Simon Shackleton on the Virtual Sessions presented by The DJ Sessions 4/23/24

In this in-depth Virtual Session, Darran Bruce speaks with veteran DJ, producer, and composer Simon Shackleton, whose career spans over 30 years and multiple acclaimed aliases including Elite Force, Zodiac Cartel, and Lunatic Calm. Simon shares the evolution of each identity, from his formative years creating Lunatic Calm with a childhood friend, to defining the “tech-funk” sound under Elite Force, and exploring melodic, emotionally driven productions under his own name.

 

He reflects on landmark career moments, including hearing Lunatic Calm’s music featured in The Matrix, and explains the artistry behind his Reconstructed sets—meticulously blending elements from a vast, 15,000-track library to create long-form, genre-fluid storytelling experiences. Simon dives into his creative philosophy, emphasizing originality over trend-following, and discusses the cyclical nature of genres like breakbeat.

 

The conversation explores his immersive live project State of Flux, which examines humanity’s relationship with technology and AI, as well as his experience in VR-based performances and spatial audio design. Simon also addresses the challenges of modern DJ culture, from social media-driven bookings to the prevalence of phone-dominated audiences, and advocates for more intentional, shared experiences on the dance floor.

 

Balancing global performances with mentoring, film and TV soundtracking, and personal well-being, Simon offers advice for up-and-coming artists: develop your unique voice, focus on craft, and resist the pull of algorithm-chasing. With decades of insight and a forward-thinking approach, Simon continues to innovate while staying rooted in authenticity.

 

Host: Darran Bruce
Guest: Simon Shackleton
Location: Virtual Studios, Seattle WA & Denver, CO

Overview:
Darran Bruce connects with Simon Shackleton to discuss his three-decade career, multiple aliases, creative philosophy, immersive projects, and mentoring work.

Topics Covered:

• Aliases & Evolution: Lunatic Calm, Elite Force, Zodiac Cartel, and Simon Shackleton
• Career Milestone: Music placement in The Matrix fight training scene
• Reconstructed Sets: Long-form storytelling from a 15,000-track library
• Burning Man Influence: Shift toward melodic, heart-led productions
• Breakbeat Legacy: Pioneering the tech-funk style blending multiple genres
• State of Flux: Immersive audio-visual show exploring tech and AI
• VR Work: Spatial audio and virtual venue builds during COVID
• Visual Philosophy: Striking a balance between spectacle and pure music focus
• Industry Shifts: Social media’s impact on bookings and artist perception
• Cell Phone Culture: Advocating for more present, connected audiences
• Mentoring: Mixing, Mastering, Mentoring program for mid-level producers
• Artist Advice: Build originality, avoid chasing trends, market authentically
• New Directions: Daytime and thematic event performances, soundtracking

Call to Action:
Follow Simon Shackleton at simonshackleton.org and on Instagram @simonshackletonmusic.
Discover more episodes at thedjsessions.com

[Darran]
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the DJ Sessions Presents the Virtual Sessions. I’m your host, Darran, coming to you from the virtual studios in Seattle, Washington. And my guest today is none other than Simon Shackleton, coming in from Denver, Colorado.

Simon, how’s it going today?

[Simon Shackleton]
Hey Darran, it’s really nice to meet you and yeah, very happy to be here.

[Darran]
Yeah, pleasure is all mine. Yeah, I’m super excited to be talking with you. You have a very long history, long-term history, like pretty much as much as I’ve been night clubbing for 30 some odd years.

You got a music career for 30 some odd years and you’re award-winning producer, DJ. I mean, you have aliases. We’re gonna get to know you a little bit better today on the DJ Sessions, if that’s okay with you.

Sounds good. Awesome, so Simon Shackleton, Elite Force, Zodiac Cartel, and Lunatic Calm. Wow, that’s a lot, that’s a lot.

Now, are each of those aliases, is there a different, I wouldn’t say persona, is there a different genre behind each of those aliases or is it like Simon produces this, Elite Force is this, Zodiac Cartel is this, Lunatic Calm is this?

[Simon Shackleton]
Yeah, I mean, kind of when I first started out in the kind of very early 90s, started making music, at that point, I was really just finding my way, as you do. And, you know, I spent probably five years working with a really good friend of mine who I’d known since I was about eight years old at school and we became Lunatic Calm. But during that time, it was a really sort of formative period for me.

So we were, you know, we were collecting equipment, we were trying to figure out, because back then, obviously, you couldn’t do stuff on a laptop like you can now. So we were just really like, we did a very, very early publishing deal, got some money in, that bought us enough equipment to be able to start making demos to a reasonably decent level and once we had the equipment, in our downtime, I started doing stuff as Elite Force. And then as Lunatic Calm, kind of in the early 2000s, that sort of ran out of steam for various reasons and then Elite Force kind of took over.

And, you know, to your point about the aliases, the Zodiac Cartel alias came up when I start, you know, around about 2008, I started making more glitchy electro house stuff and I really wanted a bit of separation between that and Elite Force, which was known more for breakbeat than anything else. So that was the rationale. And then the Simon Shackleton stuff, obviously, that’s my name, but that kind of came about, I guess around about 2011, 2012, when I first started going to Burning Man and I went to Burning Man each year for about seven or eight years and really, you know, those, like Simon Shackleton became more about, okay, this is like, I’m not making music for anybody else under that name.

I’m purely making it from the heart for myself. I’m not making it to fulfill an objective.

[Darran]
So that’s that separation. Speaking of Burning Man, you’re actually coming up here to Seattle this weekend, aren’t you? To play for Argument Temple, correct?

