Interview by Sam and Matilda Elliott.

After his global domination with the fundamental dance floor hit Sandstorm, Toni-Ville, AKA Darude, has been continuing to command the dance world in many more ways than one. 

Sam and Matilda, your twins who love tunes, sat down with the icon to chat through his newest single, Outlaws, with fellow Finnish icons House Body and Oskr, Darude’s venture in the evolution of his streaming site Vibing Out, to which he is creating a record label, World tours and Australian crowds, the iconic dance behind his newest single Outlaws and a challenge set to your twins from the man himself. 

Watch below! 

** Noting we had a few technical issues with the vision of Darude, but it comes back and in action for all the viewers to enjoy.

FMM: First off, congratulations on your newest single. Outlaws is amazing. We know you've been playing it at various sets for a while now. How does it feel to now, how does it feel to have it released as a single?

Darude: It's a relief, that's one feeling. It's actually really great to finally sort of been able to push it and name the track in my sets. I've been playing it for a while, playing it in my live sets and then also stream sets for a good while now. And initially, it was an instrumental. Kind of stood on my hard drive for a year and a half or something until I found a vocalist and I knew it needed a vocal and I wasn't in a panic or rush with it.

And then, of all things, I found this guy called Oskr, who lives about 35 minutes from me, and he's amazing. Nailed the vocal, and I tried it as an instrumental before it worked really nice. But then when the vocal is there and people hear it in a breakdown, it's one of those tracks where I guess there's something familiar about it, maybe, or the vocal style or something, because people try and sing to it immediately, even though they don't know the words. And it's kind of funny because I know you don't know the words, but I can see your mouth moving. I'm like, what are you singing?

But that's very cool, though, because it gives that or has that effect on people. And, yeah, I'm really, truly excited, finally. And then the other part of the excitement is that we started a label as well. And this is the first release on my own label. And while I've had good partners before and nothing really horrible has happened with labels, but having nobody to tell me what to do right now with my music, that's a great feeling.

FMM: Super interesting. You did mention that Oskr lived only 35 minutes from you. Very convenient. How did that go about finding him for the vocals? Did you know of him before?

Darude: Honestly, I did not know him before until I saw him on Eurovision Song Contest, the finished part of it where he was one of the contestants and he actually didn't win that year and didn't represent Finland in 21.

But I saw him perform in the finals and just fell for his vocal. He's got this raspiness to it. He has a certain way of singing, it's kind of almost folky or something. Rocky maybe. And then, well, I got to just know his name reached out on socials and it's interesting because I actually lived in the city as well, in that city Turku for like 13 years. But we're a little, I think he's like ten years or something younger than I am, so maybe we didn't just run in the same circles while the musician circles are quite small there.

But anyway, found him and he was keen on working with me and there's actually another track or probably two coming with him as well and I'm really excited that I found him. He's a great singer songwriter, but he's also producer himself, so he makes music himself and he records his own vocals and basically delivers almost ready made stuff for me. So it's a joy to work with as well.

FMM: Wow. Well look, we've heard it here first. There's more singles coming. That's super exciting. Was this the same with House Body as well? Because we know he's from Finland as well. How did you kind of get to collaborate with them as well?

Darude: Well, I've known House Body i.e. Yakuman for over 20 years now. He's actually a visual artist as well as a musician. Around the time when I came up started touring, he had a band called Beats and Styles with another guy and then they also had a live band and we toured in some of the same places. But then when my second album came out in 2003, and the first single Music, when we made the music video, it was him and his brother, they had a music video production company and now I think Outlaws was eight music video that he's produced and him and his crew has produced for me. So I knew him from that as well.

But anyway, I happened to be in California where he lives on the road and just basically called him up. I played in LA and called him up - do you want to hang out? I went to see him and his family for a couple of days. We hung out in the studio and this is what came out. Kind of very wholesome kind of connection.

FMM: I love that you said he directed like eight of your videos before, so if you like it, don't leave it. Very good.

Darude: Yeah, exactly.

FMM: You touched on this briefly with Vibing Out, but we'd love to sort of understand how Vibing Out started as a bit of a streaming project and what it becomes today. We'd love to understand where you see it going.

Darude: Well, the thing is, so I've streamed already before the Pandemic. I started streaming on Twitch in 2015 but did kind of like random studio sessions here and there. Like, this is how I make my kick drums. Or I did track sort of run throughs like showed an older track of mine. Like, hey, here's what I was thinking when I was doing this.

