Well, the soundsystem in Dance Tunnel was not the greatest, but because of the vibe I really liked it. Soundsystems are important, but a vibe is maybe even more important.This is a classic DJ trick. For me there are a couple of reasons why I do it. The first one is intuition. If I am fond of a certain song at a certain moment, then why not play it again when it comes to mind? The second reason is that I like people to leave a night with a good song in their memories. It is also a DJ's job to promote records. Banging it out is not that difficult, but to have people fall in love with a tune once they leave the dance floor is important to me. And so I play songs more often. Sometimes even more than two times in a night.Technique has always been important in Amsterdam. If a DJ made two trainwrecks in a night, people would talk about it. But now I think I don't care so much. I like it when all the mixes are smooth, but if it's not smooth I also realise it can say a lot about what kind of decisions I'm making. And sometimes if I'm experimenting and improvising a lot, then I cannot expect all my mixes to go right. Track selection is really important. If I play only house at a certain tempo and I'm doing it through rekordbox, it's hard to get it wrong. I remember, people would write all the BPMs on their records, but I never went that far. I really don't want to care about it. And then if I make a mistake, whatever.I put things in a tempo or style range, in little stacks, but I still have to improvise everything together. This is also why I play techno records at minus six. When I go to a party, I see what I have, then I see the little stacks. I need to make sure I have music that fits together for a certain moment, so I know I can stay in a housey groove if I want, and not find out the hard way that I brought all the wrong records. But now, since I travel more, airlines are being difficult with records and I don't want to check them in, I want to bring them as hand luggage. So I tend to bring 40 to 60 records to gigs, and this is why I play a combination of digital and records.I spend between three and six hours preparing for a gig. I have quite a lot of new records that I want to play right now, but the issue is always to really get to know my records and get a good feeling with them, so I know when I want to play them. When I mix something for the first time, I learn about how the record goes, I know which part of the record I want to use for mixing it in. In house stuff and techno it's less difficult because it's quantized and everything is tight. But if I play an African record, and in the first 16 bars maybe the guy is drumming out of time in the first eight, but I know in the second eight he's tight, then I need to mix in the second eight. I also need to feel where the energy is in the tune.I think you can prepare everything to death if you want. And, I guess this goes with a lot of art projects, it's a challenge to combine DJing with the other elements in life. Anybody can do one thing really great if he or she has all the time to do it, but to also manage all the other things in life... that's where the difficulty comes in. I prepare depending on the hours I have available and then I let it go, because I need to be able to work within this timeframe. I've never been able to fully go for DJing, because I've always seen something uncertain about it. I never wanted to make a lot of money with DJing. I wasn't feeling it in that sense. That's why I started a record shop. I'm not saying it's wrong—I respect everybody who can fully go for it—but I've never felt comfortable only DJing.I tend to have better results if I have a tight schedule. And sometimes, like this weekend, it's too much—I did Dekmantel radio, then played De School, then went to coach my daughter's football team and then went to Düsseldorf . It's about getting the most out of a limited amount of time. I like DJing a lot, I'm very happy that there are gigs that I can play. I see it as a privileged position, but I also see it as a privileged position to have a family and have a family life, and I don't want to leave one of the two out. I want to do both. And it's the same with the record label and Rush Hour. So it's just sometimes a case of a little bit less sleep, and a little more work. My social life is not always there. I'm trying to balance things more with gigs, as it's not always necessary to play two or three times a weekend. I can also play one time and then have a bit more social time. It's about balance, and I'm still learning and finding out how I like it the best.I feel that a lot of it comes down to timing. If I start a night, and I don't give away too much in the beginning, I can build something nicely. There are certain songs that are anthems, and if I play them too early, people won't relate to it because they're not ready for an anthem yet. They just want some things to get into the groove. So it's easier to start slow and let everybody get used to the situation, and then when things get more comfortable, build it a little bit more. I find pleasure in that.That can be difficult. If