[Simon Shackleton]
Yeah, that’s right. So I’m playing at their Sacred Dance Party, which is one of their sort of legendary white parties on Friday night at Monkey Loft in- Yeah, in Seattle. So excited to be heading back to the city.

[Darran]
Spent a lot of time at that nightclub. Lots of time. Too much time sometimes.

Uh-oh. Yeah, Monkey Loft’s a great place. I know the owners, know the bartenders, staff, just, it’s an awesome club.

Now you are making a little bit more melodic music as Simon Shackleton, correct? And with releases on Nick Warren’s Soundgarden and Juna Deep. Tell me about that.

[Simon Shackleton]
Like, is this a paradigm shift for you or is it just like- You know, it’s not really a paradigm shift. I mean, without wanting to get too sort of in-depth about it I think it’s very easy when you’re making dance music to end up making music that has functionality top of the agenda. So you’re thinking about dance floors the whole time.

You’re almost sometimes on this kind of treadmill where you’re playing two or three times a week. You need this ammunition. You need this fire.

You just need to get out there and just destroy dance floors. And for many years I almost felt like the musical side of myself as a music producer was kind of given over really to that functionality. And actually I remember when I first started making music I always, it always felt like there was a real push and pull between how musical can I be with this versus what’s the dance floor gonna tolerate, you know?

And so this more sort of musical side because I’m like way, way back in the day I’m like a classically trained musician. I went to university and I studied classical music and did a lot of manuscripted music. So really, you know, this music that I’ve been making recently is a fusion of that sort of dance floor knowledge that I’ve built up over the years and the musicality that I have.

[Darran]
Do you, should DJs learn more about music theory or does it really matter when it comes to dance music?

[Simon Shackleton]
I wish it mattered more. That’s the honest, that’s the honest answer. Cause I think a lot of the time and dance music’s always done this.

It’s almost like it can be almost an exercise in recycling, you know, recycling, musical ideas, recycling, you know, just, I remember when I first started going out buying vinyl back in the kind of very, very early nineties and you go out and you buy this piece of vinyl. It absolutely blew up over the course of two weeks. And then maybe three or four weeks later you’d hear 50 records that all had the same drum loops the same samples, whatever.

And it’s, it’s still like that. I think people kind of, there’s a tendency for people to look at what’s working, what’s popular and just try and emulate it, which I think is a shame cause it, it just diminishes the, you know the musicality and the ambition maybe.

[Darran]
Yeah. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve talked with a number of producers in the past. And one of the things I say is don’t try to produce what’s hot on Deepport right now.

Produce what you feel is great and make that hot. You know, you know, cause by the time you get that number one on Deepport that genre is already probably moving on, you know that style’s gone.

[Simon Shackleton]
Yeah. I mean, I think, I think that’s, that’s something that, that’s really important to understand with music period is that it’s never static, right? And I think as a music producer and as a label owner and all the rest of it when I’ve made mistakes, I think in, in the music that I’ve been making or the music I’ve been releasing in the past, it’s been when I’ve imagined that dance music is somehow static and that, you know oh, I’ve got it nailed.

I understand now that this is, this is this is what people want because that’s what they’ve been wanting for the last few weeks. You know, by the time you’ve, you’ve made a piece of music off the back of that so-called knowledge that you have, everything’s moved on. It’s never static.

It’s always changing. It’s always evolving. And it’s a surefire way, I think, to end up behind the curve is to think in those terms, you know?

[Darran]
And you’re kind of one of the key players in the development of, of breakbeat sound. How did that come about? Like, did you just sit back one day and like, oh, that sounds awesome.

You know, I’m going to create a whole new genre, you know.

[Simon Shackleton]
How did that happen? Oh, it’s, it’s interesting. You know, like for me, it, I, I was never like I was never a breakbeat purist at all.

You know, I always enjoyed going way, way back to when I first started making music. I always enjoyed cutting up drum loops in samplers and repurposing them and, and doing things with them that drummers actually couldn’t physically do, you know, with filters, with all kinds of different cutups. So, you know, if you listen to a lot of the electronic music from the, from the nineties, just thinking about Goldie and Metalheads and that, that kind of sound where they took these really familiar breaks and they just turned them into something that was almost like a musical instrument.

And that I found really interesting. So when I, you know, when I was working on the early Elite Force stuff and the Lunatic Calm stuff, you know, breakbeats were absolutely sort of fundamental to the way that we made music to such a point. When, when we went out as Lunatic Calm, we actually bought a live drummer out with us on the road, Jez Noble, who is, you know, was absolutely world-class.

And, and then, you know, we, we almost made things even more kind of breakbeat heavy when we, when we took it out. And then I suppose in terms of like my role in, in, in breakbeat and the formulation of breaks as a genre, I always felt like I was a bit of an outlier really. You know, I used to call my style of DJing as much as anything else to call it tech funk, which I really liked because it was, it was sort of genre neutral.

And, and when I, when I played out, especially in the kind of from, from really 2000 through till 2010, I was playing out a lot. And my DJ sets were always just a mix of breaks, techno, electro, and house music. And, and I love that sort of the ability that you had just to be super eclectic, to go wherever you felt like going.

And, and I always felt like this, the sets were sometimes a bit one dimensional if they were just kind of restricted to breaks or restricted to electro or whatever it might be. I hear you.

[Darran]
I’m gonna pause you for a second, cause I just checked it out and there were people joining the chat room, joining, not the chat room, but joining the video chat. Just want to let you know, folks, that link on his website is not the correct link to use. You want to go to thedjsessions.com if you want to watch the show, cause Rumble Monk, Rumble Monk, he’s wanted to join the show. I’ve got to keep booting him. Sorry, Rumble Monk. You can watch the show.