Here's the bass line, here's this and that. But that was kind of random. But then when the Pandemic started, as crappy as that all was, but it led to me being regular on Twitch. So I started Monday's was my studio thing. That was something that I just described. Wednesdays I did this talk show kind of thing, or Chat Stream. I chatted with my peers, people could listen in and then I would take their questions. And then Fridays would be my DJ stream, which I named Vibing Out.

And the thing about that was that I did it very for selfish reasons. I did it for me to get to connect with a crowd because now I wasn't playing live. And I also did it so that I would maintain my sort of DJ brain. That I would every week check out new promos, new tracks. But it was interesting because a lot of people and by the way, I'm not mocking anybody, I'm just explaining what I did. But a lot of people tried to continue the DJing at a club kind of vibe. So they would have green screens and big stages or they would be in their room, in their corner, but they would jump up and down and go crazy and keep the energy up. And nothing wrong with that.

But I was just like, I can't be in my studio alone. And it felt like strange to me. So this is what I would do. I would be right here. And I think you see a different picture now or do you see a video at all?

FMM: By the way, no video on it.

Darude: Well, I can show you right quick. There we are.

FMM: Amazing.

Darude: Wonderful. Okay. All right. So this is my studio. And I'm sorry, I thought it was automatically on, but this is my DJ on Fridays. And I would sit down, I would kind of calmly mix tracks in and out. I would look at my screens and talk to the answer questions and this and that. And that's what it sort of became. And I realized that I don't need to do like crazy energetic, high BPM trends and big drops. But people were loving slower stuff, deep house and all kinds of things which I would not normally play.

And the more we went into the Pandemic time wise, the more it became apparent that that kind of DJing is wanted as well and felt as well. And people on the other end in America, they'd be in their morning making their morning coffees and getting up, getting to school or work or whatever and you guys would be in the end of your Friday or the Saturday side possibly just going to bed or maybe coming from a club vibing.

And I realized that people are actually listening to music and that steered my thinking of making my own music as well because there was no gig next weekend for what I would make my track to or for. And so that community built and it shaped my thinking quite a lot in terms of my music making and DJing. So now that I started the label, it literally influenced me so much in many ways that I decided sort of to honor the stream and the streaming community, naming the label Vibing Out as well. And obviously it's kind of a sort of nice little core fan base to begin with for Vibing Out. I want to have the label it's for my own music so I don't have to think about whoever when I make it or when I release it.

But then also we want to release stuff from kind of anybody that when I like something that I hear and if they want it released, I can release it if I want to. We're also trying to be very transparent and very sort of no gimmicks in the contracts kind of label. And we'll also be like, well, I like this track, but I don't think I can do anything with it. Like, if it's a genre that I don't like or a genre that I don't know, then maybe we'll pass and hope that they'll find a better home somewhere else.

Because I've heard a million horror stories about being stuck with labels and labels doing people wrong and I really basically saying it verbally out loud now actually should ensure that I need to keep to my word as well. And there's a business side of running a label and you have to make money and you have to have contracts and you have to have certain percentages and whatnot. But we want to be a label that is not unfair or shady to the artists that we will sign in the future.

FMM: Oh, amazing. And look, it's so good to have that transparency there, authenticity. Yeah. And look, I think you're going to know my next question. What warrants a life from Darude? What gets a sign from Darude? What piques your interest? 

Darude: Well, honestly, I have a very wide variety a wide range of music that I like. Obviously, people think of me as a trance DJ and an electronic dance music producer. So that's what we want to sign broadly on a label as well. I mean, it's not like rock music that I like that I want to sign or will because we need to have some sort of a scale and range so that people, especially DJs, go by labels quite a lot. So if you mention our label's name they should think of something, a range of something.

And so I would say just House in its deep tech, progressive vocal kind of range. The same with trance really. But there's also like if I come across a great pop record, a potential one, why not release that? But then we'd obviously do a banging whatever dance floor mixes as well be trance or house or something because it's also sort of based on what I would play in my DJ set or what I want to play.

And I mean, that's one of the avenues where we will be obviously promoting whatever tracks we release as well. So it kind of doesn't make any sense to release a record that I would never play in my DJ set even if I liked it. Yeah, absolutely interesting. I mean, look, it's good to know that Trans, House are all in the Vibing Out wheelhouse so it's good to have that kind of distinction there. Yeah, to kind of bring ourselves into this and make it a bit hyper-local where we want to know a little bit about your time in Australia because we know you've been here. Are there any differences with Australian audiences as opposed to other audiences you've performed for?

