Above & Beyond’s first headline Australian tour comes at an important time for the trio; their second artist album Group Therapy dropped in June, and they’ve been hosting stages all over Europe during their summer festival season. Since launching their Anjunabeats label a decade ago, they’ve grown into one of the world’s most successful DJ acts, reflected in the size of their Australian tour.

Touching down for the first show at Metro City in Perth last Friday and then taking the long haul across the country to the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney, they’ve got huge shows to come this weekend in Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane, playing two-and-a-half hour sets at each stop.

ITM sat down with Tony McGuinness and Jono Grant on Saturday night, the two members of the trio here for the tour, shortly before they hit the stage at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney. We talked shop on their Australian odyssey as well as that ‘Trance 2.0’ buzzword they coined earlier this year.

Last year you did have your own stage at Future Music Festival, but this is your own tour. Is that the pinnacle of what you like to do as artists?
Tony: We’ve done a lot of festivals over the years here and obviously played to a lot of people, but really for us the idea is to play the biggest venue in each town and sell it out. And then go to a bigger one, and a bigger one. You know where you are with that. If you’re on a festival bill, you might be playing to a lot of people, but you don’t know how many of them are there to see you. So it’s a lot nicer that people have bought tickets to see you, and we can put on more of a show than you can do at a festival.

Jono: Also you can choose the line-up as well. If you’re playing at a festival, it’s a bit of a willie-waving fest at times. Everyone’s got an hour and a half set. With a show you do yourself, you can sculpt the night the way you want. We brought along two of the best starters from our label and I think that’s important to showcase the new talent. Mat’s not exactly brand new, but he’s young and fresh, and Jaytech’s an amazing DJ as well.

When you get to craft your own night in your own way, does that make a big difference in how much you enjoy it?
Tony: For us, it’s one thing to play for one million people in Brazil. But how many of those people were there to see us and could actually hear it, it’s hard to know. So it’s a nice thing to do, but it’s actually nicer to play places and make it your own night. It’s important to see some progress. And most places we’ve been doing this, America in particular, we’re starting to see the difference. We did two sold-out nights at the Hollywood Palladium; the first one sold out faster than anybody in history.

That’s nice to show you how you’re doing, ‘cause these days you can’t really use record sales as a measure of that. There are people listening but they’ve stolen it from somewhere. Ticket sales are some kind of measure of progress. Plus, as Jono was saying, you can sculpt the night with the other acts that are playing, so you’re not coming on after someone who’s playing at 142-BPM like we did in Romania a couple of weeks ago. That makes it difficult to do the kind of journey we want to.