Fans of electronic music attending this year’s Big Day Out were mighty excited by the prospect of catching Sasha in the Boiler Room – not only for the chance to see the dance veteran dominating such a spectacular space, but also because of the audio/visual show he’d be debuting at the festival which he promised would “blow people’s heads off.” Anyone who’s caught him so far would agree that the visuals are indeed stunning – but as the man himself confirmed at last Friday’s Big Day Out in Sydney, they weren’t quite on the whopping scale that he’d originally hoped.

According to Sasha, logistical issues prevented the show from being as “big” as he perhaps would have liked. “The last time I talked to ITM about the idea, it was going to be much bigger, and it was going to be installed on the stage. But it turns out I’m actually DJing in the booth, because Groove Armada’s live setup means they need the stage, and logistically they just wouldn’t have managed to get it together in time.”

But while it may not have towered as originally planned, the essential concept of the visuals are intact for what he terms “phase one” of the show. “We didn’t manage to do the full installation, but everything still looks great and the visuals are linked really well to the music. This is the first incarnation of it, and it’s only going to develop and get bigger and stronger from here really.”

Sasha says the project was an attempt at taking synchronized visuals to the next level. “When you go to see a DJ, and there’s a guy playing with the visuals and nothing is really synchronized, it doesn’t really have that impact. But when you see someone like the Chemical Brothers, where every single sound is locked down to what they’re doing, we’re trying to get to something that’s similar to that.”

It’s an approach that’s required whole lot more preparation than your average set, but Sasha says it’s given him a new confidence to approach those massive spaces. “My whole philosophy up until now has to try and be as spontaneous as possible. But with this tour because we wanted to get the visual content locked into the music, we’ve really prepared it and the set was pretty much ironed out about a week ago, and since then we’ve just tightened it and tightened it and tightened it. So I’m walking in there knowing what I’m going to play, I guess more like a band would do. Normally I’d walk into a festival and be scratching my head thinking what to play, but I’m a lot more relaxed now. I don’t know why I didn’t do this years ago,” he laughs.

Catch Sasha on his remaining Big Day Out dates in Adelaide and Perth, and don’t forget to check out inthemix.tv’s escapades at last Friday’s massive event in Sydney!