-This week has been super duper busy and the weekend is nothing short of packed. Tonight we’ll be in Hanko Regatta with Miswc Management’s Dance.Here.Now. -concept with myself, Mr.A, Jay Mellin and Oded Peled playing. The weather looks great and so does company so it should be fun!

This weekend holds on eof Scandinavia’s biggest and most important electronic music festivals Konemetsä. The event started as larger scale, psy-trance focus outdoor festival but has developed into a cross-genre summer festival highlight for EDM listeners. This year headlining are the likes of Deadmau5, Eat Static and Legowelt while I’m doing a rare Live PA. 1 1/2 hour Ableton live set of my own music and remixes, mashed-up and morped into a seamless journey. I haven’t really decided yet exactly what I’m playing but I’m guessing it will be slightly adjusted to Konemetsä flavor with more psy-influenced and acidic pieces  of my music (like Requiem and Xpanding Girl) taking over the more uplifting ones (like Rush or Beautiful). There is also some nice visuals combined so I hope we’ll have a rocking Friday night with Proteus taking over after me with his live set.

Last but not least there is Unity, Misc Management and Circus’ first LOVE event on Sunday at The Circus in Helsinki with Pete Tong headlining and some 15 finnish DJs supporting. We have over 50% of the tickets sold already so we’re expecting over 1000 people which in Helsinki on Sunday is quite a number. On Sunday we’ll also announce the next LOVE-event which is fairly soon with equally interesting and legendary name headlining and quite interesting date and concept around it… We’re doing the warm-up for Tong somewhat together with Lil’ Tony and Mr.A playing the first three hours and Tong starting aroun d midnite. I feel truly honored to have this true dance music legend finally here in Finland. Have a great weekend and see you on the dancefloor!

This weekend is a traditional finnish festival weekend. I will play two gigs at RMJ festival which has moved from Rauma to Pori and rebranded as ‘Party Camp’. The overall event line-up is like who-is-who in finnish pop music but they also have two dance music stages: Mecano and Dance Factory. I haven’t been to the new Pori site but the Rauma parties are legendary. It’s quite rare to get to dance outdoors (almost) all night in Finland and the production has always been top notch. On Friday I’ll play a proper big room summer prog and trance set at 22:00-00:00 joined by  Rico Tubbs (aka Infekto) and K-System and on Saturday Danceteria will host the Mecano stage with Joonas Hahmo, Mr.A and Heikki L working the decks. On Saturday my set will be on the housier tip and set time 20:30-22:30. See you there or not, have a nice midsummer weekend and remember to Chillaaaaax!

Tonight (Wednesday 17th of June) is the sixth episode of my Radio Unity show on Afterhours.fm and here’s some info about it. I don’t think there can ever be too much of great music but in June it’s bit of the case with radio mixes. Seems that there is always great tracks around summer time when everybody’s trying hard to score those summer hits. 

Because of that wide range of music hanging around this month’s Radio Unity will be a bit of a mixed bag with styles from deep and progressive trance, through summery prog house, tech trance, bootlegs, remixed classics and pumping french electronica to old school flavored emotional trance all present! Also many of my fave artists like Vibrasphere, BT, Way Out West, Allende and Jody Wisternoff are featured. 

One bad thing with the podcast is that there’s always those REALLY special and hot new tracks which you can’t yet play in radio or podcasts. But maybe it’s also good to have some fresh bombs in DJ’s sleeves on live gigs. Hope you’ll enjoy the mix and catch you live on Afterhours.fm message board! Here are the show details for hooking up:

Many of you may have bumped into Club Unity, Misc Management & The Circus venue’s new LOVE event series but here are some of my personal vibes about it. It’s quite a long post even if the story of LOVE is only about to begin…

We (Club Unity) decided last year that we would have the last Unity The Island in Uunisaari. Even though the island and everything was pretty much perfect we wanted some new creative things to work on. For us creating something new, being excited about planning and all that is almost as important as the event itself. Friends working on something - together. And we also wanted to end on a positive note when the parties are best which has been a tradition with Unity at pretty much every venue we’ve been - and there’s been quite a few!

