All this week, Swedish House Mafia don Steve Angello will be sitting pretty as inthemix Guest Editor as we count down to Future Music Festival. In his first feature for us, the DJ talks about the artists that have inspired him and his world-conquering trio.

Erick Morillo for me was the number one inspiration as a DJ. He always had a special feeling to his sets. When I was a kid, I was listening to Danny Tenaglia, Carl Craig, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Carl Lekebusch: early techno. So for me, there are a lot of influences, but Erick really tapped into what I liked because he played a lot with acapellas. He did live mash-ups basically. He was a mentor for me; the first one to book me outside of Sweden. Since then, we’ve been really tight together.

Erick taught me about long sets too. When I’m here in Brazil, I do 11-hour sets. Just yesterday I played for six hours. That’s what I really love to do. There’s a place here called Green Valley and last time I was there I broke the record for playing the longest: I think I started at 1am and stopped at 2pm the next day.

That’s what the techno guys taught me when I was a kid: it was about more than two hours. I have a playlist now in my SD cards when I’m touring here and it’s about 10, 11 hours. If the vibe and the crowd is there, I can play as long as I want. That’s what keeps me going: playing right from a small club with 200 people to a 12,000 people venue.