donating $15,000 to five charities eventually.
The British DJ now lives in LA with his wife, whom he married last year, and has given up playing from a CD player for live laptop usage. He released his blockbuster debut album ‘Northern Lights’ in 2010, which was rated as one of the best trance albums of the year and the first single ‘Sanctuary’ was voted as the second biggest track of 2010 by the listeners of A State of Trance and was one of the most played trance records that year.
His brand new album release, “Drive”, has already hit #1 on iTunes in the dance music category in the US and reached the top ten in over 25 other countries. It finds the 33-year-old producer taking his previous skill set and expanding it over a total variety of 12 tracks, including “Javelin” and “Dynamite” that produce a pure aesthetic that pulses through the music and the last track being a continuous mix of the remaining ones. The album concentrates on songs on melodies more, instead of the regular EDM festival drops. A few of the tracks have been tested extensively in his sets and tweaked many times based on crowd reaction (Firebird, Javelin, Layers, Entrada). Also, by stepping away from the big names, he has recruited artists from the worlds of acoustic music, some songwriters and one vocalist who hadn’t sung on dance tracks before.
The album features vocals from Christina Novelli, who also sung on Gareth’s most successful single to date – Concrete Angel.
Some other names in the album include Gareth’s Sister Roxanne Emery (Soldier), Bo Bruce (U) and Krewella (Lights & Thunder), ‘U’ especially doing extremely well. He terms DRIVE as the best work of his career.
One of the promoters of ‘cross-genre’ production, Gareth believes in ‘playing a good record’, regardless of the genre of music, and has been constantly pushing the envelope when it comes to the style of production, and you can hear it in the wide range of sounds that he releases, with a certain freshness in every track. He believes that there is so much good music out there that people across genres are producing and we agree, ‘so why limit yourself to a particular genre?’.
Check out the brilliant continuous mix of his brand new album, “Drive”!
Artist Of The Month – April 2014: Gareth Emery – Drive (Continuous Mix) by T.H.E – Music Encyclopedia on Mixcloud
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