DJ Blow My Mind: Evian Christ and Seretide Introduce the Debut Release From TranceParty
Words: Clive Martin
4092 words, 00:13:38
English Heritage is the debut release from TranceParty, mixed by Evian Christ and Seretide. Released one year on from Evian’s debut album Revanchist, English Heritage is essentially a collection of mash-ups—berserk, ecstatic pop remixes—that have created such a furore at TranceParty nights that some fans have been spotted pirating them on the dancefloor.
But the record is also the story of a friendship, and a creative collaboration that began when Seretide (AKA: Pedro Goss) first started attending TranceParty events as a 20-year-old student in Newcastle. After a chance meeting, the pair have been collaborating both live and in the studio, playing back-to-back at clubs around Europe while working on their high-velocity rebores of Pitbull, Bladee, and Swedish House Mafia tracks.
In an exclusive Warp editorial, writer and TranceParty bar-propper Clive Martin caught up with the pair ahead of the release—to talk music, mixing, YouTube rabbit holes, and the cheap thrills of high street clubbing.
Clive Martin: Hello boys. So, first up, how did you two meet?
Evian Christ: Maybe you should answer that one, Pedro, as I can’t piece it together too well.
Seretide: We first met at TranceParty:Reload a few years ago now. I really wanted one of the Progressive scarves, but you didn’t actually have any on sale at the time - as there wasn’t a TP store yet. But I messaged you before the show, and you said you'd bring one along.
We bumped into each other in the corridor, and you were like, ‘The scarf, right?’ But it turned out you’d lost the bag it was in, and we had to go looking for it all over Corsica Studios at like 3am, with smoke and strobes everywhere. When we eventually found the scarf, we took a photo together with it. After that, we just kept chatting about music over DMs.
EC: Yeah, I remember noticing a SoundCloud link on your bio. So I clicked and listened to a mix you’d done, which was good. There was an MRD track in there; I asked for the ID of it, and it kind of just turned into a longer conversation about tunes and stuff.
We usually leave an hour or so free at the end of our events for whoever is still around to play back-to-back—or if none of the other DJs are around, I’ll do it. The idea is to leave some room for spontaneity. Anyway, I bumped into Ped in the crowd at TP: Cool, and he had a USB on him, so I was just like, ‘Get up there, let’s play.’ And luckily it was really good, so he’s played basically every one since.
CM: Pedro, how did you get into TranceParty, and Josh’s music?
ST: TranceParty is just one of those things that everyone has heard of, and I always knew it was Josh’s night, Josh’s music. But because I was living in the north then, it was a bit of a trek to get to one of them. Still, one weekend I went down with about six of my mates. We’d been to a party in Manchester the night before, but we all thought, ‘We have to go to this.’.
Back then, no one was really booking things like DJ IBON and Courtesy in the UK, so it was a bit of a no-brainer to attend.
CM: Josh, to put it mildly, you’re not exactly a prolific collaborator when it comes to releasing music. So what made you work with Pedro?
EC: I’m not a prolific collaborator, no. I like to just do my own thing. But DJing is a bit different, and part of the reason me and Ped connected initially was because he had a really good grasp of contemporary trancey techno stuff that I didn’t know so much about. Basically, I’m really into trance that sounds like techno, and Ped’s into techno that sounds like trance. So there’s synergy. And then we both like Pitbull.
But mostly, it’s just that we just get along. We talk almost every day. We have a similar process when it comes to discovering music: going back and forth between YouTube and Discogs, finding weird channels and listening to everything on there, finding an artist who you like and listening to their entire back catalogue, then the back catalogues of associated labels, and so on. I’m obsessed with YouTube as an archive of electronic music; it’s so insanely good, I spend hours on it every day. And I think he and I have that same enthusiasm and process. We share a lot of music back and forth.
CM: So tell us about the ‘English Heritage’ release; where did that idea stem from?
EC: Well, my output in terms of official releases is very limited, but I'm actually a pretty prolific creator of edits, mash-ups, whatever you want to call them. I kind of make these tracks exclusively to play in my sets, and to hear them, you have to be at the show. I generally don’t even give them to other DJs. Sometimes I make things for specific shows and only play them once. Never thought too much of it.
But this year, I’ve been touring a lot, and people started remaking the more popular edits that were staples of my sets. And then those remakes would start showing up in weird places, like other people’s sets—or people would rip them from mixes of mine that were online and play them out. I also had a bit of a strange thing happen where, I think, Skrillex and Boys Noize most likely used one of my edits as a reference point for an official release. It didn’t really bother me, but I realised the only way to regain control was to actually release the music and stand behind it.
