For John Summit, the only real challenge is knowing when to slow down“There’s always a kind of cosmic merry-go-round in entertainment, where some people are jumping off the ride while others are jumping on,” says Ryan Raddon, better known as the trailblazing producer and DJ, Kaskade. “John’s timing into music and DJing happened at exactly the right time — he’s who the audience was looking for.”
John Schuster stands in the centre of Madison Square Garden, June 2024, surrounded by a colossal diamond-shaped stage, four CDJs and a crowd of 20,000. His track with HAYLA, Shiver — a dramatic, synth-filled banger from his debut album, Comfort In Chaos — builds intensely as phone cameras flash down on him.
“New York — how the fuck we feelin’ baby!?”
The crowd eats it up as pyrotechnics ignite in sync with the track’s drop, momentarily sending a wave of heat through the iconic New York City venue. Schuster probably didn’t envision the scene when, while studying as an undergrad accountant (a detail of his bio the press has glommed onto hard) he stepped up to the decks of Illinois’ Canopy Club in 2015 as an opener for DJ trio Cash Cash, playing his debut show as John Summit after almost landing on the stage name ‘Johnny Mountains’. After being fired as an accountant, he likely didn’t see himself remixing his all-time favourite dance track, Kaskade and deadmau5’s I Remember, in 2023. Even during the 2020 pandemic, when he was making music production YouTube tutorials and live-streaming boozy DJ sets on Zoom, he couldn’t have foreseen his rapid ascent to dance music’s apex.
The data tells the story. In the past 12 months, Summit has played over 220 shows, closed EDC 2024 with fellow Chicago hero Green Velvet, played the aforementioned sold-out MSG show, and is set to play three shows at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum, the first two of which sold out in days. In the same way, dance music culture has long taken knives out for its biggest and brightest new stars (see Avicii, Skrillex, Fred again..) — he’s been called edgy, immature, and ‘a frat DJ with the ego of Elon Musk’ on platforms like Reddit, which he sees as a kind of a sign of success, too.
“I’m not comparing myself to LeBron James at all but he could have a perfect game and still get haters.”
John Summit. Image: Ben Bentley for MusicTech
But Comfort In Chaos is the artist’s real talisman; proof that the thousands of hours he’s put into producing music and dealing with online critics have paid off. Released in July, the album skips between melodic techno, progressive house, liquid funk and tech house, with features from Sub Focus, Kaskade, HAYLA, Elderbrook, and Julia Church, among others. It’s now racked up hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify alone.
John has no intention of hitting the brakes. The only time he’s taken out of touring since 2021 was to create Comfort In Chaos this past winter, and he’s already got plans for the next album – “I plan on doing multiple, I’m not stopping anytime soon”. He’s eyeing up more intricate live shows, working with more hip-hop artists (he’s coy about who but says he likes what Lil Yachty and James Blake did with their recent album Bad Cameo), and taking fresh producers under his wing via his Experts Only label — and still thinks he has more energy to spend on partying at his shows.
“I’m huge about age being nothing but a number,” says the producer, who turned 30 exactly one month after selling out MSG. “Age is a mentality”

John joins our video call at 9 am, Los Angeles time in mid-August. He’s there working on his next single, the Subtronics and Tape B. collab (Gas Pedal, released today) while promoting his album and preparing to play shows in Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Croatia, Ibiza and the UK, all in the seven days following our interview. He beams from cheek to cheek and chuckles often when we talk about his hectic schedule.
Have you had the chance to take a minute and appreciate your career, the album launch and all these shows?
“A little bit [laughs]. I took a few days off after the album and after the big MSG show — but as soon as I was done with that set, which I’d been working towards for months, I went to the green room, and I couldn’t even celebrate because then I played a three-hour after-party to 6,000 people. So, yeah, I don’t know, when I look back look at these vlogs I’m doing, I’m like, “Oh, wow, this is kind of crazy.”
So you’ve been doing this for eight years at least now?
“Yeah, eight years releasing music but been doing it for 10-plus years now.“
And you started producing in college?
“That’s not what I was going to college for but like anyone, you get a degree in something that you’re not super passionate about but you need to make money in. But my hobby was just making music — I was a big video game guy back in high school so, naturally, I liked being on my computer.”
What games did you play?
“I was a big World of Warcraft and Runescape player. Yeah, I was a nerd [laughs]. I’m just very fortunate that I got good enough at my hobby that it became a pretty solid job.”
