John 00 Fleming: Finding 'The Lost Tribe' and Reclaiming the Dance Floor Experience

Since its inception, dance music has been a haven for the outcasts; the weirdos who are shunned by mainstream society, both figuratively and literally. Now, more and more in recent years, dance music veterans are feeling like outcasts within their own culture. Phone lights restrict dancing through fear while narrowing the music into high-impact moments to be shared for the sake of likes and reposts. 

Those looking for a journey through hypnotic sounds and unified freedom are once again without a place to call their own. But fear not. Trance legend John 00 Fleming is here to guide everyone back home with his new album The Lost Tribe. 

The release features 18 tracks, each running between eight and 12 minutes. The individual pieces of music are their own sagas, but they also combine into a modern opus honoring the culture Fleming’s been pushing for the last 40 years. With The Lost Tribe, Fleming is sending out a reminder that those values have been a constant in every phase of dance music, including now.

“I've just been speaking to a producer today, actually. They're so frustrated, and they're lost, because they're looking at the mainstream world, that high-impact world, those short tracks,” Fleming says. “There is another world out there. But the underground is underground on purpose. If you're not shown it, it's difficult to find.”

Fleming is one of the DJs who will help you find the underground, as he pushes underground music across the mainstream. When he speaks to Beatportal, he’s in his hotel room taking a rest before his first show of the massively popular Miami Music Week. 

He was on opening duties for fellow trance legends, Infected Mushroom, at Mazuma, and he jokingly bemoans that he only had a two-hour set. At underground festivals such as Boom in Portugal or Own Spirit Festival in Spain, he’s free to play for up to five hours. With two hours, he couldn’t even play The Lost Tribe in full. The album runs two hours and 57 minutes.

“I'm going to try and play as many as I can,” Fleming says of playing the tracks from The Lost Tribe at the Mazuma set. “But I don't know what vibe's gonna be on before me. Hopefully, they're not pounding it out too hard because my album starts off quite slow, and it builds. I'll go into DJ mode to resettle things, readjust, and then figure it all out, as I always do.”

Fleming has been figuring it out since he was 15, an idea that expands beyond DJ-awareness and into sustaining a successful career aligned with his values.

“I'm used to seeing these musical fashions, these musical trends, these movements. My gut instinct serves me well. It tells me what's happening. I can easily figure out what's going on, and I navigate and realign myself to the scenes that suit me as a DJ,” Fleming says. “That's why I'm still packed, gigs-wise, because I seem to get it right.”

After running his label, J00F Recordings, since 1998, Fleming has come across hundreds of artists who, unfortunately, get it wrong. So, in speaking to him, he shares some of the values he espouses that have kept him on the right track. Gut instinct is one. Another is perfectionism. The Lost Tribe took over six years to produce because it is so difficult for him to let go of his music. 

“It's a nightmare,” Fleming admits. He spends so much time on every track (especially in this case because they’re all so long and intricate). Each of them also has to fit into the larger narrative he is building with the album. But during his time in the process, his own musical identity will evolve, often leaving completed music as an inaccurate interpretation.

Another wall brick in his wall of perfectionism is technology. As production software develops faster and faster, Fleming will face an influx of exciting new features and products that he wants to test and apply to the music in the midst of the album-making process. But when he tries out something new, the track may no longer fit into the dynamics of the full album.

“Even now, [after] I had to let the album go, I listen to them. ‘Oh, I'm not happy with that bit. Oh, I could change this bit.’ When I've made a track, for me to let it go takes months, maybe years,” Fleming says, going on to share that he applies the same perfectionism to his live sets. “I know the set went well. I get the feedback, I see the crowd going crazy, and I know I can do better. I get back to the hotel room. I'm making notes on tracks. I just want to get everyone back in the club. Let's do this again the next day.”

While he may experience internal turmoil in the aftermath, this leads to an incredibly focused experience in the moment. When he’s in “DJ Mode,” as he described earlier, he is attuned to how the crowd responds to every element of each track. Is the breakdown too long? Is the drop as powerful as he envisioned? Was a track he intended to be hypnotic, actually more ragey? These are questions he’s asking himself to create the best possible experience on the dance floor.

Fleming’s “DJ Mode” antennae are so strong that he’s even able to pick up the relatively few times when a crowd is simply not interested in the style he planned for the gig. If the people aren’t feeling it, he has the library of music to adjust and still play a top-notch set.

“If they're not getting my tracks, and they're also not getting other tracks, which are tried and tested, that's telling me instantly this crowd is not quite vibing into what I'm trying to achieve,” Fleming says. “I go into emergency mode and start playing something I'm not too comfortable with, but still rock the crowd and do my job.”

To deliver for the crowd that isn’t interested in his style takes integrity, which is another of Fleming’s values that sustains his career. When trance was lumped in with the euphoric sounds of artists such as W&W as part of the EDM boom, he was releasing tracks like “Mmx1215,” firing off the haunting sounds that led dancers into the proper mental state that titles the genre.

Now, as top artists are pushing BPMs into the range of 140 and higher, the fastest track on The Lost Tribe is 138. 

“When you're around about 130 BPM, it's perfect. Between the kick and the bass, you've got room to make a groove. When you see people, they're dancing to these little elements of dark, trippy sounds,” Fleming says. “You can be [on the dance floor] for 8-9 hours. Good DJs will build some tension and then take you back down within that groove. You're not overthinking big magic moments or big, huge melody moments. They're creeping up on you. You're just locked in this groove.”

And of course, Fleming has never produced a piece of music for the sake of a high-impact moment. This phenomenon wasn’t brought on by social media, either. Popular music has always leaned towards short and flashy. Hence, why prospective hit songs have always sat around three minutes, even in the beginning of Fleming’s career when he was still writing entrancing journeys.

“That has always been there for the commercial masses, because it will always be there. But what's happened today is that the so-called underground scene and the mainstream worlds are too close together. They run parallel, and then they clash. We’re at that point again,” Fleming says, going so far as to say he’s grateful to the mainstream for disrupting the underground. That’s what fuels a resurgence. 

“Yes, the corporations come over and kind of take what we build. But we need that, because we'll get lazy otherwise, Fleming says. “We've obviously made a scene that's good enough that they want to commercialize. It just fuels us to go somewhere else. That's what I see in my long time in this career.”

Right now, plenty of ravers are looking for somewhere else to go, and John 00 Fleming knows the way.

John 00 Fleming's album The Lost Tribe is out now via J00F Recordings.

Get it on Beatport.