Miguel Ramirez
Cosmic Gate are gearing up for Australia’s newest music experience, Festival X, and are sure to create unforgettable memories with the Trance Family.
Both well-versed in the arts of electronic dance music, it was more than right for Festival X to lock in the legendary duo. Not only do their DJ sets stand out, so do their productions, having created some of the genre’s defining singles, including classics such as ‘Exploration of Space’, ‘Fire Wire’ and ‘Back To Earth’.
Ahead of the Festival X tour, which lands in Sydney Showground on Saturday November 30 and Melbourne Showground on Sunday December 1, we caught up with Bossi to talk about the much-anticipated festival, Australia’s music scene and all things Trance.
Check out the full interview below and grab your Festival X tickets here!
We’re thrilled to see you on the lineup for Festival X – how excited are you to return to Australia?
We actually started our 20th Anniversary Tour in Australia on New Years and it was a big show, but with Festival X, we are really excited because it brings back that real big festival feeling to Australia. We always enjoy touring with acts from different genres and we think you guys deserve a full-on festival back in Australia.
You’ve toured right across Australia for many years now, what do you love most about Australia’s dance music scene?
Even if you come once a year or every one and a half years, it’s pretty hard to actually truly know about what’s going on in your scene. What we definitely do know is that at all festivals all around the world, there is always Australians in the crowd. From lots of Aussie flags to the people in the crowd, there’s always support and we’ve never had a boring party in Australia. You guys just like to go and enjoy a good night out, which is what we can say, for sure!
Now that you’ve reached 20 years as a duo, how do you feel about where Cosmic Gate is right now and what does the future hold for Cosmic Gate?
The shows of the 20th Anniversary Tour were all freaking amazing haha! Fortunately, we are still relevant, selling out big shows and well, I think 20 years as a duo was worth the celebration. We already have new music, half ready tracks that didn’t make it on the album, so we are going to keep pushing forward.
Our new album title ‘Forward Ever Backward Never’ is not just a title to us, it’s how we feel and how we act. We’re going to release another one or two singles from the new album and then there’s going to be new music, new collaborations, new tours, new ideas, so we aren’t going to stand still, because we still enjoy doing it way too much.
What do you think is the key to your long lasting success?
I think we’ve always been writing music that we like and we haven’t followed any trends. A lot of colleagues have moved to full-on EDM, we may have some influences of it in our music, but that’s about it. We’re just always ourselves and when we do a track, it always has that Cosmic Gate imprint. It’s always been that way since our Hard Trance days and still is now, in our more progressive sound these days. We are always true to ourselves and love the Trance style of music. We love the feeling that Trance music brings. We write tracks that touch us and hopefully afterwards our fans love it as well. We just want tracks out there that touch people in many ways.
The Trance music scene has changed so much and has gone through different phases in the past 20 years, do you think Trance music is in a good place right now?
Well, I’d say yes and no.
20 years ago, Trance pretty much was of a harder style and later more fluffy beats came about, but it was all 140 BPM. When I think about it these days, there is a lot of variety. FSOE now has a Progressive label with tracks around 125 BPM and for me it’s Trance with Progressive House and it’s wonderful. Then there’s the Anjunafamily with their sound, the 138 BPM sound is also around and PsyTrance has come up for a while. So I think there’s a lot of different styles and sub genre’s within the Trance genre itself, which is maybe making it a wider scene and bigger than we’ve ever had before.
On the other hand, sometimes it’s sad to see how Trance stages get handled at festivals. It seems Trance is never really ‘cool’ for a lot of the promoters that put more money into Techno and other styles, but we feel okay, let’s show them their wrong, let’s do it better. There’s some Trance festival out there that attract 30,000 fans. Trance fans are always the most loyal, they’re real music lovers that consume the music and love the artists, that’s another big advantage of the Trance scene.
What can fans expect from your upcoming sets at Festival X? Will you be playing material from your new album?
Yes, absolutely! I think it’s a 75-minute set time, I wish could keep playing for five or six hours as we have so much new music, and if you’ve heard the ‘Forward Ever Backward Never’ album, you know there is a lot of club music, so we’d need just an hour alone for all the new tracks on the album, plus you always want to play some other classics and some of your current club favourites, it’s really challenging for us to program an hour or 75-minutes of a festival set, but of course, we’ll play a lot from our ‘Forward Ever Backward Never’ album
Do you have any final words for all your die-hard Australian fans?
Nic and I were just talking about the tour, so we’re real pumped for Festival X and to be touring with everyone, and we’ll see you guys there. We are really looking forward to it!
