Dr. Fresch: Raves Anatomy, Global Tours, and Immersive Connection interviewed on the Mobile Sessions 4/28/23

Dr. Fresch: Raves Anatomy, Global Tours, and Immersive Connection

In this exciting Virtual Session, The DJ Sessions host Darran Bruce sits down with Los Angeles-based DJ and producer Dr. Fresch inside the Mobile Sessions Studio in Seattle. Fresh off his Raves Anatomy Tour, his first major tour since 2019, Dr. Fresch reflects on the overwhelming response from fans, noting more sold-out shows than ever before. The tour’s success has extended beyond North America, with new dates announced in Australia and New Zealand, including stops in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, and Auckland.

Dr. Fresch discusses his philosophy of connection as the foundation of live performance, contrasting the intimacy of small clubs with the spectacle of large festivals. He shares how immersive 360-degree stages and booth-to-dancefloor setups create deeper fan experiences, drawing inspiration from iconic parties like Boiler Room and Def Atlanta.

The conversation also explores his dream festival vision, incorporating nature-based settings, diverse genre stages, live art, and his record label crew at the center of it all. He shares personal fan stories, including a painting gifted to him in Victoria, BC, and a surreal moment of hearing his track Feedback blasting from a wedding party’s boombox in Mexico.

Beyond touring, Dr. Fresch highlights new music including Bricks, a mid-tempo G-house track infused with funk and Memphis hip hop influences, and speaks candidly about his early inspiration from Steve Aoki and Dim Mak Records. With thoughts on VR, AR, and the future of immersive tech in live shows, this episode captures Dr. Fresch’s balance of authenticity, innovation, and community-driven artistry.

Show Notes 

Host: Darran Bruce
Guest: Dr. Fresch
Location: Mobile Sessions Studio – Seattle, WA

Overview:
Darran Bruce sits down with Dr. Fresch to discuss the Raves Anatomy Tour, immersive performance setups, new releases, fan stories, and his vision for the future of electronic music and live experiences.

Topics Covered:

• Success of the Raves Anatomy Tour with record sellouts
• Expansion to Australia and New Zealand with multiple stops
• Philosophy on live shows: intimacy in clubs vs. spectacle of festivals
• 360-degree stages and booth-to-dancefloor concepts for fan connection
• Dream festival: nature settings, diverse stages, live art, and label showcases
• Memorable fan gifts including a custom painting from Victoria, BC
• Surreal story of hearing Feedback at a wedding party in Mexico
• New release Bricks blending G-house, funk, and Memphis hip hop
• Inspiration from Steve Aoki and early years interning at Dim Mak Records
• Views on VR, AR, and immersive tech in future festivals and clubs
• Importance of authenticity and keeping community at the core of music

Call to Action:
Follow Dr. Fresch on Instagram @drfresch and stream his latest tracks including Bricks and Feedback.
Discover more exclusive interviews and live sessions at thedjsessions.com.

[Darran]
Welcome back to the DJ sessions where we feature the best DJs, producers and industry professionals from around the world. I’m your host, Darran. And right now we’re standing in the back of the ITV.

Wow, that was a blast from the past. The DJ sessions mobile studio. ITV used to be our previous show that we used to do before it became the DJ sessions.

And we’re standing here with none other than Dr. Fresch. How’s it going, Dr. Darran, I’m doing great, man. It’s fantastic to finally be here in the truck in Seattle.

Absolutely. I mean, I remember when I show you it backstage and decadence and your eyes just popped. And you said, I want to get in that truck.

And I said, I will get an interview in the truck. You’re like, no, I want to play the truck. I’m like, damn, like, okay, when you come to Seattle, like, I can’t tell you about I got this tour.

Don’t talk about it. Don’t tell anyone about it. And we’re gonna talk about the tour, the Raves anatomy tour.

You’re just kind of wrapping up but it sounds like it’s gonna keep going a little bit longer, correct?

[Dr. Fresch]
That’s correct. We’re wrapping up the North American portion. But we just announced last night that we’re going to Australia and New Zealand, man.

So yeah, huge.

[Darran]
What part of Australia?

[Dr. Fresch]
Man, so we’re doing six shows. You’re gonna be doing Sydney, Brisbane, Central Coast, Perth, and Auckland. Wow.

I’m forgetting. Oh, excuse me. Electric Circus in Adelaide, one of my favorite clubs in the world.

That’s the tour.