You can join the chat room on Twitch if you want to chat or Facebook. That’d be the best places to go. And RPA3, same goes for you as well.

Sorry, we don’t take in show guests. Could you just imagine the can of worms that would open up about how crazy, like back in Pandy, you know, people would get Zoom bombed. Do you remember that?

Yeah, I’d say I remember it well, yeah. That was interesting. Anyways, so where is like the weirdest moment you’ve ever heard one of your own songs tracks play?

[Simon Shackleton]
Oh my God, the weirdest moment. That’s a difficult one. I mean, we had, as Lunatic Con, we actually had a lot of music licensed to movies, you know, back in the late nineties.

And one of them was the original Matrix. And I remember when that license came in, our manager was like, he just moved to LA from the UK and he managed to hook us up with this license. And he was super excited about it.

And we’d obviously like, we’d never even heard of the Matrix. It hadn’t been out. It was just about to come out.

And then obviously it came out and just exploded. And it wasn’t, I probably didn’t see it. I didn’t see our music in the movie for about maybe two years after it came out or something.

And then I went to see it in the cinema and that kind of blew me away. I didn’t like, obviously we’d seen the film explode and I’d seen a couple of snips of it here and there, but actually feeling the energy that that music kind of gave to a scene in such an iconic movie was, that was pretty special. What scene was it?

It was actually the fight learning scene where Morpheus teaches Neo.

[Darran]
No way!

[Simon Shackleton]
So yeah, that was neat.

[Darran]
I literally have seen that movie probably over 200 times. Wow. Yeah.

I mean, that used to be my come home movie. You kind of come home from the nightclubs and I pop the VHS. Yes, the VHS into the three-quarter and make it about like, about that far in before I fell asleep.

Yeah, there you go. That’s such an iconic scene too. Yeah, Morpheus goes, you think that’s air you’re breathing?

Yeah. That’s right. I know, that’s crazy.

Right on. So tell us about, what are your reconstructed sets?

[Simon Shackleton]
So, obviously I’ve been DJing for years and I kind of, I guess around, maybe around 2010, 2011, I just wanted more, you know? I was playing all over the world and it wasn’t uncommon to get on a plane and fly out to China for two nights and then fly back in time for dinner on Sunday and stuff. It was insane.

And I was kind of doing this every week. I’d be in Australia one week and Morocco the next week and Russia and the US. And, you know, it was a crazy time.

But I realized that during that time, the vast majority of the sets I got were headliner sets and they were for peak time. And so you’d be parachuted into this world where really people just wanted you to kick the ass out of it. That was it.

And that was my goal. So I would turn up fully armed with all of these new tracks and just, you know, do my best to kind of blow the club out of the water. And actually, I think it was 2009.

I started getting, I started feeling that the music that I had access to, obviously it was the same as everyone else, except for the fact I was running a label. So I had a load of promos and all the rest of it. But the way that I organized my music library has always been very meticulously in key.

So I have, now I have 15,000 tracks and they’re all meticulously in key and they’re labeled so that even if I’m not in Rekordbox or whatever, I can see that, okay, if I want a techno track that’s in the key of A, there’s 400 tracks to choose from. And I know that they’re all gonna, you know, they’re all gonna sort of work with each other. And so I was like, this is around the time I was using Ableton a lot more as well.

So I was thinking when I was getting on these long haul flights, like what can I do during the flight that could be useful? So I started going into my DJ library and just grabbing, I was like, well, what happens if I take that really cool baseline from that rolling tech house track and I blend it with this breaks track, but then it’s a really cool kind of lead sound from a tech house tune here. And I love the production on this electric house track.

So I started kind of sitting on the plane and just fusing all this shit together, including dubstep as well. So bringing that into the equation. And then, you know, I realized that after six hours of messing around on a flight, I could actually have a couple of brand new tracks.

So that’s how, that was the sort of precursor to Reconstructed, but these were, this was called Revamped. And I ended up putting together an album called Revamped in 2010. And it turned out to be, honestly, it was a bit of a genius move because I had all of these, had all of these different artists that were fused together on each track.

And I, me and my manager at the time, we approached every label and we got clearance for every single sample, but right, which was insane. But a lot of the people we approached, they didn’t understand what we were asking for at all. So it wasn’t like, oh, can we license your vocal line for this track?

It was more, okay, this dude is throwing together like eight different tracks. Your track is just a tiny bit of it, but we’d really like to get your permission to use it. And a lot of labels just said, oh, you can, yeah, just have it.

It’s fine. Or, you know, give us 50 bucks and it’s a lifetime license. We did all these crazy good deals with it.

And then the day the album came out, there were 14 tracks on it. And, you know, all of a sudden you had, like each track had Wolfgang Gartner. It had Stanton Warriors.

It had the Plump DJs. It had like all of these artists, like as the artist’s name on there, which meant that everybody that followed those artists on Beatport was notified about it. And basically, and within five days, all 14 tracks were in the Beatport top 50.

And all 14, well, there were 12 of the tracks were Breaks tracks and they formed the top 12 in the Breaks chart for six weeks and nobody even got close to moving them. So this thing was like out of control. Anyway, the Reconstructed thing is like, and we’re now sort of 15 years on from that really, but the Reconstructed thing is almost like a sort of turbocharged version of that, but over the course of an entire live straight DJ set.

So the idea really is this 15,000 track strong music library just becomes a huge kind of melting pot of sonic ideas. And you can pull out anything from any genre, from any track and just try and fuse it with other tunes to create what’s basically a piece of kind of long form storytelling.

