Tim Bergling, aka Avicii, stands high and revered in his DJ’s pulpit, his sharp Scandinavian features crowned by headphones.
Perched between two enormous screens that project his image to the 16,000-strong Sydney crowd, he twiddles knobs and does unfathomable things on his computer, producing bass-heavy electronic house music that delights his fans to the point of ecstasy.
It helps that a lot of them are on ecstasy, but there is no denying Bergling’s music has power.
“I would say that I am a songwriter first and foremost,” the 24-year-old Swede explains after the show last month, before changing his mind. “I am more like a composer, in the sense that I don’t sing myself. I don’t play guitar or piano … but I write the melodies. I know exactly how I want the guitar to sound. I know what notes. I know what kind of timbre I want, I know how I want the pronunciation.”
The Stockholm-born DJ, remixer and producer is one of the biggest stars of electronic dance music (or EDM, as it’s known to scene-sters) in the world. Until recently he regularly played around 250 gigs a year, earning six figures for each performance.
Bergling began his career as a teenager with just a computer and an internet connection, but since his 2011 track Levels, he has broken out of EDM into the mainstream thanks to music with its roots in soul, blues and funk.
He is mobbed on the streets of New York and Stockholm (although he says Los Angeles, where he lives with his model girlfriend, is “pretty okay”, mobbing-wise).
He has played with Madonna and modelled for Ralph Lauren. He has achieved platinum sales across the world, been nominated for two Grammy awards, and Paris Hilton haunts his shows like a sexy ghost in hair extensions.
Given the saturation of his most recent hit,