[Darran]
You know, it’s my couple of my friends, good friends just moved down to Melbourne. But she’s from Perth.

[Dr. Fresch]
Nice.

[Darran]
Which you can look how far Perth is from Melbourne. It’s like, I think isn’t Australia bigger in land size than the US?

[Dr. Fresch]
You know, I think, I think you’re correct.

[Darran]
Four and a half hours, five hour flight to get from one end to the other.

[Dr. Fresch]
When I’ve done that flight, it’s pretty exact to the East Coast, West Coast flight here. It is a massive continent, dude. Yeah, it’s huge.

[Darran]
So, you know, you’re wrapping up the tour, continuing the tour a little bit longer. But tonight you’re in Seattle, you’re playing Q nightclub. Now I’ve been watching you and following you online on this tour.

Is every club you’re playing sold out? I mean, pretty much sold out?

[Dr. Fresch]
I will say there are more sellouts on this tour than I’ve ever had. We’ve exceeded all expectations. We’re selling out, you know, the majority of the venues at this point.

And I’m grateful for that. Absolutely.

[Darran]
And this is your first tour in four years, correct?

[Dr. Fresch]
First tour since 2019.

[Darran]
2019. Wow.

[Dr. Fresch]
Waited until the right time after the pandemic to do it proper.

[Darran]
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, as things were coming back, it was uncertain. Some states were doing stuff.

Some states weren’t doing stuff. Took a little bit of time to come back. But it feels like things are really back in the full swing.

You hit it right at the right time. It’s just awesome. It’s great.

You know, when you’re on stage, do you become a different person on stage? Or are you a different person off stage? Or is there Dr. Fresch on stage and Tony off stage?

[Dr. Fresch]
Yeah, I’d say well, you know, to me, it’s not so much of a persona. It’s like an attitude. I’m definitely the same guy that is in his bedroom dancing to dance music behind the decks.

Like, Darran, I would say that Tony is Dr. Fresch. But I get into this state. And it’s a you know, you know, it’s that dream like state where you know, you’re doing your favorite thing.

And that’s how I explain it. It’s like, if you’ve ever played sports, you know, it’s like you’re in the game. And you know, a whole quarter will go by like that.

[Darran]
I was in the store the other day shopping for a rooftop party tomorrow and Michael Jackson, old school Michael Jackson comes on like pre pre off the wall. And I just start dancing the aisle and I make a little video of it and I brought it up online and I like if you know the lyrics to this song dance along with me. You can barely hear him but I’m just like when you dance you got to move and you’re in that zone.

You’re in the zone you are. Do you prefer now you play large scale festivals you play kind of intimate smaller clubs. Do you have a preference or is there a different energy that you feel when you’re at either or like I mean, totally, it’s a lot about this word connection.

[Dr. Fresch]
I would that would be probably the most direct way to talk about it. It’s a being in proximity to the fans is the first thing and you know, that’s kind of people’s biggest gripe with big festivals because of the production they have to be 40 5060 feet away. And a club like Q is awesome because you can literally reach out and touch the Seattleites or Seattle is you know, like, you’re right there in it.

And I think this is a great example of that. And a lot of what I’ve been trying to do on the tour with the smaller venues trying to bring the stage to the booth to the dance floor.

[Darran]
Yes, yes. Tell us about that booth to the dance floor. How’s that been working out?

[Dr. Fresch]
And I take inspiration from a lot of the great parties out there in the last 1020 years that have done this boiler room, Deaf Atlanta that I most recently played. The 360 immersive experience is becoming popular for a lot of reasons. But I think one of them is because social media is showing us through the lens just how much more fun that is.

And in a way, it’s like, it brings you back to that connection, right? At the end of the day, you know, that’s what the dance community is about, fundamentally. And the good thing that our phones can lead us to is creating cooler environments, embrace the positive things that our phones bring us to.

I love that.

[Darran]
Absolutely. You know, if you have if you could create your dream event, name five things will be a must have at that event, you would want to have black American Express card. There’s no limit on the budget, five things you’d want.

[Dr. Fresch]
I would say we’re talking about a festival here. For me, it would be a small, perhaps camping festival, if not, you know, out in the wilderness. So nature is important.

Number one, whether it’s a forest or a desert, some sort of environment like that. That’s number one. Number two is having that what we just talked about the connected environment, whether it’s a 360 stage or an immersive stage.

