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During last month’s ADE we crowned Tiesto with the Top 100 DJs Legend Award, brought to you by Royal Dutch Airlines. The award was chosen by Top 100 DJs voters, who were asked to name ‘the best DJ of the last 20 years’.

DJ Mag finds itself in a desert, 200km from the nearest city and surrounded by enormous soundsystems for Monegros Festival, but is the music as far out as the location?

“Everyone wants to call dance music EDM these days but I call that shit that’s popular — you know, the cheesy stuff — I call it PDM,” says New York DJ Dennis Ferrer.
“That stuff everyone is going on about, it’s pop dance music. I take offence when someone calls my shit 'EDM' and lumps it in with all the crap. What I do is what I’ve always done, and I don’t like someone calling it anything else.”

“I love listening to a cool techno DJ, in a club, but if you go and see Swedish House Mafia DJ, for example, there’s no artistry involved. They are just getting behind the decks, with a finished CD, and pressing play then putting their hands in the air. This is something that is so wrong, because they get paid so much money for that.”

In the mid-‘90s, drum & bass was the most futuristic, kick-ass, innovative UK-derived music around. After a gestation period in the underground, breakbeat science exploded into the mainstream, although that led to assorted TV ads and theme tunes and suchlike co-opting a d&b element to them. But because the scene itself was controlled by the DJs — Bryan Gee, Fab & Groove, Goldie, Hype etc — it was able to be steered back underground, so that by the end of the 20th century d&b was largely associated with the dark tech-step sound of No U-Turn et al.

Pioneer have just released one of the most intriguing and hyped pieces of DJ equipment — the Pioneer XDJ-Aero. It's not often that a product can live up to the expectations that this kind of hype generates, but Pioneer have outdone themselves and have managed to create something truly revolutionary with the XDJ-Aero.

That dubstep is a scene in flux is one of the truisms of dance music, like saying 'music sounds better loud' or 'Sven Väth enjoys...

Part of becoming older, and part of the old-skool, is becoming jaded and harder to excite. Once upon a time I couldn’t walk past a...