As with all journeys, this transition was rarely straightforward. The live artist in me had to be put on hold for a while in order to focus my energies honing the skill set of DJing. I quickly realised something in my DJ sets spoke to people, and every piece of positive feedback made my desire to continue even stronger. In a short period of time, I had concluded a lot of DJ gigs to small yet roaring crowds. The festival at Ravnedalen Live 2023 was a great milestone, as the first time I managed to get 1,000 people dancing. Imagine: a crowd of people surrounded by forest, completely absorbed in the music I was playing. It was certainly a wild experience.
It’s now almost two years since I first landed behind the decks. Some personal highlights of my DJ gigs are:
As time passed, I began to focus more and more on DJing. I also could see it giving me a direct income: another satisfying milestone in an artist’s life. Yet a part of me – that live artist part of me – still missed playing live sets.
In early spring 2023 I shifted my focus back to producing music and preparing the live set, but now with fresh eyes. I had shifted away from the pop and electronica genre, and now I moved more in the direction of high energy house music. I completed two live-performances in May and June 2023, and I could see that this format worked based on the audience's positive feedback. A question started to form in my mind: what would happen if I managed to merge these two worlds? To use the DJ decks with other people's music as a framework and include my own productions with live elements like vocals and keys. This became the topic I wanted to explore in my master project: the quest for the hybrid set.
Foreword
During lockdown in a dark and cold November in Berlin 2020, sitting in my tiny 10m² room, I started looking for options on how to move forward with my life and proceed with my musical career. Through the all-knowing search powers of Google, I ended up finding the masters programme in Electronic Music at the University of Agder. For the first time in months I felt a spark, a gut feeling telling me to go for it. I still remember the day I got the acceptance letter; pure bliss.
Moving from the metropolis of Berlin – population 3.6 million – where I spent the first eight years of my twenties, to the tiny coastal town Kristiansand – population 86,000 – was, to say the least, quite a culture shock. There were no clubs playing house and techno music, and no “underground” meet-up space for like-minded clubbers. As a newcomer in the city, I quickly got established and became the co-founder of a house and techno collective called Klubb Kosmos. We had our first club night in December 2021, where I had my DJ debut. This was after accessing the DJ decks available at the university for the whole month of November. I had spent almost a decade in front of the DJ decks as a clubber and dancer; now, suddenly, I was behind it. This would prove to be a pivotal moment in my career. Before my focus had been on creating electronic live set performances with live vocals.