you start 3 AM, I'm not necessarily ready for the energy that the dance floor might have. Hunee and Sadar Bahar often start with their acapella where they just break everything in one go. Because if you start with an acapella, you kind of—Yeah, you reset the room. And then you can go in all sorts of directions. But if I try to mix in from where the other person left off, the story is not really in my hands, especially if that person left the energy high. So when I have to give over to someone else, at 3 AM, or 4 AM, most of the time I make sure I'm not ending on a super high level, because I don't think it's good for the whole room. It's not nice for the DJ after you, and it's not nice for the room. If you bring it a bit down and the next DJ can just start nicely, then everybody can pick up the energy again together. I think this is why it's nice to start a bit slower and calmer, because then you can give more. But if I end on a super high energy, what can you do? Of course you have to bring it all down and start again, but it's not necessarily what people might want at that moment.It's something I wanted to do, and I'm thankful and happy that people and promoters are up for it, too. I feel it's from the same mentality of trying to learn different skills. I think it's important as a DJ to know how to do an all-night set. Trying to stretch my energy over six or eight or ten hours, it requires some thinking, it asks me to learn, and to reinvent myself in a moment of the night when I'm going into the wrong direction. I get this feeling inside, I know it's heading in the wrong direction, and I have to come up with a solution to get things back on track.Building up sets is something I've done a lot of times because of the Paradisco night. I would often open the night, so I would do the first layer. And the first sets are important, but they're also easier because people are not going to walk away. I know this because they want to see the main act. But then when I do it all night, I have to start from there, but then I have to bring some energy, but I also have to stretch that energy. I have to make a nice thing that becomes a great night overall, and I can only learn by doing it, and I've done it a couple of times now.It's up to me to decide when I want things to be a bit calm, and then feel when the energy goes up, and then bring it up again or bring it down again, or go in different directions. I also have a lot of interest in playing a lot of different types of music. I think that's nice. And it's also something that comes up in my head, especially when the night is right, I have a little drink, and I'm playing a Stevie Wonder song, and then I think, "Fuck it, now I'm gonna play a Robert Hood track," and I try to mix it. And Stevie is a pretty tight drummer, so it's OK, but sometimes it's not so tight and trying to bring in things is difficult. I remember once in Trouw I constantly changed the last ten tracks of the night. It went from disco to Jeff Mills "The Bells" to Fela Kuti, just to fuck around. Just play a lot of different things, but try to make sense of it. Pick up the energy. And it seemed to work.Recently I played a techno-only set at Concrete, in Paris, with the Indigo Aera label. And it was nice. I liked it. Within that limitation, I felt progression. Generally I like to combine a lot of different styles of music and I don't want to limit things, but a limit sometimes also forces me to get creative. That's why I really enjoyed playing a techno-only set, because it meant I couldn't escape by playing Afrobeat or disco. It forced me to keep a flow within a certain area of music.I found that one in Brazil. I played it and it worked. I played it again—it worked again. It's very catchy, so I guess people react when you play it in the right moment. The song was not really known in Europe as far as I know, but in Brazil it's a classic, which I didn't really know neither. I found out later by playing it in Europe and getting a response from Brazilians about it, like on the video of the Macki Music Festival.I think there's a certain respect for a DJ that comes with introducing tunes that are unheard in a certain scene. I try to focus most of the time on trying to discover new and old music. That's where the passion is. I have a hunger to find stuff that I haven't heard before. It's nice when I go searching in a direction where I don't know a lot of stuff and hear new tunes and then play them out. To me, that's the role of DJing, because in essence a DJ is just a record promoter. He or she has to promote records that you haven't heard so that they become valuable for people. If I copy tracks from other sets, because I hear a great song, and then I start playing it myself, it doesn't necessarily give me that same feeling. Not to say that I don't do that—I learn about music through other people all the time.That's "MBO Theme" by Warrior, which is a cover version of Klein & MBO's "The MBO Theme." I found out by playing that one that nobody really knew it. I didn't know that in advance, I just played it. I found it in Cape Town on a digging trip.They're sorted by