Darude: Yes and no. I mean, what is amazing is that music is a very universal language. And when I go and play in America, when I play in Finland, when I play somewhere in Europe or Australia, I don't need to too much worry about my set, like a similar set or my kind of thought of a set works kind of everywhere. I tweak per night per crowd. I mean, obviously I don't play the same set every night, but I have my active stuff that if I play tonight and tomorrow and you hear both sets you will hear similar tracks and similar combos of tracks. But then in a month you will hear a different thing because I phased out tracks and brought in new ones. But the Aussie crowds, to me, I've always felt that you guys are very open minded in the sense that my best example always is you can have a festival stage where the same day you would have a drum and bass act, you would have a deep house act, you would have a trance act, and then you could have something like, say, prodigy, and maybe 25%, maybe 50% of the crowd changes when the act changes.

But a lot of people, sometimes most of people, just stay and party because it's a party. And in some places people are very fussy about that kind of thing. And they are like, oh, I only like this and that. But I very much feel that Aussies are just easy going. This is a party and now we party. It doesn't matter exactly who is on stage right now. As long as the music and vibes are good.

FMM: Yeah, no, I think you're pretty spot on there. But look, when you're playing, we'll absolutely come watch. Can we expect you, like, are you hoping to come back anytime soon or am I being a bit greedy and hoping that..

Darude: Be as greedy as you want. I like that. My ego likes that a lot. Realities. I did June a good tour, and then the December, January again, which was great. Both of them were actually really good tours. Right now, I don't have a tour planned, but my agent definitely keeps their eyes and ears open. How it works in Australia for me, you guys are so far, so it's not just easy hopping and to skip it there. So we usually do at least two, but probably three, even four weekends at a time. And we need to find a couple of sort of anchoring gigs, like big festivals or something like that. And then my agent can build a tour around that. Right now, I know we've had requests, but we haven't started building a tour yet. It might be end of the year, might even be next year, which would suck because that's a long time. I love coming to Australia and it's a really good market for me as well. So fingers crossed that it's sooner than next year.

FMM: We'll keep our fingers crossed. Lovely. So, last but not least, we'd love to know, I guess within your Outlaws video, you do have a dance. So we've learnt the dance. We were wondering if we could show you or if…

Darude: You can oh, you know what we could do? I would love you guys to show me and I can take part in some of that, actually. I don't know if you've seen my last kind of couple of days social media. There's a couple of things from behind the scenes where we actually did this conference room thing where we all were learning it and it was kind of fun. I'm not the best of dancers, to be honest. That's why I guess I'm a DJ, but I can do stuff with you if you want.

Darude and Futuremag Music go through the dance together. Watch the video above to see all the fun

Darude: But here is my challenge. Now, formally, I'm expecting an Insta or TikTok or whatever video of you guys doing it to the track.

FMM: All right, look, challenge accepted. We'll put it together nice with our video. We'll tag you.

Darude: Please do.

FMM: Well, you've made a great dance. We've got it to it.

Darude: Oh, yeah.

FMM: That's everything on our end. Anything you feel you'd like to touch on before we head out?

Darude: I don't think so. The thing that I would like from people is to just listen to the track, check the music video. We had a ton of fun making the music video, by the way. And like I said, House Body, who I've known for a long time, he's a riot. And I can tell you from behind the scenes, by the way. So Yako is the one who is doing The Running Man, who is the shirtless guy in a video. And as you can see, he's fearless and he's amazing. And he lived that character that day. He had his eyeliner all day. He was half the day wearing the big jacket that you see in the beginning of the video. And it was so funny to have him be behind the camera with all the gear on 1 second serious and discussing with his brother about this and that or assistant and then the next minute he's doing The Running Man or whatever.

I also need to mention my brother Oscar, who was the really cool mustache wearing cop and he also really threw himself into the role. I really enjoyed it. And then also a big shout out to everybody who was there. It was the last snowless weekend in November and I don't know how we were so lucky. It was actually below freezing, I think at some point of the day and people were in their teeth and tank tops and whatnot and they were just going at it. And we tried our best to keep all the breaks short enough and then just blast music so that they would keep themselves warm dancing and it was incredible experience and the extras and all the crew really made the video happen. So I'm very thankful for that amazing look. You've got to be part of it. It's worth the below freezing, which look, it's unheard of in Australia.

FMM: You make it incredible. Thank you for your time. It was a pleasure to meet you and yeah, really appreciate it.