There are some who believe art is but a whim, a passing fancy to be indulged whenever the mood takes you.
But more often than not, those are the people who don’t make a cent via creative means. If you want to earn a living from putting work out into the world, you have to approach it as you would a nine-to-five, gruelling away at drafts for hours and sometimes wasting time to follow through on ideas that won’t amount to anything.
Eric Prydz has such a working routine down to a fine art. Perhaps that’s why the acclaimed Swedish DJ and producer has been able to make such a name for himself over the years – as long as he’s not touring, he heads over to his studio from Monday to Friday, pouring hours into the creation of the dance and house-based tunes he has forged his reputation on.
He even fields his call from the BRAG from the confines of the LA-based studio he calls his own, and we catch him just as he’s tinkering around with a new toy. “I just got a smoke machine, so I’ve been playing with that,” he chuckles. “It’s my daily routine. I get in here at eight in the morning and hop out at five in the afternoon.”
Not that he works the whole nine hours uninterrupted. He finds it important to treat his muse with respect, and he never pushes something if it seems like it won’t come. “I’ll sometimes do other stuff while I’m here, you know? Just watch movies, or just basically hang out. But I want to be there should the mood strike.”
Such an answer might go some way to explaining why Prydz has only released his debut album – a glistening collection of bangers titled, in slightly braggadocio style, Opus – this year, despite spending more than a decade in the recording industry. He works hard, constantly, but without rushing, and for him it’s all about haste rather than speed.
“With Opus I didn’t know what it was going to sound like when I sat down. The album took a lot of years. It was more a question of me having a big body of music and then pinpointing which tracks I was going to use. It wasn’t written one track after the other and then presented as an album. It was more of a long, ongoing process.”
A lot of the difficulties associated with Opus therefore came from the editing down of the album, rather than its writing. “Obviously because it’s my music, it’s very hard to decide which tracks to include,” Prydz says. “If I could choose, I would probably put 50 tracks on there. It was hard. It was like, ‘I love this track but it doesn’t really fit.’ I had to then put it aside, narrowing it down and then narrowing it down again.”
Indeed, it’s the writing itself that really sustains Prydz. He takes to it with gusto, and prides himself on the freeform, unrestricted manner in which he allows his songs to take shape. He relishes heading out into uncharted territory when an idea comes flittering into his head, and a track like the thumping ‘Breathe’ was created without the aid of a blueprint.
“I don’t have a set way of making music, not like some people who start with some beats and build from there,” he says in a deep voice, his Swedish accent still strong after years of living in the States. “It could be anything – I could start with a melody or a bassline or whatever. Or just even sometimes I get a full idea in my head and I just sit down and make it.”
After he has discovered that first spark, Prydz finds it relatively easy to transform the ideas that live in his head into tracks to be appreciated by dancers and clubbers worldwide. “I think that’s what it is to be a music producer. A lot of people have ideas of tracks in their heads, but it’s about having the knowledge and the know-how to translate that into the real world. It’s about making it sound exactly how it does in your head, how you imagined it. These days, for the past ten years, it just comes naturally to me.”
Though some producers find it lonely working without the aid of a band or other musicians to bounce off, Prydz doesn’t miss having others around him while he creates. He has a whole management team to help with that kind of thing, along with the friends who give him direction when he needs it most.
“I’m always getting feedback,” he says. “People say what they think and what they like. A lot of the time you are so close to the music that you are making, it’s really nice to have someone come in and give you perspective and tell you basically what it looks like from the outside.”
Of course, Prydz also has his audiences to help him shape the music. His Australian fans will greet him at the Electric Gardens festivals in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth next year, and it’s these audiences who ultimately keep him going.
“When I started out making electronic dance music, I was always imagining me performing the music I was making in front of a crowd that would dance,” he says. “Still this to day, the music I make is for the clubs and the dancefloors. I make it because it’s music that I want to play in my sets. I make the music that’s missing from my record box.”
That said, he’s learnt that you can’t always trust the crowd. He respects those who flock to his shows, but he doesn’t follow them blindly – he’s been burnt too many times before. “When I made my track ‘Pjanoo’, I actually made it back in 2006 but it didn’t get released till 2008,” he explains.
“I made the track and then played this club in the north of the UK. Obviously, I was really excited about this track because I thought it was a smash hit. I was like, ‘Wow, this is going to go off.’” He takes a moment, then bitterly grumbles the punchline, the pain still present in his voice. “It didn’t work at all. People didn’t get it. So I forgot about the track for two years. Then I found it again on CD in the back of my wallet while I was playing. I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll play the track again,’ and it just went off. Someone was filming me playing and then someone put it on YouTube and it became a hit record.”
He laughs. But rather than making him cynical, such an experience has simply helped Prydz realise that he works in a fluid industry – one that will never cease to surprise him.
“I know some people who are always trying to make hit records. I just tell them, ‘They will come when they come. They won’t come because you’re trying to make one. They will just appear. One day you will make a track and you have no idea that it’ll blow up and it blows up anyway.’” He pauses to reflect. “So concentrate on making music that you love. Then, if you are destined to have hit records, they will come to you.”
Eric Prydz appears at Electric Gardens Festival 2017 at Centennial Parklands on Saturday January 28.
