Las Vegas Weekly

February 18, 2010 · 5:52 PM

Nightlife Podcast: Menno de Jong

By Deanna Rilling

Menno de Jong

Photo: Courtesy

No wonder 25-year-old Menno de Jong has found so much success in the electronic music game already: He started partying before puberty. Attending Germany’s infamous Love Parade at age 10, de Jong discovered early on the path to his eventual career.

“I was 13-years-old in my friend’s basement … with a program called FastTracker,” de Jong says. “The first tracks I did sounded like complete shit.”

Fortunately he’s vastly improved production-wise since then and his popularity is rising. Though he plans on releasing a mix album in the near future, de Jong also has his first artist album in the works. “I hope to have it finished by the end of the year,” he says. “But I don’t want to let it go until it’s absolutely, 100 percent what I want it to be. It’s a big step, and a lot of people in this scene put out an album just for the sake of putting out an album. I want to make it something that really tells people what I do and represents what I want to make and the quality that I want to make as well.”

De Jong focuses on creating and playing trance music, a genre that has received some flack as of late from others in the industry. “There’s so much stuff out there you can’t really stigmatize it anymore,” says de Jong. “It’s a beautiful genre and there are cheesy tracks, but there are very credible tracks at the same time.”

In Las Vegas for a return gig at Rain for Paul Oakenfold’s Perfecto, de Jong took a few moments before the gig on February 13 to chat inside Nove about not only music, but late-night kabobs, his bad-ass USB stick and why “headphones are still the only thing that distinguishes a DJ in the DJ booth.”

Click here for the free MP3 download of this nightlife podcast.

Music featured in this podcast:

1. Menno de Jong & Leon Bolier, "Last Light Tonight (Intro Mix)"

2. Airbase ft. Floria Ambra, "Interfere (Kimito Lopez Loves Ibiza Dub)"

3. Menno de Jong & Mark Otten, "Mad World (Marcus Schossow Remix)"

Share This