One minute you’re a finance major, the next you’re DJing at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. While this may sound like a power lecture daydream to many, such is life for 21-year-old Justin Blau. Blau, or 3LAU as he is billed, was attending school at St. Louis’ Washington University when a two-week trip to Sweden changed his life. “The culture there, the dance music culture is phenomenal,” he said when he caught up with The Badger Herald from his St. Louis home on Tuesday.

Although Blau had not paid much attention to dance music before the trip, upon his return he decided to dive into the genre headfirst. This was the summer of 2011, and, according to Blau, “Things just kind of took off from there.” With appearances alongside Avicii at Marquee in Vegas and sets at Electric Zoo and Global Dance Fest already under his belt, it would be hard to disagree with him.

Up to this point, Blau has been a mashup artist, pairing LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” with MSTRKRFT’s “Bounce” and hints of Steve Aoki’s “Turbulence” in one track, Kaskade’s collab with Skrillex “Lick It” with Krewella’s “Strobelights” and Lucky Date’s “Hos and Discos” in another.

“I make bootlegs and mashups and I also make a couple of remixes,” Blau said. 

To clarify the jargon, “A bootleg and a mashup is basically the same thing, it’s just a mix of multiple things,” he said. “A bootleg is kind of a European-accepted term for a mixture of songs that you play live … remixing is basically making your own song with the parts of something else.” 

Terminology aside, he tends to follow his whims.

“When I’m mixing, I kind of use whatever I feel like,” Blau explained. “I love electro, I love progressive house, I love everything so it’s kind of just whatever mood I’m in. But when I’m making music myself I tend to make trancier stuff. My future releases are more on the progressive trance side than the electro kind of hard-hitting bass music.”

While Blau has yet to release an original song, the wheels are in motion to get his first single released by the end of the year. At his shows, he plays what his albums have called “dance floor filth,” but he credits his musical background to his preference for trance in his own production.

“When I sit down to make music, I think in chords and melodies and not in patterns and bass sounds,” he said. Blau plays guitar, strings, drum and piano, but stresses that making dance music requires an entirely different skill set.

“It’s very important to separate songwriting and production,” Blau said. “Songwriting is very creative, it’s very left brained, and producing is very right brained, very scientific, requires a lot of patience, a lot of time.”

For Blau, the patience is finally paying off.

“A lot of people are always like ‘how did that kid get so big without having any of his own music?'” Blau said. “But I never wanted to send a song to someone for it to be produced so I’m learning production myself. For the first time ever I’m confident in how it sounds, but it took me a really long time to get to this point.

“I think people really underestimate the amount of time it takes to make things hit really hard in certain places, make people jump out of their seats when they hear a drop. It’s not just about the music, it’s about how the sounds are processed.”

But for 3LAU’s live sets at least, making people jump out of their seats is de rigueur.

“I started off with Top 40 stuff and then I moved into more solid dance music-based stuff, still with a little bit of a poppy edge with my mixes,” Blau said. “In the beginning, people didn’t really know what dance music was so I needed to have pop vocals in the music to make that familiarity come alive. But, lately, people aren’t caring as much about hearing the pop vocals as they want to hear that huge drop that’s going to make them go crazy in a live setting.

“My live sets are 70 percent what people know and 30 percent of things that no one’s ever heard before that I think is going to make people go crazy.”

To get an idea of what Blau thinks will make people go crazy, his monster mashups and mixes are all available online, and all for free.

“Making people pay for music just seems so silly to me,” Blau said. “As long as people are listening to my music I’m happy as a human being. I would love to release all of my music for free for the rest of my life.”

Although both of 3LAU’s Dance Floor Filth albums and his 3LAU Haus mixes are available for download on his Facebook page, Blau admits there was one instance where a track wasn’t free.

“I ended up selling one song ever, and I ended up donating the proceeds to a charity so that we could build a school in Guatemala,” he said. “In the rest of my career, if I ever have to sell music I’m going to donate all the money I get from it.”

Blau is also donating one dollar from each ticket sold on his current 3LAU Your Mind tour to Pencils of Promise, a charity in Guatemala for which he has already raised $25,000.

Even though Blau is more than happy to give money earned from his stint as 3LAU away, he fully intends to make music his full time career.

“I really hope to play Ultra [Music Festival] and EDC (Electric Daisy Carnival) next year,” Blau said. He also dreams of touring with Kaskade. But regardless of where the next year takes him, Blau won’t be retiring anytime soon.

“I always want to make music,” he said. “I don’t think I’m an established dance music artist yet; I think I have a long way to go, but I think that in five years, no matter what happens, there’s a place for me on the business side of music if this doesn’t work out.”

3LAU will play at the Majestic Theatre in Madison Friday night. Doors open at 9 p.m. and tickets are $15.