Bastian Bux is a Barcelona-born DJ and producer who has spent more than a decade developing a house sound that moves between funky, disco, minimal, and tech house.
Photo credit: Bastian Bux – Official
Across his career, Bastian Bux has released music through Hottrax, Desolat, elrow Music, and his own Neverendz, while his productions have received support from artists including The Martinez Brothers, Marco Carola, Michael Bibi, and Joseph Capriati.
More recently, he has built Petit Comité of House around a return to what he describes as the original spirit of house music. The project has expanded from an event series into a record label and international community, with releases including ‘Only U’.
In this conversation, Bastian Bux discusses the thinking behind Petit Comité of House, preserving intimacy as the project grows, the relationship between house music’s subgenres, adapting to different dancefloors, and the community surrounding the label.
EG: Hi Bastian, welcome to Electronic Groove. It’s great to have you with us. How have you been, and how are things looking for you at the moment?
Bastian Bux: Thank you for having me, guys! It’s been an amazing summer and the best year of my career so far, so I couldn’t be happier right now.
EG: You’ve built Petit Comité of House around a fairly simple idea: reconnecting people with the original spirit of house music. What does that spirit mean to you today?
Bastian Bux: It means the same as it did right at the beginning of my clubber life, when I had zero fancy expectations and all my motivation and excitement came from going out with my best friends to listen and dance to this happy, positive music that made us enjoy ourselves alongside strangers that felt like family. Joy, connection, and togetherness stripped of all kinds of artificial hype or expectations. That’s what the original spirit of house music meant to me yesterday and means to me today.
EG: Petit Comité has grown from an event series into a label and an international community. When did you realise that the idea had the potential to become something larger than a party?
Bastian Bux: I was envisioning the whole ecosystem from the beginning. I imagined the parties and the music that would be played there. I dreamt about doing them in Barcelona, which was an accessible goal, surrounded by artists that are my friends and making music that would fit in there. Nobody wanted to sign that music, so releasing it ourselves made a lot of sense from the beginning. What I didn’t expect was for it to become the international community it is now. I envisioned something really local and intimate, almost like a form of personal relief, but I knew it was something larger than a party even before I started working on it.
EG: There’s a deliberate sense of intimacy in the name Petit Comité, even as the project continues to expand around the world. How do you preserve that feeling of community as the scale gets bigger?
Bastian Bux: First of all, by saying no to some things. Second, by putting the essential quality of the experience first. We’ve always understood the expression “Petit Comité” as referring to the core group of people you really want to be with. When a party ends, and you say, “Hey, let’s go to my apartment, but only in petit comité,” that means only your real ones. I imagine having 10 real ones, 100 real ones, or 10K real ones. What you really need to preserve is the quality of the experience so it’s pleasing to every single one of them. If it’s too big for Petit’s quality standards, it simply won’t happen. But I can definitely imagine ways to scale without losing this integrity.
EG: Your own approach to house has always moved freely between funky, disco, minimal and tech house. Do you think the genre’s history is actually more useful when you stop treating its subgenres as separate worlds?
Bastian Bux: Absolutely. I think the separation of genres and this labelling fever are relatively new in electronic music and have something to do with this era of hyper-simplification we are living in. Every complex idea has to fit in 140 characters, a 15-second video, or a 2-minute song. Artists and music have followed the same path, but by doing this you are just missing A LOT of essential information, details and nuances that create whole gradients. I grew up listening to DJs that were able to go from Gadjo to Josh Wink in 3 records and make it make sense, and I kinda try to do the same. House music is a complex universe, not a collection of separate worlds. Treating it as such is just incredibly sad considering all that you are missing. I’m definitely trying to avoid that.
“House music is a complex universe, not a collection of separate worlds”
EG: You’ve played everything from intimate all-night-long sessions to huge festival stages, including Tomorrowland, Encore Beach Club and Space Ibiza. Does the size of the room change the way you tell a story through house music?
