Electro-dance artist Eric Prydz may be afraid of flying, but that won’t stop him visiting Australia for the first time ever as a Future Music Festival headliner. “I’ve been to a lot of other places, but I haven’t been to Australia. So that alone is a pretty good reason to finally come and do this tour with Future,” he says.
This run of Australian dates will see Prydz unveil the EPIC (Eric Prydz In Concert) touring experience for the first time Down Under. “EPIC was a live show we started working on a few years back and we started out doing it in the UK,” he explains. “It wasn’t really something that we toured with; it’s bigger than a jumbo jet, it’s a massive structure, a lot of holograms and projection mapping.
“I did the EPIC 2.0 as we call it – which is the updated version – which is technically so much more advanced and logistically it’s now tourable. So we just did two shows in New York and one in LA. It’s kind of hard to explain, but anyone who wants to know what it’s like can probably go on YouTube and check it out. It’s really cool.”
When it comes to the live performance, don’t expect a pre-synced show from Prydz. Rather, this man enjoys performing without the aid of a safety net. “I just think it’s more fun. A lot of these big production shows that people do now are all pre-synced, because they need to sync with the fireworks, the cannon, the visuals, the lasers and the this and the that.
“It’s basically what everybody does — they have everything pre-programmed and they go and press ‘play’, which I’m absolutely fine with. I don’t really care if it’s really hard for them to produce what’s coming out of the speakers or not. I only care about what I see.
“But for us as a team doing EPIC, we just thought it would be so much more fun and challenging for ourselves [to do it live]. And it’s also going to be more fun for the people that come and see it because each show is going to be unique. More like when you do a normal club set, when you go and take the night as it comes.”
Prydz has found incredible success with hits such as ‘Call On Me’ and his popular remix of Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick In The Wall (Part II)’, entitled ‘Proper Education’. Although Prydz’s success has given him the opportunity to produce his own music without any trouble and tour (just about) the entire world, it has also put pressure on the artist to continuously reinvent himself. Not that he reads the comments anymore.
“It was a few years ago,” Prydz says. “I can’t even remember what record it was; it was one of the new records on Pryda. We uploaded a clip to YouTube and obviously people go and comment and it was this one guy, I can’t remember the exact phrasing now, but what he wrote was like: ‘Yeah, it’s really good, but it’s nothing groundbreaking. I expected more.’ Each time I release a record it needs to be ‘groundbreaking’. I need to redefine music in every new release, according to this guy. So after that I was like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to do what I’ve always done – I make music for myself and if others like it, then great; if not, then go listen to something else.”
BY JESSICA DARNELL
Eric Prydz plays Future Music Festival with Deadmau5,Hardwell, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Phoenix, Kaskade, Knife Party, Rudimental, Sub Focus, Porter Robinson, Paul van Dyk and more at Royal Randwick Racecourse on Saturday March 8.
