inthemix | Features | Ferry Corsten: Flying high

It’s the day after his birthday, and Ferry Corsten is back in the office working on his next album and preparing for a big weekend in Moscow. It’s just another typical day in the life of this hard-working Dutch DJ and producer: walking the dog, off to the office for meetings, then into the studio to work on his latest production or radio show. Then, on the weekends Mr Corsten is off to the airport to play gigs around the world in legendary clubs and dance parties such as Godskitchen, Gatecrasher as well as his forthcoming gig Sydney’s own Sublime, which will make for a lightning-quick stop in Australia.

“Yeah, it’s exciting, it’s a night that I’ve played for couple of years and yeah, it’s always amazing.” Ferry says that Australia’s laid back attitude and great weather puts us on top of his list of places he’d like to move to if he ever left Holland, and I assure him he’d be most welcomed here. Would he like to swap places with me? “Yeah sure, why not!” he laughs.

Although he has experimented with productions in other genres, evidenced in the recent remix of his favourite Public Enemy tune, the 1988 hip hop classic Bring the Noise, Ferry Corsten is still very much a trance devotee who describes his sound as, “definitely trance with an edge”.

Starting out as a producer at only sixteen years of age, he remembers the first time he was introduced to the potential of electronic dance music. “One of the first tracks that I really went crazy to was 808-State Cubik. It was so hard for it’s time. It was really, really rowdy. Everything I heard before was sort of like hip hop/hip house, you know? That was as dancey as it got for me, what they were playing in the clubs. Then I was in this club and they started out playing house music, then they started playing Cubik, and it was the electronic sounds I had never heard before. I was like ‘woah, what’s this? What’s this noise?’ Because it really was, just noise.”

Ferry also recalls the first dance party he ever went to:
“I don’t remember the year, but it was one of the very early Mayday parties in Germany. It was in this huge old ice rink in Cologne. It was the first big rave with 15,000 people and Joey Beltram was playing, it really was the first time I had ever seen lazers on such a big scale. It was amazing”. So was he ever a ‘raver’? “You mean like candy raver with the fluorescent glow sticks and stuff like that? No, I’ve never really been into that scene”, he laughs. “I mean I’ve been in that scene because I play for them, the Gatecrasher kids as we call them over here”.

Ferry Corsten was responsible for mixing the first CD of one of the most classic trance compilations back in 1999 with Ministry of Sound’s Trance Nation that featured his own track Out of the Blue, released under the alias of System F. This uplifting track also featured on the Human Traffic soundtrack and heralded the start of a whole new era for the Dutch DJ and one which he cites it as one of his most memorable moments.

“When Out of the Blue all of a sudden broke through and sort of opened everything for me. All of a sudden I could remix everybody and I could play everywhere. Trance of those days was amazing. There’s still a lot of good stuff coming out now, but now we’re kind of used to it, back then it was still new.”

Playing to 9,000 of his fans at his ‘Full on Ferry’ concert in Rotterdam earlier this year was a very special moment for him, he says, and he is due to release the Full on Ferry DVD very soon, but his proudest achievement in terms of productions, he says, is for Rock your Body, Rock. “It was different from the stuff I’d done before, it also opened a lot of doors for me, people did accept after Rock you Body, Rock that I did not only produce the pure trance sound, but that I could also play around with other stuff as well. As for my remixes I’d have to say Barber’s Adagio for strings”.

When he’s not playing or producing or listening to dance music for inspiration, Ferry Corsten likes to mellow out with a bit of Eighties music, or the smooth sounds of Sade or Norah Jones, but trance is definitely where his heart is at and where he sees himself continuing to keep producing for many years to come. His next album due out later next year will be very much based in rhe trance equation of things. “It’s a very warm, embracing type of music, it’s very melodic, it very easy to feel comfortable with. It’s very emotional, and it has the right amount of energy, and that’s what I love about it.”

With a hectic jet-setting lifestyle, Ferry has found grounding and a new sense of purpose with the addition to the family of a new puppy called which he says helps keep his feet on the ground and stops him from getting too swept up in the hype of his high-flying lifestyle.

“You gotta psych yourself up for it, you know? Flying and everything, flying first class, staying at five star hotels, eating in the best restaurants, you never have to buy a drink. You never even have to get a drink because it s all done for you. But it’s a very thin layer in real life. I always have to pinch myself and think: ‘Stop flying’”.

You can catch Ferry Corsten flying high at Sublime in Sydney on Friday the 28th December. And check out this clip from the Full On Ferry event in Rotterdam earlier this year…