Charlie Sparks: Built For Energy
From architecture to neo-rave, reverse bass and the expanding world of ELEKTRA, Charlie Sparks has spent the last few years turning intensity into an artistic language. His debut album POWER UP brought him back to the foundations of his sound, while the growth of the harder electronic music surrounding him has opened another question: where does that energy go next?
Charlie Sparks calls himself the “Energy Selecta”, a phrase that has become closely connected to the way he presents himself as an artist. It would be easy to read it purely through the physicality of his music, where speed, pressure and rave intensity rarely disappear for long, but Sparks sees something broader in it. Energy, in his world, is also about the exchange happening between the person behind the decks and everybody standing in front of them. The music is the mechanism that allows that exchange to happen.
“For me it’s perfect, it covers all the aspects of who I am and who I feel like as an artist. ‘Energy selecta’ to me is someone that brings everyone together through sound. The energy I emit transfers into the crowd, creating this bond that we share together every time we meet!”
Behind that physical approach to electronic music is an unlikely reference point: architecture. Sparks studied the discipline before his career moved fully towards music, and traces of that training remain in the way he understands production. Rather than seeing a track as a collection of sounds that happen to work together, he thinks about the placement of individual elements and what their combination can make somebody feel. There is structure underneath music that, on the dancefloor, can initially seem driven by pure instinct.
“It’s easy, just how architects work with materials I work with sound and by layering and carefully placing specific sounds and elements I can create emotions people didn’t know they could feel through my music.”
That relationship between instinct and construction became particularly important when Sparks began working on his debut album, POWER UP. Making a full-length record required him to consider his sound beyond the immediate purpose of a single track or DJ set, but it also forced him to confront how much had changed since he first entered the scene. His rapid development as a DJ had taken him into a completely different world, and production had temporarily moved into the background while he learned how to operate within it. Returning to the studio meant returning to a version of himself that had been left there several years earlier.
“When I started to DJ I left the producing side of me in the studio for more than two years as I was trying to learn this new world that I jumped into head-first. Since then, my sound and the sound of the scene changed with me. The album helped me strip back and recover the true me and merge it with the new me. It was more about reconnecting with who I truly am and the things I genuinely love. It helped me rediscover myself at my core.”
The distinction between the artist before and after POWER UP is important to Sparks. Those years had exposed him to new genres, different environments and a rapidly changing harder electronic music scene, giving him more material to work with but also more questions about which direction was actually his. The album became a way of sorting through that accumulated information rather than adding another layer on top of it. Instead of trying to predict what Charlie Sparks should sound like, he started from a blank canvas and worked from what still felt natural.
“The artist before ‘POWER UP’ was one that had just experienced a whole new world of sounds and genres. An artist that had been on a long journey of exploring and gaining knowledge. The ‘POWER UP’ album was the process of collating the last three years into different pillars to understand what I really want to push and the emotions I want to emit. I looked at the album as a blank canvas and just made what I felt. The artist after ‘POWER UP’, the Charlie Sparks you see now, has funnelled everything he has learnt and taken the experiences of making an album, to be able to pinpoint the sound he really wants to push.”
That process has happened while the wider environment around Sparks has been changing too. Neo-rave, reverse bass and hard bounce have travelled considerably further than the underground spaces where much of their recent momentum began, with sounds once treated as peripheral increasingly appearing across major festivals and international line-ups. Sparks was already moving between those references when doing so made him something of an outsider, but he never approached that difference as a deliberate strategy. He played what interested him, and the fact that it did not neatly match everything happening around him ultimately became an advantage.
“Honestly I have always played what I wanted and at the start I stuck out because of this and it really helped me as I was the odd one out, which works well sometimes and in my case it worked really well. I’m just happy to see more people feel what I feel from this music and experience all the fun I have had with this music. It’s got a real rave, high energy feeling to it which runs through your body and mind. It’s amazing!”
There is always a complicated moment when an underground sound begins operating at a much larger scale. The increased audience can create opportunities for artists who previously existed outside the dominant festival circuit, but it can also quickly produce repetition once promoters, producers and audiences recognise a successful formula. Harder electronic music is now experiencing some of those pressures, although Sparks is less concerned with defending old genre boundaries than with seeing what can happen when they continue to collapse. For him, the most interesting development is precisely how difficult some of this music has become to categorise.
“I think honestly it’s going in the right direction. I’m not exactly sure what needs to happen but I can say it’s different from before. Now music consists of multiple genres in one. It’s a lot more exciting. I just want to push good artists that create this same sound with high quality productions, so everyone can enjoy it and understand it the best possible way. This is exactly what ELEKTRA is doing.”
ELEKTRA has consequently become an increasingly important part of what Sparks is building. The label is tied to his own artistic universe, but its purpose is becoming wider than simply providing another outlet for Charlie Sparks records. It gives him a platform to support artists operating across the hybrid territory he has been describing, without demanding that every release follow the same sonic formula. The common denominator is not necessarily tempo, genre or a particular production technique, but whether the music carries the feeling he associates with ELEKTRA.
“ELEKTRA is all about the energy! That’s why it has a broad spectrum when it comes to the music released on the label. Energy is not defined by one specific element but a feeling. The feeling of the artist behind the music and when it feels and has ELEKTRA energy qualities it becomes a part of the ELEKTRA movement.”
That definition leaves ELEKTRA enough room to evolve alongside the scene rather than becoming trapped inside the sound of a particular moment. It also reflects what has happened throughout Sparks’ own career, where the genres surrounding him have changed while his attraction to physical, high-impact music has remained remarkably consistent. What he wants now is to turn that instinct into something with a larger identity, using the label to connect artists and audiences rather than allowing it to exist purely as an extension of his name. For someone whose career has grown during a period of constant stylistic crossover, building around a feeling rather than a rigid genre makes sense.
The next stage of Charlie Sparks follows a similar logic. Despite the increasingly large stages, the album and the growth of ELEKTRA, he does not speak about his current position as though he has arrived at a final version of himself. If POWER UP was about recovering something that had been obscured during his first years of touring, the music that follows will continue bringing those older instincts into contact with everything he has experienced since. The objective is not to return to the beginning, but to find out what happens when those different versions of himself finally exist in the same place.
“I want to take it to the next level. I feel like I am no way close to where I want to be and it’s just the beginning. I want to bring the part of me that started all of this into my music and merge it with the new me. Create a new type of energy that feels more me and electrifies all the stages around the world while pushing the ELEKTRA sound. With that, also creating a community that brings everyone together through the power of music.”
The scale may have changed, but Sparks keeps returning to the same relationship he described at the beginning: music as a transfer of energy between people. ELEKTRA gives that idea somewhere to expand beyond his own sets, while his next records offer another opportunity to work out what his version of that energy sounds like after everything that has happened since he entered the scene. There is no suggestion that he wants to settle into the formula that brought him here, particularly when experimentation and collision were what allowed him to stand apart in the first place. His final words are therefore directed less towards the industry surrounding that growth than towards the people who have been experiencing it with him.
“I just want to say thank you to all of you who have joined me on this journey, it’s a forever changing one, but the one thing that has stayed the same is your love and passion! I want to repay all of you with my music and share my energy with you.”