[Darran]
I’m glad you brought that up. How important is it to storytell in a DJ set?

[Simon Shackleton]
Personally, I think it’s really important, especially now I’m not necessarily doing sort of fist pumping peak time sets where you can get more kind of experimental, you can get like just go into things a little bit deeper. I think if you’re doing a 45 minute set perhaps where you’re just looking to bludgeon the audience into submission at a giant kind of EDM event, maybe storytelling is not such a big deal. I still think having a beginning, middle and end is a good idea because then there’s some kind of narrative to it.

But for me, I’ve always thought of my sets as stories, even the shorter sets. And I’ve always tried to, I hate this phrase, but take people on a journey with it. And that’s something that’s kind of informed pretty much everything I’ve done, certainly over the last 10 years.

And what this technique allows me to do is to go even deeper. So now I’m pulling out elements from soundtracks, for example, and fusing those. I’m able to, I’m using AI tools as well.

I can separate tracks into their kind of stems. So I’m using, I’m able to get a bit more kind of clinical with that stuff as a sort of production tool. And not only that, but you can actually now clone people’s voices.

So you can start fusing bits of spoken word in there. And it just, all of a sudden, there’s this incredible world of possibility out there.

[Darran]
You know, the AI whole thing took off. You know, I saw a lot of people doing a lot of photography or pictures and things of that nature, but it’s gonna make its way. And it is making its way, like you just said, into the music world.

What are your thoughts on AI and its role in music?

[Simon Shackleton]
I read a really good comment the other day from somebody just saying, I know this is incredibly divisive subject, but I read a really good comment saying, it’s not AI, as a musician, it’s not AI that’s gonna take your job. It’s another musician using AI that’s gonna take your job. So for me, I think that’s the way I look at it.

Like, you know, we’ve been, we’ve had, over the last sort of 30 years, we’ve had the most phenomenal amount of technological development, like unimaginable technological development. And when you think that even things like YouTube, for example, it was only invented 20 years ago, and it just blows my mind. It’s like, it just feels those, that kind of having that tech just feels sort of ubiquitous in the same way now that I’ve actually done away with almost all of the physical stuff from my studio.

And I pretty much exclusively just use a laptop and an amazing set of headphones. And it’s, I’m making better productions than I’ve made throughout my entire career. So, you know, these kind of advances, they’re inevitable.

The AI stuff, I think where it gets, where it gets into a really sort of sticky argument is around simply being able to plug in a prompt and just generate a random kind of finished bit of music. But by the same token, there are people who are incredibly skilled at using mid-journey to come up with the most incredible images. And then there’s the 99% of people who just churn out meaningless fodder.

So a lot of it, it’s really, it really comes down to, I think, the artist and the way that the artist’s actually able to use the technology to their benefit, you know?

[Darran]
Now you’re working on an immersive live experience called State of Flux. Yes. Has that already been out there?

Is it launched or is it gonna be launched this year? What’s the, tell us about State of Flux.

[Simon Shackleton]
So State of Flux, I’m super excited about. And actually, this is a project that a couple of years ago I did a lot of work on. And then it had to be for various reasons to do with relocating and my father passing away and everything.

It had to be kind of benched for a while. But now I’m sort of established in Denver. I have a lot of friends out here and a lot of very, really super cool kind of creative people who are willing to get involved and who are willing to help in various forms.

So, you know, State of Flux is, it’s an immersive interactive kind of one and a half hour live show that fuses visuals and the kind of narrative behind it is it’s really an examination of our relationship with technology and specifically with AI. So we’re, as the show, you know, the show begins with super kind of intimate, human, vulnerable performance and gradually goes through this journey and takes it into the realm of the impossible basically. And we’re, you know, there’s so many moving parts with this show.

I’m looking at teaming up with some of the orchestral players at the Colorado Symphony. And we’re probably looking at launching the show early in the new year. So that’s our timeline at the moment.

It’s, we’ve got about nine months that we’re working towards. So, yeah.

[Darran]
And as far as immersive experiences, virtual reality. Have you been playing around in VR at all?

[Simon Shackleton]
I have, I did a lot actually during the COVID times. Yeah, I had a Quest 2 headset. And at the time I was doing a bunch of kind of consulting work with this team of architectural fabricators from Philadelphia.

And their history was more in the physical world of architecture. But as COVID happened, they started building all kinds of really interesting virtual environments. And I kind of got bought in doing some audio consulting and looking at how we could use audio in the virtual space.

So during that time, we were doing all of these really interesting kind of build outs in alt space and a couple of other like virtual worlds. And I was doing a bunch of spatial audio around like kind of the location of audio and the journey that the character would have in the virtual space to actually trigger different audio parts, which would almost create these composite tracks out of sort of spatial stereo. So I think there’s a lot of really interesting, you know, it’s interesting that how, as everybody kind of bounced back after the pandemic and we all started to go out and then all of a sudden everybody wanted to be in person, it felt like a lot of that kind of tech, it’s still going on in the background, but it became a lot less sort of vital to people in the moment.

But I definitely see in a few years time, I think it will be very, very commonplace for a lot of big events anyway, to have these adjacent virtual experiences that, you know, as you had at Coachella with Fortnite hosting, you know, various acts at Coachella this week. And I think that would just be on the norm, you know?

[Darran]
Absolutely, you know, we have our own VR nightclub and we started in alt space. It was really such a shock to us because we just launched our nightclub. We’re getting ready to push it out there to alt space, alt space, and then Microsoft shuts it down.

And we’re like, whoa. So I had to quickly scramble and take my alt space. I was gonna launch it in VR chat as well, but alt space was gonna be first.

