Martin has been making waves this last year for his solo productions though. His debut album, Ghettos & Gardens, was released in May on Dirtybird. Talking from his San Francisco home during a rare break in his touring schedule, his passion for the city shines through.
“I absolutely love living here. I’m not home that often but when I am I’m as busy as I can be in studio. I love San Francisco and I’m very proud to be based here. I have been out to Australia three times now and Melbourne has similar vibes for sure. I think that’s probably one of my favourite cities in the world. It’s such a cool place and such a beautiful city.”
Unfortunately his schedules don’t often allow for much time to be a tourist. “I do check out places when I can but it’s definitely not easy,” reflects Martin. “Lately I have been going on slightly longer tours where it’s not just a weekend excursion. So I usually have a little bit more time to during the week when I’m not playing shows.
“I try my hardest to put myself in a city on my off days that I have always wanted to explore but I think the only times I have had down time in Australia it has been in Sydney which is an awesome city as well.”
Martin believes that his debut album has started a new phase in his already successful career. “It was honestly one of the best experiences that I have had. I had no idea what I was really getting myself into. It had been a long time goal of mine that seemed elusive for years. I just didn’t have the discipline or the focus to sit down and do it. I was finally on a roll in the last two years. I got super motivated and saw that the harder that I worked the more fun I had. I just decided to buckle down and do it and, to be honest, I could not be happier with the response. It was just a really incredible experience.”
So what has the reaction been like? “When I was touring after the album I didn’t really know how people were going to take it and how the critics were going to write about it and all that stuff. All of that went well but for me the biggest thing was the tours and doing the shows. Seeing how excited my fans were when I dropped my own music was, for me, the biggest pay-off. That’s the whole reason that I do it. I make music for the dance floor and to make people happy when they dance.
“I was a DJ before I was a producer first and foremost. There’s nothing that I love more than performing and just making a dance floor of people happy. I have just kind of seen in the last six months in doing this tour that it’s a complete thing. The excitement and energy that is there is something that I only got glimpses of in previous tours. For me, this is a whole new world and it’s a game changer.”
Martin followed the album with a compilation of remixes. “It was really cool to have an opportunity to do the remix album. I had seen Claude VonStroke do the remix packages after his last album release and I was just like, ‘This is definitely something that I have always wanted to do’, handpicking my favourite artists and some of the musicians who have inspired me to do remixes of a body of work of mine. There’s no way I can pick a favourite because every single remix is so exciting. It gave me a whole new arsenal of music to play in my DJ sets as well which is really awesome.”
This year is shaping up to be another busy one. “I’m releasing my first EP with Eats Everything on Hypercolour in February. I have been working in the studio with him a lot and we’re planning a kind of secret project for 2014. So we’re trying to get into the studio as much as we can this year. We have another single coming out on Dirtybird in May.
“We’ve also got this Dirtybird players compilation. It has all of the different Dirtybird artists, the young blood and the up and comers, and the extended international family just contributing to, you know, what we like to think of as the Dirtybird sound. That’s going to be coming out in March I believe and there are 12 tracks I think. Other than that, I’m going to be doing a bunch of touring and try to do as many Dirtybird parties around the world.”
Martin is looking forward to his tour and he was forewarned that it’s Australia Day weekend. “People are telling me it’s going to be crazy! I’m totally excited!”
