Alden Martin

Piano lessons that didn't take

Martin grew up in the UK, where dance music had been part of ordinary cultural furniture for a generation before it broke through commercially in North America. He has dated his own interest in dance and EDM to the age of ten. Piano lessons were tried and did not hold him; by twelve he had moved to the production side instead, which is a different discipline from playing and one that rewards exactly the sort of obsessive solitary fiddling a bored twelve-year-old with a laptop can supply. That early switch explains a lot about the shape of the career that followed: he arrived as a producer first and a performer second.

By 2015 he was pushing a solo project from London. Jesse Fischer, a Canadian, was doing the same from Vancouver, having bought DJ equipment around 2012 after watching DJs work on a spring-break trip to Cancún. The two found each other online and spent roughly a year trading Facebook messages before they made anything together; the first result went up on SoundCloud. Fischer has made the point that the mainstream dance wave reached North America around 2010 and 2011, well after it had settled into British life — which made the pairing of a London producer and a Vancouver DJ less of an accident of geography than it looks.

VAVO, and a comment that became a genre

The duo's breakout arrived in 2019 with two number ones on US dance radio, among them 'Like Nobody'. What followed was less obvious. Rather than chasing the festival main-stage sound, VAVO went at country music, remixing Morgan Wallen, Mitchell Tenpenny and Dustin Lynch. In commercial terms this was a sharper read of where American listening was going than most of their peers managed: country was expanding its audience at speed, and almost nobody in dance was building the bridge.

The name for the hybrid came from the audience rather than a marketing meeting. Under one of their Wallen edits on TikTok a commenter wrote that it was YEEDM season. Fischer's account is that they went back to her and asked whether they could use it, and she agreed. YEEDM — yeehaw dance music — stuck, and is now the first thing written about them in almost every piece of coverage.

The clearest statement of the method is 'Spring Break '23 Remixes', released on 28 April 2023 with the country singer Priscilla Block, which took four of her songs and rebuilt them for clubs rather than bolting a four-four kick underneath. VAVO record through KESS Records. Their running totals, as the duo report them, are north of 100 million streams, several number ones on US dance radio, entries on the Billboard dance charts and a nomination at the EDM Awards. It is a substantial body of work for an act most British listeners will not have heard of, because the audience for it is largely American.

The credits that do not carry his name

Alongside the duo, Martin works out of London as a producer, remixer and mixer for other artists. The credit list he publishes runs to Tiësto, Sam Feldt, RAYE, The Chainsmokers and VAVO itself; he describes his own output as modern dance in its various house dialects — house, tech house, pop house — and reckons more than 50 million Spotify streams across work he has had a hand in. He maintains a public Spotify playlist collecting the tracks he has written or produced, which is a more honest CV than a press release.

He also hires himself out directly rather than only through label channels. The terms are posted openly: production, mixing and mastering offered separately or bundled at a discount, roughly 100 to 1,000 dollars a song depending on the service, with the client keeping 100 per cent of the royalties and receiving the project files and stems on delivery. That is a transparently unglamorous way to run a dance career, and a practical one. It is also why his name turns up more often in metadata than on posters.

2026: two minutes and eleven seconds

The most recent release under his own name is 'Forget Me Not', made with the London producer Harry Thompson and put out on 19 May 2026 through Hit & Hope and Isekai. It is deep house at 134bpm and runs two minutes eleven — short even by the standards of a club edit, and closer in length to a streaming-era pop single than to the extended tools DJs used to press. It sells on Bandcamp from 99p, with 24-bit downloads for anyone who wants them, and sits in Thompson's catalogue next to 'Back 2 Reality', which followed in July 2026.

Under his own name the discography is thin and widely spaced: the earliest item on his Apple Music artist page is a single called 'Cyclone' from 2015. That is not a gap in the career so much as evidence of where the career has actually been spent — inside a duo, and behind other people's records. The solo name is a recent and still lightly used front end for work that has mostly reached listeners wearing someone else's label.

The Atlantic City booking

The one date on sale is Friday 9 October 2026 at HQ2, the nightclub inside Ocean Casino Resort on the Atlantic City boardwalk, with an 11pm start and a 21-and-over door. Tickets are handled through TicketWeb; tables are booked separately through the venue's reservation system. This is a club booking rather than a tour stop, and it is billed as Dance/Electronic without further description.

HQ2 runs a single headline DJ on Fridays and Saturdays, which places Martin inside a clearly defined autumn run: Crankdat on 3 October, Xandra on the 10th, Jamo on the 16th, Block & Crown on the 17th, Beachcrimes on the 30th and Joel Corry on Halloween, with KREAM and Tchami following in November. It is a room that alternates between big festival names and working house and tech-house DJs, and the 9 October slot sits in the second category. No support act is advertised.

Written coverage of his sets under his own name is essentially non-existent — no reviews, no published setlists, nothing from the trade press. For a producer whose public record is credits and streaming counts rather than tour reports, that is consistent, but it does mean the Atlantic City date has to be taken on the strength of the records rather than on a reputation built in rooms.