As we wanted to try something new it was nice coincidence that Niko Hallamäki (of Helsinki Club, Stockholm Diskotek and Den Kunliga Klubben venues fame) contacted me to ask to do some events at a forthcoming venue in central Helsinki. I was blown away when walking to a massive empty warehousey hall right in middle of Helsinki. That felt like something truly international, reminding me of Amnesia in Ibiza, Heaven in London or E-Werk in Berlin. Owners Niko and Mehdi suggested doing couple special events per year with major foreign names and we thougth this could be something special… Right from the beginning I wanted Misc Management guys Oded, Asaf and Juska to be on board too so I think there is great bunch of people and talent on board and some pretty amaaazing events coming up!

But what about the concept itself? LOVE is probably the biggest word there is after all. The idea came from simple fact that “love” is also the biggest source of inspiration there is. We do art, music, books, paintings, events inspired by love or sometimes due love lost.. We go clubbing, do parties, do music, see friends cause we LOVE it. We’ve also had a longtime idea at Unity to ask finnish artists to deliver us their pieces of art to be used in flyer or ask finnish writers to deliver something for our events around a theme like “love”. So these ideas come alive in LOVE events. We hope them to blur the lines between “entertainment” and “art”, leaning more towards the latter than most of the club nights. These events also carry on our legacy of hedonistic summer events like Sun @ DTM and Jose Padilla at Kaivohuone. There is something special in summer Sunday clubbing that I simply love.

First event will have one of the most legendary and significant DJs ever: british DJ Pete Tong. His biography is too long to copy paste here, but putting together UK’s first ever house compilation, signing Orbital and Goldie to his label, being officially the most downloaded DJ on the planet, hosting world’s most listened dance radio show, giving name to blockbuster movie and being one of the main figures of the (credible) Ibiza club scene for almost 20 years are just slices of his amazing career. He is also one of the rare EDM legends who haven’t yet visited Finland and we’re honored to have him here. I think the timing will also be perfect for all us trainspotters and music lovers as in early July Tong surely has all the big (yet unreleased) tracks of the summer and has been road testing them for a month at Ibiza.

The event itself is also the official Konemetsä afterparty, runs for full 16 hours on Sunday 5th of at Mbar and The Circus with a massive line-up of finnish DJs and artists. Full details at Facebook-event and Klubitus.org topic of the event. Below are “Love Stories” telling more about details of the event. There will be close to ten stories all-in-all so please come checking here for the weekly stories. And I hope to see YOU smiling on the sweaty Circus dancefloor surrounded with 1000 smiling Helsinki people!

I’ve finished couple of remixes recently and the first one to come out is my version of german trance DJ/producer Alex MORPH’s ‘Purple Audio’. It is the title track and forthcoming single from Alex’s album released within next few weeks of Paul van Dyk’s Vandit label.

I was positively surprised when Alex contacted me and wanted a breakbeat trance remix in the spirit and feel of my ‘Metaverse’ track. He told me that ‘Metaverse’ was the track playing in their office when he heard he made it to DJ Mag Top 100 and had special memory because of that. I worked well over a month on this and wanted to base it musically on the original which is a 137bpm full on PVD-esque trance track with a nice and summery main riff. It took tempo down to 135 added a rolling bassline and some wide atmospheric synth pads and lots of arpeggios. Also came up with an old school trance viney movie sample about time traveling. When I was done I got some additional help from Mr. Lowland who added his magic in form of some wonderful Vangelis-like synth lines and dirty stabby sounds. He also helped with mixdown and I must say that guy just amazes me everytime we work together. Inspiring combination of musical wizardy and technical geekyness!

Remix should be out in June and I hope to include it to June episode of Radio Unity too. Let me know what you think if/when you hear it.