Zach Steinman and Sam Haar make up the New York-based duo Blondes, who for the last few years have traded in lush, live takes on dance music motifs. Certainly “live” is thrown around a lot as an adjective for any music that’s even remotely unpolished, but for Blondes it’s actually a central aspect. Their tracks are honed from a constant flow of jam-outs and live performances, and the results typically feel intuitive and open, full of a kind of elongated euphoria. Over the last year, they’ve worked with the RVNG Intl. label for a series of 12″s that show them moving closer to the dance floor than ever before; and their new self-titled LP combines these sides with new tracks and remix turns from the likes of Andy Stott, Laurel Halo, and John Roberts. We called them to ask about the series, their sonic evolution, and their weirdly perfect stint playing live in Ibiza.

I think your back story is pretty well documented so I don’t have any Oberlin questions or anything like that–

Zach Steinman: Any what? Berlin questions?

Yeah, Berlin or Oberlin.

ZS: Oberlin. Yeah, good. [laughs] That’s good.

Your first 12″ on Rvng, Lover/Hater, those were staples in your live set, correct?

ZS: Yeah.

Sam Haar: Yeah, we were playing them for basically six months before we recorded them, so they were…

ZS: That was a different approach to making those tracks because we already sort of fleshed them out a lot. It’s different than some of the other 12″s because we made those 12″s at a time when we were knowing we were going to release them and hadn’t played them out very much.

Right, that’s what I was wondering about, if those were taken from your sets as well, or were they completely new compositions?

SH: They were mostly pretty new compositions, yeah.

ZS: Yeah, they were — we’re still trying — you know, I mean we play Business / Pleasure pretty thoroughly out now, but we’re still trying to figure out “Water.”

You’re trying to incorporate them.

ZS: We’re trying to incorporate “Water” and “Wine,” too. But we already started playing “Wine” a lot.

SH: We also actually — well, those we were playing out a lot before, but then they took a totally different shape once we recorded them, actually.

ZS: Right. That’s true. And now with “Lover,” especially, we also do things in our live show, that we — it’s pretty different now than it is recorded on the 12″.

SH: Yeah, I’d say just from playing a lot it’s definitely evolved.

ZS: The repetition of playing these tracks over and over again has sort of made us find new ways, and it’s given — [the tracks have] taken new lives themselves.

Constantly changing?

ZS: Yeah.

OK. So when you decided to compose the series of 12″s, how much were you considering the dualistic titles? Because they seem like…almost dictatorial, like, very clear opposites, but the sides only seem pretty subtly different from each other. Were you really considering, “This is going to be the ‘Wine’ side; this is going to be the ‘Water’ side,” or [was it more arbitrary]?

SH: It was much more like, “We’re going to make two tracks at the same time.” So each 12″ was made at the same time, like, concurrently, basically going back and forth a lot. And so that’s why they sound very similar because they each have their own sort of… process and vibe that they’re working on.

ZS: But yeah, we weren’t like, you know, “‘Business’ is going to feel like… corporate, and then pleasure is going to be like, ‘ah!’” Like, you know, “pleasure.” It was more of a fun naming system.

Right. I don’t get that impression from the music.

ZS: Yeah. I think if anything, “Gold” and “Amber” are the ones that are probably the most true to their names.

Did you decide to collect them all on an album from the beginning, or did that develop just from — was that [Rvng Intl. owner] Matt [Werth]‘s idea?

SH: I think the project took form as we embarked on it. We decided we were just going to do one 12″ at first with Lover/Hater and, you know, we and Rvng wanted to do more. And as we were doing it, we were like, “Oh, we should probably — at some point it would be sweet to release this, like, digitally and put it all together.” So it kind of took shape as we were working on it.

I know you talk a lot about how your tracks are very live things, and they really take shape in the live setting. I was wondering if you had any plans to release a live album ever. I know mixes aren’t really — people don’t really buy mixes anymore, but as far as a live performance album, would you jam out for an hour or something and release that?

SH: We’ve definitely considered it.

ZS: We’ve been asked to release live sets. There’ve been a few people who have asked us for that. We’re probably going to release something like that where it’s like in the form of a mix, or I don’t know. But yeah, I think it would make a lot of sense for us to do a live album.

SH: It’s definitely something in the cards, I’m sure, in the future.

ZS: Merok was trying to get us at one point, when we released Touched, to do alternate versions. Alternate, live versions, but we never ended up doing that. Which is another cool idea. Our tracks are taking new shapes and could be different things.

Yeah, I know you’re kind of known for doing very few takes of your tracks. Do you have alternate versions of your tracks, or do you just go with the first one always? Or…

ZS: We usually have four different versions, I’d say. Generally speaking, we choose the best of four versions. And — minor editing is what we strive for. Even though sometimes we do real editing, but –

SH: Yeah. Sometimes, while we’re composing the track — I don’t — I think we rarely go with the first kind of compositional run.

ZS: It’s very similar to a pancake, you know? You never take that first — that first pancake’s always kind of like a dud when you’re making pancakes. You’ve got to wait for the grill to heat up. [laughs]

The perfectly formed pancakes.

SH: Yeah, I mean the thing is we have to play — we have to play each track a bunch in many ways before we really kind of understand what it’s doing, like, what it is, you know? I feel like sometimes we’ll be playing it and it won’t click for a week or two or who knows, and then it clicks and you know where you want to take it, what you want to do with it, and then you start recording. So it’s definitely not, like — the elements are not improvised in that way, you know? And then on the other hand, sometimes you do a take and you’re, like, “Man, how the hell did we get there?” And it ends up being the best one.

ZS: Right.

So regarding the [Blondes] remix album, I was curious what remix captured your style the best, or what’s your favorite of them?

SH: I feel like they were all such good — they were such good interpretations –

ZS: Of our style, I would say.

SH: I also really like that everybody made it their own in many ways. But I thought — it’s kind of funny, the one that sounds to me like it was made in the same way that we make music was the Traxx one, which is a pretty weird one, you know? But to me, it sounds like he’s just sitting there and playing it in the same way I feel we do. So actually, stylistically, I don’t necessarily feel that much of a connection with it, and he totally made it his own, but, just in terms of process…

I get that same kind of vibe from Traxx, yeah.

SH: Yeah, but everyone took it and made it their own thing, and I really have been happy with that.

ZS: Yeah, I think the remix album turned out really well.

So Matt told me you’re preparing for an installation at MoMA? Is that going to entail anything, special or different from your ordinary live set?

SH: Yeah, well, we’re doing a live set — that’s sort of the main performance — but before that set, as an opening, is going to be — we’re doing an eight-channel site-specific sound installation there. Or semi-site-specific. We’re going to have eight speakers all around the space playing some piece that we’re going to make. And there’s going to be some video installation up too, on the screens there.

ZS: Yeah, we’re going to make a video that’s basically in conjunction with a video we’re making for “Amber,” that will be incorporated into the video. And yeah, it’ll be at MoMA. And then Juan Maclean is doing this deep techno set that we — that he did when we were on tour with him in Toronto that was, like, really amazing. We asked him if he could do a set like that again. So we’re psyched on that.

So yours is a completely new composition?

SH: The installation, yeah. The performance is going to be one of our normal live shows, basically. But the installation is going to be all new composed work. Specialized around the space.

I was wondering if you had any intention to add new gear to your setup. Because I know live and studio are exactly the same, but yeah — or have you added much new equipment since you started playing?

SH: No, we’re trying. I think it’s a process; we already have been slowly adding pieces in since we started. And it’s going to continue to evolve. I think we’re going to get some money [laughs] and sort of feel like wanting to push it in certain ways.

ZS: I think our next album is going to be sort of — we’re going to get some new gear, which will kind of form how we play on that album. So I think we are going to evolve our gear setup.

SH: Yeah, so much of how we play and compose is sort of limited and — on purpose, you know, by the gear or sort of instrument. And so we work with those limitations, and as we alter that, you can sort of help to change your process.

So you’re working on an album right now?

ZS: Not yet. We’re really just working on the MoMA show right now, and –

SH: Then working a lot on promoting this album too. [laughs]

ZS: Right, yeah. And we’re about to go on tour in February to Europe, which we’re –

SH: Prepping for that. When we get back in March, we’re probably going to start diving into some new stuff.

Speaking of Europe, I wanted to ask you about playing Ibiza in the summertime. I remember when we did that email interview a while ago you talked about people, sometimes lying down at your shows. I mean, you make spacey music. I was wondering if you had to change or if you played differently for that kind of scene. I haven’t been there, but I can imagine — I know it’s like super-clubs.

SH: Yeah. No, definitely that’s a good question. We’ve been playing more — I mean even since that initial email interview we had too — we’ve been playing more and more clubs and less sort of, you know, rock venues and more dance-oriented spaces. So we’ve definitely gotten a little more “clubby.” A little more dance-y and dance floor friendly, and I think that’s reflected in the stuff that’s on this record. You play places like that, and you just — it’s a lot more fun to do that than just working more on the builds and getting people going. But on the flipside of that too, when we do play a show that’s much more chill, it’s fun to not try to do that and to get really spacey and let people sort of drift with it, you know?

ZS: Yeah. But in Ibiza, people were there to party, you know? They were all lubricated. I don’t know, it was –

SH: And our job was much more functional, in a way. A lot of people were like, “Who are these guys?” “I don’t know. We’re in Ibiza; we’re going to go clubbing. We don’t know who’s playing.” [laughs] It’s much more functional, and it’s also — it’s fun. I like those kind of parties, too.

ZS: They had the best lasers in the club we played. I just remember looking up and just being like, “Whoa, Jesus.” They had to be, like, $100,000. It was amazing.

I imagine they have a pretty high budget for lasers.

ZS: I’m sure. They had to.

SH: We talked to some people who tried to get a laser that good to go on tour and stuff, and it’s like, you can’t. [laughs] Unless you’re U2, you know? If you’re U2, maybe. What’s also fun about playing those environments is that people, they want to dance, you know? You don’t have to convince them; you just have to give them something that they can dance do and that they enjoy dancing to, you know?

Do you find that’s a thing? Like people have to be convinced to dance?

ZS: I mean, at more rock-oriented venues.

SH: They’re there to see you, and they might dance, but it takes a little more coaxing, sure.

ZS: Yeah, it does take a little more coaxing. Dancing isn’t exactly all our agenda either. It’s kind of –

SH: True.

ZS: We react to the crowd a lot. And I think that if it’s not that vibe, then we play in a different, more — you know, go spacier, usually.

SH: It’s not like we’re up there with a mic being like, “Come on, motherfuckers, y’all gotta dance!” [laughs]

ZS: Yeah, we kind of just –

Adapt.

ZS: Adapt. Adapting, yeah.

SH: It makes it more fun for everyone involved, I think.

Peter Kersten first tried his hand at producing in 2000, releasing his first ever effort on Dial, the label he had just set up with friends Carsten Jost and Paul Kominek (Turner). His melancholic, measured brand of house and techno has been consistent in its quality for more than ten years, thirty singles, five full length albums and around fifty remixes. In the realm of electronic music, maintaining such a consistency of quality is rare; having your first releases sound remarkably undated over this length of time is almost unheard of, yet this rings true for Kersten’s music. With Lawrence as his most well-known moniker — dedicated to his deeper musical expressions — he uses the handle Sten for his dance floor oriented material. Over the years, Dial has seen a remarkable run of releases from kindred artists like Efdemin, John Roberts, Pigon, Pantha Du Prince, Roman Flügel and many more. Its off-shoot label, Laid, has since 2009 done similarly well on a deep house tip, with memorable releases by Rick Wade, Kassem Mosse, Smallpeople and RNDM. In 2006, Kersten, along with a few close friends set up the record store and physical label Smallville Records. The friendly vibes and family feel of the store also extends to the regular parties they throw and of course the music that the label releases. Little White Earbuds got in touch with Kersten to talk about the longevity of Dial, which producers are exciting him right now and the forthcoming projects for his various enterprises.