I just really liked the functionality of alt space where you could build inside, whereas, you know, VR chat, you have to build it in unity and then import it in basically, you know? And that was just kind of a nightmarish time. I was just like, oh my God, but we finally got it there.

It’s up and running. This is actually being broadcast in the VR nightclub right now. I, you know, it’s funny.

I got a Quest 2 as well, but I haven’t picked up my headset in a while though. Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t know why.

I just like, I guess it’s, I need to start getting back into VR again. But yeah, I mean, everyone migrated over to VR chat and people were complaining and then there was Spatial and there, you know, there’s a few others out there. I think VRC is gonna be the one that people are gonna go to though.

[Simon Shackleton]
Yeah, we did actually, as part of that kind of VR time, we did a really interesting project with this guy, Theon Cross, who is a, he’s a hip hop tuba player. Sounds kind of out there. He’s one part of the Sons of Kemet.

And he, so he was doing a solo album of tuba stuff. And we actually got, we got some funding from the British government to do this piece at South by Southwest, which was the 2021 South by. So it was all kind of, it was all remote, but we built a perfect replica of the Cedar Street venue in Austin, which is the one that the British Music Embassy were using for all their real world productions.

And then we actually took Theon into Abbey Road Studios in London and filmed him doing performances using a mocap suit. So we were then able to build an avatar and actually have his avatar do, have all of his little kind of nuances and stuff. And then we, you know, we actually put him into the venue doing this performance every sort of five minutes or something.

[Darran]
So it was pretty cool. That’s crazy. You know, I was talking with a guy here.

He’s based out of Seattle, the Seattle area. And we were talking about, he had developed a way to do it. The first person to ever really do this, where he would go in with a 3D camera and map the whole, say, venue.

Then what he’d do is he’d come back to his studio and kind of be in a green screen room. And he could actually, not an avatar, he could place me, like my physical version in that environment. And I could be playing like a guitar and put me on the stage at Carnegie Hall or put me on the stage at Hollywood Bowl or wherever he 3D mapped.

And, you know, it was just crazy tech. And he’d have three cameras, like one here and two here. And you can get right up and like, look and see the color of my eye if you wanted to.

And zoom in like that. It was crazy tech. I don’t know whatever happened with him.

[Simon Shackleton]
It’s really, I find that all of that stuff super interesting. So I think where it just sort of fell down a lot of the time was not being able to get the volume of people in a venue space that would make it feel like it was populated. And, you know, even big events, you’d be going in there and there’d be like 10 people all kind of figuring out what avatar they had on and stuff like this.

And yeah, it just didn’t have the… Yeah, it was just a different experience. And I think trying to take the sort of real world experience and put it into VR is just a mistake.

It’s a different experience. It’s cool in its own way, right?

[Darran]
It’s so funny you bring that up because my friend, when I was going through the whole development, first got my headset in like April of 2022.

[Simon Shackleton]
Yeah.

[Darran]
Yeah, 2022. And then I went and got my nightclub, started building my nightclub and figuring out how am I gonna get this? How I gotta make these changes to it and then getting it into alt space.

But the funny thing he asked me says, why do you have pillars in your nightclub? There’s no graffity. And I’m like, that’s a good thought.

I didn’t think about that. You know, it was like I would explain to people they’re gonna build it from that four wall ceiling floor experience. But I’ve seen some places that these guys that I was talking to, I wanna develop my second version of the nightclub.

They actually won Cannes Awards in France for their design of VR spaces. And I mean, they are just, unfortunately, alt space ended up closing down because that’s where they were all at. But I don’t know if they ended up migrating them over.

I’m sure they went and migrated over VRC. But yeah, I just remember him asking me that. And I was like, so the next version, I’m gonna make people fly around.

Yeah, right.

[Simon Shackleton]
I mean, one of the genuinely challenging things around that is motion sickness, actually. You know, and that’s partly why you have these pillars and stuff. It’s because it roots people in something that keeps themselves feeling kind of normal somehow.

[Darran]
Yeah, absolutely. I used to get bad vertigo all the time. And now I know how to, I know a little bit more like eye control and just close my eyes for just a second and take just a little break like that, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, I used to get, take the headset off and I’m just like. Oh boy.

That’s not fun. So speaking of visuals, how important are visuals to your performances?

[Simon Shackleton]
I mean, I’d like them to be more important because visuals are very, they’re very important to me as a person. You know, I’ve done for years and years, I’ve done, I’ve been a real fan of landscape photography. So it’s almost been over the years, that’s been a form of meditation for me.

Just, you know, going out, being patient, researching something, going out and then sort of attempting to execute it and having all these little technical challenges. And it’s like the perfect, it’s the perfect storm of challenges that I just kind of like, you know? Plus I’m on my own.

So I can be chill and I can be, I can feel a bit isolated and stuff. But yeah, I mean, in terms of visuals for shows, it’s often felt a bit overwhelming on the technical side of things. And I have some basic skills.

I’m pretty good with Photoshop. You know, I’m pretty good with AI generation these days. And I can do some basics with Premiere.

Fortunately, my wife is actually a filmmaker and she’s very skilled at these things. So, you know, she’s one of the core members of this team and she’ll be sort of the main visual lead for the State of Flux show. But I do think, I was talking to someone about this the other day.

I think that visuals in electronic music have kind of, you know, I see that there’s a balance there somehow to be had. And I think when you get to a point where you see 20,000 people at a Tale of Us event and literally every single person is watching the show through the prism of their mobile phone, because, you know, the show is everything. It’s almost like the music is nothing more at that point than kind of underscore for some world-class visuals.

