Double Touch

A studio session in 2015, and two record collections that did not match

Double Touch began the way plenty of durable partnerships do: by accident, in a studio, with two people discovering their tastes ran in opposite directions. Van-Anh Nguyen is a classically trained pianist and composer. Mark Olsen is a DJ, drummer and producer. They connected during a session and formed the project in 2015, and the appeal was the mismatch rather than the overlap — Olsen was the one with a love of classical music, while Nguyen was the one who had quietly fallen for house.

Olsen has described the starting point simply as curiosity about what would happen if those worlds were blended. What emerged was not a crossover gimmick but a working method: house records built around real playing, with piano and hand percussion treated as structural parts rather than ornament. The duo has operated between Sydney and Los Angeles for years, which explains a catalogue that sounds written in transit.

Nguyen has been candid that the result resists tidy labelling. Some of their music, she has said, sits somewhere between genres and even they are not sure where it belongs. In practice the output lands across ambient textures, organic house, Afro-leaning rhythms and, increasingly, straightforward melodic house.

All Day I Dream became the address

The duo's recorded life has been almost entirely bound up with one label. They first appeared on Lee Burridge's All Day I Dream in 2019 with the Adagio EP, and have returned to it steadily ever since — Greatest Day in 2020, Storm in 2022, Gran Amigo in 2025, Dreaming Of You in 2026, plus appearances on the label's annual Summer Sampler compilations. Olsen has called the label home, and in a scene where producers chase imprints release by release, that kind of single-address career is unusual enough to be the defining fact about them.

Storm, out in December 2022, was a four-track EP with vocals from Reigan on two cuts including the title track. Reigan framed it as a record about surrender, describing the title track as a dance of power and passion, pleasure and control. It arrived as the duo were coming off a Los Angeles residency and heading into dates across Australia, New Zealand and Asia, with a return north for the All Day I Dream festival in May 2023 — the shape of a touring year they have broadly repeated since.

The label context matters for understanding the live work too. All Day I Dream started in 2011 on a Brooklyn rooftop as Burridge's answer to the aggressive end of club music: outdoor, daytime, melodic, with a consistent visual identity carried from deserts to hillsides to rooftops. Double Touch's instrumentation is unusually well suited to that brief.

Gran Amigo, and a wine Mark got wrong

The four-track Gran Amigo, released in 2025, is the record that best explains what the duo do. It runs 23 minutes across the seven-minute opener Come With Me, then Desire, the title track, and Amour. The title came from their first trip to Argentina in 2025 and a Mendoza wine called Gran Enemigo, which Olsen misremembered as Gran Amigo — a small error they liked enough to keep.

Their own framing of the EP is the clearest statement of intent they have given: that they have always seen the music as a conversation between the classical and electronic worlds, creating a third voice neither of them could reach alone. Reviewers picked up on layered pianos, strings and organic percussion that feel tactile despite being assembled digitally, and on a record that works as well for a dancefloor as for sitting still.

The closing track is a useful corrective to any assumption that the acoustic element is the whole story. In a September 2025 breakdown of how Amour was built, the duo described a slow-burn piece assembled in Logic Pro from layered bass — a Diva patch blending sawtooth, square, sub and noise, with a hoover-style Serum layer on top — plus Omnisphere chord plucks and French spoken word run through CLA Vocals and Output's Portal. Rather than automate one bass line, they stacked several across the frequency range and side-chained the lot to make room for the kick. The piano is real; the architecture is thoroughly electronic.

Where they stand in November 2026

2026 has been the duo's most visible year. Dreaming Of You arrived on All Day I Dream on 8 June 2026, a three-tracker — the title cut, Deep Sleep and Feel The Love — that leans further into melodic house than anything before it, pairing intimate arrangements with vocals and trading the darker textures of the title track for more playful, earthy synth work on Deep Sleep. The duo described the EP as an attempt to capture the feeling of being lost in motion, written while moving between cities, time zones and emotions. They played the label's New York showcase at Industry City later that month.

The bigger development was a first residency. Across the DIO Crete season in Hersonissos, which ran from 18 June to 31 August 2026, Double Touch were the resident live act for HEDONISM Sundays, a weekly beachfront event from 5pm to 11pm built on Afro and organic house, with a white, gold and silver dress code and the kind of production and dining budget that sits a long way from a club booth. Announced in late May 2026, it gave them a fixed weekly slot in front of an international crowd for eleven consecutive weeks — a different discipline from one-off festival sets.

Either side of Crete, the year was spent on North American rooftops and outdoor stages: the Kimpton Canary Hotel in Santa Barbara on 9 August 2026, Tetto Rooftop in Chicago on 25 September, and OfF Piknic in Montréal on 12 October. In September 2026 they talked through the records that shaped them, picking out Nils Frahm's Says as a masterpiece and Sébastien Léger for folding real musicianship into house music — the two poles their own work tries to hold together.

Three dates on sale, and why they are the ones that count

Everything currently on sale is in Australia, and all three dates are All Day I Dream events — the label's first Australian run in ten years. Double Touch play Beach Hotel in Byron Bay on Friday 20 November 2026, the Ivy in Sydney on Saturday 28 November, and Bourke Street Courtyard in Melbourne on Sunday 29 November, alongside Burridge and Lost Desert on each bill.

The framing is worth noting: these are outdoor afternoon-into-evening gatherings timed for the southern summer, not late-night club shows, and the decade-long absence has done the ticketing no harm. For a duo based partly in Sydney, it is also the rare case of a home-market run that doubles as the biggest booking of their year.

What the set actually does

The performance model is specific and has got quieter over time. Olsen DJs; Nguyen plays keys live; Olsen adds percussion over the top. The tracks being mixed are the foundation, and the live playing is layered onto them — Olsen's phrase is adding little moments of magic on top of that foundation rather than disrupting the momentum. It is a deliberately conservative approach to a format that invites showboating.

By mid-2026 he was framing restraint as the main thing he had learned: once mixing became second nature, he said, he could pay far more attention to reading the room and understanding what people were responding to, and he has come to accept that a great track often does not need much added to it. The duo's identity now comes through the piano and percussion layers rather than through effects, which is why the sets read as organic rather than busy. It also means no two shows run the same way — the DJ spine shifts with the room, and the live parts follow it.