Hey Mark Roma, welcome to the Partae! Your debut on DOORN has just dropped, ‘The Realm’, massive congrats! How did the release come about?
Hey, thanks for having me! It’s quite cool how the release happened, I started sending tracks to Morten at the start of the year and he loved them. He supported The Realm in a Spinnin Records X 1001 tracklist ID livestream and when I asked would he think spinnin would like The Realm, he personally introduced me to the A&R team via email and it stemmed from there! So really all I can say is networking is SUPER important!
How long had you been working on the track, did it work quite naturally or did it take quite a bit of tweaking?
Most of the track happened to just fall into place in about a day (maybe I was having a good because this is rare haha!) I started searching really strange cinematic sounds on splice and I used lots of dark sounding stabs and pads and the drop sounded cool. The acid took a bit of tweaking to make it fit in with all these pads but not too much. I even sampled a racoon and a dinosaur sound but it works!
Where does the name for the track come from?
The name came from the feeling that the breakdown gives me, like a feeling of flying over a mountain range or over an ocean through a feeling of elation. I’m a huge lover of trance and love to incorporate some in most tracks I create so that was the aim to give a huge euphoric flying feeling.
What sort of music did you grow up listening to yourself? What actually influenced you to go into production and a career in music?
I grew up listening to a lot of trance, mainly Tiesto, Armin and Ferry Corsten, which eventually branched out into more electro and now I’m a fan of pretty much all dance music genres. When I was younger I used to down synthesiser apps onto my phone and would play about making trance melodies, then a friend of a friend I met mentioned he was doing a music technology degree and I immediately signed up. I almost was not allowed to do the degree as I had no previous music qualifications but I was determined and it showed so here I am 5 years later getting signed to my dream labels. Determination and hard work pays off!
What advice would you give to others who were hoping to follow in your footsteps and release on the labels of their heroes?!
The best thing I can advise is to network. Go to ADE, go to local networking events, like Liverpool Audio Network Sound Summit which is local to me. Make sure you setup meetings beforehand and talk to the right people who are relevant to you, face to face interactions are SO IMPORTANT!
On another note for productions, finish tracks faster, don’t spend too long forcing a track to work. I used to spend upwards of 3 months on a track and it would be trash. First time I finished a track in 4 days, Blasterjaxx supported it!
Also, do not give up. I get knocked back weekly by labels but I learn from it, maybe the track did not suit, maybe the quality was not great, maybe the A&R had a bad day, do not give up! Work hard and consistently and I promise it will happen.
Buy Link: https://doornrecords.
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