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B
ack in the 90s, you would’ve found CDs spinning at Max Graham’s
turntables at Atomic night club in Ottawa. Tracks would be mixed and
mashed over the course of hours, rounding off into the night with Graham’s
signature blend of progressive house and trance. Those CDs have since
been phased out as Graham moved to Vancouver, Montreal, and now Amsterdam
where he spins new tunes on Armin van Buuren’s massive record label Armada.
In those 15 years, electronic music has evolved as much as Graham’s home-base.
Today, we call it EDM and it consists of 10 second melodies and epileptic drops. As
Graham described it, “it that’s sort of short, fuel-burn type of thing. Just up and
down for 15 seconds, then what’s next? That’s the drop and that whole thing.”
Max Graham, however, isn’t that sort of DJ.
Having just released a new compilation album - the 5th in his Cycles series - and about
to start a new tour he’s actually moving further away from the current EDM trend. His
new tour will be the antithesis of EDM; one DJ, multiple hours, open-to-close.
“I think what we’re seeing now with EDM is that we’re starting to see people
graduate beyond wanting to just hear a one hour set of ‘bangers’. People are
starting to ask what’s deeper, what’s more, you know?”
Graham’s tour in 2014 will consist of 17 stops in cities across North America, seven
of which are open-to-close shows. For his fans, it’s an opportunity to go back to the
late 90s and early 2000s where underground DJs played for three, four, five, seven
hour sets.
Living in Amsterdam for the past five months, Graham has been pla Z[