Steve Aoki

Born in 1977, he was the son of a famous Japanese wrestler and restaurant-chain owner Rocky Aoki eventually going on to graduate from the University of Carolina. While still in his twenties he found the time to form a record label named Dim Mak in homage to his childhood hero Bruce Lee.

In its infancy, Dim Mak was known for working with a diverse range of artists from all genres and has been instrumental in launching the careers of artists like Bloc Party and The Gossip. The label soon began to focus more on Steve’s specialty, electronic music, and is now recognised as one of most influential establishments in the dance music world.

The label’s profile was further boosted with the release of Aoki’s first album ‘Wonderland’. Featuring artists as diverse as Weezer’s River Cuomo to Kid Cudi it was a huge success with every song on the album being released as a single with its own remixes.

To support his music Steve tours constantly and has become known for unpredictable and exciting live shows. Even while performing an average of 250 shows a year he still finds the energy to be crowd surfing and dancing with his crowds all of which helped him to achieve 6th place in DJ Times magazine’s ‘America’s best DJ competition’ in 2013.

With the release of the first part of his new double-album, ‘Neon Future’ on Dim Mak, Steve looks set to continue to be one of the most popular electronic artists in the world.

Laidback Luke is originally from The Netherlands, and has always been creative. He made his name as a graffiti artist before composing music, beginning with electronic music at one of his friend’s who owned an Amiga computer. It was his friend who demonstrated the beauty of sampling and how you can rework music to create your own. Once upon a time, Dobre, DJ’d at Luke’s school. Entrepreneurial Luke approached Dobre about sending him a demo and after sending the tape and earning some feedback from Dobre, Luke invested in a synthesizer. The two artists kept in touch, and Luke received mentoring from Dobre, who pointed him in the right directions enough to land himself a record deal at the age of 18. Over the next years, Luke would shape his own brand of hard techno music, which drew influences from the funky hard Chicago sound.

Throughout his career, he has worked alongside some of the greats of his field such as David Guetta, Steve Angello, Sebastian Ingross, Axwell, Example and Junior Sanchez. He was been fortunate enough to have toured Europe, North America, Ibiza and Japan, releasing countless singles along the way, with one of the most successful being a rework of a song called “Show Me Love” with Steve Angello featuring Robin S released in 2009 and charting at No. 11 in the UK Singles Chart.

With a sound that is always evolving, and has said that at times, minimal techno can become quite limiting from a creative point of view so is constantly looking ahead for the next step to see what his next target is going to be.