Coloween, Denver's Biggest Halloween Rave, Sees Return of Manufactured Superstars

When you've launched one of the most successful genre-specific online music stores to date, opened a nightclub with a world-class sound system, and built a reputation as a prominent mash-up DJ duo before retiring from all of it for a few years — what's your encore?

For Brad Roulier and Shawn Sabo, also known as Manufactured Superstars, it's playing at Coloween right after the even'ts $10,000 costume contest prize-winner is announced. The annual Halloween rave-style dance party is booked for this Saturday, October 26, with five other DJs rounding out the lineup, including DJ Manos, DJ Vinnie and Casa Migos.

"Brad and I have been in the music scene for too many more years than I want to actually say," Sabo says. "I think it's just the right time in life, and we're both feeling inspired by music again."

It's been a long road for these Manufactured Superstars. Roulier helped launch Beatport in 2004 as a collaboration with fellow Denver DJs Jonas Temple and Eloy Lopez. The website quickly became a go-to reference site for EDM DJs, documenting the tracks they created and the sales numbers of those tracks. It was sold to SFX Entertainment in 2013 for $58.6 million; SFX has since declared bankruptcy, but Beatport has survived as the go-to repository of electronic music tracks.

A handful of years later, in 2008, Roulier and sound engineer Mike McCray opened Beta, where the Manufactured Superstars held down a residency for years. (Roulier and McCray sold their stake in Beta in March 2020 to Valentes Corleons). The duo also regularly appeared at a residency in Las Vegas at the XS and Tryst Nightclubs in the Encore luxury hotel.

For a few years, Manufactured Superstars were everywhere, releasing music with some of the biggest names in electronica. But the music was changing, and so was the scene, and the Superstars decided to take a hiatus from performing. This will be their first show in Denver since 2016.
"When COVID came, I missed the music scene," Roulier explains. He started diving into yoga and meditation music, and when Denver-based Side 3 Studios put in a Dolby Atmos studio, "the first thing I thought when touring the studio was making spatial audio in ambient music. We dug in deep on the real aspects of spatial audio, and that was kind of filling a void of being in the music industry for most of my adult life — making music that's very technologically savvy and beautiful to listen to."

Then Roulier and Sabo started talking about reviving the Manufactured Superstars. "Whether it's Beatport, Beta, throwing raves before that — we've always been ahead of the curve, and if I'm not ahead then I'm not really interested," Roulier notes. "We were the first house mash-up DJs in Vegas. Even though Manufactured Superstars was a commercial thing, we're still, from that viewpoint, pushing the envelope forward quite a bit. Toward the end, we were getting kind of bored with DJing because there wasn't a lot left to do that we hadn't done before."

But as the mainstream electronic-music scene started to grow and evolve, the two became more interested in returning to their mash-up roots. "There are some cool new artists with more of an adult sound," Sabo says. "You've got people like Fred Again who are doing these almost poetic albums, where all the tracks are almost classical composure. It's not made for DJs; it's a music piece. But we can take that music and make it fun in a party environment by re-editing songs."

"We're going to play the style we were famous for before — sample-heavy, quick transitions, house DJs with hip-hop mentality," adds Roulier. "We're really good about getting in and out of songs very quickly; we have probably one of the better sample libraries out there, so we're going to use a lot of the samples that people are familiar with, but significantly, all the basslines, drums, beats will be very current. You're going to get the best of two worlds — classic fun party vibe with very high sound quality, perfectly up-to-date beats."

They both agree that Coloween is the perfect venue to resurrect their talents. "This has been one of the best Halloween parties in Denver for the past fifteen years," Sabo says. "We knew it was going to be awesomely fun — who doesn't want to play a 'Thriller' mash-up on Halloween?"

Coloween, 8 p.m. Saturday, October 26, Stockyards Events Center, 5000 National Western Drive. Tickets are $54 to $74.