And there’s nothing wrong with that at all. It’s one way of doing it. But, you know, I was saying to someone the other day, some of the favorite shows that I ever played were places like Tresor in Berlin, where, you know, there’s like a thousand capacity room.

There’s four lights or six lights in the entire room and they’re just red up lighters. And then there’s like 50 strobes or something and there’s nothing else at all. And so there’s no focus on the DJ.

There’s no, you know, there’s none of this. There’s no like giant screen behind to take a lead and to push the show forward. It’s really just about the music.

And I can actually see, I can see more and more people kind of leaning a little bit in that direction, like Ortega, for example. They have a tour that’s coming up where they’re playing in pitch darkness, like no visuals at all. It’s literally like, come and find your space in the venue and then it’s gonna be totally dark.

No phones, no anything. And that’s been- Are they taking people’s phones at the door or? I think they might be, yeah.

I know that with Trent Moller, so he did, when he did his last resort album three years ago, he hosted all these listening parties that were in complete darkness. And I thought that was a really, really cool idea where, you know, he had loads of sofas and chill spaces for people and he could just come in, all the lights would go down and then basically afterwards there’d be a Q&A with the artist. It just feels like the perfect antithesis to the huge, like Tomorrowland style spectacle.

And I feel that with that sort of level of visual art, there’s no scope for imagination at all. It’s like everything is just like put on a plate for you. It’s completely spelled out.

And I miss those days where you’d look out on the dance floor and you’d see people just staring at the floor just because they’re just totally immersed and lost in the music. So I think trying to find the balance between those things would be a really good way forward. You know?

[Darran]
You know, with 30 years in the industry, you know, you’ve seen the rise of cell phones in nightclubs or cell phones at parties. And, you know, there have been some parties here a few years ago, they called them, I believe it was called No Signal. The idea obviously came out of, you were gonna take your cell phone at the door, you know?

And what kind of, it gets people back into the music rather than, okay, I’m bored, I’m gonna play Candy Crush or I’m now recording this set and the audio is gonna sound like crap anyways. Visually it might be cool, but you’re having somebody sit on the floor like this rather than moving with the music. It’s like, now you get 15 people or 30 people doing that.

And you’re like, what the hell?

[Simon Shackleton]
Well, totally. And it’s not only the effect that it has on the individualist, it’s the fact that that individual with the screen who’s shooting the show isn’t interacting with anybody else around them. So there’s none of that kind of going up to people and having a dance off with them.

And do you know what I mean? Like sharing that moment where it’s like, oh man, this is so good. So you end up, I think you just end up very much sort of individualizing the experience and just making it about that little kind of bubble that people put around themselves.

And cell phones, they’re not gonna go away anytime soon. And to an extent, getting people to check them at the door would show people a different experience. But it’s really, I think it’s how we choose to use our technology intentionally that needs to change.

And I don’t know if people are anywhere near that, to be honest.

[Darran]
It was some time ago, I mean, I wanna say within the last, probably 2024, I wanna say somewhere 2015, 2017, somewhere around there, it was rumored that Apple was developing an infrared sensor to put in the phone next to the cameras. If you had a concert, you could basically shoot an infrared beam out and say, don’t let this be recorded. Wow.

Yeah, it would shut the camera down on both sides so you couldn’t record the concert at all. I don’t know if it ever emerged. I don’t know if it was maybe they applied for a patent to do that and it never made it into the phones, but that would be such a huge thing because it’s like, okay, I’m gonna watch the concert.

I’m not gonna try to record the concert, go look where I’m at. And even from a copyright standpoint, it’s like, you’re taking somebody’s work and you’re repurposing that. You don’t have the rights to do that.

Yeah. When you go to a football game or baseball game, they say no professional cameras allowed. If the lens can be detached, you can’t bring that camera in.

Yeah. So, it’d be very interesting to see if something like that were to be released so people could prevent the filming of their sets or things of that nature.

[Simon Shackleton]
And I think that you can’t really ignore the knock-on effect that technology has in the art that people then go on to make. And I think one of the things I always find quite interesting about this sort of history of digital technology, having, I mean, I’m old enough to have seen all of this shit like go from no real tech to, oh my God, I can’t believe I can do this with a watch or whatever. But one of the absolute tipping points was 2012 where really cell phones became ubiquitous in 2012.

Everybody had a smartphone. It was like before that we all had flip phones and all this weird shit, things the size of house bricks and stuff like that. But all of a sudden you had smartphones, they had cameras, and that was the same year, I think, that Facebook bought in the thumbs up.

And that just allowed people to get into this kind of doom scrolling thing where it’s like, oh, I can like that post without actually committing to saying how much the art means to me or whatever. And I think that the kind of net result of all of that sort of fast forward 12 years down the line is we now have our TikToks and we have Instagram and it’s all very, very visual. So if you’re a club promoter or an artist and you’re trying to sell yourself for the next event you’re putting on or whatever, you just need this great footage.

So people need bigger visuals and they need better, whatever, and the DJ needs to look amazing, standing behind the decks. It’s like, it just didn’t use to be that way at all. And again, I totally get that the times change.

I think the balance has probably gone too far that way and maybe it will swing back at some point.

[Darran]
How important is social media to you?

[Simon Shackleton]
Man, that is such a damn good question because I was talking about that this morning to my wife. And it’s really, I think it’s a constant sort of source of frustration these days. I used it really well, I think, for a long, long time.

But I feel like now there’s, it’s almost like an industry in itself is social media. I can’t go on threads or go on Twitter or Facebook or whatever and not have a dozen people saying, you need to be doing it like this. You need to get more engagement.