Image: Ben Bentley for MusicTech
It wasn’t as easy as he makes it sound. He spent those earlier years teaching himself music production through YouTube tutorials, experimentation, and, crucially, collaborating with his peers. John was taught “basic piano lessons” in high school but is adamant that “you can learn basic music theory in 30 minutes through a YouTube video.” He’s never even used a keyboard — he just draws in his chords and melodies as MIDI notes on Ableton Live (“I saw a deadmau5 tutorial and he was like, ‘I don’t use a keyboard’, so that’ll work for me,” he says).
Armed with his MacBook, Ableton, a few plugins (Diva, Sylenth1, Nexus and some Soundtoys effects), plus some limited music theory knowledge, John got to work making music in 2015 in his college dorm room at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was part of a Facebook group focused on sharing music and offering tips to peers, and became accustomed to finishing tracks and sharing them on SoundCloud to try to build a following. He started throwing parties around his college town; he even got a few gigs at Chicago’s beloved Spybar. He’d spend months on end sending demos out to labels in the hopes of being noticed — with his sights squarely set on the U.K.’s venerable house institution Defected Records.After at least 50 submissions, John claims, the label responded, asked him to jump on a video call early one morning in 2020, and informed him they’d signed his single, Deep End.
But why Defected? Why not try a label that’s closer to home?
“EDM is very dominant in America and I never really gravitated towards that sound. It’s not that I think that music is bad, but I’m really into the UK house labels and stuff — Defected and Hot Creations. And then, of course, I’m from Chicago, the birthplace of house, so there’s a big presence there, too — from Green Velvet’s Relief records and Repopulate Mars, for example.”
Do you think, beyond sending countless demos, there was anything that made you stand out as a producer?
“I don’t know if I was making stuff that other people weren’t making, but it was unique to my area.
And just being kind of young and stupid [laughs].
How so?
“It’s like, on my label, Experts Only, I listen to demos from young producers all the time; they’re not technically great — you can tell that they don’t really know what a proper mixdown is — but when you don’t have any rules [to follow], you can create great ideas.”
Image: Ben Bentley for MusicTech
John believes that you should learn the basics of whatever skill you want to excel in “and then from there, if you just keep doing it, you’re gonna get become really good.”His music production, theory and DJing knowledge have vastly exceeded his own expectations and he has the “five hours of DJing every night with DJing software Mixed In Key” to thank for it. He’s also figured out a production process that breaks many traditional rules in music production, but it seems to be working.
When creating Comfort In Chaos in London, John underwent 25 studio sessions in 30 days to lay down the album’s foundations. He’d bring in his collaborators like HAYLA, Sub Focus and Elderbrook, working with an eight-bar loop of basic chord progressions, Splice samples, and melodies.
He usually spends no more than 30 minutes on a sketch but, once he’s got this initial idea, he spends the following months “producing it out” on his laptop while on the road, transforming them into full tracks with additional layers of synths and samples. John doesn’t use studio monitors to reference his tracks, either — he listens to them on his MacBook speakers until it sounds good, then will approach the “nitty-gritty“ tasks of mixing with a pair of headphones.

John credits U-He’s Diva as the main synth plugin you can hear throughout the album (“it has this thickness and just sounds so analogue”). The string sections are made primarily with reFX’s Nexus, and he’s using Soundtoys’ Decapitator on the vocals to saturate them and “give them more grit.” He adds that all of the “ear candy” — pads, plucks and vocal chops in the background of each track — are all added towards the end, too.
Comfort In Chaos is a spectacular showcase of sound design, production and songwriting. But, for John, it was crucial that the album showcased his vulnerable, emotive side — he says that the album is more John Schuster than John Summit. To that end, collaborating with close friends and family ensures each song hits the right tone.
“I’m a huge believer in collaboration — even just bouncing ideas off someone,” he says. “Every single song I’ve ever put out, I bounced off my manager asking, ‘What’s your thoughts on this?’, and I’ll show my mom a track and see what she thinks. It’s just about getting new perspectives.”
Image: Ben Bentley for MusicTech
How do you generally find collaborators and get in the studio with other artists?
“I think you have to be fans of each other online first and be like, ‘Hey, I would love to work with you’. Then it’s easy to be like, ‘Let’s get in the studio together!’ A pet peeve of mine, especially when artists get big, is that they just get thrown in the room with other big artists, and then it almost seems like a manager tried making that song happen, not like there was an actual vision to it.”
Do you often find it easy to get into the studio with people?
“The amount of times I’ve asked people to hop in the and it doesn’t work is like, 90% of the time. Because, when you’re a touring artist, your schedules and stuff are so busy. So that’s why I think for what I do, doing albums and writing in the winter is best, because that’s when all our schedules go down.
