By SASHA RAVEN

ITALIAN AWARD-WINNING DUO TALKS ABOUT LAST CHINA TOUR

Nothing to say, the last Chinese NGD Project tour was really an awesome experience, and to confirm this, are the incredible feedback received after they returned home. They have literally left their mark in a musically new land, which is increasingly becoming one of the most loved and sought–after destinations by the most important and recognized international artists. The Asian nightlife and, above all, the Chinese nightlife, is at the highest levels, offering in their clubs and festivals the world’s best DJs and Producers, and is focused to the best emerging artists on the international EDM scene. We let Michael and Alberto tell us how it was possible to realize all this, their impressions about it and obviously some anticipation for the next summer season…

1– How did your collaboration with China and Asia was born?

Chinese nightlife always has an eye on new talents and emerging artists. In recent years, we have collected so many goals, one after the other… All this, made us grow up artistically. Our record productions have been played and supported by the greatest artists in the biggest festivals in the world such as Tomorrowland, Sensation White and Electric Daisy Carnival in China; we have been reviewed by the most important and authoritative electronic music magazines and blogs like Dj Mag, WeRaveYou etc.; we have climbed the Beatport rankings with our tracks and our remixes up to 8 times, reaching even the first position last year for the “Melbourne Bounce” genre.

For these reasons, some of the most important and authoritative Asian booking and promotion agencies, have started to contact us, until one of those offered us a musical tour. One of our secrets is that, every small or big step we take, we try to push it to the maximum by investing heavily in communication, and in the way we communicate. We want to give a real, humble, clear, clean and transparent idea of who we are and what we do. There are no secrets about us, in our social networks, photos, videos, posts, speak for themselves, we are independent artists and, for this reason, we must not think of anything else other than to grow up our artistic profile. We are really proud of this, because today many artists are built only on appearance and not on quality. We firmly believe that, this is precisely the reason why we have been so appreciated also in China.

2– In which cities and which venues have you performed? There is a lot of talk about the Chinese clubs like the most technological and spectacular clubs on the planet! Please tell us something about them with your eyes…

Each club is a concentrate of technology. Asia is no coincidence that it is the home of the best clubs in the world with advanced technologies and sets that really bring you to a parallel future world… We performed in 7 different cities, traveling the Chinese territory from the center too south to go to north–east and then, return to the south–east from where we left for Italy from Hong Kong.

We can absolutely say that we performed in some of the most beautiful cities and exclusive clubs of Chinese nightlife. Our China Tour really started with fireworks, with three consecutive shows in one of the most futuristic and exclusive clubs of China, the legendary Play House, which is a chain of clubs in more cities of China. We performed the first night at the Chengdu Play House in Sichuan, a club that hosted artists such as Tiesto and Salvatore Ganacci, the next day we performed at the Chongqing Play House that had hosted only 4 months before the world’s number one DJ Martin Garrix and, the day after, we performed at the Guiyang Play House in Guizhou, which had hosted W&W among the many great artists some months before.

After this fantastic “hat–trick” we left for Zhuhai in Guangdong, a city on the sea considered the Chinese Riviera, where we had a few days off for appreciate the beauty of the city and then perform at the Miu Line Club, where we were surprised by a truly surreal welcome, including flags, banners, our posters to be signed and numerous photos with fans.

Then we left for Qingdao, a port city in Shandong, in eastern China. Even in Qingdao we enjoyed the city for a day, where we discovered by chance huge advertisements with our faces in the city center, and then performed at Love song, definitely one of the most energetic clubs we‘ve ever seen! After Qingdao we left for Yunnan where we performed in one of our favorite cities, Kunming, at the beautiful Super Music Space, which hosted many of the greatest DJs on the planet, from Armin Van Buuren to Timmy Trumpet and R3hab to name a few.

After Kunming, we left for Dongguan to finish our tour at the historic BB Club. Unfortunately due to the Mangkhut typhoon we had to forcefully cancel our two dates in Guizhou where we really hope to be able to perform in the future. The clubs in China are really among the most technological and spectacular in the world, and it’s not a coincidence to see how many are present in the Dj Mag Club Top 100 again this year.

3– During the last two years you have experimented different genres with your productions, reaching some of the top labels, led by some of the biggest international DJs, and entering several times in the most important rankings. What is your current sound? Furthermore, we were amazed by your tour after movies! Your sets are pure energy and continuous interaction with public, which seems to want to get on the console with you! How do you manage to organize a live show of this magnitude and how is it possible to create such great involvement with the audience in front of you?

We always loved listening and being influenced by all kinds of electronic music, and we always loved to experiment with new sounds, as you can eat in our tracks, from Big Room Bounce on Ministry Of Sound, to Deep House in our official remix for Laidback Luke in 2015 on Mishmash, to Future Bass on Universal Music and Will Sparks’ Borne Recordings, to Psy Trance and Hard Psy on Junkie Kid’s Harsh Records, on Bernard’ Jakd Recordings and on Reece Low’ Lowded Recordings, meanwhile we have a brand-new Big Room Festival weapon coming at the end of April on Ensis with our brothers Subliminals.