The third one is, I’d love to have the record label crew there, man. Yeah, have that be a big part of it. The fourth one off the wall, I’d love to have a stage that has nothing to do with what we do.

Like for instance, like a left field base stage, man have like deep, dark and dangerous acts, something like this, Alex Perez. And then the fifth would be I love to have some immersive art there, whether that’s like, it could be something like, you know, live painting or live fire dancing, you know, one of my favorite sets ever, I saw Tipper and Android Jones, Tipper was DJing Android Jones’s painting, Burning Man, expose, very cool event.

[Darran]
And you know, we used to have live art at our rooftop parties few years back in 1819. And it was a hit. I mean, people just love the fact and the artists is there, they’re grooving with the music, they’re painting something right, right there at the top of their head.

And it’s just really awesome to combine that artwork music experience for our fans and people there. Speaking of fans, what’s the sweetest thing a fan has ever made for you?

[Dr. Fresch]
Oh my god, I gotta say, it’s truly a painting of me that I now have in my mom’s house. And it is a painting of me from when I performed in Victoria, British Columbia about five years ago. And it’s just this kind of pose of me.

I’m wearing track pants and a shirt that she has edited to. It’s a low rider. It’s like a 64 Impala instead of whatever I had on there.

So it’s just kind of like nod to the West Coast hip hop scene. It’s really cute.

[Darran]
Yeah, nice.

[Dr. Fresch]
That was incredible.

[Darran]
Changing gears here just a little bit. Tell us about bricks.

[Dr. Fresch]
Oh my god.

[Darran]
Okay, so we just dropped a song today.

[Dr. Fresch]
Mid tempo g house electro hybrid. This one’s fun. I went for my kind of core sound but I sampled I took inspiration from the funk scene, you know, this kind of Russia popularized this scene that really is just Memphis hip hop.

It’s like, it’s straight up DJ Paul, three six mafia, you know, cowbell sampling. That’s what funk is. So I just kind of like threw that on a little bit like a pinch of that into what I’m doing.

And that’s the track I dropped today. So I’m excited to play for you.

[Darran]
Yeah, I’m super excited. I mean, ever since like I said, when I sit on the couch, literally, I was no setup. Feedback was on my phone.

The last time I thought I fell in love with feedback. I know I’m gonna fall in love with this. And I know the audience is gonna fall in love with it.

The city’s gonna fall in love with cues gonna fall in love with everyone right on the tour is falling in love with it. You know, that’s awesome. But when is it?

Where’s the weirdest moment you’ve ever heard one of your tracks play?

[Dr. Fresch]
Oh my god. Great question. I I’ll say most recently.

I was in Mexico a year ago with Rachel and we were traveling around. I was doing a spring break event in Puerto Vallarta. So we went down to sell you lita before we were walking down the streets to sell you lita.

And it wasn’t at a bar. It was out of the back of a golf cart. Somebody was carrying just like, you know, like a ghetto blaster.

And they were bumping feedback. Nice. And they had the ox hooked up.

And I’m in. I walked up. It’s clear.

It became clear right away that it was like a wedding party. And they were like, Oh my god. It’s Dr. Fresch. And they looked at their phone and they’re like, you know, we host one of the camps at a panky rang camp at electric forest. So I would say that, you know, that was probably the craziest coincidence I’ve ever met somebody. Awesome.

[Darran]
You know, who’s been the biggest influence when it comes to your career? And why?

[Dr. Fresch]
Man? Ooh, single hand like one person single handedly, one person gotta pick up biggest influence. Ah, it’s a great question.

You know, I’ll bring it back to initially, Steve Aoki in Denmark records is what led me to like move to LA. I ended up interning for him. And that label model in the party model is what inspired me in every way to build the structure for house calling what I do.

And at the core when Steve was doing more the electro blog house thing, that was the sound that I was going for to as things progress, you know, he’s doing everything from big room to hip hop, love. And what he did with the projects amazing. The beginning of Denmark in the beginning of house call, you know, I tried to model my label after what he did.

And what I do is Dr. Fresch after how he started Steve Aoki. So in a way, you know, that would probably be the biggest tip of the hat. It was my first gig in LA to I’m driving the dimmock van around Hollywood in 2010.

I was the guy behind the wheel. So I would say that those are my formative years. Biggest inspiration there.

[Darran]
Okay. Two letters. V.

R. Have you thought about doing anything in VR? Have you done anything in VR?

Are you developing anything in VR? What’s your take on VR?

