Burning Man Diary

What have you been up to the last 12 months?
Stu Bradley picture The last 12 months have been great. I've played over in Amsterdam again, did my first live webcast for Silky's 6th Birthday, won the aftershock competition to play Creamfields in Liverpool and had a life changing experience playing over at the Burning man festival in the middle of Nevada Desert.

Then I got back from BM to find out that I'd won the Aztec competition to become one of their new resident DJ's in Liverpool. I've also got more into the production side of things over the last 6 months, so we'll have to wait and see what comes about in the future. . .

How's the new residency at Aztec going?
It's going well. I've had the opportunity to play for them at a few different venues which is good, including the Lemon lounge, The metropolitan and at Nation as well. I've been lucky in the fact that I've able to play different sets ranging from house, progressive house, breaks & techno. If anyone haven't been yet, you need to get yourself down and check it out. www.clubaztec.co.uk

How has your music changed over the last year?
Over the last year I've had the opportunity to experiment more with the combination of different styles of music and putting them together, whereas maybe before I used to keep the breaks separate to house/progressive music and so on. I've had the chance to play some long sets over the last year, including recently a 4-hour set for Aztec, and this has allowed me to do this.

What was your favourite track of 2004?
I couldn't really pin it down to one track really. A few tracks that were really good last year were Spektrum - Kinda New (Tiefschwartz rmx), Jasefos - Do what you want, Orbootal Breaks, Unkle - Reign (Evil 9 rmx), Chemical brothers - Electronic Battle Weapon 7 and Blue Bell Knoll.

What artists have you got your eye on?
One person that seems to keep coming up is Luke Fair. I've picked up a lot of records and remixes that he has done over the last 12months and the production on them are brilliant. We also saw him at Global Gathering festival last summer when he filled in for Nick warren at about 4am in the morning and he blew us all away. Definitely someone to go and see if you haven't already.

With so many of the big clubs closing over the last few years people say that clubbing is in decline, what do you think?
When people started rebelling against all the bigs clubs and brands, it's gone full circle back to loads of smaller more interesting clubs. I think it's very healthy for the music scene and it also allows for more opportunities for new and up and coming talent to get heard and progress further, rather than the same top DJ's playing the same big clubs all the time..

How soon is it before we see a Stu Bradley track?
As I said before, I had been putting a lot of time into the production side of things over the last 6months and I have been working on two or three tracks that I just need to finish off and then we'll see what happens in the future. I am also working on a live set for the future using ableton, which is really cool. It's a fresh new way to play the tracks live and sample/remix them live as well.

What's in store for the next 12mths?
I will be continuing with Aztec residency and putting more time into the production side of things. I'll be off to Miami for the WMC conference, then hopefully back over to Amsterdam in the next few months. I've been asked to go over to San Francisco and New York to play in May, which should be really cool, and then hopefully will be playing at Creamfields and Burning Man festivals again over the summer.