country, style, artist and label. So for instance, I have tabs with Brazil, Brazil Boogie, Samba Rock and Tim Maia. Or a section with Chicago House, Relief, Dance Mania, Lil' Louis, Prescription/Ron Trent etc. Or Disco 12-inch, then Loft Classics and then Patrick Adams/P&P. I try to create a range of tabs so I can find want I need quickly.We've gotten to know each other well over the past five years. We booked him to play at a party, so we played together—I played a couple of hours, he played a couple of hours, and then at some point we started to DJ together. And it's nice. We don't break each other's flow. We go in all these different directions, but it just stays in the same vibe. And so we kept doing it. Some promoters picked up on it—the first things were Trouw and Lowlands Festival. At Lowlands, the room exploded. It really was crazy. We came to the last record and we decided to play "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer, and so we play it, and then this happens . This is where it begun. I've never seen a room react like this from just playing records, not a band or anything. And I guess people saw it and started asking us to play back-to-back more often.When we play together we don't plan anything. The only thing we know is that we cannot play stuff that would bore each other, so we have to play fresh, because if you start repeating things, it's a bit like, "Ah, I know how this goes." We know unconsciously that this is not what we should do. So it pushes me into trying to do something else. It's very natural. Sometimes we have very little time to talk before we start playing. He comes in, I come in, and then we start.It's a huge honour and challenge at the same time. I have played big rooms before at festivals like Lowlands, so it's not completely new. It's also not necessarily my favourite thing to play big open stages, but when the festival asked us we accepted the challenge with open arms. I think it's important to do things that don't necessarily feel comfortable straight away.I also had this with the You're A Melody party in London, where we played with EMT turntables, which basically means doing everything with buttons, no mixing, without pitch control, so each song plays at the original speed. Such a limitation might sound unnecessary today in a world with unlimited options, but I realized that I had to come correct with my selections.The same thing goes for a big 1000-plus person stage. I'm currently thinking about songs that stand out on a bigger system, in a bigger space, and that work for a bigger audience. Of course there's a lot of well-produced modern music that can bang it out on such a system, but it's about transforming into the slow, sweet, soulful, experimental and whatnot... I'm listening very carefully to productions and the energy a tune holds and how this might sound. There is a big difference between a solid Kerri Chandler production and an old recycled Trax record for instance. As far as our back-to-back goes, we've agreed that for a big stage like this we will follow the same process we do for all our sets together, as it is important to find that honest energy. I can't prepare for that.The first time I got sick it was difficult because I had gigs, I had plans, and they had to stop. I was just about to go to Germany to DJ and I was still trying to build an international career, and then I couldn't play. I had to cancel things. It took me a year to get back into it and get the energy back, especially after chemotherapy. That was 2006. After five years it came back again and then I kind of kept it quiet, so it was only a small circle of people who knew. I had to manage it and play a little bit less. This period is behind me now—it was more than five years ago, and my health is restored.For anybody who has to deal with an illness, there's a lot of insecurity in it. But as long as I was under treatment, there was some calmness as well. I only started to get stressed again when I wasn't on the treatment, because that's the moment where I had to let go and see how my body was going to react. But, at least in my case, during treatment it was kind of calm. It's more like my physics were super bad at certain points. Because when I had chemotherapy, everything inside changed. At times I felt very weak. But when I felt good, a friend would bring me to a gig, and I'd just play and leave again, no drinks or anything.Enjoy it, listen, study, observe and play from the heart. I like to keep it as natural as possible. That's also what I love in the back-to-back sets with Hunee for instance, or my other gigs. I can prepare as much as I like, but if I improvise—and that's where the nice momentum is, in improvisation—then I also have to let go and just trust that my feeling will be in tune with the feeling of the evening and the crowd. And that's why there's always a lot of uncertainty as well, because I have no idea how my next gig is going to go. That's what inspires me to look for music. When I look and discover stuff that I haven't heard before, there's a lot of value to that. And there's also a story to it—your own story.