On top of that, Pedro’s edit of The Saturdays’ ‘All Fired Up’ has always got such a mad reaction at TranceParty—maybe more so than any of my tunes, to be honest—so I really wanted to get it out there. It feels like the definitive TP song of the past few years. I remember after one event someone sent me a ridiculously long message about it, like absolutely begging me to send it, saying that they had to hear it again and couldn’t live without it, as if it were a matter of life and death. So I was like, ‘Alright, we should probably do something with this song everyone loves so much.’
CM: Pedro, how did you come across ‘All Fired Up’? It’s such a leftfield choice, this also-ran Xenomania tune from 2011...
ST: I just like that era of pop music. A lot of it is quite trance-like in nature. I was organising my music folder one day and happened to have ‘All Fired Up’ on there and thought, ‘It would be cool to play this out one night.’ But I also knew I had to make it appropriate for a club environment rather than just playing the original. So I made it slightly faster and cut it up.
Once I had the idea, putting it together was easy enough. But for the longest time I only had a 128kbps MP3 of one of the songs I'd used ('Common Enemy' by FUJ), and there was no trace of it online. Josh was obsessed with getting hold of a FLAC. So, after contacting the artist and not really getting anywhere, I ended up going on a mad chase, searching through everyone who had liked his post on Instagram from 2020—which was when the track came out initially. I was just cold messaging everyone who'd liked the post to see if they had it, and like a day before we went to mastering, I managed to get the file. It took about seven months of trying.
EC: The original Saturdays song is so good as well. I had kind of forgotten about it before Ped sent me his version. That era of commercial club/pop music, with all the stacked supersaw chord stabs, has been a really big reference point for us recently; stuff like The Wanted, Cheryl Cole, Pixie Lott, even Magnetic Man. I think our set in December will be based on that stuff.
CM: Yes, listening to the EP, some of it reminds me of that 2009-2011 era; Geordie Shore stars doing personal appearances at Tiger Tiger, fish bowl cocktails, bodycon dresses, all of that madness.
EC: Yeah, I agree. To me, the original music is like the soundtrack of a League One footballer hanging out in the VIP section of a club in Deansgate Locks in 2011. That was a very aspirational lifestyle for me at the time, but I never quite made it, so I ended up doing this. For Pedro, I imagine it’ll be different because he’s younger.
ST: Yeah, for me, this genre is what I grew up listening to on the radio or watching the music videos on MTV.
CM: How did the title come about? It’s a very English (or British) sound, but not all the tracks are British in origin. There’s Pitbull, Bladee, and Robert Miles—who I had no idea was Italian.
EC: Yes, his real name was Roberto. It’s not a very good answer, but it basically came from (TranceParty graphic designer) David Rudnick and his insistence on associating TP with the most banal British iconography he can dig out. English Heritage was a loose concept for TP Season 4 initially. It’s quite normal for us to draw from this type of imagery—like the BT logo, the National Lottery logo—stuff like that. David generally instigates it, so you’d have to ask him.
I liked the idea of using the English Heritage identity specifically for this project, though; that was my idea. Even the songs by non-British acts have a sort of unique UK legacy, I think; they seem to activate core memories that are inseparable from growing up here.
ST: For a while, we wanted to call it ‘Urban Heat’, but decided against that after the concept became difficult to execute. We used it for the Barcelona event instead, which was a better fit.
CM: Why did you decide to do it as a fully-fledged release, on CD, rather than just throwing them up on SoundCloud?
EC: I really want it to 'read’ as a record—front-to-back, programmed, mixed and mastered. I appreciate not everyone will care or choose to listen to it like that, but I wanted to make sure it could work that way. With the advent of Bandcamp and SoundCloud, mashups have become quite ubiquitous, but I wanted this to be a fully fleshed-out project.
I put a lot of time into it—learning about different stem separation models and trying to break the songs out into multitrack environments that I could control more granularly. For some songs, I wanted full control over the arrangements—the individual sounds, how they were balanced against each other, especially vocals—like a full session. Sometimes that meant re-synthesising and re-playing stuff, reprogramming drums, processing the vocals, and then taking the end product and getting it properly mastered for CD. Some songs were easy, others were a nightmare. Chris Pawlusek, my go-to engineering guy, helped a ton.
So it's been a process. It’s just how I am. It's a case of trying to squeeze an extra couple of percent out of everything I work on. You can always hear when someone has just slammed two songs on top of each other and EQd them a bit; banged a limiter on and hit ‘export.’ That's all fine, and I do that too sometimes, but once I decided we were going to put these songs out, I wanted to treat them with a similar neurotic level of detail I would do with tracks on an Evian Christ album. Then I wanted to extrapolate the end product into a bit of a campaign with Clubland-style promo elements, like the video we made with the MC Tazo voiceover.
