3LAU – Bang (Tiesto Bootleg)
One of 2014’s rising stars 3LAU impressed us all yet again. This time, he really blew the roof off with a little help from one of his idols, Tiësto. 3LAU stated the following in regards to his latest release:
“I began my career from my college dorm room, mashing producers’ instrumentals with familiar vocals. 3 years later, I bring you my first ORIGINAL mashup combining MY instrumental & Tiësto‘s undeniable ear for dance floor destruction, infusing a throwback acapella from the Bloodhound Gang – “The Bad Touch.” I sent this to Tiesto in October of 2013, he loved the instrumental & thought it would be awesome to add something w/ an oldschool vibe; thus “Bang” was born. We wanted to try something different, making an original release w/ the same flow & feel of the music I mashed when I started my journey in dance music…”
You could stream [most of] Tiesto‘s bootleg of “Bang” below right now, and be sure to pick it up when it dropped entirely on April 28th via Tiësto’s Record Label, Musical Freedom.
Stream it here: https://soundcloud.com/musical-freedom/3lau-bang-tiesto-bootleg
“Bang (Tiësto Bootleg)” officially dropped on Musical Freedom as planned, and it ended up being a solid showcase of the direction both artists were heading in at the time. For 3LAU, it was another step in his climb from a mashup-making college DJ to one of the most prominent names in electronic music, a run that would eventually lead to festival main stages and, years later, his high-profile pivot into blockchain and NFT projects with his “Ultraviolet” album. For Tiësto, it was a continuation of his ongoing support for rising producers through his Musical Freedom imprint, which he used throughout the 2010s to spotlight up-and-coming talent alongside his own releases.
The Bloodhound Gang sample was a fun, slightly cheeky throwback that fit right into the mashup culture 3LAU came up in, and tracks like this one are a good reminder of how much of early-2010s EDM was built on producers reworking familiar vocals over massive new instrumentals. Looking back, “Bang” holds up as a snapshot of a moment when bootlegs and mashups were still a legitimate pipeline for young producers to get noticed by the genre’s biggest names.
