Sven Väth

Sven Väth (born 26 October 1964) is a German DJ and electronic music producer. He is a three-time DJ Awards winner, and his career in electronic music spans over 30 years. The single "Electrica Salsa" with OFF launched his career in 1986. Referred to as "Papa Sven" by his fans, Sven Väth has made his mark in the music community by being one of Germany's pop stars in the nineties, running two night clubs in Germany, and starting his own company Cocoon, which encompasses a booking agency, record label, and a branch for events. He is recognized for cultivating the underground electronic music scene not just in Germany but in Ibiza as well, with his own night at Amnesia for eighteen years and after-parties at creative locations around the island. Sven Väth is a major proponent of vinyl, using only two decks and a mixer for his extensive DJ sets, his longest set having been 30 hours. Both of Sven Väth's parents were from East Germany. They escaped separately and met again each other by chance in the West when they were very young, in a town near Frankfurt. The two of them married and had three sons, including Sven, while his father was still a painter. Young at heart, his parents would go dancing often and his father wished to open an English pub, which they did. The pub had a small dance floor, where Sven was introduced to a wide range of music, from rock’n’roll to disco.In the summer of 1980, Väth went for the first time to Ibiza after hearing about it from the local scene in Frankfurt, where he was living at the time. Using his job seeker's allowance money, Väth hitchhiked from Barcelona and ended up spending three months on the island, sleeping on beach chairs and distributing flyers for clubs in order to get by. It was that summer he decided that he wanted to become a DJ, after becoming enchanted with Ibiza and his time there. When he returned to Germany, Sven's mother asked if he would DJ at his parents' pub. Sven gladly accepted. He was 17 at the time.