CM: On the subject of MC Tazo and Clubland, I’ve always thought TranceParty has a very British sense of humour and sensibility that helps it stand out in what can be quite a globalised club culture. Was that a conscious decision?
EC: I think it’s something we’ve grown into. This might be a long answer; stick with me. So when TP first started, we were perhaps a bit junior to nights like Janus in Berlin and GHE20G0TH1K in New York. They were the renowned, talked-about parties at the time, embracing this global approach to booking and the crazy style of DJing that Ashland [Total Freedom] had pioneered. I was very inspired by him and by that. And I remember seeing Arca and Shayne Oliver play in NY in 2012—to maybe 30 people—and it was so far ahead of what was going on in the UK at the time. So initially, TP was just me trying to fill in the blanks and book some stuff I thought was exciting.
Anyway, quite quickly, a few of the acts we’d booked for our first events went on to be massive—Travis Scott, Arca, SOPHIE, etc.—which maybe gave us (and everybody else) the impression that we were onto something. So we had momentum, even though our programming style was still developing. We were just kind of randomly doing stuff and having fun, and everything kept selling out, so we kept going.
Working on the events was a way for myself and David Rudnick to get to know each other better, and more and more, our work together started to coalesce around trance and its status as a sort of abandoned British cultural powerhouse. But he was always adamant we should engage with it in a way that avoided being straightforwardly nostalgic. So the events became a way for us to explore what the legacy of UK club culture meant in the present—and UK culture more generally, I guess—and consequently, TP actually started living up to its name. Rather than just being a cool party, it became a party about trance, about the past and the present, something like that. Simultaneously I was doing more explicitly trance-adjacent Evian Christ stuff and finding my voice with that, basically doing a 180 from Yeezus. At the time, people didn’t understand at all, but I didn’t give a fuck because I knew what I was doing.
So a couple years into this, myself and David were like, fully locked-in to this Trance War concept, doing exhibitions with the ICA and stuff, and I wanted to lean TP towards a programming style where we’d combine “legacy” dance acts with contemporary ones, trying to find a weird synergy between old and new. I think the first time we really nailed this was booking Altern8 and EVOL in 2015, and today we’re still generally thinking about our lineups this way, like with Hixxy, Snow Strippers, Phresh [Phreshboyswag], or whatever. That style of programming is quite unique to us, I think, and I guess we’ve also come to be defined by the way in which we engage with the fact we’re a British club night, in a moment in time that, as you say, can otherwise feel a bit globalised.
I think the Bad Boy Chiller Crew night in 2019 was the first time we went properly all-in on a regional UK act, and we’ve been going more in that direction in the past couple of years with the makina and hardcore stuff especially. We have so many scenes that originated in the UK, and so much music and culture to celebrate. I always knew that, but at some point I like, knew it, and from that moment it was obvious to me that one of the main priorities of TP should be to advocate for and perpetuate British music. I don’t really give a fuck about what’s going on in Berlin or NY anymore; I don’t need to. I mean, I have half an eye on it; don't get me wrong. But this extremely British sensibility—and the way our audience has adopted it—has set us on a completely opposite course to other club nights and festivals. Our thing is a local, British club night, and we have a solid core of people who come to every event and genuinely get what it is. I love that.
CM: Pedro, as someone who was once a TranceParty punter, how do you think it compares to a standard house or techno night?
ST: It just ruins every other night you go to, to be honest. It did for me anyway. Every party I attended started to seem really underwhelming. When you go to TP, all your senses are tested like never before. You’ve got strobes, lasers, thick smoke, and it’s so, so loud. You're being pelted from all directions. Then there’s all these little details that make it really special—weird luminous cocktails and hundreds of posters stuck up around the venue.
It's really tricky to compare TP to any other night—especially techno parties—because it's a completely different scene. I’ve been organising and playing techno parties for a while now, through Bipolar Disorder Records in Switzerland and Primal Instinct Recs in Berlin. They’ve made me realise how specific lighting, lasers, etc. at TP are just so suited to it. Applying the same setup at, say, a techno night wouldn't have the same effect.
CM: You’re both DJs who believe in dropping in a well-known, or “anthemic” tune into your sets. How do you strike that balance of playing both the cutting edge and singalong without over-egging it?
ST: Well, I think if you're playing like just a regular techno set, the audience can get quite lethargic. So, sometimes you need a tune that they're going to recognise instantly, something that will inject some energy back into the set.
But if you want to play music like that, you also need to make it “club-friendly” by adding intensity, by putting your own twist on it. Playing the original is fine, but anyone can do that. There’s a balance you need to strike, and I think we’ve achieved that in the release.