You’ve been releasing music for over 10 years now. One thing that has always struck me about your productions is that right from the start you’ve had a very polished sound. How do you feel your own productions have changed or evolved over the years?

Writing music for me is a very spontaneous issue. For over a decade I have been digging a lot of styles — house music, techno, ambient, hip-hop — from my very first album to my latest CD, Until Then, Goodbye on Mule Electronic. I don’t see any straight line of changes, but I am still hungry for trying out any sound that fits. The new release on Koze’s Pampa imprint was quite an adventure, as well as my latest project, an experimental jazz band with Christian Naujoks and Richard von der Schulenburg.

Likewise there is a strong aesthetic running through the artwork that accompanies your albums and single releases, which has remained consistent in theme and style. Do you work closely with the people who are responsible for the artwork?

Yes, there is a close relationship to almost all artists who are responsible for the artworks of our labels. One of my very best friends, Stefan Marx, has done all the covers for Smallville and Mule Electronic. He even released his own “record,” a gatefold cover including three gorgeous posters. Our graphic designers Christian Doering for Laid and mainly Till Sperrle for Dial Records are doing an extraordinary, wonderful job, as well as all the artists contributing their amazing pieces. After running Dial Records for more than 10 years, we just started running an art gallery in Berlin called Mathew.

Dial has also remained a by-word for quality in the world of deep techno. What has been your approach to the running of the label in terms of keeping it moving forward yet retaining its consistent high quality?

What holds the Dial family together is the never-ending openness and curiosity for any kind of music. The musicians appearing on our little eccentric label are into so many music styles, whether it is contemporary classic, Norwegian black metal, or sine wave drones. Listening to African mbira music or some old Folkways records at Phillip Sollmann’s place, for example, is part of our influences for making dance music too.

With vinyl becoming more and more rare and less of a tradable commodity, can you tell us the reasons behind setting up the Smallville store?

Exactly when selling vinyl turned out being only a business struggle, including dumping prices on the Internet and discussions about downloads, Julius Steinhoff, Stella Plazonja, Just von Ahlefeld, and myself hardly missed the main points of running a record store: having nice selected music, a great interior setup, lovely people meeting in a cozy atmosphere. Finances are not our thing, but still its working quite well with doing the Smallville parties and printing Stefan Marx t-shirts, et cetera.

And how about the label? What is the mission of the label and how does it differ from Dial and Laid?

Smallville is a straight, deep, club label with focus on friends being part of it. Laid is a house music label too, including contributions by some heroes we love.

Have you had any formal musical training or are you self taught?

I am 98% self taught, I would say. Or let’s say I don’t know much theoretically about production — it still is a very intuitive process.

How long were you experimenting with production before you started making things you were happy enough with to release?

My first try ever was also my first released track, “Shoes,” appearing on Dial-00.

Since you started releasing have there been any major changes to your studio setup that have changed the way you make music?

Oh yes, I started only playing some samples on an E-mu E64 and Kurzweil [K]2000 using Cubase. For quite a while I am using mostly Logic Audio but the really important part of my studio is some selection of vintage acoustic instruments, including a steel drum and an old Deagan vibraphone.

In terms of your album releases, how much planning goes into your albums? Are they thought out with material written around certain themes or ideas, or are they more just a collection of tracks?

There is never any kind of master plan. When I finish a single track or an album I never see an approach regarding the beginning or a straight process. But surely the feeling behind it creates a whole piece of art, not just a collection of tracks. The same goes with my first mix CD, Timeless, on Cocoon — it was quite a long process to collect the tracks and to let them grow together.

Is there non-electronic or non-dance related music that you listen to that influences your own productions?

All the time I am listening to non-electronic or non-dance related music all the time. Schubert, Scelsi, Linda Perhacs, Jeremy Jay, Ariel Pink, Robert Wyatt — a never-ending list of music — that’s my life!

Apart from the remix of the Lawrence track “Never As Always,” it’s been a few years since we’ve heard anything from your Sten alias. Do you have any Sten material you’re working on at the moment, or is your focus on Lawrence?

The focus is on Lawrence at the moment — quite influenced by Sten though.

Your latest release has come out on Pampa. Did you make the tracks specifically for the label, or did you already have them completed? Are you interested in working with the label again in the future?

“Kurama” was intended to be the very first track of my next album. But then at one of the very sweetest festivals ever — the Smallville Open Air in August 2011 — I played back to back with DJ Koze, and he fell in love with that number. He constantly tried to convince me to have it as a Pampa single. If there isn’t any new album by Lawrence this year, it’s because of Koze. But I love him; I would even give him my last pants.

Speaking of labels, what have been some of your favorite labels in the past while apart from your own ones?

Workshop has been a top label for between-the-chairs dance music, I love all the releases here. The Kann guys from Leipzig are my favorites when it comes to cozy house music. Live At Robert Johnson, Underground Quality, Pampa, Aesthetic Audio, It’s, Sistrum — a lot of great stuff is recently coming out. I cannot believe that I am digging electronic dance music for over 20 years now and it never gets boring.

And are there any newer artists you’ve discovered lately who you’re really enjoying?

Richard von der Schulenburg, aka RVDS, is not just my favorite DJ ever — he is an excellent producer playing the keys of deepness all night and day. The Juniper boys from Manchester are the shooting stars of today. Kyle Hall is one of the most exciting newsters — wicked stuff. And Smallpeople, Moomin, Christopher Rau — the Smallville’s magic releases are getting me all the time. And watch out Kassian Troyer!

What can we expect from you over the next year across the board, from Lawrence to Sten and with Dial, Laid, and Smallville?

A Lawrence remix for my friend Superpitcher should be coming out soon. As I am still not deep enough into production for my next album, I’ll be finishing a new Dial 12″ soon. The Smallpeople will be releasing their first vinyl album this year, and I just can’t wait for it — it’s gonna be wonderful! On Dial we will leave the dance floor for some new albums by Christian Naujoks, Phantom Ghost, and a new project by Stephan Abry and Pantha Du Prince called Ursprung. The year will be started by 12″s from Kassian Troyer on Dial and a various artists single on Laid featuring Palisade (aka Redshape), Moomin, and RNDM. What a happy new year!

This year saw the collaboration of two luminaries in the electronic and dance music world. Mark Pritchard has a long history in a wealth of projects, from Global Communication and Troubleman to his recent Harmonic 313 guise for Warp Records. Steve Spacek formed the trio Spacek with Ed Spacek and Morgan Spacek (now Morgan Zarate on Hyperdub) before moving on to solo releases under his own name such as Spaceshift, which featured J Dilla on one song. After both relocated to Australia and found themselves living near each other, they embarked on an exploration of shared themes and beats. The result was Africa Hitech and 2011′s 93 Million Miles, featuring the breakout “Out In The Streets” single. While touring the U.S. they found time to chat with LWE about their history, influences, working together, and what the future holds.

When was the first time that you guys met each other?

Mark Pritchard: I think the first time we met we were both working for a label called Island Blue, which was a subsidiary of Island Records. A mutual friend called Ross Allen was running that label, and I met another band called Custom Blue, who was a friend of Steve [Spacek] and Morgan [Spacek]. So I think there was some kind of Island Records night, or somebody was doing a launch from that kind of crew, and then we all went to it and met them. And then I think I’d heard Eve off of Ross way before it came out, and I was really blown away by that. Then I think just really coming closer to Alex Pilkington (from Custom Blue), there was this point where when I started doing Troubleman projects I was thinking about getting vocalists to feature, and then I was thinking, “Oh, I really like Steve’s voice; I’d like to do something with him.” And I think then maybe by right about 2002-3ish, Steve came down to the studio and hung out for a week, and we started to cut the tracks then, and then one of those made the Troubleman album, and one later got released on Sonar Kollektiv, which is that “Turn It On” track. So that was kind of the first — yeah, we kind of met in early 2000s, I suppose.

With such long histories in dance music of kind all types, what keeps you guys evolving, do you think?

Steve Spacek: Man, just the excitement of it all, really. It’s just, because I always thought, no matter how much stuff you do and how much stuff you touch on, it’s not even the tip of the iceberg, you know what I mean? Sometimes I hear people talk about music and they say things like, “Man, everything that’s been done has been done already,” and I’m like, “Really?” I mean if you thought like that, then you might as well give up already, you know what I mean? I thought, with all the music that has ever gone before, it’s not even — we’re not even anywhere near completing anything. There’s just so many places to go with music. Within those twelve notes, there’s just infinite possibilities.

Yeah.

SS: And so it’s just the whole excitement of that. Because, you know, there’s this feeling that you get sometimes when you do a really great track, when you’re really satisfied with a track, and I love that feeling. And I always look forward to that feeling again, do you know what I mean? Like, where I’ve done something I’m just really buzzing off of and I know that I’m capable of doing that. I know that when I’m working with some people like Mark or whatever, I know that as a collective we’re capable of doing that. And it’s that feeling, that really good — that high, you know, within yourself, when you put something together and it’s sweet and right, and it’s nice and resolved, and the bass line and all the frequencies are hitting you in the right space, it’s just a right emotion being created. That feeling is almost second to none, you know what I mean? And so I know that infinitely that feeling is out there all the time. And then hopefully, you can encapsulate that within a track so when other people listen to it, they get the same vibe too. Or the essence of it, anyway, you know?

Does the history of all of that you’ve done before influence what you’re working on currently? Do you think about that, or are you always trying to move on?

SS: Well, I mean we’re always trying to move on only because we know that naturally, all the things that are meant to be in something, they will just fall in there anyway. When you’re doing stuff you try and cover all bases, but you can’t cover everything, you know what I mean? But if you’re true to yourself and you let it flow out, then when you look back on it, or when you listen to it or whatever, everything that needs to be in there will be in there. And sometimes it’s not and if that’s the case, then that’s fair enough. You kind of win some and lose some, but ideally, you look forward. You always look forward because some of the greatest music from the past… for instance, in the 60s and the 70s, you get so many people so hung up on that stuff. I meet people that are kind of into old music or whatever and they’re not interested in anything that’s new, and I think that’s really sad because what they felt back in the day, in the 70s and the 60s, whenever guys were making that music, one of the big reasons that it sounds the way it does and it’s so compelling is because they were doing, like, essentially what I’m doing now, you know, just without iOS. Man, they were messing with two-inch tape and those old disks, that stuff was state of the art; it was the latest technology.

But these guys had whatever they had within — inside them. And then they were interacting with these pieces of the latest equipment, latest gear, and a lot of it was kind of military gear that had been moved over to kind of the creative and the music side, you know, for film and whatever, do you know what I mean? But they were getting off on it. It’s like, “Wow,” you know, “This mad reel-to-reel machine,” you know, “I can put these two kind of spools up on this machine, and all of a sudden I can sing something into a mic, and when it comes out on this machine it sounds so beautiful. This is fantastic; did it just fall out of space?” Those guys would be flipping out on the latest technology, and a lot of the people that are kind of so hung up on the retro kind of thing, and nothing else, they kind of fail to miss that. So, for us, we’re kind of — we’re sort of championing that — we’re like, this is us now, here, right now in two-thousand and whatever, and we’ve got all these silly devices, I’ve got my phone, I’ve got, like — what do you call it? — I’ve got a Minimoog keyboard from nineteen sixty-whatever, I’ve got the MPC from maybe 10, 15 years ago, I’ve got this iOS app that hasn’t even come out yet — whatever. I’ve got all these bits of equipment, and I’m flipping out on the fact that this is what’s available to me right now, at this point, and I can make this music, do you know what I mean? I can convey this emotion. And so that’s where we’re at. It’s always about looking forward, but with what we’ve got around us.

