Steve Aoki: core strengths

He’s EDM’s day-glo, high-octane super-entertainer, a main stage hyper-energy festival sprite, the electro-house-banging, crowd-surfing, bio-hacking, never- stopping, cake-flinging DJ/producer Steve Aoki — and he’s back with a brand-new album, ‘Paragon’.

Steve Aoki is lying on his back, topless, speaking to us via Zoom from his hyperbaric chamber, which looks a bit like the inside of a spaceship. He’s just had his morning coffee and vitamins, and pauses mid-sentence, turns his head sharply to the right, and opens and shuts his mouth as though he’s trying to catch a fly. Long, silent seconds pass, Aoki’s world-famous face occasionally freezing on the screen with his mouth wide open, presumably due to the poor signal you get in a personal hyperbaric chamber.

“Fucking ear won’t pop,” he eventually informs DJ Mag, before immediately launching into a detailed rumination on culture and the nature of the DJ role. Welcome to Steve Aoki’s world. His hyperbaric chamber, in case you’re wondering, provides high oxygen levels in a pressurised environment, which reportedly has multiple health benefits. Aoki takes lots of meetings in his. “I’m really into bio-hacking,” he tells us. “I’m really into just having an edge on life and trying to do my best to lengthen my life, so I try to do this every day when I’m home.”

The blocked ear is just another of the occupational hazards that are inevitable when you fly as much as Aoki does. He’s currently in America on his Heavenly Hell tour — named after the opening track on ‘Paragon’ — where he’s previewing new songs from the album. Since his debut album, ‘Wonderland’, dropped in 2012, Aoki has crafted a sprawling catalogue of high-impact electro-house and main stage EDM, picking up a couple of Grammy nominations and over three billion streams on the way.