DeadlyNoiz reflects on creating a 60-minute opening mix for the opportunity to support Martin Garrix on his American tour. Long before DeadlyNoiz began producing his own music, he was watching Martin Garrix perform through festival livestreams and imagining where his own career could eventually take him. Earlier this year, that influence became part of one of his most personal projects when he created a 60-minute opening mix for the opportunity to support Garrix during his American tour.
He was not selected for the slot, but the work behind the submission gave him the chance to test himself as a DJ, think carefully about how an opening set should progress and create something connected to an artist who has inspired him for years.
The competition invited DJs to submit a full one-hour mix that could be played before a Martin Garrix performance. For DeadlyNoiz, the challenge was not only choosing tracks that worked together, but understanding how the set needed to function at the beginning of the night. He had to gradually increase the pace, leave enough space for the headlining performance and make sure the mix still reflected his own musical direction.
Working within that brief changed the way he approached the full 60 minutes. Each transition needed to move the set forward, while the track order had to feel natural from the opening minutes through to the final selection. The process pushed him to think about the role of an opening artist and how to prepare a crowd without moving too quickly into music that would be more suitable later in the show.
Although DeadlyNoiz did not receive the opening slot, he remained proud of the final mix and decided to release it publicly. The submission allowed him to work with a clear performance setting in mind, improve how he builds longer sets and better understand the choices required when creating music for a specific place on a lineup.
Martin Garrix has been one of DeadlyNoiz’s biggest inspirations since his early introduction to electronic dance music. Garrix’s releases helped strengthen his interest in EDM, while his festival performances later encouraged him to begin producing music of his own.
For years, he followed those performances through Ultra Music Festival livestreams and online videos, paying attention to the track selection, progression and way Garrix introduced his own productions during each set.
The Ultra Miami 2019 performance became especially important to him. Watching Garrix play the Ultra Music Festival Main Stage at night made DeadlyNoiz more certain about the goal he wanted to pursue. One of his biggest ambitions is to perform on that same stage during a night set and play his own music to people from different parts of the world.
Creating the tour opening mix gave him the opportunity to connect that long-term inspiration with his own work. It was no longer only about watching another artist perform and learning from those sets. He now had to make his own decisions, arrange a complete hour of music and show how he would approach the responsibility of opening a Martin Garrix show.
Following the competition, DeadlyNoiz attended both nights of the tour as part of the crowd. These were his first Martin Garrix shows, allowing him to experience in person the performances he had previously followed through livestreams and recorded videos.
The music, visuals and full-scale production gave him a clearer understanding of the type of event he had created the mix for. Attending both nights also added another personal connection to the submission. Although he was not performing before Garrix, he could see how the evening progressed and how the supporting music led into the headline set.
The experience allowed him to reflect on his own mix while seeing the complete show from the audience’s perspective. Most importantly, the two performances reminded him why Martin Garrix had influenced his decision to pursue electronic music. After years of watching his festival appearances online, hearing the tracks live brought that early inspiration back into focus and reinforced the goals DeadlyNoiz is continuing to work toward.
The mix may have begun as a competition entry, but it now represents a clear point in DeadlyNoiz’s development as a DJ and producer. It challenged him to create for a specific performance setting, strengthened the way he approaches longer sets and connected his current work with the artist who first encouraged him to take electronic music seriously.
By releasing the mix, he is sharing the progress behind the submission and the ambition that continues beyond the end of the tour.