With humility, we consider ourselves artists who are just emerging, who still have to take their direction with their music and who are not yet recognized with their own genre. So far, we have fun trying to produce tracks of different genres but at the same time we try to always push us beyond what we have already done, to grow up and improve day after day, also to understand what genres we like the most. Honestly we can safely say that, in our studio, things are changed in the last few months. We really started thinking about what we would like to become in the future as NGD Project, this partly thanks to our China Tour.

In the last few months, we are focused on producing Bigroom, Hairstyle and Psy Trance, which are the three genres that we are interested in and play the most in our sets. We already have several tracks ready, and we have clear in mind what our objectives are and which labels we want to reach with our productions from now on. Our live shows are like a long and unique complex record production, always organized in the studio with only personalized edits, mash–ups and bootlegs; a MUSICAL JOURNEY and a fusion of styles that includes Big Room, Hairstyle, PsyTrance and some Future Bass, but also milestones of Rock and Indie music…

4– What impression did you have about China, of the Chinese population and of their reception? Please tell us what it means to live about a month in China. What about your tour managers?

We love the Far East and its culture, China is a fantastic country, we loved living in a country that is so different from our and so big for almost a month. It was an indescribable experience that certainly made us grow from all points of view, from the artistic point to the human point. The welcome of the Chinese population is wonderful, with us it was really surreal, we have always been welcomed in every city and in every club by blowups of our photos, flags, banners, by many fans who asked us for photos and autographs, not to mention the utmost cordiality of all the club staff where we performed.

We have been DJ-ing since 2004, we have DJ sets at private parties, graduation parties, birthdays, small clubs in our hometown… Basically, the classic beginning of every DJ… We met back in 2011 when we were both Resident DJ s in a club of our small province, and that‘s when we started with “NGD Project” which stands for “New Generation DJs“…

So you can imagine for us what it means to have lived such an experience. We literally fell in love with all the cities where we have lived, and we really hope to return soon! We love living in city of tens of millions of people, it really seemed to be in the future, and we definitely hope to return this year for another big tour. Living on tour in such a large country and in these big cities, is something we could only dream about a year ago. We also want to thank you all our tour managers, who have never let us miss anything, and made us live this great china experience.

5– Are you planning more international tours this year? What do you expect from the future?

We are working a lot, and we have already started working hard for an upcoming tour in China and other countries not only in Asia as soon as we returned from our tour, both at the disco graphical level and at live performance level. We have many tracks in the pipeline, including some important international collaborations, and we have been working hard over the past few months to build a huge brand–new live show. We want to grow up to perform in Asia at one of the major festivals like Ultra or EDC in Shanghai, where last year Sophie Francis played our official remix for Reece Low of “Bounce That Ass“. We are working hard every day to reach this goal, and we will not stop until we have reached it.

6- Finally, we saw the video of your Play House live experience, and we were speechless! How did you think of an intro like this? When was it born? And above all, how long does it take to buildsuch a spectacular intro like yours?

Our intro was designed, created and built day by day specifically for our China tour. We thought of it in just one night actually when we were in the studio last summer, while the realization from the beginning to the end took more or less two weeks of work in the studio. When we signed our contract for the tour, we immediately said “we need a new crazy intro, which should leave the public in front of us speechless, that totally captures their attention and upsets their emotions, immediately transporting them inside to our musical journey ”.

We thought of doing an intro composed of several types of tracks, bpm and different genres that would put the eyes of the public towards us and that would totally capture their attention. So we started from a track that should have given a clear break between the resident Dj performance before us and our arrival at the console; we also enhance all the potential of the club by putting the entire lighting and visual systems at stake, making the audience think “yes, something unique starts from here on”…

We started our intro with a track composed by acid sounds and alarm siren along with drums and efx that progressively increase the bpmtogether for about a minute, and that “shoots” light beams in time giving the possibility to the light jockeys, to create what they like the most with his system, becoming the protagonists for the whole time of the first part of intro. In the second part of our intro there is a new detachment, both musical and scenographic, where after a spectacular light show, the total darkness comes…

The visual announce us with our logo and a completely different bpm and genre New Age track starts, which progressively creates an epic atmosphere that allows another different light show, up to the third and final part, a boom that marks our arrival at the console and the beginning of our performance, which begins by greeting the audience and loading it up with a countdown to the explosion of a Big Room drop that will then characterize the style of our entire live show. We are pleased that you enjoyed it!

Thanks guys, it’s always a pleasure to interview you… We can only wish you the best and good luck for the next summer season…!!!

*All photo credits by NGD Project