Being an elder statesman of the scene Fleming has a strong opinion on the seeming gentrification of electronic dance music through the proliferation of music via the Internet. He begins by grappling with the fact that Australia traditionally was behind in the dance scene. “There have been various changes since the early days of dance music. I think there were multiple reasons why Australia and other territories were behind,” he notes. “[As a releasing artist] you could only hit certain territories at certain times because you only had certain stock and you could only handle the press and media [of a specific territory] at one time. So you would focus on Europe, North America, then South America then Australia…when running a label that’s how you would target it.
“I think the music magazines worked in the same way,” contends Fleming. He believes that due to our geography and small market size pre-Internet Australia was often the last to get the good beats. “They’d hit where they would sell the most first [Europe and America] and they’d dedicate the exports three to four months down the track so that’s when you guys would get it.
“I felt years ago that Australia definitely mirrored the UK scene, but if you fast forward to today I think that you have a more generic scene,” he notes. “I really miss that Melbourne used to have its own scene completely different to Sydney. In the UK you had different scenes in the north and the south. Spain had its own great club culture. Belgium had its own scene. The east coast of the States was different to the west coast of the States. But now this generic EDM sound is huge – not that I am a fan of it. It’s just this big mainstream sound that is [all] around the world. All those independent small scenes that are the places that fuel underground and new sounds to those specific cities are gone – it’s really sad to see that. I can be in Melbourne one week, go to Houston the next and the be Toronto the following week and it’s all the same.”
It seemed only appropriate at this juncture to ask Fleming if he was disregarding the much lauded ‘Melbourne Sound’ – a phrasing of hard dance that has seen Melbournian’s such as Will Sparks become international superstars. “That hard dance sound? I don’t think that it’s unique to Melbourne. I can name you loads of cities where it is. I am aware of him [Sparks] and it’s not unique to him and it’s not unique to Melbourne, and that’s unfortunately where it’s gone wrong,” establishes Fleming.
However, Fleming is doing his bit to keep it real. John ‘00’ Fleming is famous for his weekly show Global Trance Grooves. The latest mix Fleming did was with legendary Israeli DJ Guy J and aurally the mix is very deep. Fleming grapples with where this deepness came from. “I have always played pretty deep so if anything I’m getting back to my roots and I’m allowing myself to do that on the J00F edition tours that I’m taking around the world where I do extended sets,” he details.
To close the interview Fleming reveals his eight hour J00F sets contain the best parts of his 25-year career as a DJ and then when he comes back at the end of November for Earthcore it will be something different all over again. “Now that I am doing open to close sets it allows me to go back into that deep world where my heart is,” he notes. “At Earthcore I will be feeding off the crowd and playing all the good music I’ve found – maybe even as recently as that day.”
BY DENVER MAXX
