Jack Of Sound: what’s up?
Signed at Fusion Records, Jack Of Sound represents his own vision of hardstyle, always trying to deliver a great atmosphere. He doesn’t just want to release tracks, he wants to tell stories!
Jack of Sound is one of your two aliases, what is the Story of this unique name? And who the hell is Jack? I’ve read about the offspring of your name, it deals with a card game and your real last name ‘Oberman’ – would you explain it to our readers?
When I started DJing I wanted to have a unique alias. An uncle of mine used to collect card decks and ‘Oberman’ was used for the ‘Jack’ in a specific card deck, like Jack of Hearts or Jack of Spades. So I changed it to Jack Of Sound.
How did you came in touch with the harder styles?
When I was 16 years old, I was in love with Hip Hop actually, but with 19 I went to my first hardstyle party – X-Qlusive Pavo, years ago. I was blown away and since I was already producing, that was the key moment when I thought ‘I want to do this!’.
You have two aliases – Jack of Sound and Mashup Jack, is it hard to focus on both and switch between them or are you trying to combine them?
Everything started with creating mashups, cutting out samples from different tracks to put them together. Later on I learned how to produce my own tracks so I’ve been doing both for a long time. When I work on a track but get stuck, then I’ll just work on a new mashup and vica versa. Some of my mashups don’t fit in a Jack of Sound set so it’s not hard to keep those separated. It’s not hard to focus on both but it does take a lot of time.
Your latest release ‘911’ is claiming the charts and it seems the people really like it – as a producer, what is an important element for you, especially in your tracks? Besides that, what is your personal favorite, by picking one of your tracks? And do you have a top 3 hardstyle tracks of all time?
For me, it’s important that you can visualize a story in your mind when you close your eyes and listen to it. I like to create a deeper atmosphere in my tracks as well.
My favorite hardstyle tracks? Well, that’s a pretty hard question. One of my favourites has always been Hardstyle Rockers by Donkey Rollers, then, probably a Noisecontrollers and Zany track.
Jack Of Sound - 911
‘Das Weite Land’ is still one of those tracks everyone can sing along with. Who came up with the idea of the track and what does the title mean? What feeling do you have when you play it and the crowd goes wild?
For me ‘Das Weite Land’ is one of my personal favorites. I made the track together with Alpha2 which was awesome. We had lots of ideas in the studio so we made the track actually pretty fast! Everytime I play that track the respons from the crowd is huge! It’s an awesome feeling when you see the people go crazy on this track. The lyrics are about a distant land, far away. We thought about a cool title so we called it ‘Das Weite Land’.
Is there a specific goal you absolutely want to achieve with Jack of Sound? I there a specific event or maybe a country you would love to play or maybe a collab you would love to do?
Well, my goal has always been to create music in the week and be able to perform and make a living from that. I want to play as much as I can, no matter if it’s a small stage or club or a bigger stage. Playing at a big stage with a huge crowd is awesome but the crowd is further away so there is less personal contact than playing at a small stage. At a small there’s obviously less people but you can make better contact. So I like to play at both. I love meeting new people and seeing new places.
Is there anything else you can share with us?
I finished a collab with Delete called Heavy Damage, which we premiered at Defqon.1! I’m planning to have more collabs in the future, but I can’t tell more about this now 😉 But also, Adaro is remixing one of my tracks which I’m really excited about! And of course, thanks to everyone for their support!!