Going places: DJ Max Graham, the globetrotting mix master
DJ Max Graham's biggest hit started life as a joke bootleg. And he's been distancing himself from it ever since
Max Graham cannot sit still. In his sets the Canadian DJ, perhaps best known for 2010 trance smashes Sun in the Winter and Nothing Else Matters, and for his fairly unrepresentative 2005 remix of English prog-rock band Yes' classic Owner of a Lonely Heart, pretty much runs the gamut of electronic styles, from trance to progressive house to techno to electro, but with an emphasis on emotional, uplifting, melodic, often vocal-driven sounds.
Similarly, the music he's produced has hopped across the genres, and has ranged from deliberately highly accessible to the far darker and more challenging, while always remaining dancefloor-friendly.
Graham, who plays Hong Kong on November 29, thinks the roots of this vigorous eclecticism might lie in his peripatetic upbringing. Born in the UK, he moved as a child to Spain, then as a teenager to New York, then Los Angeles, then Ottawa, and then in his 20s to Vancouver and then Montreal.
"I've been influenced by such a wide variety of things, and I got used to culture shock at an early age," the 43-year-old says. "It's fairly easy for me to leave one comfort zone and go somewhere else. It's a safe assumption that's why I've been all over the place musically, which sometimes has worked against me, because I'm hard to classify."
Graham got his first job as a DJ in Ottawa in the late '80s when he applied for a job as a barman, the bar's scheduled DJ didn't turn up and he stepped in. For a few years his style mixed hip hop with mainstream pop music, a formula that was working out very nicely when, in 1994, some friends dragged him along to a rave, and had he moment of epiphany regarding the role of the DJ.
"That changed everything for me. I realised that there was an art form behind it, and that there were people who appreciated that art form."