When did you start talking about working together on Africa Hitech?

MP: Well, we coincidentally moved — we both ended up in Sydney, Australia, and I basically spoke to Alex, because I hadn’t seen Steve for a little while; I think he was in L.A. And then I just told Alex, you know, “I’m moving to Australia,” and then I was over there, and then he just said, “I think Steve might be coming to Australia.” And then when I moved, I went back home to pack up my life to ship to Australia, and I think Steve landed — you know, he’d been there a few times already, but then he actually landed there just as I left to go back and get my stuff to come back. So yeah, we both ended up, like, 10 minutes from each other on the other side of the world. Which is awfully nice because it’s a big move for both of us, and going to a place, a new place, with at least somebody you’ve worked with before, and also you have a lot in common with musically, which was great; and as soon as we got there we were just kind of hanging out, and we started music straight away. So seven years ago we started making music, and then I supposed the more we were doing it, the more we started — the album just developed from there. At the Toronto Red Bull Music Academy we did the track called “Blen.” And we did a track called “Too Late,” and we’d been working on stuff before that. And then it got to the point where we were like, “OK, we’ve got this kind of thing that’s happening, and some different vibes of tracks are kind of happening,” and then over the next few years after that we just kept working on stuff.

I played “Blen” to Steve Beckett, who runs Warp, when I was finishing the Harmonic 313 album, and he was just like, “What’s this? You’ve got to put that on the album.” And I was just like, “No, this is just another thing — another project I’m doing with Steve. You know, we’ve been working on music for a while.” And he thought, “Well, if you’ve got more music like this, then I want to do it,” straight away. After the the Harmonic 313 album we just kept on working on stuff, basically, and then it got to the point where we were like, “OK, we need to kind of lock in and get this album, you know, work on this album and finish it.” So a lot of the stuff is quite old. I mean tracks like “Glangslap” were probably three years old, and “Our Luv” is at least two or three years old.

This is stuff we’d been working on, which is quite good because when we actually went to lock into finishing the album we probably had four or five tracks pretty much done. And then we had a hundred plus tracks that we’d started through that period, and we just went through choosing which ones — we’re both constantly writing all the time so that was the hardest part, really — working out what was going to go on it. I mean it wasn’t really hard because luckily there was a lot of stuff that we were into, but it was just like, “Which ones shall we finish?” It’s in some ways a gamble. Sometimes you pick ones you think are going to be good, and you work on it for a couple of weeks, and it kind of turns out OK. And then sometimes other ones that you think are kind of not a quite nice idea, you work on them, develop them, and all of a sudden you realize, you know, it’s much stronger than what you ever thought. An average track would take a couple weeks, I’d say. And that would happen over maybe three years. You know, so I might spend a day on it, and six months later a might do a couple of days. You know, and then other tracks like “Out In The Streets” were done in pretty much one night. And then I think a week later, I spent another day on it, and that was it.

Did you always know that you wanted to explore dance music through a shared history of African rhythms on the album? Or did that come about organically through working on the album?

MP: Yeah, it just came about organically because I think it’s something that we both look for in music and it naturally kind of goes that way. But the more we started talking about, really, then the name Africa Hitech came up, and then the more we thought about it and talked about it, we both realized that we thought the same thing: it’s like the music we like has that kind of connection to African music. And growing up in the UK has a similar kind of connection, but at the same time you have far different aspects like Jamaican music coming in and Jamaican people coming to the UK. You start just thinking about these things, the reasons why — because a lot of people look at the UK, and they split things up in genres — “Now dubstep’s happening out of England” — but really, when you look back and kind of think about why this has happened, and we always felt that it was the same thing, anyway. It was drum and bass and when dubstep, especially the second time around, right about 2004 when it kind of had that second resurgence with Skream, Benga, Digital Mystikz coming through. it was exciting because it had the same possibility and excitement of what drum and bass did. And all these things have these kind of feelings; it’s just — it’s a tempo, it’s an idea, and you can go — you’ve got a bass sensibility and a drum sensibility, and then you can just go anywhere with it. I mean broken beat’s the same, jungle is the same, garage, grime, up to UK funky, and then going even to footwork from America. It’s just another idea. It’s a rhythm, it’s a tempo, and then it’s open to anything, which is what makes it really exciting.

When I reviewed the album for Little White Earbuds, I made a note that it almost seemed like you were traveling backwards in time over the course of the album, that it was very current in the beginning, and then as it went on you started to hear kind of older song structures. Was that a plan, or did that kind of just come about when you started sequencing all the songs?

MP: Yeah, I think it came about when we were sequencing. We basically kind of wanted to have an album that had some more aggressive club kind of tracks, but also some musical things because obviously an album — you kind of hope that it will be something that people could listen to, and it has different ups and downs and different vibes. Because if you just have loads of 140 [BPM] grime hard techno kind of sounding tunes and some footwork, it’s like you need to give the listener some kind of different vibes to go into. So then otherwise if you have five hard grime tunes in a row, they can really kind of lose their impact. And we didn’t want it to be the kind of album that — we worked really hard trying to find a way of making it so it wasn’t starting off mellow and then going really hype and then ending, or starting off really hype and then just going to all the mellow tunes at the end. But at the same time, it’s kind of like, it’s quite nice to lead people on some more musical kind of, more emotional kind of sounding tracks. So it just felt natural to kind of go that way, but we really tried to kind of get some in early — have a few kind of clubbier ones and then have a few deeper ones and more musical ones and try to switch it up. But instantly there were tracks like “Cyclic Sun” that just felt like a nice ending track. But we had a few tracks that we felt were quite — would be nice, and it was sometimes quite difficult, at that point, to try and find a way. But we always try and get help, when I’m sequencing albums, from other people who I kind of trust their opinions because you get so close to the music and sometimes you would never think about putting one track after another. You’d be like, “Oh, that won’t work.”

One of my favorite tracks is “Cyclic Sun,” and I think it’s because it has a very Mulatu Astatke kind of vibe. Were you looking to evoke African luminaries like him through it?

MP: Yeah, I mean I’m a big fan of his stuff, but I think that one, for me, is kind of like — was definitely — I’m a big fan of Moondog. It has that kind of cyclic sound like a lot of Moondog’s music has, those kind of sounds, and I was really into that kind of vibe and trying to work on that. But also, yeah, it has some — I think you can hear a definite influence from other African kind of music. I think that one, for me, was just kind of trying to work on having those kind of like — using the flutes and having those cyclic sounds happen to fall over each other, and you can have different chords kind of coming down and falling, creating different harmonies — trying to do something like that, but with an African kind of rhythm to it.

It was interesting that it comes towards the end of the album, after you’ve gone through all of these very kind of modern footwork and high tech, so to speak, tracks.

SS: I mean, that’s just the way the album was sequenced. When you’re so close to the music and you’re recording it, you know, when you get to putting it — sequencing it together, sometimes that can be quite hard. As you’re putting the album together, if kind of all makes sense, it just falls into place, and by the end you’re like, “Yeah, I know that’s going to go there.” But you know, we were so close to the music it was quite hard so we sort of gave out a few set lists to friends, you know, like Mark’s girlfriend Lorna [Clarkson], she DJs quite a lot, you know? Just the people who we know around us that we respect in music. And they did they’re little iPod or iTunes sequences, you know? That’s sometimes what I do: I just do an iTunes shuffle, and I find sometimes the shuffle just comes with some wicked kind of arrangements. Some tracks finish, and the other track kind of blends in — I don’t know how it sort of works out — but you can come up with some really nice arrangements there.

Another thing I realize is, you’re really close to the tracks sometimes, and if you can just get them and just throw them up in the air and just let them land, in that sequence there it might be like, “OK, that’s the way they landed; I’ll listen to that. Alright, sounds a bit alien.” But as time goes by, it just makes complete and utter sense. It’s just a funny thing with the brain. The brain kind of just makes sense of everything after a while. You look at something, and it just looks a bit kind of random, and then all of a sudden you start to see patterns. And you can’t imagine it any other way. It’s like, “Uh oh, even though I kind of put this together randomly, now that it exists, it makes complete and utter sense, and I can’t imagine how it would’ve been any other way.” The brain’s got a funny way of kind of doing that to you. So once you’ve got the music you can’t even be too precious about it, do you know what I mean? There’s sort of a kind of element of randomness in the sequencing of the album and a little bit of the, “OK well, maybe that should go after that track’s a definite.” But yeah, that’s just the way it ended up, essentially.

And then, by contrast, tracks like the title one seem very far away from what a student of African music would recognize. How did you translate that central idea into more modern ideas like the more footwork-influenced stuff?

MP: Yeah, I mean that track still, I suppose, it’s African definitely in the rhythm and the bass. It’s still there, just the palette of sounds is different. That track, to me, just sounds kind of like Detroit techno, in a way. But it’s not, you know, the pattern is more an African kind of rhythm or something more like a grime person would do, in a way — it’s that kind of syncopated kind of rhythm. But at the same time the palette is kind of — it reminds me of Detroit and Chicago house in the early 90s, in a way. It’s got that kind of vibe to it, but with a different kind of rhythm. That’s really one of my favorite ones on there.

What was the process for working together? Were you passing files back and forth, or did you spend a lot of time in the studio together?

SS: Aw man, we were in the studio a lot of the times because Mark’s studio is just down the road from both of us. We both live in Baradine in Australia, and his studio is based in an area called Surrey Hills, which is literally, five, 10 minutes tops in a car. Down the road. And it’s quite a nice little area, so we spent time in there, essentially. We’d sort of just be in there, and I’d have an idea or Mark would have an idea, and we’d put it out there, we’d be playing each other’s stuff, because we were always on the same page, and just be flipping out on each other’s beats or whatever. And maybe Mark would have a groove or whatever, and I’d hear a bass line, and I’d be like, “Yeah, I can hear a bass line.” I would jump up and stick the bass line down on it, and then Mark would get back on it again or vice-versa, you know? I would have a groove and Mark would hear a synth line or a bass line or whatever. It’s kind of quite easy, really. And the times when we were apart, then we were exchanging files, but that was rare, really. Because essentially in the last sort of few years, the projects that we’ve been working on have been mainly together, so we’re kind of always sort of around. But yeah, we’d essentially just be in the studio sort of trying things out and just messing around with stuff. We’ll go home and we’ll have our laptops or MPCs or whatever and just have grooves, and then come back and meet up. Or sometimes we’d go into the studio and just be like, “You know what? Let’s just start something fresh,” just sort of like wiping the slate clean and just come into something fresh. It’s fun. It’s the way it should be, really? Just enjoying it. Doing it because we can and it’s there, and then trying to just create something that’s amazing.

I found it real interesting that for the singles from the album you’ve chosen to rework songs and do versions, almost like a sound system way of working. Is the idea of sound systems and versions really important to what Africa Hitech is about?

SS: That’s part of what we do because part of what we champion is that whole sound system thing, anyway, because we grew up in that — more so myself, just being in London and being in Jamaican UK and being in that environment. But it’s just naturally a part of what we do, the whole version thing, and the whole dub plate thing. And you know even with doing stuff on the iPhone, I’ve been — I mean I haven’t really come with it yet so I’ve kind of got to hold it down, but I’m coming with a whole iPlate thing, do you know what I mean? Instead of dubplates. We like that feeling of back in the day when the guys that were in the sound systems were making tracks. Like they would make a track on a Friday afternoon, and by the night that track was being played in the club. It’s fresh and hot off the press. That’s quite a nice feeling, that sort of thing. Maybe it’s not as immediate as it used to be back then, but in a lot of respects we do champion that as well because sometimes in a set we’ll play some grooves that I might have literally just laid down on the iPhone whilst I was on the plane before a gig. And if the vibe is wicked enough, we’ll literally stick it in Logic, you can just maybe boost it up a bit, and play it that night. But yeah, it’s just one aspect of what we’re about. And it’s definitely part of it. It kind of fits into what we do, but in the context of now.

