In a recent interview at the A State of Trance event in Utrecht, Dutch DJ Hardwell, made the trite and self evident observation that he was “sick of what was going on in EDM right now” claiming that it was “too formulaic”.
“I thought you just play the same generic songs all the time,” continued Hardwell. “Use as many drops as possible, throw your hands in the air and just let your mix CD of electro-house hits play until the gig just sort of ends.”
Hardwell claimed that he would follow the recent examples set by the likes of Tiesto and Steve Aoki and attempt to distance himself from EDM by stealing inspiration from “trance and hip-hop” for his next imitative electro-house album.
“You don’t want to throw away the rule book,” he claimed. “You just want to disguise your process by including some novel samples and perhaps a guest vocalist or two.”
Most viewers of the interview responded with a collective “well duh”, expressing that the “fucking obvious” statement that EDM is formulaic comes as no surprise to anyone other than Hardwell, whose opinion on the current state of EDM, or as it’s properly known, electro-house, is considered “too little, too late”.
“Hardwell distancing himself from the current formulaic state of EDM,” said one commentator, “is a bit like a man who has woken up to find out that he’s just stabbed a prostitute trying to say that there is no blood on his hands while holding the knife that killed her.”
In the rest of the interview, Hardwell, seen her “being sick of the monster he helped create”, espoused on some of his other beliefs such as – that the Earth is round, the sky is blue, “what goes up must come down” and “two plus two equals four”.
