I have to ask you straight away… The last time we talked at Opera, you said that you had talked to Empire of the Sun about collaborating, and I wondered if anything ever came from that.

Not really… I wish. We talked a little bit. They seemed excited about the idea of working together, but I think they were working on an album. We never got the chance to get in the studio, but we’ve been in touch once or twice. Collabing is kinda one of those things where it's like... you always hope it works out but it just has to be the right timing. Even the Snails thing that I just put out, we wanted to do a track for years, since we met. It never came together until we randomly were in LA at the same time and we decided to work together in the studio. Sometimes you get in the studio and nothing happens, or it’s not that cool, and sometimes it works out great. So yeah, hopefully, that will happen eventually.

Last time we talked, you had also just gotten your Gud Vibrations radio show on Sirius/XM with Slander. How’s all that been going?

It’s been amazing. All the festivals this summer have been really good. It’s awesome to be able to have great production, like always having effects like CO2 and flames and stuff for festivals. Gud Vibrations Radio has been awesome. We have a small little team of people who help us put it together every week. We always end up picking songs and recording our voiceovers, and sometimes I’m in Asia and they’re in New York and we just have our mics on the road. We can record stuff and send it in. It’s really cool and we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback just uploading all the radio shows to SoundCloud. And, just a lot of tweets from people driving to work and seeing it on Sirius.

You’ve got a pretty big fan base, and festival season is winding down. How is the year looking for you as you move into winter?

Well, I’m doing the NGHTMRE Before Christmas thing… We pick a lot of good big venues where we can go and do one show and have a lot of big support on. So, we have maybe 10-12 of those and then a lot of times it’s a good time to do international stuff. In January, February every year, I usually go to Australia because it’s summer down there. There are a lot more festivals and things going on down there. And I go to Asia next week for a week and a half, and I just got back from Europe and then I’m going to Europe again for ADE. So, it always still stays extremely busy, but it’s not as much U.S. stuff. It’s usually either out of the country or like last year we got to do the Gud Vibrations bus tour which was really awesome. This year, I don’t get to do the bus tour, but we’re going to have a tour still. It’ll be fewer dates. Last year we got to play a lot of really historic venues.

Do you notice any difference in the crowd in different cities or countries?

It’s a little different. In general, the community of dance music is a pretty similar vibe around the world. Most of the places I’ve been, I’ve been to all of them once. Like in Asia, I’ve been to Bangkok once and Japan once. So I’ve been to all these places, and kind of had an experience there, but everyone is different. In Japan, I did a small club and then in Korea, I did this huge festival where I didn’t get to see any fans but it was still wild. Europe is so hit or miss. It could be a show like in New Orleans two weeks ago in a room of 300 max capacity. There were 150 kids there, and everyone was going super hard, but it was just super random. Then I went to Lollapalooza in Berlin and it was the wildest shit. I posted a video the other day… you know how DJs will make the crowd get down low? Like, they did one without me asking them. There was just a dude in the crowd who got like 20 friends to get low and then I looked up and half the crowd was sitting. It was amazing. Germany’s just always a super high energy crowd.

When can we expect new music, an EP or maybe an album?

I basically have an album’s worth of stuff, but we figure it doesn’t make sense to drop an album all at once. It's better to just do singles. So, I put out “Embrace” with Carmada about a month ago, and then me and Snails just put out a new song. Then on September 29 I have the first single off my EP coming out. The track’s called “On The Run” That one has been a long time coming. I remember playing that for the first time at EDC Orlando last year in November, so it’s been almost a year. Me and Dylan have a new collab that’s going to come in December, and then I have a really dope song with A$AP Ferg and a VIP, so a cool hip-hop thing and then a crazy dance version. Hopefully, both of those will be on the EP, but the thing with Ferg might take a little longer. I have a song that I’m really stoked about that I did with one of my buddies from Icon Collective in LA. Glad we finally got to do a track with them. Got three or four just like banger type songs. I’ll have stuff coming out basically every three or four weeks through February or March. I’m always working on tons of stuff.

You work on the road, too, right?

I can be on an airplane and start an idea, so I do a lot of that where I just make a cool idea at the airport or something and then when I’m home I can actually sit down and clean it up.

Cover photo by Megan Friddle for Bullet Music.