Ferry Corsten: Still pushing boundaries

The wait for Ferry Corsten’s Full on Ferry tour has been a long one. It was five years ago the trance maestro first unveiled the show concept in his native Netherlands, and two years since Corsten hinted he might bring the tour to Australia. Now we’re just a couple of weeks out from the Dutchman unveiling the Full On experience in Melbourne, alongside special guests Zoo Brazil and Shogun, before taking it around the country. In the lead-up to the tour, inthemix caught up with Ferry and found him, as ever, excited about keeping things innovative.

Hi Ferry. So you did Tomorrowland last week, how was that?
Tomorrowland was amazing. I mean, it’s the biggest festival in Europe right now. I mean not just in numbers – if you look at the whole thing, the whole production and stages and the way they have an eye for detail. The stages are amazing, and the line-ups, but even the food stalls and the trash cans! Everything has full attention to detail, all the decorations on the stages…it’s really amazing. A wonderland for grown-ups, basically.

Great. So you’ve championed producers like Arty in the past, and there’s a strong rise of young trance producers coming up now. Do you think there are more avenues for upcoming talent to get noticed these days, or is it more cutthroat?
Well that’s the debate. On the one hand, it’s definitely easier for people to get their music out now because of all the social media, and Soundcloud, and also all the studio equipment and the software that people can get. It’s a lot easier to make the music itself. But because of that, it’s tough in the sense that there are so many people who actually have access to a lot of that, so you have to do something to really stand out, be really creative and special to get yourself noticed amongst all the others.

Do you see a lot of mainstage DJs playing trance, but just calling it something else?
Yeah, maybe. I think DJs who have been into trance…well, trance in the pure sense of the word has become more niche. In general, the sound is evolving and getting with the times. Right now, music in general is mixing and blending everything together. House is meeting trance, house is getting more melodic, trance is slowing down in tempo and getting more groovy. It’s almost really hard to say “yeah I’m playing trance” because there are so many influences of other styles right now, that it’s almost easier to say “I just play dance music”. I still say I’m a trance DJ, but definitely not any more than the DJ who plays 138bpm straight up heavy stuff.

On that note, the last time we spoke to you, you said that listeners can be very narrow-minded sometimes. Was your WKND album meant to challenge people’s perceptions of what you do?
Yeah. You know, people just need to realise that you are a creative artist, and you need to trigger yourself and keep inspiring yourself. If I’m doing the same thing I did ten years ago, I would’ve gone numb and I wouldn’t even be here any more because I don’t see the excitement about it any more. I think it’s good to look for different sorts of challenges and therefore you will upset people sometimes, even if you will please people on the other hand. It’s a game that you play and I think really if you want to stay on top of everything and stay with the times, you need to change with everything that’s going on. With WKND I definitely tried to do that.