[Dr. Fresch]
I’ve never developed anything in VR. But I have great example of this is over the pandemic, guys like Sci Boy, who was doing a lot of my art at the beginning of house call before he became a full time techno DJ again. Sci Boy was trying to get me to do exactly this and a lot of AR too.

So just like deep not even just DJing in virtual reality. I myself haven’t done anything with like a virtual reality mask per se, other than DJ in the metaverse through Oh my god. Now I’m spacing.

I’ve done a couple different festivals and one of them was in tandem with Oh, geez, Darran.

[Darran]
Don’t worry about it.

[Dr. Fresch]
I’ve been living in 3d man.

[Darran]
Exactly. No, no, I bring it up because we just launched our first VR nightclub in VR chat. Tell me all about it.

And so we call the club beta nightclub. And we had it in all space. But unfortunately, Microsoft dropped all space like a bad hat.

I was like, I were getting ready to launch and boom. So we had to quickly migrate over to VR chat. We’re super excited.

Our world just got approved. It’s gaining momentum. We’re getting ready to put our schedule up.

We’d love to have you come by check it out. And I’ll just give you a tour sometime. Absolutely.

And check it out. But we call it beta because it isn’t our first it isn’t version one yet. I love it.

You know, and then we’re gonna have version two because we look at VR is that people are gonna have to acclimate to it. So some people said why do you have pillars in your VR nightclub? There’s no gravity.

So what’s it holding up? And I’m like, okay, you got to remember people are coming into this for the first time. So we still keep the ceiling, the floor, the pillar, like you’re walking around a regular room, right until they get advanced so they can start flying.

I was in second life back in the day.

[Dr. Fresch]
Oh, wow.

[Darran]
Yeah, you could like fly fly through the prams and do all this crazy stuff. And oh my god, people thought it was a video game. And you got to change that mindset of it’s not a video game.

It’s a virtual world. And these virtual worlds are there to come with concert shows. I mean, you’ve heard what Marshmello and Travis Scott did on Fortnite and 12 million people or whatever.

And it’s like, okay, so we just see that we always like to be a front runner for runner to the new technology just like live streaming. When we jumped on board and started using that and doing a DJ show. So we see VR being the next thing but AR is a huge one too.

And I have a strategic partnership that I’m working on with a company that should go through I don’t know if you’ve heard about them yet called unity. Tell me when I t a. Okay, like they got Claude Dunn stroke on board.

Yeah, they do is you go around and use this app and you kind of leave unity team do not murder me if I describe this wrong. But basically you go around and you do stuff and you use like like Shaq has an AR thing and use that you make it but you can only get the AR inside of the unity app and then you share that then you get karma points then you can cash your karma points in like backstage passes or meet and greets or shirts or merchandise and things like that. They’re developing a few cities and we’re proud to announce we should hopefully be doing something here in Seattle with it as well with our events and getting that karma points going with special DJ AR stuff and you guys are ahead of the curve.

[Dr. Fresch]
I’m excited to jump into the I can’t even say 2d space but yeah, it’s gonna be sick.

[Darran]
Yeah. AR VR XR it’s all gonna be there and if you’re not involved in it get involved in it now. Don’t sleep.

Don’t sleep. All right. Well, we’re gonna get to this exclusive mix in the back of the DJ sessions mobile studio.

Is there anything else you want to let our DJ sessions fans know about before we let you go?

[Dr. Fresch]
You know, thankful to be back here in Seattle after a few years. I will see tonight q nightclub. Thanks for the love everywhere on raves anatomy.

It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[Darran]
Yeah. Where can people find out more information about you?

[Dr. Fresch]
Everything on every socials is dr f r e s ch. That’s forward slash Dr. Fresch everywhere. Thank you all everywhere.

[Darran]
Right on. Thank you so much doctor for coming on the show. Don’t forget to go to our website, the DJ sessions.com find us on Tick Tock, Twitter, Twitch, Facebook, everywhere, the metaverse, the DJ sessions. But if you go to our website, the DJ sessions.com you’ll find it all right there. 600 news stories, exclusive mixes interviews with guys like this, you know, and more fun stuff and our event series coming up soon and contest giveaways memberships. It’s all there at the DJ sessions.com.

This is Dr. Fresch, and I’m Darran coming to you from the back of the mobile sessions studios in Seattle, Washington. And remember on the DJ sessions, the music never stops.