Every Saturday ✦ 9pm – 4am  

185 Watton St, Werribee

To listen to Billy Gillies is to capture true joy, because every song he produces and DJ set he performs radiates pure passion and vibrant spirit.

 

The Northern Irishman’s blend of quirky Eurodance synths, uplifting trance grandeur and hard-hitting bass rhythms goes beyond catchy melodies and expert timing, as breakout hits “Lagoon” and “Youth” tap into the very essence of what makes a night spent on the dancefloor with your best mates such a special experience.

 

That’s why he’s earned more than 145 million views on TikTok, filled a Creamfields tent with thousands of ravers at 1 p.m. on a Sunday, and why he’s managed to get an official remix of Madison Avenue’s 1999 hit “Don’t Call Me Baby” after ripping the iconic vocal off the internet.

 

Crowds chant his name from Taiwan to Texas because Billy Gillies dares to do something different; something unique to himself. Now, Billy Gillies is the next superstar-DJ-in-the-making, poised to take over the world.

 

Billy’s musical obsession started in the 2000s when his older sister started buying Clubland compilation CDs and dating a local DJ. One night, the boyfriend came over and brought his decks, but when the couple left to go dancing, 11-year-old Billy snuck into his sister’s room and started playing with the turntables.

 

“I was like, ‘what is this music? I love this,’” he laughs. “On the Christmas list for that year was a set of decks.”

 

His mom delivered with his first set of Kam belt drives, and Billy’s been mad for mixing ever since. Each Saturday, he’d head out of the house with a five Pound note and spend it on a new record (Tiesto’s Traffic being particularly influential). In turn, he’d spend the next week learning to mix that record in and out of his steadily growing collection.

 

When he was 17, he got his first taste of true Clubland. A year underaged, he caught an hour-long bus from Belfast to Banbridge and talked his way into a club called Coach. Japanese DJ Yoji Biomehanika and the UK’s own Lisa Lashes dropped heavy hard-house records all night, and Billy started dreaming of his own chance to rock a crowd, proper.

 

He knew that if he wanted to be an in-demand DJ, he’d have to come up with some original songs. In 2011, he locked himself in his bedroom with a copy of Ableton Live and didn’t come out until he’d mastered the basic trance sound.

 

He fell in love with music production and started sending his tracks to BBC Radio 1 DJ Judge Jules, who played them on his show every Friday night. For 19-year-old Billy, there was nothing better.

 

After spending much of his 20s as a self-described “party animal,” 28-year-old Billy once again locked himself inside his bedroom and churned out a ton of original tunes. The result? A spot on the lineup of Luminosity 2019 alongside major trance legends Paul Van Dyk, Ferry Corsten, Gareth Emery and more. He played a set of all-original material, and when a recording was posted to Soundcloud, it earned more plays than any of the headliners.

 

“I’d brung a fresh sound into the trance scene,” Gillies says. “Everyone was making the same type of thing, where I just look back at my influences growing up and crammed it into the main trance style.”

 

International booking requests flooded in, sending him to Argentina to Australia—and then COVID struck. Many of his peers saw no point releasing music to a locked-down crowd, but Billy saw a chance to experiment.

 

“People need music in hard times, not just for clubs,” he says. “The music I was making around that time was proper emotional melodies, and it was resonating with everyone.”

 

He’d share each tune in a rough clip to Facebook or TikTok, and every post brought shares in the thousands. His fan base wasn’t just growing, it was ballooning, due in part not only to his masterful skills in the studio but also his effervescent personality that spills into each tune.

Hi, my name is Mandragora, I am a time traveller from 1354, while I was looking for weeds in the forest I fell into a wormhole, I traveled through infinite alternate realities for like a year, after I got bored of all that cosmic stuff I decided to camp on year 2012, then I found this weird music making box and I knew something big was coming.


Bookings:
ianoche@usn-agency.com

Mandragora prefers to keep his name out of the light and go by the name of
“Neto”, hence the username @holasoyneto on most of his social networks.
Apparently born in the desert city of Chihuahua, located in the north of
Mexico, it was in this place where he decided to fully go into music,
enrolling at the local Conservatory but quickly dropped out to pursue a career
in music production.
While still studying in the Conservatory of Chihuahua he had access to a
computer lab which had GarageBand installed, he rapidly realised the
possibilities of digital versus paper. One day one of his classmates listened
to one of his compositions and said, “Hey, Neto, that sounds like Goa music,
you should play it at the local raves.”
Not long after being introduced to the local rave scene, he started promoting
different kinds of events for different kinds of audience, this served to
create a local community to introduce the “Mandragora” project to the world,
inspired by the local rave scene and the hip-hop ethos.
Having this school of thought led him to create “#futureprog” a sub-genre of
Goa trance based on the idea of ever evolving music, of trying to predict the
future, right now #futureprog is produced and played by many artists big and
small throughout the entire world.
This creation led him to move to Brazil for 6 years to join forces with Alien
Records, releasing several albums and successful singles, performing at
legendary festivals, inspiring a whole new scene of producers and partygoers
worldwide.
At the moment Neto is based in the south of France locked in the studio
creating hundreds of tracks, just released a new mini album and is back on the
road, always on tour, always getting those new tracks mastered and ready to be introduced to the world.

Andy07 is following