Easy does it: Sonny Fodera

Sonny Fodera has been hitting it hard. It’s ADE week in the Dutch capital and he’s been trawling famous venues for the last two days.

“I’ve been hitting up all the museums,” he tells us as he arrives for lunch at the plush Pulitzer Hotel. With his mum and girlfriend in town, the 30-year-old Antipodean has been taking a slightly more relaxed approach to the five-day industry soirée than some of his contemporaries. “I find it so inspiring going to art galleries,” he tells us. “My girlfriend has just finished a course at Central St Martins and the graduation show blew me away! I really want to do something where I combine my music with a conceptual art piece.”

The Australian DJ has every right to take a brief respite while he’s here. This summer saw him hold down a bi-weekly residency at Sankeys Ibiza for Redlight, playing gigs everywhere from Beirut to Brussels, Mexico City to Marbella, all the while putting the finishing touches to his second album. He’s clocked up so many air miles in the past few years that he’s decided to call the record ‘Frequently Flying’ in reference to his penchant for working on music mid flight; and not, as Mixmag jokingly suggests, in reference to the hedonistic nature of the world he inhabits. “Well maybe that too,” he laughs.

Yes, over the last few years, Fodera has steadily, and without a huge amount of fanfare, become a pretty big deal. On Beatport he’s the second-highest charted club DJ in the UK and Europe, and number one in Australia, while he’s recently mixed his first Essential Mix for Radio 1 and already clocked up nearly 300,000 views on a Mixmag Lab stream he did from Hideout this summer.

Sitting down to lunch, he orders a Heineken and begins to deliberate over whether to order a salad or a burger. At 6.3”, and dressed in an oversized blue T-shirt, long black hoodie and trademark baseball cap, Fodera looks in rude health for someone who’s spending more than a fair amount of time on the road. Settling on a Caesar Salad, he begins to tell an anecdote about working out with an ex-military friend of his (“he pushed me so hard, man! I think I’ve put my shoulder out or something”), before beginning to dwell on how long it’s been since he’s had a gig in London. “Man, it’s been the best part of a year! I’ve been away so much. That’s too long. It’s my home town now.”

Originally from Adelaide, Fodera first dipped his toes into music production in his mid teens, working on hip hop beats, before a visit from Derrick Carter set him on a slightly different path.

“There was a club in Adelaide called Electric Circus and Derrick came to play one weekend,” he explains. “After that I really got into that sound, and going there became a religious experience for me.” Eight hours’ drive from Melbourne or a three-hour flight to Perth, the city’s isolation meant it wasn’t top of most DJs’ tour lists, “but when a big name did make it, people would really go for it.”

Soon Sonny was getting regular gigs in Adelaide, which quickly turned into shows all around the country, before a release on Nottingham-based Inland Knights’ imprint Drop Music led to him making a move to Europe.

“I moved to Nottingham first, and I was working in the same studio as Crazy P,” he explains. “And then in summer 2010 I took the plunge and went out to Ibiza.”

DJing around the island, including a stint at Savannah, Sonny was soon picking up gigs around Europe (“I played some really weird places to start with, like Bulgaria and Russia”), and after steadily building his reputation on the continent, he dropped an album on Green Velvet’s label Cajual, bringing him to the attention of Defected head honcho Simon Dunmore.

“Simon just tweeted me saying, ‘I love your record, follow me back’,” he explains. “And then he got me to do a remix, and I’ve been working with them ever since.”

In person, Fodera has the relaxed, easygoing charm so often found in people who grew up blessed by copious amounts of sunshine and an idyllic beachside locale. When he recites a potted history of his career so far, you get the impression that everything’s come with relative ease. Is there a tough, steely determination lurking beneath his breezy exterior?

“I do have goals and put a lot of time into things in the studio,” he tells us. “But I think you can get too stressed about stuff and try to force things. I’m easily approachable, and so much in this industry is making friends and getting along with people.”

With a vocalist on every track, (Yasmin, Janai and Kwame all make an appearance) and a warm pop sheen to proceedings, ‘easily approachable’ is also an apt way of describing ‘Frequently Flying’ which dropped earlier this month. Citing Smooth Radio and Jazz FM as influences, alongside the more obvious house touchstones, the album is classic Defected fare.

“Defected are known for great vocal soulful house,” explains Sonny. “So they really encouraged me to work with more vocalists and musicians, and makes things more soulful on this record.”

Thoughts, though, are already turning to his next big project.

“The last track on the album is in more of a SBTRKT vibe,” he says. “So I’ve got another alias where I’m going to put out more music like that. And I’m really into Drumcode and people like Marco Faraone so I’m working on stuff like that under another name.”

First of all, though, there’s one small problem: just which museum did he leave his mum in?

'Frequently Flying' by Sonny Fodera is out now on Defected