Steve, since you mentioned the iPhone a couple times, where do you see this kind of new instrument fitting in to the workflow of kind of music making these days?

SS: I think the main thing in that is that you’re talking about economics and stuff like that now. Because not everybody can afford to have a studio space, but also as well more people are traveling. More people are moving around so it’s really nomadic at the moment as well. I live on the completely other side of the world to where I was before. So for me it’s like that — that just makes it — it just means I’m on the road, but I’ve got all the tools I need to put together this idea that’s floating around in my head. So I’ve got this groove that’s just bugging me. It’s like, “I’ve got to lay this down,” I just pull my phone out, and it’s a done deal. In some cases, if I’m lucky, I can kind of translate that groove from my head totally the way I hear it down onto this piece of equipment. And then it might just be a simple case of going into the studio and just boosting it or mastering it or whatever. Giving it an overall mix, or whatever. Or, in some cases, then it’s a case of where I’ve got the basic kind of structure or the skeleton, then I just go in and elaborate. But yeah, the possibilities are endless. It’s one of those things that literally maybe tomorrow or in a month’s time, some other kind of angle that we don’t even know about’s just going to pop out of it. And all of sudden people could be using it in a way that we never imagined.

I don’t know whether people were thinking, “We’re going to make these apps so that people can make professional music,” Or whether it’s like people can just play around with sounds and have a little kind of like mess around whilst they’re out and about or whatever. When we first started making music on the phone, for instance, loads of people were saying, “Oh, really? Wow, you know, I’ve kind of heard about that stuff, but can you really get anything decent out of it?” And I’m like, “Are you for real?” If you make music, you can get anything decent out of just banging on the wall. So if you’ve got a piece of equipment that’s got tones in it and drums in it, if you can’t make a complete track from that. I mean, sometimes people kind of miss the whole point. At the end of it there’s instruments around us right down to your voice or, you know, just tapping on something — so if you’ve got something like that that can emulate a Moog or a 808 drum machine or you can put samples in it, then it doesn’t matter how small it is or gimmicky, it might come across. It’s like a valid instrument within itself, do you know what I mean? Because if you click your fingers, that’s a valid instrument. No one can take that away from you. It’s all context, and it’s all the way you see it. [If] it makes sense to you, then hopefully it makes sense to everybody else. And that’s all that matters. But yeah, in that whole iOS thing, man, that’s just like some whole untapped, infinite universe. And it’s just starting. It’s just crazy. Because some of that stuff is even more powerful. I mean, for instance, the Fairlight thing. You know, they’re saying that that little app in the phone is way more powerful than the other one that cost, like, a quarter million two decades ago, do you know what I mean?

Yeah. Certainly the processing power is a lot different.

SS: Exactly, you know? It’s just kind of way more up on it. So go figure. You can kind of go wherever you want to with it. It’s all about what’s inside your mind. And where you want to take it, what you want to do with it.

Once you guys start moving on to making more music, do you think you’re going to be exploring the same concepts of looking back at African rhythms, but in different ways?

SS: Yeah, I mean always. I mean it’s exciting becausewe don’t even know where we’re going to end up with it. The album, the way we presented it is — when people hear it as far as they’re concerned, that’s a snapshot of us at this particular time. But when we were actually sequencing the album together we had this selection of over a hundred tracks. That’s just ones that we’ve recorded down. There’s bits still lying around in laptops, in Logic sequencers. I’ve got a ton of stuff. There’s just loads to play. It’s just really exciting right now, man, because even when we put the album together, there were all these tracks we had to choose from, but then there’s a load of stuff that people ain’t going to believe when they hear it because it’s really quite African sounding as well. They’re quite raw, the drums and stuff like that. But maybe still slightly tech-y, just maybe not as tech-y as the stuff that people have heard, maybe a lot more traditional. But not trying to be traditional; it’s just that’s the way it came out. We were feeling these certain sounds, we put them together, and somehow it sounds a lot more organic and a lot more kind of old school. But then with that stuff we kind of lace it slightly with some of the modern stuff. Not too much, just so there’s a little kind of edgy kind of juxtaposition. It’s nice to have that push and pull of, “Right, it’s kind of over there, but then it’s kind of over here, but then it’s kind of in the middle.” It’s kind of like I’m not too sure if it is or isn’t. Other people hear it, it’s distinctly right over there, do you know what I mean? And it’s just like — kind of when people listen to it, they can kind of get their own vibe from it. Do you know what I mean?

In “Everything Popular Is Wrong,” Stefan Goldmann claimed that the more artists deviate from the known and established, the better their chances are for success. But why should this be so? Now he offers a detailed examination of the psychosocial framework that underlies what we listen to, looking into the factors that decide what is culturally relevant and what is not — with surprising results: exploring the unknown is not only more fun, but also more rewarding. You can read Part 1 here.

Life cycle: crystallizing fields and the avant-garde

For an obscure speech, held in 1961 in the German city of Lübeck, anthropologist Arnold Gehlen designed one of the most accurate descriptions of how culture works in the big picture. If there ever was a valid explanation of how cultural styles emerge, grow and die, that’s the one. Let’s have a look:

He called the concept “crystallization”^[1]: any new, emerging field of culture grows to the point where its boundaries, basic rules and antitheses are found. Once these are accepted, the field “crystallizes,” which means it doesn’t grow further beyond but develops ever smaller subdivisions and variations within ever smaller categories. Novelty and some surprises still occur regularly, but the field’s boundaries are not crossed and the basic rules don’t get violated anymore. Basically any metacategory of 20th century music of the western world seems to have reached the stage of crystallization, be it jazz, rock, contemporary classical or techno. Since all big subcategories within these have been discovered and occupied a long time ago, we now have shallow novelty of the kind of disco edits or “slowhouse.” When there is no clear path ahead, moving back and searching for the overlooked crumbs is just as good an option (in the earlier stages no one bothers looking back). Becoming aware of crystallization effects is the reason why we feel there was greater music being created in the past. When a new cultural field opens up, exciting new categories emerge and those discovering and promoting them have a far greater time at it than later explorers of the field.

Along these lines we can also define a widespread term: Those pathfinders traveling virgin roads are described as the “avant-garde.” In the language of the military, avant-garde used to refer to those troops of the cavalry who went into the battle first. In the arts, avant-garde means nothing but identifying a new category and occupying the lead position in it. Then it is all about waiting for the flood to set in. It is the only definition I can think of that makes sense in conjunction with the military meaning of the term. It is not about making weird sounds and shocking the public as often assumed. Once something has been established, it doesn’t make much sense to label mimicking or preserving efforts avant-garde anymore. The association of avant-garde with earpain is grounded in a different observation: every truly new aesthetic seems alien and unpleasant at first. Only later we learn to process it and enjoy its characteristic features.^[2] That usually happens when more artists enter the scene. When no one follows the avant-gardist, things stay alien.

Extended cycles: museum categories

Categories emerge, grow and eventually fade away. So do the careers of their inhabitants. When no one is interested in one category, leadership doesn’t mean much. Even most successful styles and fashions in music disappear sooner or later. Those categories that survive along their representatives often exist for the lifespan of the fans that spent the time to learn the category’s cultural codes. You know those concerts where everyone is 60+. Some categories are so strong that they live on for centuries, if not almost infinitely. Probably ever since someone beat a stick on a stone for the first time there has been some equivalent to the 4/4 beat we call techno today.

Every generation rediscovers the category and feeds it with its own stars. This is most obvious with classical music where every few decades there is the new superstar soprano, conductor or violin virtuoso. It is also a “museum category” preserving the live performances of works written sometimes centuries ago (a recording is still a poor substitute for an acoustic live performance). So does every new generation form its own rock superstar and a lot of electronic music seems to enter a similar road. In a crystallized environment eventually a prototypical subcategory is deemed worth to become a museum category. Then there come musicians who want to sound like the prototype from back in 1715, 1923 or 1988.

Case study: Minus vs. Richie Hawtin

Let’s examine the story of the Minus label. When Richie Hawtin founded it as an outlet for his own productions, he already was the main exponent of minimal techno with a string of hit singles and extremely refined albums under the moniker of Plastikman (most notably Sheet One, Concept 1 and Consumed). The Plastikman project was so influential and successful that people had its logo tattooed. When he opened Minus up to other artists, two things had happened: The first wave of minimal was over, leaving basically only Hawtin and Basic Channel as still widely reknowned artists. And Hawtin had almost stopped releasing new original material (except for the artsy album Closer and two mix CDs). Minus formed a crew around Magda and Troy Pierce, and facilitated associates like Marco Carola and Mathew Jonson. A second wave of minimal techno swept the world, much bigger than the first one and went on to dominate dance music almost to a degree only trance had reached before. The Minus crew was probably at the top of it, accompanied by the likes of Ricardo Villalobos, Luciano and many others. Intriguingly Richie Hawtin, who hadn’t released one track contributing to the renewed minimal style, peaked his career in terms of reach and reaped rewards, becoming techno’s number one DJ. Compared to stadium rock, minimal techno is still a miniscule niche market. Yet its leading artist mentioned in a recent interview that he sometimes plays up to three performances a night, often in different countries, which is only made possible by employing the services of a private jet.

It is a wonderful example of how categories develop. After helping to form a first minimal subcategory of techno, Hawtin was recognized as its leader. Branding the Minus label and opening it up to others, their efforts accelerated his position as the one “owning” the style in the minds of the audience. With thousands of enthusiasts and artists jumping on the bandwagon and deepening the category to gargantuan proportions, Hawtin got leveraged proportionally to the size of the category itself. Once it outgrew the other subcategories of techno, he automatically became the leading artist of “all techno,” although the thousands of tracks that actually formed and defined the second wave of minimal were all produced by others. The critical point was making the transition of personal “first call” status from old minimal to new minimal. As we see, this can be achieved even without actually producing any new music in the style in question. This is not to be misinterpreted as unjust recognition though. Hawtin had shifted away from primary production to pushing new means of production, presentation and distribution. He spearheaded promoting a whole industry from Native Instruments to Ableton to Beatport, shaping the infrastructure of new minimal and beyond like no other artist. He’s also a really nice guy.

The gap between the category leader and the next on the ladder might be so wide that it even tolerates severe flaws in the primary sector: you might get away with continuously unexciting or even bad performances. In several interviews Hawtin cultivated an attitude of method over content, claiming he doesn’t even listen to the tracks anymore before he plays them and instantly forgets about them afterwards. I listened to a three hours set of his recently and indeed it seemed like watching a factory production line rather than a performance of music. It’s alienating and amazing at the same time, truly avant-garde in its dedication to taking things to the extreme. A new arte povera (a 60s Italian movement of making art from trash materials) seemed to have formed. As you see, at the end of the case study we are not with the label anymore, but with its leading artist. That’s what category leadership does.

The artist: category elasticity and time factors

Most great categories are discovered rather quickly by those who manage to move in boldly without giving it too much second thought. Whatever is possible will eventually be done. That is also why the audience doesn’t grant artists too much time to prove their talent. For visual arts, Chris Dercon, head of Munich’s Haus der Kunst museum, once estimated an artist has about seven years to break through^[3]. In music it might be less. Especially after you have some initial success there will be limited time for your full “potential” to unfold. Slow growth is a concept punished severely by the social environment. If people come to your concert in order to find a half empty room or you deliver a poor performance, they are unlikely to try again unless they have some very good reason to believe next time will be dramatically different. If you already spent a couple of years on the circuit that’s an unlikely scenario. Also the media and promoters will think you aren’t “hot” anymore if you don’t deliver accelerating results early enough. That is also why a cover story or other overblown exposure too early in an artist’s career might bring things to an early end: rewards associated with fully shown potential require just that. It is of benefit to an artist’s development if rewards and recognition lag slightly behind her actual level.

