Ready To Take Over The World, An Interview With Dutch Duo Disfunktion

Things are going really hard for Dutch duo Disfunktion. Slowly their star is rising and rising, making them a name to watch. But who are the men behind the amazing music, that can be labeled as Progressive, even though it might not be completely Progressive. We sat with Mike en Bart and they told us about their career on the basis of 4 terms: Free Tracks, Burning Man, Working Together & Upcoming Releases.

Free tracks

“We like making free bootlegs and mashups just for fun. These tracks get supported a lot especially from Tiesto. We like to take our favorite tracks, give them a new, Disfunktion flavor and share them for free afterwards. That’s why we definitely are a dj/producers duo, because we make these bootlegs and mashups also for the sets, so we can play them a lot. That’s how we also came with the idea to give away a free bootleg or mashup every month. People like it and big names like Tiesto & Hardwell play it. Our latest track the ‘Greece 2000’ remix originally started as a bootleg, then it ended with Armada and they told us they had the rights and were willing to release it officially. We couldn’t give it away for free then anymore haha.”

Burning Man

What is Burning Man exactly?
“Basically, Burning Man is a big city. Of course it’s a festival, but it’s in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mountains. 69.000 men are there and that’s it. Everyone brings their art and the terrain is full of special vehicles, like an Octopus that spits fire and drives all over the terrain. People always partied a little more when that Octopus appeared haha. It’s so big, that you need a bike to get everywhere, see it as the center of Amsterdam. Everyone has his own camp and almost every camp is different. You also got crazy places like orgy-tents and that kind of things haha. The principle of the festival is gifting. You don’t pay with money or so, you ask people for something you like and you just get it. You do it yourself as well, so it becomes one big community and playground . It’s one big discovery there.”

“As you heard, Burning Man was very bizarre to us. We stayed there for 4 nights and our two hours set was planned on the last night, right after Diplo. The night before our gig, a dj couldn’t make it in time, so we had the opportunity to play another 2 hours set. Of course we took the chance! Haha. We definitely boomed the whole two hours, but the second set was even better. We got invited by Paul Oakenfold, who does the whole lineup and he definitely gave us one of the best timeslots available. It was Diplo-Disfunktion-Paul Oakenfold, making it the most crowded moment of the whole festival.”

Most memorable moment
“The set we played, definitely gave us a kick. We also had to leave right after the gig, back to the Netherlands for our next gig. You live towards the moment that you can play your tracks and when it was finally there, we both had instant goosebumps haha.
One of the craziest and nicest things besides that was that right after the festival, a lot of people thought we played the sickest set, that’s really kicking. It definitely got picked up by the audience and they enjoyed it just as much as we did.”

Check out the Burning Man Aftermovie

Working together

“We know each other for 16 years now and we both have our own strong points. Mike is dj’ing for a little longer, but Bart is more into producing. Bart: I also like producing more than dj’ing. I can work over 6 hours on a kick and when Mike comes, we can work on the whole track afterwards. Mike: I would definitely get absolutely crazy if I had to work for 4 hours on a kickdrum, while he gets more than happy doing it. In that way we complement each other perfectly.”

“In our eyes, we loved our latest track with Paul Oakenfold ‘Beautiful World’, even though it might be a little bit commercial, compared to our other tracks, but we were very happy with the result and working together. Unfortunately the radiostations didn’t pick it up, but in our eyes, we were very proud of the result. We also always make music that we think is right and suits us. We don’t want to change our style, just to become more popular. We love the things that we do and we hope to move people with it and we think that’s how it should be. You can’t make tracks that make you think, okay…, just because you want to be popular. We do our own things.”

Upcoming material

“We got quite some stuff coming up in the coming months. We will release a track with Kid Massive, called ‘Amrock’, on Mutants in October and got a lot of collabs coming up. Think of Olav Basoski, Feenixpawl & Billy The Kit. These tracks should be released around December of the beginning of next year. Also, we are working on remixes for Scooter and Inna, which will be released later next year. We definitely got enough stuff coming up, Haha!”

Find Disfunktion via their Social Media:
www.facebook.com/DisfunktionOfficial
www.twitter.com/RealDisfunktion
www.youtube.com/DisfunktionTube