Wolfgang Gartner Plays Boulder Theater on Saturday, October 15th

ThisSongIsSick.com will present Wolfgang Gartner at the Boulder Theater on Saturday, October 15th, 2011. Tickets go on sale Saturday, September 24th for $25 in advance & $30.00 day of show.

"I have to make something that's never been made before; have to make the best thing that I've ever done in my life - otherwise it gets stagnant or worse," says producer/DJ Wolfgang Gartner. Whether or not his progressively more maximilist take on electro-house is your bag or not, you have to respect his exponentially steep rise through the electro-house ranks. And Lord knows, you've heard it -- or about it: flipping Beehthoven's 5th for the 4 am crowd; eight #1 tracks on Beatport; remix/collabs with Britney Spears, Timbaland and Black Eyed Peas; festival-highlight performances at Coachella ‘10 and Electric Daisy Carnival's ‘10 and ‘11.

Where Joey Youngman, the one-time party kid from San Luis Obispo, CA and another-time househead old soul, has been electro-house's dark (work) horse, Weekend in America, his debut full-length for Ultra Music, is Wolfgang Gartner becoming dance music's one-man parallel universe, outpacing electro-house and outdoing himself.

"One of my mantras is that I have a responsibility to advance the genre. If I'm capable of doing something I've never done before, I feel like I have to use that ability, because there are not many people who do - or can. I have to push myself real hard to do it. That's something that's really surfaced with this record," he admits. Gartner's work ethic is mythical amongst even his most storied contemporaries: Make music all week. Play it out all weekend.

Take "Forever," the menacingly not-what-you'd-expect will.i.am collab on Weekend In America. It's a track that, with its ominous chord progression and middla-nowhere "RIP" shout-out to DJ AM from will, is as unlikely as it is, literally, amazing. " That's just me sitting with my keyboard and pounding out chord progressions for three days and coming up with a hundred or so and some of them are good and a few of them are great, until finally I get to that one where I can say, ‘This is something I can spend three weeks making into something," says Gartner.

And therein might lay the greatest mantra/myth of the Wolfgang Gartner story and the greatest contradiction of Weekend in America: that it's just dance music. "I would think I would hate what's mainstream, but the truth of it is, the dance world makes sense to me," says Wolf. "I understand how and why it creates the response that it does with people." That said, as Weekend In America shows in its byzantine soul, kaleidoscopic command of frequencies and impossibly imaginative arrangements, Weekend in America the artist is answering to an altogether higher power and potential, one the Wolfgang Gartner massive has the good fortune of being able to get onto the floor and out of their heads to every weekend.

More Articles by This Author...