Then also once you have your name associated with a category, it is extremely hard if not impossible to move on to a different category. Once people know you as a black metal goddess, you won’t seem credible in pumping out dubstep tunes. It is actually easier to change when you are below superstar status. The only super-prominent historic counterexample that comes to mind is Miles Davis, who changed over the whole jazz world every couple of years throughout a career that lasted half a century: Birth of the Cool, Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew, On the Corner and Decoy are just a few examples, all differing wildly from each other. Yet they include some of jazz’s biggest (including the biggest) commercial successes ever plus separately inspiring thousands of musicians to follow and deepen the styles Davis designed. Although he regularly alienated his fans, he also managed to build up new followings every time change stroke. If the fans stay, it usually indicates that you didn’t leave your category.

On a side note, superstars also regularly fail to take into account that they are such only within one category at a time. Jeff Mills and Ellen Allien are still all over as DJs, but their fashion lines never went anywhere for instance. Miles Davis’ appearance in “Miami Vice” didn’t quite make him a Hollywood celebrity and his much advertised late paintings haven’t make it into the MoMA so far, too. The ultimate fallacy is when established artists try to reposition themselves by reacting to new developments imposed by others: they regularly fall to the bottom. When wild pitch pioneer DJ Pierre started to play the post-minimal hits of the day, it was the last time we heard of him. Unless you have pioneered the new thing, you’d better ignore it entirely.

Do we still need marketing?

Don’t expect a description of how hits are crafted or what kind of supportive promotional efforts are necessary for an artist to actually get his categorical findings into the minds of the audience. That’s a slightly different thing that’s too deep to discuss here. Yet the relation between category leadership and marketing efforts should be clear: no marketing effort will get an obvious “me too” artist’s profile sufficiently off the ground (this is the one point 100% of music marketing books fail to discuss). Within the range of the possible, the avant-gardist of a new category will have the biggest chances to be considered the best and therefore will be the easiest to promote. All categories are not created equal though. Some will have bigger potential than others, since they will address a need that is culturally relevant to more people. That’s usually where trial and error begins and predictions fail. Categories compete, too. The bigger the gap between them the smaller become the competitive effects. An isolated, small category might have bigger problems initially communicating the means necessary for understanding and enjoying it. So the initial promotional effort will have to be bigger. Once it is established though it will be more stable because fewer other categories will overlap with its position. Vice versa, a new category closer to existing ones is easier understood, but also more threatened by competition. It is quicker to establish and quicker to be forgotten. Closeness to the known is the prerequisite for hyped fads. That’s why we regularly encounter two word style names that start on “new” (or “nu,” for that matter).

Of course, marketing allows for some severe distortions, too. The most notorious is known as “payola,” referring to purchased exposure. In its contemporary form, usually ad money leads to overexposure of certain artists (attention they wouldn’t get without money being exchanged). When a song is on rotation on the radio it must be popular, social proof teaches us. Even in cases in which the connection is obvious we seem to assume that if an artist is willing to invest more than others there must be a reason (i.e. his talent justifies the investment)^[4]. And we move along too often. I know of concert promoters who booked artists on the basis of the number of “fans” on their social networks, even when they did know those numbers were manipulated by a piece of software adding random people.

Randomness and self-regulation

Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus (circa 460–379 BC) used to define “chance” as the ignorance of the hidden cause of an event^[5]. Often we attribute some unexpected outcome to random factors, since we don’t see any pattern that would allow us to explain what happened. The arts seem to be a field whose dynamics we regularly fail to understand, which results in a constant stream of surprising events. The very nature of competing categories means the other rules are constantly changing, making exact predictions regularly sound idiotic. One would wish to have clarity at least that the arts are a contest of ideas and the bolder new idea shall win. In reality, crossfire comes from even more factors than just marketing abilities. Someone figured out that pianists competing at a piano competition regularly had greater career chances if they played later than others. Juries happen to be in a better mood in the afternoon. Years later those who played in the afternoons had more concerts and better recording deals^[6]. It is impossible to identify all such biases. When you hear someone lamenting that “the time wasn’t right,” he might be referring to this complexity of the unknown. The deep insecurities of which outcomes to expect actually promote diversified culture. Many attempts that turn out to have no chance to succeed nevertheless do get initial support (“trial and error”). A lot of category depth has been gained by the belief that what worked once might work twice. And a new category’s reach won’t be obvious before it has been actually built and tried.

Yet the concept of category leadership by definition works for a minority only. When it seems to install the same hierarchical structure in any new category, this is only true as long as the majority wastes its time chasing categories that already exist. Innovation seems possible because we clearly know what the mainstreams are. If every artist would first and utmost try to differentiate from all others, we would face a self-regulating process. If the mainstream gets fragmented new rules will emerge, requiring new approaches.

The garden of the closing paths

If the above descriptions hold some truth, it is not the most hostile environment to be in. Most musicians have marveled over which marketing strategy would help them and how to adapt their sound to fit “the market” — just to wonder why what worked for someone else simply doesn’t work out for them (exactly because it worked for someone else). In the light of the mechanics of category leadership such considerations seem plainly wrong. The need to differentiate from the established encourages experimentalism and individuality — not the worst things around. On a sad note, going deeper in an established category is not rewarded. For the cultural (and economic) success of any piece or style of music quality is overrated. Eminence is gained because of the potential for social distinction. Any social group within a new generation builds its identity to differ not only from previous generations, but also from its social peer groups. That’s why it will embrace anything that seems new and different, no matter how stupidly new or different that might be. Listening to a “better” song never did the job, exactly because it lacks the effect of clear cut social distinctiveness.

Our culture is not so much cluttered with successful bullshit because we have no taste, but because our brains are built to pay more attention to novelty of form than to variety within a form. The stone age application: your chances of survival increase when you recognize clearly unfamiliar patterns rather than variations of familiar patterns. It’s some kind of deer, so eat it. But beware of that new snake, insect or other tribe with unclear intentions. Quality helps only later on to sustain the life of a category (not necessarily the life of the one who delivers it). Once we grow aware we’ve been listening to trash, we eventually move on and the category fades. On the other hand our culture is cluttered with unsuccessful bullshit, too, because we simply don’t learn about how our minds function. It is a default on the side of the musicians, concert promoters, labels and distributors of culture, deeply misunderstanding the audience. Instead of pursuing individualism, they keep searching for repeatable formulas. As the joke goes, “I don’t understand why nobody is interested in my music. It sounds exactly like anybody else’s.” Ironically, what is called “commercialism” regularly fails in the market at an astonishingly high rate.

Once we learn the aesthetics of one category, we stick with it. People are very loyal in their tastes of music. We only change our preferences on flat fads and fashions. Search and learning “costs” are too high to change complex, deeply built tastes regularly. That’s why our parents still enjoy the same music they enjoyed when they were twenty (“gerontorave” becomes a less futuristic outlook every day). This encourages artists to build categories aesthetically as deep and strong as possible in order to engage their audience “for life.”

Stefan Goldmann is an electronic music artist, DJ and owner of the Macro label.

stefangoldmann.com

Footnotes:

In “Everything Popular Is Wrong,” Stefan Goldmann claimed that the more artists deviate from the known and established, the better their chances are for success. But why should this be so? Now he offers a detailed examination of the psychosocial framework that underlies what we listen to, looking into the factors that decide what is culturally relevant and what is not — with surprising results: exploring the unknown is not only more fun, but also more rewarding.

The amplified champions

In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Bluebeard, its protagonist Rabo Karabekian muses on the origin of special talents and the diminished opportunities in modern societies: “I think that could go back in time when people had to live in small groups of relatives – maybe fifty or hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on. […] of course a scheme like that doesn’t make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communication has put him or her in daily competition with nothing but the world’s champions. The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness.”^[1]

Science has had a thought on this subject, too. This development has been named the Superstar Effect^[2], in which presumably only minuscule differences in talent or slight advantages in competitive situations snowball into the domination of a whole market by one or a few performers. If you want to buy a recording by a soprano opera singer, you’ll most likely want to buy one by the best — the number two soprano will have a hard time moving any CDs, since the presumably slightly better number one will have preempted the market. The CDs cost about the same, so why spend any second thought on lesser talent? The superstars obtain what I’d like to call a “first call” position: it is not just about income, but mainly about opportunities. That’s where things strike culturally. Everybody prefers the top performers. A festival wants to present and a label wants to sign the best artists, a movie producer wants to hire the best actors and playwrights, someone who goes to court wants the best lawyer, and so forth. Only affordability and availability seem to give the rest of the list any chance. That’s why the superstar gets the greatest choice to pick from the best opportunities, earning disproportionately more rewards and spreading out to even wider recognition, while the other contestants service whatever is left over.

This cumulative aspect of superstardom has been described by sociologist Robert K. Merton as the Matthew Effect^[3], named after the verse from the Gospel of Matthew: “For unto every one that hath, more shall be given, and he shall have abundance, but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” In other words, the rich get richer, the poorer get poorer and success breeds success.

What are rewards?

An artist feels rewarded when she receives the attention of the audience and of those mediating between artist and audience. Rewards are people coming to hear a performance, spending time listening to recordings, learning the specific style, recommending the music to others and following the further offerings of the artist. Rewards are receiving critical acclaim by experts and peers, finding followers who copy the style, getting the aesthetic message distributed with the help of those who service the media or manage the venues where artists meet the audience. In short, the more social interactions the artist’s efforts produce, the more those efforts have been rewarded. That’s the way society views an artist to be “excelling.” On the economic side, all these interactions produce fees, royalties and other sorts of material exchanges. People pay to attend concerts, to listen to recordings or to consume media coverage. In varying shares, these payments eventually reach the artist. Usually income will develop in parallel with these social interactions. Respectively some economists have argued that social relevance and monetary rewards match, i.e. whoever ends up earning more is also the better artist, offering the higher quality works of art^[4]. Such reasoning makes most of us cringe simply because we don’t trust the market to be a good judge on matters of quality and relevance. Investigating this assumption, in what follows I’ll discuss some theories that separate quality, relevance and the rewards system and examine how they interact.

Birth of the star

But how do we decide who is “best”? Even experts often disagree on the qualities and talents of top performers. And we all have encountered the notorious prevalence of some cultural product that no one we know in person seems to consider even “good,” yet it is inescapably all over the place. It’s not as if we’re all listening to the Rolling Stones or whoever dominates the stadium act category in music. There are many artists who comfortably occupy a place of their own without having the reach of a stadium act. So there must be something else going on as well.

Reasons given for the emergence of superstars range from differences in talent, amplified by mass media^[5], to the need to communicate about the same topics when socializing with others^[6]. I don’t think these models match what we experience in reality. I’d like to offer a different explanation based on the effects of mental shelf space limitation and social proof. The concept of mental shelf space is analogous to the shelf space limitations in retail: a shop can store only so many CDs, books or brands of cereal. In any given category our minds only comfortably deal with between three and seven items and zone out on the Long Tail, limiting the number of names we can memorize^[7]. Most people will not bother to regularly follow more than a few novelists, musicians or movie actors. There are simply not the psychological capacity, enough time and funds to compare thousands of contestants in order to figure out who should receive our limited attention. The search costs would be too high. Therefore we try to minimize them by employing shortcuts. Sticking with the best is one of those shortcuts. And in order to quickly identify the best we look out for social proof. Social proof is a psychological principle that states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct^[8]. We assume that enough of the others have gone through the search process and have identified the best when choosing one over the others. Whenever we are uncertain of what to look for, we’ll try to figure it out by looking at the choices of others.

