PURPLE SNEAKER DJS

Bringing The Party

Martin Novosel (PhDJ) is most definitely living the dream. The man behind the Purple Sneakers DJs project and club night is travelling the world, spreading the musical message and taking the odd moment to chill out on islands. RK chats with Novosel ahead of Purple Sneakers DJs’ appearance at Groovin’ The Moo.

“Right now, I’m getting onto a plane to fly back from Townsville where we just played some shows alongside some pretty big acts,” Novosel begins. “Prior to the start of the Groovin’ The Moo tour, I had just come back from some time in the USA where I went to SXSW, played a few shows, did some musical collaborations and got some business done.”
    Alongside the touring and music, Novosel is a businessman. But, all of this is interrelated. “Purple Sneakers as a business has club nights and events in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra,” he says, talking of his mighty music based business which has gone from strength to strength over the last few years. The lads have released two compilations – We Mix You Dance - since starting out. Featuring mixes of likes of Tame Impala, Washington, Flight Facilities, Kele, The Chemical Brothers, Caribou, The Drums and more, Purple Sneakers DJs have been on top of the freshest tunes infiltrating the indie-dance scene since they started out.
    “Originally, that started a few years ago when I was really into what you would call ‘indie guitar’ music – which is my background,” he says, talking of the founding of Purple Sneakers DJs. “That soon progressed into anything you could loosely call ‘indie’. By that, I mean a broad based term that almost encompasses anything you want. The most important thing that we are about is wanting to keep things new and song based.”
    The key focus for Purple Sneakers DJs is keeping people partying. That said, Novosel goes on to explain that they are not mashup DJs. “We mix quickly; sometimes our tracks are only 30 seconds long; it maybe just a chorus edit, or a verse then a chorus and then mix into a breakdown but rarely do we bust out a standard rap over instrumental type mashup. We leave that for the guys who know how to do it best. We just like keeping people on their toes and waiting for what’s coming next.”
    This balanced repertoire, it seems, is their very raison d’être. “Let’s be honest, it’s not rocket science what we do as DJs,” he says. “But at the same time, it requires thought and reason. Sure we’ve been producing tracks. It’s been taking a bit of a while to push them out mainly because we’re figuring out which angle to go with.
    “The tracks we make vary so widely and there are many ideas banging around between us at the moment. But it’s not a conscious effort to ‘keep things fresh’. It’s kind of an unselfconscious organic process that just kind of happens. If we are doing something that we like, we just keep going. We just keep things fresh by playing our own remixes and edits; playing brand spanking new shit as well as ripping into tracks that we know are going to make the crowd go gnarly. And very gnarly it has been!”