MaRLo

Marlo Hoogstraten — known professionally as MaRLo — was born in the Netherlands and raised in New Zealand and Australia, where he has been based for most of his career. He emerged as a producer in the early 2010s, releasing on Armada and A State of Trance, and quickly built a reputation for the hard-edged, drive-forward sound that would come to define modern Australian trance. His 2019 single "Lighter than Air" became one of the era's defining tech-uplifting records — a track whose breakdown-and-drop architecture has been widely imitated and whose Spotify count has crossed eleven million streams. Subsequent releases including "Atomic" with Jano, "Haunted", and a long catalogue of singles on his own Reaching Altitude imprint have kept him in continuous rotation across major trance shows. MaRLo founded Reaching Altitude in 2014, building it into one of the most respected mainstage-trance imprints of the post-2010s era. The label has signed Heatbeat, Mark Sixma, and a steady stream of younger artists, and the Reaching Altitude Sessions radio show has run weekly since launch. He has appeared four times in the DJ Mag Top 100 poll. Live, MaRLo is a fixture at Tomorrowland, Electric Daisy Carnival, A State of Trance, and Transmission, often closing tech-energy stages with sets that prioritise relentless drive over harmonic patience. For listeners who came to trance through the post-2015 mainstage rather than the 2000s ASOT golden era, MaRLo is one of the names whose current sets define what the genre sounds like in real time.