This can go to bizarre lengths: Participants in an experiment were told that two shown, obviously different geometrical objects were the same. Astonishingly, when social proof is overwhelming (actors pretending to be other participants identified the objects as being identical), an MR imaging of the brain indicated that the objects were actually seen as being identical^[9]. In other words: In the right social context, we override our own judgments and rewire our brains to see, feel or hear what’s actually not there^[10].

Music is a means of social distinction, too. We actually do want to associate with certain groups of people and disassociate with others. With social proof we can figure out what others do and match our behavior accordingly. Social proof is so attractive because it helps us socialize, identify our group and save a whole lot of time, too. We might end up watching a mediocre movie, but we’ll enjoy the company of like-minded friends. In cultural contexts we rarely ever experience severe pain from following that strategy. Well, unless the movie was “Cowboys & Aliens” of course. In the bigger picture, social proof and limited mental shelf space promote diversity of categories and monoculture within categories at the same time.

These psychosocial factors are the reasons why the Long Tail doesn’t work (within one category) and people flock to the upper end of the scale. Against what a lot of propaganda claims, no distribution model or technological measure has ever changed this. Only a few geeks and professionals will ever bother to check out more than a few alternatives, and we all end up with the superstars. In a self-fulfilling prophecy these eventually do get better than the rest since they are exposed to better opportunities, get more funds to reinvest in their work and education, as well as better access to and allocation of other supportive means.

Quality is overrated

The Académie Francaise, photo by Niviere/SIPA

A nineteenth-century French novelist named Arsène Houssaye coined the phrase “the 41st chair” to describe the plight of talented individuals, deserving of rewards or recognition, who are nevertheless bypassed as these rewards are garnered by a select few. Houssaye’s phrase was inspired by the Académie Francaise. This elite institution, founded in 1635 during the rule of Louis XIII, was designed to identify and reward the nation’s greatest talents. If you are elected to one of the 40 seats you retain your position for life. These positions are so important to French society that the members of the Académie are called the “immortals.” The immortals that have held seats include some of France’s most famous citizens, from Dumas to Poincairé to Voltaire. It is intriguing though that the likes of Descartes, Molière, Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Diderot, Stendahl, Flaubert, Zola and Proust never got in. It was not that they lacked the ability. It was just that the limitation in numbers made them inhabitants of the “forty-first chair.”^[11]

Houssaye’s phrase is a good analogy to what happens to the other contestants within one category. Once the shelf is full, they are relegated to the forty-first chair no matter how great or valuable their actual contributions are. Mental shelf space has two varieties though, a vertical and a horizontal one. Vertically, within one category there are a few superstars and many inhabitants of the 41st chair. Horizontally though there are many more individual categories, each with its own superstar structure. That’s why we don’t all listen to the Rolling Stones exclusive, but also Theo Parrish, Carsten Nikolai, Pierre Boulez, Meshuggah or Fred Frith. This is intriguing, since horizontal mental shelf space for anything seems to allow for the coexistence of much more items than vertical: we know more separate supermarket product categories than brands of ketchup for instance. In marketing theory the according strategy is known as category positioning: if you can’t be number one in an existing category, create a new category. That might be a good explanation why culture is always changing. The contestants’ determination to reach “first call” status (and the impossibility to get ahead on crowded paths) makes them invent categories. Whoever creates a new category into people’s minds is likely to be associated with it due to social proof snowballing effects.

The horizontal dimension is a social one in the first place. Individuals don’t follow all categories available, but have preferences of a few, becoming “fans” of a style and its representatives respectively. Still, whenever we decide to engage with something less familiar (“let’s go to the opera tonight”), we consult social proof again. Then we join the already existing fans and skyrocket the chosen superstars’ social exposure. That is why the artist who is considered best by the public is not defined by talent or social chatter, but by category leadership, which is usually obtained when the category receives its initial public recognition (“Oh, that’s interesting — who does this?”). That’s why the actual quality, say of works in a new style of music, doesn’t matter much for success. This explains why often artists creating great works later on receive seemingly unjustly little recognition, while others reap the rewards. Some had their names identified with the category earlier on. Deepening a category is an activity that leverages those already on top. It is a paradoxical situation in which increased competition actually helps the predetermined winners by inflating the category’s rewards (more attention and funds flowing in).

This failure of readjusting the “class” structure within a category once the positions have been distributed is also named the Ratchet Effect^[12]: those on top do not fall much behind. It would cost the audience too much brainpower to readjust regularly. If you wonder why someone is still around artistically despite failing to keep up the quality that’s the reason. “Once a Nobel laureate, always a Nobel laureate” as Merton put it.

That effect is not always obvious. For instance, I recognize that virtually all techno superstars of the last decade now seem to lose their grip on dominating the distribution of recorded music. Their singles and albums don’t move that much anymore and their labels are shrinking to levels where they have to be cross-subsidized (even if that’s through the cheap labor of and endless supply of new interns). Still, their touring schedules are packed to the max. They do lose some ground, but no one replaces them. The Ratchet Effect applies to the internal hierarchy, not to the category itself. Categories often decline or get repositioned by other (sub-) categories, but even the captain of a sinking ship is still its captain.

Categorical morphology

In music, categories are often defined by but not limited to styles. One might be the leader of post-minimal technocumbia, but acting in a movie or wearing a mouse mask might do the job, too. “Gimmick categories” like these are usually exactly one artist deep, but at the same time they are subcategories of wider styles of music, too.

Things often get mixed up and attributes from outside music often define what artists stand for. A lot of pop has been highly influential with unimpressive musical foundations and inflated political, social or other agendas. Eventually such agendas help to break new aesthetics, too. Punk’s social and political relevance was probably earlier understood than its groundbreaking musical implications.

An initially small stylistic category might grow big and then split up into subcategories. Think of rock, having branched out in tree-like fashion with countless levels of subcategorization. It is sometimes hard to draw the line whether contestants happen to be in the same or in separate categories. Each of the 40 members of the Académie has his own story, and so have the artists on top in a bigger category. They share an audience, but develop individual profile in order to make it worthwhile for the audience to engage with more than one artist (even if that means putting on the mouse mask). The clearer the differences are the more likely we look at separate categories.

At a higher level, a subcategory might grow to become so enormous that entire other subcategories get repositioned. Once minimal outgrew loop techno (you know, the stuff Adam Beyer used to do), the leaders of minimal automatically became “bigger” than those of loop techno. The personnel’s structure within the subcategories didn’t change, but the metacategory (“techno”) found itself being transformed.

Read Part 2 of “Quality Is Overrated: The Mechanics of Excellence In Music” here

Stefan Goldmann is an electronic music artist, DJ and owner of the Macro label. stefangoldmann.com

Footnotes:

Long before Berlin’s nightlife narrative was dominated by Berghain, Bar 25 or Watergate, there was Tresor, a bunker in the city center with a killer sound system pumping out the most uncompromising electronic music known to man or woman. The club opened during the aftermath of the Wall coming down, as a previously divided city reunified and east met west in a post-communist, ecstasy-fueled embrace. Unlike the explosion of acid house a few years earlier in London or Manchester however, tie dye T-shirt and kicker-clad crowds did not get under a groove to the sound of Chicago trax and Woodentops B-sides. Instead, Tresor, situated at the societal intersection of Eastern Bloc bleakness and the giddy excitement of a new world disorder, and, informed by the industrial and post-punk heritage of Berlin, resonated to the sound of new music from Detroit, a relentless, futuristic and inspirational style called techno. It was 20 years ago that the club and label became a European staging post for US techno and in that period, Tresor was responsible for promoting music by Jeff Mills, Blake Baxter, Juan Atkins, Robert Hood and Drexciya to German audiences. In this interview with LWE, founder Dimitri Hegemann reflects on his experiences in Berlin, Tresor’s background and history, how the Detroit-Berlin alliance was forged and his plans for the club and label’s future.

Tell me about you own background: where are you from and how did you end up coming to Berlin?

I’m originally from Westphalia in West Germany and I first came to Berlin in 1978. Like many other people in a similar situation, like many country boys, I wanted to live in a flat, be in a band, something that was not possible in my small hometown. I was 20 or 21 at the time when I first went came to Berlin. They called me “Dorftrottel” or “village trash.” At the time, West Berlin collected all these “Dorftrottel” from all over Germany. I was very much influenced by hippy consciousness and the Woodstock generation. Berlin at the time was like an island, it was this crazy time. I felt that it only became a big city after the Wall came down.

Do you look back fondly pre-reunification Berlin, when the city was still divided into East and West?

Yeah, sometimes I miss the Wall in a strange way, now that Berlin is a city of four million people. Before the Wall came down there was an alternative, people were opening bars, clubs and galleries and I learned so much. When the Wall did come down, all of these subcultures took their chance, saw their opportunities and took over all of these spaces. Now we have all of these creative industries and that attracts visitors. Last year in Berlin there were 20 million hotel stays and 65% of the people coming was due to the alternative culture.

Other cities don’t have this kind of cultural strength for a few reasons: The first is that Berlin is so full of space and it’s still cheap. You can still survive here on maybe 400 euro a month. Also, Berlin is alive, it’s full of crazy, intelligent people, you can do things here, set things up because there are so many creative people here. Companies come here to find clever people and recruit them.

When I first started buying Tresor records in the 90′s, I noticed that the releases used to have the word “Interfisch” on them. Perhaps you can explain that as it always fascinated me.

Yes, before Tresor, Interfisch was the first label in 1986 and Fischburo was the first club. We used the word “fisch” (fish in English) because what we were doing was all about moving in different directions, doing different things. So we had this small club and once we had the club, we decided to do some recordings. I had been involved in running festivals in the 1980s and we had bands over like Test Department and Psychick TV to perform. John Peel had picked up on the festival — it was called Atonal — and it became very popular. It was an industrial festival, but it also had great visual presentation. As it became popular, we started to do archives of the music. By the end of the 1980s, we had made contact with Clock DVA, the band from Sheffield because we wanted them to come and play the festival. So they played Atonal and then released some music on Interfisch.

So in essence Interfisch was a precursor for Tresor. How did the label change from releasing industrial to techno?

One day out of the blue I got a call from Jim Nash who ran the Wax Trax label. He wanted to sign Clock DVA for the US, so I went over to Chicago to see him. I was staying with Jim and saw all of these demos he had refused for Wax Trax. The first white label that I picked from the pile just had this 313 number on it, so I called it up and spoke to a guy in a band called Final Cut who had sent the record to Wax Trax. His name was Jeff Mills. So Jeff came over and played the last Atonal festival. It was amazing to hear this new music.

The original Tresor

This must have been when there was great change taking place generally in Germany and across eastern Europe…

Yeah, it was at a time when the Wall had come down and everything was changing. A year later, in 1991, I found an old vault right in the middle of Berlin, so we called the club Tresor, the German word for vault. At the same time, Jeff had developed an organization with Mike Banks in Detroit called Underground Resistance. We were very oriented towards them musically, but what we gave them was how to use a space and put in a kicking sound system. We had found this incredible space, the Wall was coming down, people wanted to party, there was this amazing music coming from Detroit, it was just a unique time with so many things coming together at once.”

And as you mentioned earlier, West Berlin had been a magnet for people across Germany who had been trying to escape from conventional society.

That’s right. The other thing is that if you were a German citizen registered in west Berlin, you didn’t have to do military service as it was under the control of the Allies, so you had all of these people who had opted out of military service looking for something to do.

Tresor was arguably the first label in Europe to make such a close connection to Detroit techno, and one of your earliest compilations is called Berlin & Detroit: A Techno Alliance. Why do you feel that this was the case?

It’s true that we became so successful with Tresor and with Detroit artists because we took a chance, we didn’t care about anything else at the time. We moved our asses and went to Detroit, met the artists and DJs, none of this came our way by us just sitting around at home in Berlin waiting for it to happen. The other big thing about Tresor was that we acted like a family for visiting DJs. We picked them up from the airport, we brought them out for dinner and they stayed with us. We felt it was very important that we gave them a warm welcome — maybe it was this old hippie idea coming alive again.

