"MY SHADOW"

Enzo Holdt— You just got back from Europe, and you're off to Asia soon, right?

Woesum— Yeah, I leave to go to Korea on Thursday. Then there’s quite a few bits coming up. It’s my first time going to China, so that’ll be very cool — I’m excited.

How do you feel about the touring life? Do you thrive on the road?
 

It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. I’ve really enjoyed playing this tour — the venues let me shape the set the way I want, moving from intense to calm and back. That’s harder in club shows. But the travel and everything around the shows is exhausting, especially on a small solo run.

Do you have any rituals while touring?
 

I guess that’s the part I’m trying to figure out the best way. The best approach has been treating shows like a job: go home after the set and don’t treat it like a party. I had almost two weeks in Stockholm to decompress with family and friends and do everything except music, which really helped.

When you say “everything except music,” what does that look like?
 

Mostly watching movies and being by myself. I’ll hibernate for a few days, avoid heavy social activity, and hang with a few friends and family. I’m always making music, so sometimes I have to force myself not to open Ableton.

What have you watched recently?

I really like horror films. I went to see Pulse (2001) at a rerun in London — that terrified me, but it was so good.

How about scandinavian cinema?

The Kingdom by Lars von Trier messed me up as a kid. My dad put me on that when I was eight — way too early — but I couldn’t stop watching. And The Seventh Seal — that whole chess-with-death thing is timeless.

That’s so early.

Yeah — my dad was like, “it’s an old one,” said it was R-rated, and just put it on. I was terrified, but I loved it — it stuck with me.

I noticed you worked a lot with visuals elements such as lighting on this tour. Talk to me about that.

I have kind of very strict guidelines for how I want the lights to work with the music. It’s definitely something I want to delve deeper into, and hopefully in the future maybe get proper LED screens and all of that because I’ve been wanting to do a proper visual aspect that goes along with the music. But you can create that with just a light show as well, and if you work with proper venues — which I was lucky to do this time — you can get really good collaboration between lighting and music, which I think is very important. I do think the music itself is the most important, but when it matches with the visual components it becomes something completely different.

Have you always been interested in working with visual elements to accompany your music?

I think very much it’s been about the music — the majority of my career I’ve been the producer behind stuff more than necessarily the artist, especially before I dropped Blue Summer. Visuals make a huge difference. But bad visuals can turn me off a song, so when it’s my turn to shape the visuals I take it seriously. I’m lucky to work with friends — the drain gang and Sad Boys — who are masters at this. For Protected, about eight people worked on the artwork; I’m not a visual artist, so I rely on people I respect.

Walk me through Protected. When did the idea come?
 

Every time I go to a session — whether alone or with someone else — you sometimes leave with nine new songs. The same happened for Blue Summer and Protected — the songs just happen, and then you sit on them and start to see a pattern in the stuff you’ve been working on. Then you start compiling them and it becomes a project. After the Paradise Tree EP, which was ambient and lullaby-ish, I wanted something more aggressive, bass-heavy and club-friendly. The songs I thought about for that idea started to show up, and I realized there was a whole project there. Most songs on Protected were finished the same day they were started; there’s not a lot of post production.

Are there older songs on the EP?

Yes — one track is six years old, another predates Blue Summer, and some are recent. If a song still feels right after years, it’s stood the test of time for me at least.

How did you come up with the title Protected?

When I was compiling everything for this project, last fall I had an introspective time. We’ve had some wild years, and I think everyone — especially me — had moments thinking, “Am I going to kill myself doing this? Am I taking care of myself?” I had a moment where I felt I needed to figure out how to do this in a way that works. I felt like there have been so many moments when it could have gone so wrong and it didn’t. It felt like there’s been some kind of “protection” over us — protection from friends, or a spiritual protection. That idea kept popping up, and the songs felt like a mix of the end of times and the start of something new. That’s where Protected came from.

What do you hope people take away from the EP?

I want people to have fun with it. I was trying to make something more for the clubs, but it’s also dramatic and introspective. I hope it evokes introspective emotions. For me, songs like “MourningStar” can be played in a club and still feel melancholic — that cry-in-the-club thing is what I like: fun songs that make you feel something. Ultimately I want listeners to decide what it means to them.

You told me that you’re working on a new album. Is that a continuation of Blue Summer?
 

It's not a part two. But the next album will be more vocal-forward — I love vocalist collaborations. The last two projects were fully instrumental, so I’m excited to shift focus.

How do you decide if a track should remain instrumental or get vocals?

You just hear it. With Protected, a lot of the stuff felt already full and there wasn’t really space for anything else, so it stayed instrumental. Other tracks you make and you think, “This just needs a vocal.” It’s obvious from the jump whether it’s instrumental or needs a singer.

You’re on the new DJ Billybool project too (Thaiboy Digital’s EDM project)— when was that made?

The start of that song was made three years ago in Bangkok around 6 a.m. I was literally going to bed and he came in like, “No, fuck off, wake up — we gotta make a song.” I was so tired but we made something half asleep, and he laid down the whole vocal. We sat on it a long time and later he and Eurohead expanded it into a full anthem

What’s the studio environment like with Thaiboy and the other drain gang members?

It’s very friendly because we’re all friends. It’s not work vibes at all. Thaiboy is one of my favorite people to work with — we make fun music together. With the Swedes it feels like hanging out: we go to the studio, shoot the shit, and sometimes someone’s making something in the background and suddenly it becomes a song. It can be anywhere — studio, hotel room, someone’s crib. A lot of the stuff with Bladee on Blue Summer was made in his living room at night while we were watching TV. I’d be making beats for fun and he’d grab the mic and record in four minutes. Then we’d continue watching TV.

When did the worlds of EDM and Hip-Hop start to overlap for you?

Hip-hop was always big for me — the first CD I was given as a kid was 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. My sister is six years older and she got into sites like PlayAhead back in Sweden where people put music on their profiles — it was full of Basshunter, Eurodance, Axwell edits, Tiësto edits, etc. We shared a computer and her downloads filled it with all these tracks (and probably viruses). She showed me that world when I was 10 or 11 and it opened something. It felt like a guilty pleasure then because friends didn’t think it was cool, but I loved both rap and that EDM world. I kept trying to make both, and eventually the relationship between the two happened naturally.

How do you measure success?

What means the most to me is meeting people on tour who say the music helped them through hard times — that’s intense and humbling. If my friends and people I admire think it’s cool, that’s enough for me.