Gareth Emery

Gareth Emery functions under several aliases, among them GTR, Cupa, Digital Blues, Rue de Gar, and Runaway. The English DJ and producer brings a direct and adaptable style to mixing, composing, and staging multiple strands of electronic dance music that encompass progressive trance and tech-house. Public notice arrived in the early 2000s after his rework of the Shrink's "Nervous Breakdown" and the GTR release "Mistral," both issued in 2002. He has held steady visibility behind the decks, placing inside the Top Ten of DJ Mag's Top 100 poll in 2009, while steadily expanding a recording catalog that includes studio albums from Northern Lights in 2010 through The Lasers in 2020.

Born Gareth Thomas Rhys Emery in 1980, he spent his childhood in Southampton, England, beside his sister, singer/songwriter Roxanne Emery. Classical piano training formed the foundation of his musical education, and he later played guitar in punk bands while attending high school. Interest in electronic music, especially trance, developed while he completed a politics degree at the University of Warwick. Remixes of other artists' material came first, followed quickly by original productions of his own. Attention increased in 2002 once his version of the Shrink's "Nervous Breakdown" received BBC Radio 1 airplay, and further recognition followed later that year when "Mistral" appeared on the Five AM label run jointly with Alexis Hooper under the GTR name. The Five AM Sessions from 2005 marked the first of several commercial mix compilations he would assemble.

Operations at Five AM ended around 2008, after which Emery relocated to Manchester and launched the Garuda imprint. Its initial CD offering was the double-disc set The Sound of Garuda, issued in late 2009. The debut album of original material, Northern Lights, followed in 2010 and was succeeded the next year by the remix package Northern Lights (Re-Lit). In 2013 Emery asked supporters to halt votes for him in DJ Magazine's annual Top 100 poll, a ranking he had entered every year since 2006, because of the sizable marketing budgets involved and instead directed his own allocation toward charitable causes.

Drive surfaced as his second album in 2014, with an expanded edition containing a disc of reworks arriving twelve months later. That same year he began hosting the weekly online radio program Electric for Life, two volumes of which were later released as Electric for Life 2015 and Electric for Life 2016. After moving to Los Angeles he issued the full-length 100 Reasons to Live in 2016. A collaboration with fellow DJ Ashley Wallbridge produced Kingdom United in 2019, and the following year he delivered The Lasers, his fourth solo studio album. The Laserface arena tour supported its launch, and his reputation for visually striking live presentations grew further in 2022 when the LSR/CTY show debuted during EDC Week in Las Vegas.