But there were parallels between Berlin and Detroit: I flew to Detroit and found a city very similar to Berlin — all the spaces were empty. There was so much space in Detroit. Blake Baxter told me that he thought all the guys from Detroit were hardcore, but when they entered Tresor for the first time, they didn’t feel so tough anymore!

Just a few Tresor classics

Apart from showcasing Detroit techno, the Tresor label and club were also very active in promoting the new wave of UK techno producers that emerged in the 90s — artists like Surgeon, Ruskin, Landstrumm and Cristian Vogel. How did this come about?

I called Cristian Vogel. He was involved in a label in Frankfurt, Force Inc, and was interested in playing the club. Don’t forget the label was a big promotional tool for the club and we got more and more people to play. Surgeon had a residency at Tresor and he brought in new people like James Ruskin and Neil Landstrumm. They were so young at the time, so fresh. I spoke to Jeff Mills about this recently and I said that after 20 years, this music [techno] has become more sophisticated, not necessarily better, but definitely better thanks to technology. So at that time it was Cristian Vogel, Neil Landstrumm, Ruskin, Regis and Surgeon and they were this whole new wave of UK artists who were playing at the club. But if I am honest, I was more personally involved and interested in the Detroit sound; my favourite was Juan Atkins.

Why was that?

Because in Berlin we were very much influenced by the harder end of dance music, the industrial beats, and not so much Chicago house with vocals. Tresor’s first record was X-101. As we were setting up the label, Daniel Miller from Mute called me and asked me to wait as he felt we should work together. We ended up putting out the X-101 record with Mute in Japan and it made the Tresor brand very popular there.

So what happened to the original Tresor club, and why did it shut down?

The club had a temporary usage licence and initially the club only had a contract to open for three months, but we ended up staying for almost 15 years. I feel that the city should have kept the space for the club as it was very symbolic for Berlin.

Do you feel that the new Tresor club captures the spirit and attitude of the old venue?

To take the spirit of a club to another space is very difficult to do and the new Tresor does not have the same vibe. Also, having a techno club in Berlin now is nothing new and loads of clubs have opened since the first Tresor closed. But I still think the new club is the best space in Berlin. It will take a few years, but we will find the right partner and it will encourage young people to do similar things. The building the club is now in is also amazing and I would do an art gallery there on a par with the Tate Modern called the Tresor Modern of course! The space I propose to use for the art can be seen at berlintrafo.de — maybe there is someone reading the article who is interested in sponsoring the gallery space?

The label also seemed to scale back its release activity around the later part of the last decade. What happened?

The label’s big problem was when writable CDs came on the market. Gradually people didn’t want to buy vinyl anymore and the market has changed. We still push vinyl and even have vinyl-only nights at the club, but there are now too many DJs in Berlin trying to do the same thing and the competition has become much harder. But it is not just in the techno sphere that things have changed: I was recently in the Blue Note jazz club in London and it has become more sanitized, I mean no one even smokes there anymore! In the early days of Tresor, when you were in the club, all you could see were the shadows and the strobe and feel this hard, kicking music.

Didn’t the label also have a lot of problems with its distributor?

“We lost so much money when our distributors went bust, and it happened a few times. First it happened with EFA and then with Neuton, and you have to remember at the time we were putting out maybe an album a month and two EPs. So when EFA went bust we went to Neuton and then they closed, the club closed because the city wanted to put up apartments and replace the club and we fell into a hole. There is now a movie about Tresor called “Sub-Berlin.” It’s a really good movie. I had collected images and material about the club and this guy has put it all together and the result is really good. I mean it’s just a story about a club and a label, but it’s a story worth telling.

The new Tresor, photographed by Anna Krzyzanowska

You must have seen and experienced quite a lot of eye-opening scenes over the years. Was there anything in particular that stood out?

I was sometimes disappointed by the way certain people behaved and I didn’t know how bad show business can be. I was shocked by these money-oriented attitudes. Money was never a serious subject for me, it was never the main issue and it wasn’t what Tresor was about. But we found that if you build people up, they go away and that’s OK because they usually come back. We have had hard times, but we decided to follow our mission.

The good thing is that you overcame your problems and Tresor is now back…

Yes, they couldn’t stop our spirit. We opened the new club in 2007, but it was more difficult to restart the label. We had to find artists with the same spirit and we now have a good, connected team running the label. We work with SRD in the UK, our distributors, and we now have artists like Sleeparchive, Pacou and Juan Atkins releasing material. Our goal is to put out an EP a month and we are happy if we sell 800 copies. I see that vinyl is increasingly becoming a collector’s item so we want to invest more in the product, in the artwork. We are under no stress with the label and see it as marketing for the club.

Is the new mix, which exclusively features old Tresor releases, part of this attempt to sell the club and the idea behind it?

Yeah, we try to create this mix of the club and the label, but we always remember where we came from. That’s why I am keen to cultivate a relationship with artists, give them good contracts and throw big parties at the club. You have seen the space at the power station (new building) — Tresor could even do a big festival in that space a few times a year. If we can survive in this way, then I am very happy. Many of the big names go away and do their own business, but a lot of them come back. Much of what happened to Tresor was a sad experience, and in the music business, if you are out, you are out, but now we are back.

Looking back on the last 20 years, what do you think was the defining moment for Tresor?

If the Wall had not come down, there would not have been a techno revolution. Techno is all about spaces and the coming down of the Wall was the frame that built the techno revolution. It was a case of the right place at the right time. Nowadays, techno is socially acceptable, clubbing is an acceptable activity — 20 years go, it would have been, “What are you doing?”

Mike Huckaby Reflects On Tresor

Although Detroit DJ Mike Huckaby has never released a record on Tresor, he experienced its seismic impact on techno music. As a buyer for Record Time, Huckaby saw first-hand that the label gave a European platform to producers in his hometown. As a touring DJ from the mid-90s onwards, it was clear to him that Tresor had helped introduce Detroit techno to European clubs and record stores. In this revealing interview, Huckaby explains the role the label played in the development of techno; how the club pushes its visiting DJs to the limits and why, despite the growth of electronic music’s online community, the location-specific Detroit-Berlin alliance is still so important.

First of all, how did the idea for the mix CD come about?

It was a project that I brainstormed with Tofa from Tresor when I was down in the club one night. I just happened to be there and he just happened to mention to me that the 20th birthday was coming up. I said it would be a shame if they did not produce a compilation or a mix, so right on the spot I said I’d be interested in doing the mix and doing it as a Berlin-Detroit connection thing. There are some vinyl collaborations and Pacou is doing some records as far as I know.

You were already DJing and working in the record store when Tresor started. What was your involvement with it?

I played in Tresor over the years. I played there for the 1997 Love Parade, or it could have been earlier, but I just don’t recall. I’ve seen the development of Tresor from the other side, from the city of Detroit. I saw it first had as a DJ and from working in the shop (Record Time), buying and ordering Tresor releases for Detroit DJs. From day one, the links were there. I was touring a lot in Europe and Germany in particular during the mid-90′s, so I was picking up on a lot of music that was coming out on labels from Europe.

Was it somewhat unusual for a European techno label to be big in Detroit, given that artists from your hometown were becoming well-known all over the world?

I mean, Detroit always had steady European influences from Kraftwerk and Italo Disco and even Italian house, so we were no strangers to music from Italy and Germany.

Tresor photographed by Rick Kay

How come you never released a record before on Tresor?

That’s what we’re discussing now as a result of the compilation, it’s something that should have happened a long time ago. I don’t understand it myself. Maybe because I wasn’t releasing hard techno, it’s also a factor; maybe my music didn’t have an appeal for people who were fans of the label.

How did the tracklisting for the mix come together? Were you given free reign over the licensing? Also, do you think that the mix marks something of a departure for you as a DJ?

I could only use the tracks that were available to be licensed, so the final mix is a result of that. It presented a lot of limitations, but the tracks on the mix are a lot of what I had played and bought for the shop. I always played a lot of techno from long ago, it’s good to be versatile as a DJ. I can’t dictate what the crowd tells me to play and I think that I do versatility better than anyone else. Most crowds these days want to be taken on a journey, but that’s the point I want to make. Sometimes you don’t see a huge difference between the house floor and the techno floor at Tresor, and that’s the same with many clubs in Germany. Tresor books deep house DJs, but they like to have people who can accommodate both floors. Sometimes it’s a bit too much of a spillover, but Tresor has always been known to be a hard techno club, so when they invite house DJs to play there, they expect them to accommodate and switch. Some fail miserably and can’t handle the crowd; you can only go your own way in as much as the crowd gives you the capacity to do so. It seems the definition of the DJ has changed and I have seen DJs get eliminated, overwhelmed by the reaction of a crowd.

Do you think that the club still caters for a crowd looking for a harder sound?

Tresor is for the younger market, but they have a definite market. They also have the history, but there is still a demand for that type of music. Tresor have been known for that type of music and they are especially known for it especially over the past few years as the main types of music have been deep house or mnml. Tresor survived without compromise, which says a lot about them.

Did the records you chose bring back a lot of happy memories?

Yeah definitely, a lot of these records have a lot of memories, including memories for me. I mean, you talk to anybody in Detroit who was around in the mid-90′s and all of these records are easily recognizable to people from that time. Tresor is like an institution — even the youngest raver knows about Jeff Mills.

Do you think that Tresor was instrumental in getting Detroit techno known to the wider world? How much do you buy into this idea of the Detroit-Berlin connection?

It is debatable as to whether Detroit techno would not have become known outside of the Midwest if it wasn’t for Tresor, but I do know that it made Detroit known everywhere eastwards of Berlin. When you talk about the Detroit-Berlin connection, there is Hard Wax and Tresor on the Berlin end. At the other end of that connection at the time was the position I was in at Record Time and artists like Underground Resistance and Mike Banks, Alan Oldham and Blake Baxter. They were the people in Detroit who first had the connection with Tresor. Alan [Oldham] was steadily releasing records, a lot of records on Generator, he was doing a load of gigs in Germany and he was doing the artwork for Djax, so he was permeated in that scene. Blake was also releasing a lot of classic techno records at the time, so he was heavily involved too.

Do you think that the relationship still exists?

Yeah, the connection continues. A lot of labels in Berlin get Detroit artist to release or remix for them and Detroit DJs play over in Berlin a lot. It goes through phases and up and downs, but Detroit music is still very much in demand in Germany.

But surely the availability of music in digital formats negates the need for location-specific relationships — does it really matter what city you are from?

The fact that a guy in Tokyo can find a track in minutes says more about iTunes reshaping the music industry, it has more to do with it having an impact on record stores, that a corporation can stamp all over the industry. I mean, vinyl is still the only format that people are buying legitimately.

Does this tally with your own experiences at Record Time?

“My tenure at the record store came to a terrible end. After 14 years I was told all of a sudden that my job was gone. I thought it was the end of the world, but that wasn’t the case. Vinyl sales may have gone down, but it’s growing in importance. If there are 40,000 releases every week, the only way for an artist to get known is by a vinyl release — otherwise, by the end of the week the listener is overwhelmed by all the digital releases.

So you think there are too many digital releases out there?

To be honest, the future of digital music is fucked. No one is buying music from these download sites like Beatport. I can’t say for sure, but these sites probably aren’t making any money. The future for major labels is also fucked as they do simply not realise that the resources for distribution, merchandising and stocking the product, all these things have been diminished. Digital is a fucked format; it’s not the solution, and I can say that for definite about digital.

If digital has no future, then what’s the alternative?

