Gareth Emery

When the Top 100 stopped mattering

In 2013, with the public still voting him among the world's trance greats, Gareth Emery asked them to stop. He denounced the campaign budgets of the DJ Mag Top 100, donated his own to social causes, and set a different metric: the ticket sold, the shared track, the club night. He had reached number 7 in 2010, the highest-ranked Briton that year; from then on, his story was written in anthems, his own label, and an increasingly theatrical live show.

Mistral, Five AM and the flight of Garuda

The starting gun fired in 2002 with Mistral, signed as GTR and embraced by Tiësto, Armin van Buuren, and Ferry Corsten after a first vinyl—the remix of Nervous Breakdown by The Shrink—which had already been played on BBC Radio 1. Between 2003 and 2008, he co-managed Five AM, home to More Than Anything and This Is That. In 2009, he founded Garuda, a name taken from Hindu-Buddhist mythology after a tour of Indonesia. The debut, Exposure / Metropolis, opened a decade of progressive and uplifting trance. Garuda nights hosted Ferry Corsten, Markus Schulz, Above & Beyond, and Sander van Doorn; between 2014 and 2019, the label coexisted with Armada Music.

Three Tunes of the Year and the weekly radio

Northern Lights (2010) topped iTunes Dance in the United States. Sanctuary, his first vocal production, was the second track of the year on A State of Trance and the most played of 2011 on SiriusXM's BPM. Drive (2014) and 100 Reasons to Live (2016) expanded the arc. Three-time Tune of the Year on ASOT: Concrete Angel (2012, with Christina Novelli), the Bryan Kearney remix of U (2014), and Saving Light (2017, with Standerwick and HALIENE, on Monstercat, alongside Ditch The Label against bullying). The Gareth Emery Podcast (2006-2014), three-time nominee for the Miami IDMAs, mutated into Electric For Life: radio, tour, and foundation.

From Laserface to the CYBERPUNK city

Between 2017 and 2020, Laserface put lasers at the center, from Vancouver to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. In 2021, LSR/CITY was born, first as an NFT collection and since 2022 as an immersive tour: EDC Week in Las Vegas, the V2 and V3 editions—with Vancouver's Pacific Coliseum sold out—and CYBERPUNK, with the Kia Forum in Los Angeles in 2025 and a European debut at the O2 Academy Brixton. On record, Kingdom United with Ashley Wallbridge (2019), The Lasers (2020), and Analog (2022), announced as his final artist album. Today, based in Los Angeles, with the LSR/CITY X tour of 2026 and CYBERPUNK reboots of his catalog, Emery occupies a rare place: that of a classic trance author who has turned the live show into a science fiction tale.