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Luciano has led a somewhat nomadic life on the White Isle, with the Swiss-Chilean occupying the decks at an array of venues all over the island since his first introductions with Cocoon back in 2001. The 2014 season has been marked by a very clear mission of focus for Luciano and a sense of rediscovery, manifesting itself in a distinctly back-to-basics approach – the weekly Luciano & Friends at Destino and eight Origins takeovers at Cocoon made up his party schedule this summer.
Luciano works tirelessly, and as a result, it’s no surprise to hear he is very busy. The chance to sit down with the man for a chat is a rare occasion, so as he was making an appearance at the DJ Awards, we grabbed the opportunity to catch up with the Cadenza boss. Eloquent, articulate and looking decidedly suave in an all black leather combo, Luciano gave us the low down on what has possibly been his most important Ibiza season to date.
I just wanted to know how the season has been going for you. Well, the season has been fantastic. We’ve decided to make a commitment this year by putting Vagabundos on the side. I also stopped doing Ushuaia, which was a big commitment – shutting down two residencies a week that were working. I really wanted to come back to quality instead of quantity. I wanted to be able to deliver each time I was doing a gig with a very happy feeling. I’m always doing the job, but there are just some times, if you’re doing five times a week – as good as it could be, as good as the records could be, as good as the music could be – there’s just the human factor. It’s just that you can’t take it and at one point you might not be 100 percent. So I really wanted to reduce so I could provide more energy with everything we’re doing. I think that is what we did this year.
We created Origins, in order to do the combination with Cocoon. I was there 13 or 14 years ago, so it was important because I was uniting with someone who was there at day one, and the result was beautiful. We hosted eight shows and the result was fantastic. Cocoon also did a great and amazing job with great line-ups, so we were really happy. We thought it was a hard decision because we have a team here, there are a lot of things depending on what we do and we have to also deal with that, but the result was just super-positive.
You mentioned you’d been at Amnesia so many years ago, did it feel like you were going home? Kind of, yeah. We did four or five years at Pacha, and we moved around and I always compromised because of my team and the people I’m working with – sometimes it can be up to 30 or 40 people during the season, it’s a lot of people. This year I really wanted to reduce and say less compromise with the surrounding and what I love, which is the music. Of course we had some difficulties, but the result was positive.
Were you happy with how Origins turned out? Yeah. With Origins, the idea was getting back to the roots. There was nothing melancholic or nothing that was trying to recreate the past. The past is the past, the present is the present. And we’re trying to do the future. We felt that the future for us was quality rather than other things. Rather than everybody being exhausted and at the end nobody understands each other and fights, we really wanted to say we’re going to go on like a family and like a team and keep it like this.
You did eight takeovers this year – do you think you’ll expand next year? Well, we really don’t know yet. We really wanted to shut this down properly and then sit down and think about it. From mid-November I’m going to some time off. I haven’t done that in 14 years I think. I’m really going to take this time to get back in the studio and to have the time to be free in the studio without thinking “I’ve got to catch a flight, I have to finish this shit!” Just to make music and sit down with my team and think about what we want to do – if we’re happy, if we’re unhappy. We want to just go to the point where we’re all 100 percent committed with what we’re doing.
You had Luciano & Friends as well. Yeah, that was also the other great surprise with Destino this year. It was a fantastic surprise after the sadness of Cova Santa, but it was just magic what we could produce at Destino, which is a beautiful place, very simple, a little bit back to Ibiza and the day time party. The result was very positive, we weren’t expecting that success. Everybody was like, “Wow!”
It’s an amazing venue. Yeah, incredible! It really highlights the summer there. It’s definitely a fantastic venue.
You said you’ll take some time off – will there be releases to come from you? Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot of music in the past few years. I’ve been doing things with musicians, singers, on my own and one of the last tracks I did with Joe from dOP. I’m enjoying it. I’m so spread into the world of DJing and playing around and travelling. I hang out with my friends and they’re all making music and they all have more time. I have four kids – my life is really, really busy. So all my friends are doing music and I’m always doing administration for the company, the booking agency, the label, the kids, the DJing and I’m like, “Shit, I’m creating the platform for everybody in order to create music, but I’m the one who’s not doing it!”
I just took a little bit of distance from that. I want everybody to be peaceful, there’s no bad feeling towards anybody, but I just need to come back to who I am. I think I never lost that, I just got away from it because I felt responsible for people. When you have a lot of people around you can’t just say “Fuck off, I’m going to the studio," because you will make a lot of enemies. So you have to be responsible, but it took a lot of time to understand that and to process it and to organise it in order to be able to come back to my point of making music without making enemies.
Will you release music on your own labels? No, I’m just coming back to a point – I always made music without intention. It’s like breathing for me, I need it. I need it constantly. I have an album kind of ready, it’s a double album. It’s very down tempo, soft music. It’s the music that I always wanted to do. I’m finally finding the right people, the right platforms, the right things to believe in it.
In terms of Ibiza in general, there’s so much change going on and so much change since you were first coming here, what do you make of it now? Ibiza became a brand – a very strong brand worldwide. As far as I’ve seen in the 14 or 15 years I’ve been coming here, I feel responsible and I feel guilty for changes that have happened. I remember when we dropped out to do our own party, Vagabundos, and I felt that a couple of years after, a lot of people started doing the same thing with the same genre of music. Which at one point was fantastic as it was giving a big opportunity for everybody to do something, but on the other hand it also split people. Some things got bigger like Ushuaia – when Ushuaia started it was a very small place on the beach. We started this in a very small format and it got into this mega structure.
Sometimes things are like Las Vegas – that’s not what I remember from Ibiza. Everybody is doing an incredible job – Ushuaia, Destino, everybody is doing the best they can. It’s just that Ibiza was something different. You had rich people and poor people and they was no pretention. It became very pretentious in the last few years. And there’s the nostalgic part like, “I would like it to come back,” but this neither exists nor is possible. We are in the present and we create the future. The past is gone. The best thing is to accept and to see the most important things that have always been part of this island and to say all together that if we take too much from it, we’re going to destroy what we most love.
We all came here because of one reason – we all have to work to find that one reason that brought us here. The most important thing is to have the intelligence and the ability to say “I’m going to keep this [negativity] away and I’m going to focus on what matters most to protect it, I’m not going to destroy what I most love”.
Listen to Luciano on Pulse Radio.
It's been a huge 3 years for Belgian up and comer Ilario Liburni. 