You must feel quite fortunate to have collaborated with Kaskade and deadmau5 on the I Remember remix?
Well, I was just thinking ‘I really don’t want to fuck this up’ [laughs]. I was already connected with Kaskade because I already did the remix for Escape ft. HAYLA [released by deadmau5 and Kaskade as Kx5], which is also how I got connected with Hayla, which started this beautiful friendship and working with her. So then I think he already had trust in me, but then from there, it still took a while to really lock in the I Remembet remix, because now I’m like, ‘Oh, this is so iconic, so historic, I can’t fuck this up!”
You tweeted Charli XCX earlier in the summer about a collab — did that end up happening?
“‘Nope! Charlie hasn’t responded yet [laughs]. I think I’ve tweeted at Dua Lipa, no response. I don’t think any of these people take me seriously yet. But, also, I am tweeting Charli in the midst of this absolutely insane Brat campaign she has, so I can’t imagine how busy her phone is right now.”
John’s pretty vocal on X, formerly Twitter. He, of course, tweets artists to publicly ask for a collab, to varying success, which is fun for his fans. If the ‘DJs complaining’ account was still active, he’d be lucky to avoid being called out on it but, mostly, he’s got a healthy following off the back of his bro humour, candid thoughts and chatter about the party life he’s ended up in.

The partying has actually become part of his act; clips of him downing shots, popping bottles and hanging out poolside and shirtless are rife across his channels. His fans embrace it (a number of his Discord members have named themselves Hungover Heroes; others are Guest List Goblins, Red Rocks Rangers and other names less fit for print), while his critics use it to fuel their disdain.
What’s your read on the negative online commentary about you?
“My read is that I am very unapologetically myself. And it’s not like I’m hiding behind a brand, so it’s really easy for people to talk shit. You’re gonna get you’re gonna get haters no matter what, and as long as it’s a decent balance, it doesn’t affect me at all. It’s especially easy too, because you see the lifestyle, the partying, and if you have a job that you really don’t like, and then you see me out there, living what it looks like to be my best life. It’s easy to be like, ‘Fuck that guy’.
It seems like you’re able to laugh it off now, at least
“1,000 percent. It used to affect me a little bit, but now I get more humour out of it.”
Are you living your best life? It does seem like it.
“I’m living life to the fullest. That’s the way I say it. The only thing is that, like you said, I haven’t been able to really sit back and look back on it all. But what drives me is that I want to wake up every morning. ‘Oh, I got this to do today. I got this. I have a purpose’. So, yeah, living a purposeful life is living my best life.”
Image: Ben Bentley for MusicTech
Kaskade, a teetotal DJ, doubles down on the idea that John’s partying is secondary to his aspirations as an artist.
“John is going full-throttle in what he’s doing,” he says. “This is not a person who is just partying and coasting on the success he’s had already. He’s a surprisingly disciplined work-horse, the schedule he keeps with touring and producing is mental. I love seeing anyone who feels blessed to be doing what they’re doing and then leans in to make it even better. I see him doing that.
John’s vision extends far beyond the studio. He’s working on the final touches of his Comfort In Chaos show, a live production that draws inspiration from Daft Punk’s iconic Pyramid show, and deadmau5’s Cube production. He talks of a potential show at the Vegas Sphere one day (“or some kind of mini-Sphere”), and of creating more intimate, adventurous experiences for dance fans.
Kaskade, meanwhile, offers his own advice to the young dance Jedi: “Take the time to acknowledge what just happened — whatever it was, even if it was terrible. The momentum of focusing on the future is a detriment as it casts a shadow on anything good that is happening in the present. I see a lot of very driven people working 17 steps ahead and never sitting down with their crew or loved ones, soaking up success. I would tell him: soak it up.”
Image: Ben Bentley for MusicTech
Eventually, when he slows down on the touring and DJ lifestyle – “hopefully, have a family some day or whatever” — John is looking to become an educator. “I think teaching is what’s going to be giving me fulfilment. Especially with the tour, I have so much to tell and so much to share to people; that’ll be a fun thing to do one day.’
For now, he offers one crucial lesson to budding producers right now: “Do not be afraid of rejection. Everybody sees how I just tweet at the people to collaborate with — you don’t lose anything by putting yourself out there. And no one really gives a fuck. People get too in their heads about this stuff too, but you don’t lose anything from putting yourself out there. And it does come with some hate and stuff but if you don’t give a shit, then anything is possible.”
Image: Ben Bentley
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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