EC: There’s a magical thing that happens sometimes, when you can just hear in your head that two very disparate songs, played in combination, would somehow work perfectly. Like, you can listen to the combination in your head and then just go on Cubase and make it—and it works exactly like you thought it would. I really love that feeling. It can just arrive out of nowhere.
CM: Are you conscious of doing it too much? Relying on the stuff people know? Going a bit “wedding DJ?”
EC: Well, TP has been set up in such a way that this kind of stuff is expected and embraced more than at other nights. Like, we established those parameters over time, and now that they’re well defined, we know how to play within them.
Outside of TP, like festivals and stuff, it depends. You might take a risk, and if it works, you’ll give people a moment to remember—something to talk about, to love or to hate. I think people come to my shows expecting me to do this kind of thing, so it’s not that risky for me, to be honest. But with the big moments, it’s more a question of how you enter and exit them without losing control of the energy too much—going too high and not being able to land it.
Honestly, I always want to create an environment where people are getting lost in the music, rather than waiting for the next clever pop mashup or waiting for me to play Adagio for Strings, or Yxguden, or whatever. I can—and usually will—do that stuff at the right time. When it comes to festivals in particular, often the slightly bait move is the right thing to do. But if you aren’t careful, you can end up doing a sort of James Hype thing, where you have this box of tricks and people are waiting for you to do your little gimmick, and you inadvertently turn into a clown.
CM: Well, I hope Mr. Hype isn’t reading this.
EC: He’s from down the road from me. He knows where to find me.
CM: Towards the end of the album, there’s what I would call a “Bladee section," where he features on two of the tracks. Tell us about your relationship with Benjamin and the impact he’s had on the music scene.
EC: I mean, he and those guys have come to define this whole era of underground music. Not just rap, but also what’s happened in our corner of electronic music and the club culture that has developed around it. I think for a decent amount of people that come to TranceParty, Drain Gang and SBE were like a gateway into it—especially in the past few years. I think it’s a good thing; everyone’s welcome. But yeah, those songs you mentioned, like the others on the CD, were staples of the party in the past year. So it made sense to include them even though it breaks with the wider concept a bit. I checked in with Benjamin on it, and he was like, 'Yeah, we have to do it’, so here we are. [Ripsquad producer] Lusi said, ‘Let’s do it.’ I couldn’t ask Robert Miles because he’s dead.
CM: Taking it back to the UK, what are your favourite high street clubs? Your favourite high-street clubbing memories?
ST: I went to a few commercial nights growing up; I even got dragged to an under-18 night when I was 14 years old. There was this one called Wonderland - or Gridlock - in Norwich, the kind of place where Joey Essex would show up and take photos with everyone. Usher would be playing, and it would be full of kids like me running around with bottles of J2O.
EC: I have a lot of affection for high-street clubs. When the Evian stuff took off originally and I started playing these European art/media festivals, or trendy experimental club nights, I thought it was cool, and I was very grateful, but overall, I was really confused by how little fun people were having, as someone who associated going out with going to places like Concert Square in Liverpool or the clubs in Chester. I suppose what I try to encourage is an experience that sits somewhere between those two poles. We’re serious about good music, but good music can just be a Pitbull song at 160 bpm if the bright lights are flashing fast enough.
CM: Tell us more about the club scene in Chester. I’ve always been intrigued...
EC: Well, there’s two main ones. Cruise is slightly upmarket, but not really—the kind of place you need shoes on to get in, not trainers. Rosie’s is a bit more messy, but the premise is the same—a three-story commercial nightclub. Floor one will be a popworld-adjacent party thing; floor two will be more like contemporary radio and dance music; and floor three, drum ‘n’ bass, rap, whatever.
I love the experience of multi-room clubbing, just wandering around. That's one of the reasons I like Corsica Studios and running nights there. I’ll go check out Room 1, Room 2, press the smoke machine button, head to the smoking area, chat to some people, go to the bar, get a drink. Kick someone out of the backstage. You can just wander around doing stuff. It’s like an open-world game.
ST: “Side missions," they call them.
EC: Yeah, absolutely. I hate clubs that are just a long, rectangular room with no points of interest.
CM: And finally, what is the best scenario for listening to English Heritage, and what should they be drinking?
ST: At home, pre-TranceParty. It’ll get people in the mood and set the tone.
EC: They should probably drink that Blue WKD and Guinness thing we do sometimes, whatever that’s called?
CM: Is that “Turbo Guinness?” It’s been a long time for me.
EC: Actually, we created a terrible drink special at TP last year, which was Heneiken, port, and prosecco. It was called “Pride in the Port,” and it cost nine quid. There’s your answer.
CM: Ok, well, anyone listening to the EP knows what to pick up in Budgens. Cheers guys!
EC: Thanks, mate; just try not to make me sound like an idiot.