Dash Berlin will return to Australia this weekend for Ultra Australia 2020.
Contributing to the international dance scene for well over a decade with monumental sets across the globe and releasing massive hits like ‘Waiting’ and ‘Disarm Yourself’ with Emma Hewitt, ‘Man On The Run’ with Cerf, Mitiska & Jaren, ‘Better Half Of Me’ and ‘World Falls Apart’ with Jonathan Mendelsohn, ‘Apollo Road’ with ATB, ‘Till The Sky Falls Down’ and many more, Dash Berlin has truly captured the hearts of global dance music fans.
Things took a bad turn in June 2018 when Dash Berlin frontman Jeffrey Sutorius parted with the group due to mismanagement and issues concerning the usage rights of the stage name, Dash Berlin. After reconciling with the other band members Sebastiaan Molijn and Eelke Kalberg last year, Jeffrey Sutorius now continues the Dash Berlin story as a solo act, and is ready to rock Australia!
We recently caught up with Jeffrey ahead of Ultra Australia 2020, see the full interview below!
We’re so thrilled to finally see you back in Australia for Ultra Music Festival! How excited are you to be returning back to our shores?
Australia is not a country you can easily tour, you carefully have to plan that, and it’s been a while! For me, to come back to Australia with the ‘Return of Dash Berlin’ is exciting, I’m really happy, I really like the crowd in Australia, the people are really rowdy in Australia, they’re quite well known for that and I cannot wait to test some of the new Dash Berlin music for the fans and supporters at Ultra in Australia, I’m really excited!
What can fans expect from the ‘Return of Dash Berlin’ at Ultra Australia and will you be playing much of your much-loved classics as well?
I get that question quite often on social media, I have to figure it out a little bit, I cater to the fans as always and I try to listen to the fans as much as I can when I’m working on the shows. The shows for Ultra are really important, they are the highlight of the year for me.
When people go to a Dash Berlin show, they feel like it’s a bit like a hybrid, which I think is a good term to describe what Dash Berlin represents at the moment. Long story short, if I can provide some of the classic Dash Berlin tunes into the show, I will try to do that 100%!
What do you think makes Australia’s dance music scene so unique?
Like I just explained, the crowd is really rowdy and they’re really into it! I know the Aussies also like it a bit rougher and harder, so usually when I go to Australia I play a little but more up-tempo orientated material when I find I have decent tunes in my grasp, they like to party, they like it hard, so I always keep that into account when I tour Australia.
Do you have much new music in the works?
Actually, I’m in the studio right now and I’ve finished some work today that I’ve been working on these last couple of weeks and I’m really excited to share that. One of the brand-new Dash Berlin tracks is ‘Wild At Heart’, which I’ve been playing these last couple of months and I hope that it’ll be released as soon as possible. Also working on other material with some known and also some unknown vocalists, so I think there could be some quite interesting for the near future. Currently with management I’m trying to decide how and when we are going to release these tracks and you know when im not touring, I have been working in the studio continuously, not only on brand new material, but also on some remixes like, some of the remixes that have come out recently were for Marco V ‘Come Back Home’ and Laidback Luke and Marc Benjamin’s ‘We’re Forever’ and there some reworks to be done, so my agenda production-wise is quite full but I’m excited to show a lot of the new Dash Berlin material.
Do you think trance and dance music is in a good place right now?
Yeah, I think in it’s a good place. Let me give you my view on this and I’ll try to keep it as short as possible.
I’ve seen that things in the US kind of stabilised more or less, you see that Hip Hop came back on the map, that’s logic if you see where that comes from culturally in the US as well, so I kind of was expecting that.
You see Techno doing really well, even at bigger events, in some cases even underground artists in the Techno scene are becoming a little bit more mainstream which is something we’ve never really seen before, which is kind of cool.
A lot of my colleagues in Trance, Bigroom and Progressive, we’ve all seen Asia opening up more to electronic dance music, especially in China. It’s such a big country and over the past year or so, the dance industry has set foot in mainland China which before was kind of a hard country to travel to and the popularity of the music was quite low, but that has now changed. I think there’s a lot of stuff to explore there, which is great!
What you also see is the uprising of unique locations on where to party, like Tomorrowland Winter edition in a ski resort! I’ve seen that in Utah, if I’m not mistaken, where I saw that concept first where people were really ready to party with the whole skiing vibe and you now see that concept spread over Europe.
I also see Australia bouncing back, there was a little bit of a dip there in the past few years, where dance music fanatics where looking at where the scene was going. Trance is going really well, and hardstyle is going really well, and I’ve seen some big events which have been going really well via social media, and that’s really impressive for a country that is so far off the map and dedicated to different forms of electronic dance music and that’s so great!
So, this is kind of a little bit like my dance weather report, haha!
I have to say, when I refer to that as a weather report, I would say the sun shines pretty happily and the skies are blue for the scene!
Do you have any final words for all your die-hard Aussie fans?
Absolutely, I’m really excited and I’m happy that people are excited for me to come back as well and I cant wait to party together again and show some of the new content I’ve been making these last couple of months and also keep an eye on the well known material of Dash Berlin as well, so everyone is going to be happy there and up in full spirit!