Exclusive Interview with Sander van Doorn

Siam2nite had the opportunity to have an exclusive interview with Sander Van Doorn, shortly after his performance at Together Festival 2015 on 9th May.

We had the pleasure to interview you back in 2012 on occasion of your performance at Levels. On May 9 you returned to Bangkok to play at Together Festival 2015. Did you keep your previous Bangkok performances – and Thailand in general - in good memory? How was your experience at Together Festival?

Yes, definitely!! I always really enjoy being in Thailand and it was a real pleasure to perform at the Together Festival with some other amazing artists. It was also always very enjoyable seeing the energy from the crowds here in Thailand and that made me more energetic and motivated as well. It was an amazing experience.

You started DJing with 16 years and producing at the age of 19 years – as of today you are in the premier league of the world’s top DJs, and known as expert in mixing and matching styles. You entered the DJ Mag Top 100 DJs list in 2006 and it’s now your 9th consecutive year in it, currently ranked #51. You have played more sold-out gigs, produced more number one records and received more awards than most artists do in a lifetime. What are you currently working and focusing on? What’s on your agenda for the near future?

Yes, first of all it is of course insane all those awards and the recognition that I have received, so very thankful and honored for that of course. For this coming year I will of course be focusing on my label Doorn Records. I think with Doorn Records we created a platform for unique and original music and it has already grown so much over the year, so hope we can do everything to make are label grow even more. Besides that, I am of course busy with performing and we had a good studio run back in January. So I will be playing a lot of my new track ‘Ori Tali Ma’ during tours! I hope I can do this for another ten years.. but you also have to remember that there is life after being an artist..

Your music is an energetic mix of different electronic music styles including Electro- & Progressive House, Techno and House. This year you have released 3 highly successful tracks already: “Rage” (with Firebeatz & Julian Jordan), “Phoenix” (with R3hab) and “Ori Tali Ma”. What other tracks, remixes or mix-sets would you recommend to someone that is not yet familiar with your music?

Well, I can say that I like I it to combine house music with different genres of music and once in a while I play a more hard record in between. For example, I can combine a more hard record from Firebeatz with a deep house track. Also, most of the times during my own set I try to play my own songs, because those are the songs my fans like. I made a nice mash up of the record ‘Spoon’ with lyrics from Bob Marley. This records works very well on festivals for example. You also just need to have some courage and just have a lot of variation in your sets as well.

Looking back on an highly eventful and equally successful decade as DJ & Producer, what was the best and the worst gigs you ever played and what were the funniest things ever occurred during any of your performances?

I will start off with the worst most painful gig, which was actually in Poland. It is around 8 years ago, and I was attacked by bees during my performance since I was surrounded by cans of Red Bull. One of the bees crawled into the ear shelf of my headphone and another one stung me on my chin during my set. Nobody around me understood what was going on, because they couldn’t speak English. This was definitely one of the worst gigs.. Looking back at it, you can also say this was actually really funny as well, but at the time I was not really enjoying it.

And considering best gigs.. this is always very difficult to say.. The past years have been just insane and there were so many great festivals and shows. Looking back at for example festivals like EDC and Tomorowland, they are off this world. So probably, gigs that I did there are the best gigs I ever played.