You need to have X amount of growth. This is how I can help you grow your business. And actually what we’re ending up doing, I think, by going down that road is just sort of, A, and I hate this idea of content creation because it’s like, for me, that’s like, it’s a euphemism for fodder.

It’s like content, what does that mean? It’s like, you’re just, I have to create content. It doesn’t matter what it is.

I just have to make more of it. And I just, I don’t see myself as someone who particularly wants to play that game at all. And it ends up a lot of the time, the vast majority of the posts that I read these days are really just like engagement farming as much as anything.

It’s like, I know that if I write a post where I complain about how much Spotify are paying me, I’m gonna get 50 other people saying, yeah, that’s rubbish, it’s terrible, we should get rid of Spotify. I see that 50 times a day, honestly, it’s just so tedious. But that’s kind of what it’s become.

People are just chasing numbers and they’re chasing metrics. And I don’t know, how uncool is that as an artist?

[Darran]
That’s the thing, I now know that there’s promoters, bookers that will, I’m gonna go check out your Instagram. You don’t have more than 10,000 people on your Instagram, I’m not gonna book you for a show.

[Simon Shackleton]
Yeah, totally.

[Darran]
And they could be a phenomenal artist, but they might have 500 people on their Instagram and they don’t engage because they’re like, I don’t do social media. And they’re like, well, we don’t book you then.

[Simon Shackleton]
Yeah, yeah, totally. I’ve had that before where there were two other artists on the bill with me at this event and I didn’t know either of them. I’d not heard of them.

And the promoter said, yeah, we’re gonna put you on as the opening act because we’re doing it in terms of who has the most followers. I’m like, that’s insane. I genuinely haven’t heard of these people at all.

And you do know, by the way, that you can buy followers. So, you know.

[Darran]
Exactly.

[Simon Shackleton]
But yeah, and that kind of, that’s sort of the ruination really of hard work, isn’t it? Yeah. You can just like shortcut it like that.

[Darran]
So, you know, recently, you know, you kind of took a step back from Elite Force. Is that, that was a conscious decision? Because why did you make that decision?

[Simon Shackleton]
Man, I just, you know, I’ve been doing it for 20 years or something. And I felt a bit like, especially with the break scene, but like back in sort of 2015, it really, it felt like it was really on its knees. Like it, there wasn’t a lot of interest.

It felt like the, it felt like all of the people that were originally into it had all grown old together and grown really grumpy together. And they, you know, when like, I was getting booked to do quite a lot of shows where you’d be like, quite often you’d be asked to do a retro set. And I hated that.

I just like, it’s just, you know, like operating in a kind of time capsule. And I just, I didn’t like that idea. I wasn’t really feeling making a whole load of new music around that sound.

So I just sort of focused on other stuff, but then, you know, the whole kind of like breaks has sort of come a little bit back into vogue. And I guess if you stay alive for long enough, you’re going to end up finding yourself inadvertently popular again, because it’s, you know, it’s the way things are really cyclical, I guess, within the industry. But it’s been really cool hearing a lot of these kind of newer artists, much younger artists coming in and not, you know, and drawing on different influences.

So it’s not like, you know, it’s not the same old funky breaks or it’s, you know, whatever it might be. It’s like people coming in with new ideas. There’s also, interestingly, I think there’s a lot more kind of musicality from that school of thought kind of coming back in.

And I really like that fusion of something that’s a little bit more, a little bit more thinky and a bit less sort of pummeling, you know.

[Darran]
Carl Cox just recently turned 62 and he’s still rocking major festivals, producing work. I don’t know if he’s ever going to retire. Do you ever see yourself getting to a point where you’re like, okay, I’m going to hang up the computer.

I’m going to go this direction with life.

[Simon Shackleton]
Well, I guess, you know, to an extent I’m in that zone at the moment, not in the retirement zone, I hasten to add, but I’m definitely, I’m really looking to focus my efforts outside of that kind of late night economy. I find it harder and harder to raise my game for like a 2 a.m. set. And, you know, I just honestly don’t generally enjoy it as much as I used to.

And there were lots of other things I do, you know, and I’ve done a lot of sets over the years that have been like daytime sets or sunrise sets that have been in absolutely stunning surroundings. And they just feel like they have a lot of meaning to them. And what I like about those as well is that, like we were saying earlier about the visuals, they don’t rely on visuals at all.

They just rely on mood and they rely on setting. And that’s really where the reconstructed sets really come into their own as well. So with these, you know, I’m actually looking, I’m actually doing some, like I’m doing an event in New York next month, which is, I wouldn’t say it was, it’s not like a corporate event, but it’s like a, it’s a themed events and it’s a theme party, a very kind of high-end theme party that is like a celebration of the Rolling Stones.

And they have an album coming out around then. And so it’s like the gauntlet’s been thrown down for me to create like a one-hour reconstruction that is based on the music of the Rolling Stones. So, you know, I’ll be diving deep into stem separation and just creating like a really beautiful audio blend that may have more to do with soundtrack than it will with the dance floor.

But I do think that this idea of really just deconstructing music and piecing it back together in this sort of forensic art of storytelling, I think it has a lot of opportunity that goes beyond the dance floor, which I’m quite excited to pursue, you know? That sounds amazing.

[Darran]
You know, how do you balance your DJ producing career with the other obligations in your life?

[Simon Shackleton]
Good question. I mean, it’s always been a juggling act. You know, I remember when I was going out and I was doing, like I had on my BA account, my British Airways account, I remember having half a million air miles.