Bastian Bux: Yes, completely. It’s not only about the size but also about the reason why you are there. Being part of a long lineup stacked with superstars isn’t the same as being the main support act for one big name or being the headliner yourself. Adapting to your position in the lineup is as important as adapting to the size of the venue. Context is everything. There’s a story for every context. I don’t understand this job any other way.
EG: The label has already had a significant run, with ‘Only U’ reaching number one on Beatport multiple times and remaining among the platform’s best-selling tracks for an extended period. What has that response told you about the audience Petit Comité is building?
Bastian Bux: It’s interesting because ‘Only U’ is what they call a slow burner, one of those songs that don’t peak instantly but instead start compounding and keep delivering results over a long period of time. Every week there’s some new achievement for this song. I think this is an exact analogy for what Petit Comité is building in terms of audience and community, and that’s what makes me the most proud. I feel like there’s not one single big factor that attracts people to our world in large numbers, nor a huge audience that made ‘Only U’ this big, but a sum of different inputs that creates some kind of attraction that compounds.
EG: There’s a strong emphasis on curation across the project, alongside your own productions. When you’re deciding what belongs within the Petit Comité world, what are you listening for beyond the obvious dancefloor impact?
Bastian Bux: I try to be brutally honest about what I feel during the first 3 seconds after being exposed to something, be it a song, a new decoration, a visual for the party, a design, anything. If it doesn’t create that immediate feeling of satisfaction, interest, joy, positivity, whatever you want to call it, I simply discard it. This project started as a personal outlet built around my own taste, and the formula has been working as well as I could have hoped, so I’m trying to stay true to that.
EG: Your career has also taken you through very different corners of the house scene, from Hottrax and Desolat to elrow Music and your own Neverendz, with artists such as The Martinez Brothers, Marco Carola, Michael Bibi and Joseph Capriati supporting your music. How has moving between those different environments shaped your understanding of where your sound belongs?
Bastian Bux: I think that for a curious person like me, who’s always craving new knowledge and experiences, having actually experienced different sounds, situations and environments firsthand has given me the essential confidence I have now to be 100% sure about what I am doing and what I want to devote my energy and time to. I always say that it is as important to know what you want as what you don’t. And of course I’ve learnt a lot about an infinite number of topics, from the technical to the spiritual. All those achievements have guided me and are part of what I am today.
EG: You’ve described house music as something universal, with its power ultimately depending on the people who know how to shape it into a moment on the dancefloor. Has that belief changed after more than a decade of playing and producing?
Bastian Bux: No, that belief has only grown stronger. What maybe has changed is that now I can think of a wider variety of possible dancefloors that shape someone’s perception of house music. It might be a regular club with a professional DJ, or it might be your best friend’s apartment with a JBL Bluetooth speaker when you are a teenager. There are an infinite number of ways to enter this universe and different characters that will shape those moments. I respect, embrace, and try to learn from all of them.
“Context is everything. There’s a story for every context. I don’t understand this job any other way”
EG: Looking at Petit Comité now, what would you like the project to become over the next few years, and what do you hope people feel when they walk away from one of its parties or discover one of its records?
Bastian Bux: I don’t want to make it sound cheesy, but Petit has become what it is now because we’ve been listening to our inner clubber, our inner self who fell in love with a simpler, purer way of understanding this world, and we’ve devoted our work to pleasing it. So I would like to never forget about pleasing this inner me. I’m sure that if we keep doing this, people like us will feel the same and get the same sort of positive emotions as we do. I truly believe that we can only be sure of what WE feel, so making sure we take care of those primary inner feelings will for sure create positive outcomes.
EG: Thank you so much for your time. We wish you all the best with Petit Comité and everything you’re building around it. Take care!
Bastian Bux: Thank you so much for these questions. I loved all of them, and they make me proud of what we are projecting. Thanks for having me.
Bastian Bux’s ‘What U Say Girl’ is out now via Petit Comité of House. Stream and download here.
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