Like I was looking at this thing going, geez, like I’m definitely not getting enough upgrades. And that was, I was, you know, I was probably doing 250,000 a year, I’d say. It was absolutely crazy.

And I remember doing, it was actually, because it came up on my Facebook memories today. I think it was 11 years ago, I did an Elite Force tour in America where I did 16 shows in 17 days, all in different cities. And it was, I mean, I literally went home.

I pretty much went home in a body bag. I was so destroyed at the end of it. And that in some ways for me was a bit of a tipping point.

And I was like, this is not adult behavior. This is not sustainable. I’m not like, I’m not DJing at such a level that I’m traveling business.

And I’ve got like a yoga instructor following me around saying you need to do some stretches or something. So I really, I think, you know, I think I’ve got a much, much better kind of balance now. I tend to really just take shows that I really do wanna do, that I’m really excited to do for whatever reason that may be.

But I’m also just looking at increasingly kind of pushing more into the kind of mentoring side of things and into sort of soundtracking and music film and TV stuff. Cause I really enjoy doing that as well. And it doesn’t destroy me the same way as going out every weekend.

[Darran]
You know, I always love it when I’m doing an interview with somebody and they pretty much, I didn’t send you any questions beforehand. You don’t know what I’m gonna come up with next. But you mentioned a word there, which is gonna lead right into my next question.

Mixing, mastering, mentoring. Tell our DJ Sessions fans all about that.

[Simon Shackleton]
Yeah, so I’ve been doing some mentoring now for about four years. I set up this business called Mixing, Mastering, Mentoring. And I’m actually about to funnel that into my website at simonshackleton.org and just bring it under the same banner because I just find it hard to keep lots of different businesses on track, especially with the kind of grind of self-promotion and all the rest of it. You know, as far as the mentoring goes, you know, I don’t, this is not like a full-time pursuit for me, but with the knowledge that I’ve built up over the years and the number of releases and record labels that I’ve run and stuff, I’m in a pretty good position to kind of help people with production and or kind of DJ development. And so, you know, I started doing some mentoring three or four years ago. And what I really focus on are people who are, you know, who have some knowledge, who have some sort of intermediate ability, who are maybe getting to that point where they’re just getting stuck.

You know, they’ve got an eight bar loop that sounds great, but how do I get it to the next level? How do I get to the point where I can get labels interested? Or how do I get to the point where I can have music that is of a good enough standard to be able to play out?

And so that’s the work I particularly enjoy, is like, you know, is helping people who are already helping themselves. They’re already doing the work, but just giving them those extra kind of insights and that accountability as well, and just sort of helping them do some troubleshooting. So yeah, that’s definitely something.

[Darran]
Is there something you’d like to say to new and up and coming producers to watch out for when it comes to making their career successful?

[Simon Shackleton]
I mean, I think a lot of the time there’s maybe too much focus on the visibility, you know, is making sure you have, oh my God, content, you know, more content, must make more content. There are so many different ways of doing things. And I think that example I gave earlier, people like Orteca and Trent Muller deciding to play in pitch darkness, it’s a really good example of, you know what, if everybody’s doing it this way, why don’t you just do the opposite?

Why don’t you just do the opposite? So, you know, so spend some time just really discovering what it is that you want to make rather than chasing algorithms, chasing likes, chasing followers, make something super cool. I mean, you look at some of the artists that we value or we have valued so much over the years, like Bjork, for example, like David Bowie, like Prince, you know, like these kind of iconic artists who they simply develop their sound.

Like David Bowie wanted to wear, you know, Spiders from Mars costumes and makeup and whatever, fine, knock yourself out. And people were just very, very attracted to that confidence and to the fact that he just had his own unique sound. So, you know, just do more of that and then figure out how to market it.

Don’t get the whole thing kind of mixed up in like this horrible mess of sort of trying to cater for what you perceive as already being out there.

[Darran]
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, it’s about time to wrap it up here. Is there anything else you want to let our DJ Sessions fans know before we let you go?

[Simon Shackleton]
Man, I don’t know. Yeah, it’s just been a real pleasure kind of talking through all of this stuff with you, man. Absolutely.

Yeah, anyone wants to kind of find out more about my music, then I’m, you know, I’m on all the usual SoundClouds and BandCamps and whatever, Facebook, Instagram, but simonshackleton.org is probably the best way to, yeah, to reach me. And yeah, you know, if you are interested in mentoring and you’re at that kind of level that we were just talking about, then give me a shout and, you know, we’ll do a short kind of little taster session and see if we’re a good fit.

[Darran]
Awesome, I already sent out your information to a good friend of mine who’s looking to do that today, right before the show. So awesome. Simon, again, thank you so much for coming on the show.

We’re definitely going to follow up with you, try to stay engaged with everyone every six months and see how the summer rolls out for you and how things are going to go into Q3, you know, as they call it. I don’t know if you go work by quarters or- Ah, it’s good for me. Well, good for you.

So we’ll definitely follow up with you again in the future. Thank you so much for coming on the DJ Sessions.

[Simon Shackleton]
Yeah, thanks, Dan. Really appreciate it and I’ll speak to you soon, man.

[Darran]
Thank you. And on that note, don’t forget to go to our website, thedjsessions.com. You’ll find us on Meta, X, Twitter, Insta, TikTok, everywhere out there.

Follow us, even subscribe to our shows on iTunes and download our mobile app and check out our VR nightclub as well. You can find it all at thedjsessions.com. I’m your host, Darran, and that’s Simon Shackleton coming from Denver and I’m in the virtual studios in Seattle, Washington for the DJ Sessions Presents The Virtual Sessions.

And remember, on the DJ Sessions, the music never stops.