Some experts believe that the future of music will see it return to a scenario where people want to hold the music in their hands. Anyway, the earth will not be a silent planet, music will never cease to exist. My job is to remain creative and I know that I will live through all of this shit. I’ll never forget that Cliff Taylor from Buy Rite told me that if you can stay away from the anxiety-driven aspects of the music industry, you’ll be fine. The anxiety aspects are all to do with the digital side of music.

Back to Tresor, what is your upcoming release like? Have you changed your sound to fit the label?

It’ll be a fine balance between both; the tempo will be a bit faster than the house sound I am known for, at least that’s what I’m striving for with the release. It’ll be one EP for the time being.

Have you only agreed to one EP because of your methodical approach to music-making?

My rate of production has become significantly faster these days, but I still want to focus on the strength of the release and would prefer to put out a release when it’s ready. I mean you have guys who have 20 EPs out and no one knows about them. Everything is ass backwards these days. [laughs] You have 20 EPs and no one knows about you? How can you consider yourself an artist? It has always been a qualitative approach for me. How can you justify a quantitative approach if no one has heard of you? It’s like a lottery approach to music-making: “If I put out 20 records, maybe one of them will be a hit…”

Outside Tresor in 2004

What are your memories of Tresor during the 90′s?

During the Love Parades of the mid-90′s, Tresor was the club to go to. If you were touring in Germany, it was the club to play at, especially if you were from Detroit. At that time, hard techno were not dirty words, in fact it was revered, it was a force to be reckoned with. E-Werk was even harder and faster, that club started where Tresor left off. It was a great, great time.

Do you look back on this time as a golden period for Detroit techno?

Yeah, you went to record stores and you got the feeling that Detroit was really influencing electronic music in a major way. It was the force that was driving the club, and it made me feel proud that records from Detroit were driving the club. When Tresor releases came into the store in Detroit it was like mania, you could just put them into people’s hands, they didn’t even listen to them, they just bought them. People in the store would buy The Extremist (by Jeff Mills) or a Rob Hood record without listening to it, or they’d quickly hear just one track on a doublepack like Waveform Transmissions (also by Mills) and they’d want it.

How do you think that Tresor in its current incarnation compares to the club in its original form?

Tresor nowadays faces a lot of challenges in terms of surviving as a club and as a label. It has huge challenges because of the differences in musical tastes nowadays. A lot of Germans have become more pacified in their musical tastes and also in the energy they use to express their personalities. When Tresor started, the Wall had just come down and the people going to clubs were expressing that crazy time. It is in this time of upheaval that Tresor has its roots and foundations.

But surely the fact that it stuck to what it knows is positive?

The good thing is that you still have a crowd who support that kind of music. It may be a smaller crowd now than it used to be, but the fact that it’s appealing to younger people is a good thing. Tresor needs to stay true to its roots and step up. Nowadays you have a club like Berghain which is as interested in booking DJs like Patrice Scott and myself as much as Tresor is.

You spoke just now about Berghain; irrespective of the club, do you view Berlin gigs as pivotal to what you do?

Germany is the place where the fittest survive and Berlin is the capital of electronic music. No one who is making an impact in electronic music will not pass through there at some point. Germany and Berlin as a city are the most influential places to play, and are where you can develop your stamina as a DJ and develop strong skills. You are often playing longer sets there or performing in the morning or very late at night, sets that are unheard of in the US. I have found a lot of new skills — endurance and being able to program music into your sets at extremely unusual times of the day. ”

Are these skills needed at Tresor or do others apply?

At Tresor, you learn the ability to entertain a crowd. You also need a lot of variety to play at Tresor. You have to step your game up, you will have people coming up to you telling you to speed it up, to play harder and faster.

It is fall 2011, the busiest year yet of Fred Peterkin’s growing career as one of deep house’s most watched producers. In the past 12 months the producer also known as Black Jazz Consortium has circled most of the globe on tour and in the process taken his sound in new directions as well as forged relationships in previously unvisited corners of the world. He’d just played Labyrinth festival a few days before, a first for him even though it was his third career appearance in Japan, all of them in the last few months. Now back in Tokyo just two days after the festival, we strolled around the Imperial Gardens in the center of the city within steps from the residence of the imperial family, absorbing the remnants of 400 years of Japanese history, and our minds both wandered towards reflection on the long road that had brought us here. Amidst the beginnings of a typhoon, the wind is gusting, and bouts of rain force us under shelter to look at exhibits that show what had once stood in the place of the sprawling open garden we have been circling.

With the backdrop precisely set, the conversation begins, “Could you tell me a little about how you got started with music?” I’ve known Fred for more than two years now, but he’s not the easiest person to get to open up. “I had heard you started off with hip-hop way back.” “Yeah, it was like ’82,” he says, “One day I watched this movie called ‘Beat Street,’ and the guy was making beats with all of these tape decks just stacked up. I had no idea what I was doing, no idea about generational loss or any of that. I thought I could just make stuff like that, so I went around finding tape decks people had thrown out. After I collected a few of these, I started to experiment with making sounds. It wasn’t really music… you couldn’t call it music. I was just fascinated by how the tape decks changed the sounds and brought out new things that you couldn’t hear before.”

In this early period, Fred experimented with making beats as well as DJing for family and small parties in the neighborhood. When he heard house music in clubs while in high school his interests began to shift towards these contemporary sounds. After finishing high school, he slowly stopped going to clubs, but by now Fred had begun buying records and absorbing the music at home. The two common currencies of mid-1990s New York: hip-hop and house music. I’m already scratching my head and wondering how he moved forward from such humble beginnings. He offers, “I have this cousin, and one day he found this ad in the Village Voice where we could get studio time at a real studio. We didn’t have a studio or anything, it was all a hustle, but in this time record companies were just giving away money to try to bring up new talent. We didn’t even have a demo or a finished song….” Amazingly, they were accepted, and after a few sessions the engineer in charge was impressed with Fred’s dedication. “He liked that I had this kind of passion for it. Even if I didn’t know the rules, I was really trying to learn them and make something.”

Fred P. playing Labyrinth festival

It turned out to be the winning point for his character because shortly afterwards the engineer took the young initiate under his wing. “He taught me how to put things together: chords, how to build a song, how to structure it, how to make it sound good when you recorded it.” Finally with this background in place, Fred was ready to give it a try on his own. He bought his first studio equipment: a TASCAM Portastudio, a Korg 01/W, an old 12-track mixing board, a Sony DAT machine, and a beat machine. By 1993, he had earned his first credit for rhythm programming on an album for jazz violinist Noel Pointer; it would be his only credit for years to come. Back in the studio with the cousin that had started things off, it had taken time to get things together, but by 1994 the duo had assembled a demo and were shopping it around to labels. “There was this one label, they were ready to sign us. Remember, this was back in the day when there was money in the industry. We were offered a quarter of a million dollars… we couldn’t believe it. To two dudes from Brooklyn then, that was a lot of money on the table. I had no real idea what I was going to do with it. I thought I would build a proper studio and then use the rest to help my family.”

He continues, “Long story short, the deal fell through”, says Fred. “I was devastated. I sold all of my studio gear, my turntables. I didn’t want to have anything to do with music after that. I got a job working security, and I spent the time not working partying.” After years of inactivity, Fred’s demons began to get the best of him. Not taking care of himself and not suited for the kind of work he was doing, depression began to set in; although he kept his records and continued to listen to them, the bitterness of his first experiences in the music industry kept him from trying that route again. By 1998, things had reached a critical point, and a chance encounter with friend Jay Locke on his way to work began a series of events that would produce dramatic changes. “He could see that I was really depressed. Things weren’t good. Jay has been a DJ for more than 20 years, and he had just come back from Paris with all of these new tracks of broken beat and that early nu jazz. He’d come to my work every week and bring me mixtapes. That’s a true friend right there. It really saved me. It was the most beautiful music I ever remembered hearing then.”

Part of the garden in which the interview took place

Inspired again by these new sounds, Fred decided to buckle down and rebuild his studio, but this time around he chose to work entirely on his own. He also took up DJing once a week just for practice and fun at Jungle Sky in West Village. “I’d come around on my nights off. I think it started on Thursdays first, then I moved it to Tuesdays.” It was 1999 when he finally made the beginnings towards the new studio. It took time to get it going with the immense expense of outboard gear, but eventually he managed to collect an Akai S2000 sampler, a Boss DR-202 beat machine, and a Roland 840 hard disk recorder. It wasn’t much, but after refreshing on what he had learned the first time around and taking inspiration from the music Locke had been giving him, Fred decided to take another chance at producing dance music. “I was trying to do something between nu jazz and house. I liked the simplicity and the straightforwardness of house, how it has that hi-hat that keeps it moving. But I also liked the looseness and swing of the nu jazz stuff, and how it was more musical. So I tried to make a combination of these two things.”

After starting to show his new work around in 2002, he again began to get some positive feedback from labels, but at the same time other situations conspired to keep things from going smoothly. Now burning his candle at both ends with work and production, as well as continuing to party harder than he could maintain, Fred began to fray around the edges. Again a label showed interest and coached him towards release on one of their sub-labels, but again the deal fell through at the last minute. Although it didn’t have anything directly to do with the loss of the record deal, a lull between surges in the underground dance scene in New York added inertia to the situation. “Nu jazz never took off in New York. It should have been the same as house, just as big as that, but the people controlling the parties didn’t want it and the promoters didn’t know how to sell it.” With no way to press forward in music and with pressure bearing down from all directions, he decided to quit his job. “I couldn’t take it anymore, but really things got even worse then. I was temping, and the rest of the time I spent trying to make music but now had no hope of ever trying to put it out. I was just doing it for me at this point. I had given up.”

Fred P at Labyrinth festival

His new situation eventually disintegrated, and soon enough Fred found himself living at home, drinking heavily and without steady work or horizons for his music. Simply out of frustration he began to release the new tracks on go-nowhere Internet labels out of some form of masochism and in full awareness he was making no progress towards proper releases. In spite of this, he kept recording entire albums that he kept solely for himself and upgraded his studio gear when possible. Finally in 2007 Fred decided he’d make one final stab at getting out of the rut that had been haunting him for years. This would prove to be his breakout a few months later, but at the time he imagined it entirely differently, “I was giving up. I’d had enough.” Fred laughs as he speaks about it now, but it’s clear that the situation was grave. “I took the best tracks from these three different albums I had done; that was RE:Actions of Light,” Soul People Music’s first physical release and a CD album originally intended to be his farewell to the music making business. Rather than vanishing without a trace like his previous efforts, it earned him his first professional DJ spot in New York playing for E-Man’s Deep See night, as well as attracting the attention of underground house figure Jenifa Mayanja, who soon asked Fred for a remix. “Jenifa was a resident of a party called Hamsa I used to attend religiously back in 2002. I would not go anywhere, but I would go there. The best party ever, and nothing else since then has even come close!”

It was also around this time that Jus-Ed came into the picture. Fred had met Ed through Jenifa, Ed’s wife, after doing the remix for her, and when Ed heard Fred’s music he enthusiastically began playing tracks on his radio show. With Underground Quality already receiving some notice in New York and his radio show having earned a worldwide audience, it did not take long for word to spread. The heat was finally on in some small way, and taking his cue Fred assembled the first vinyl release for his label, God’s Promise, featuring remix work from Jus-Ed and Mayanja. It turned out to be an underground hit record of sorts and subtly steered the course for the future. Fred emphasizes Ed’s importance in the equation, “I owe Ed big time… he set me straight. He’s like the big brother I never had and never met until I was grown. He helped me put my life in order, encouraged me to continue, and showed me what it takes to be a professional touring DJ.” Fred’s debut solo 12″, the aptly titled No Looking Back EP, received airtime through Ed and thereby picked up support from a radio DJ in Germany named Tanja Harde, who offered to bring him over the Atlantic to DJ a party in Offenbach. “I’d only played one professional gig in New York,” Fred attests, “and here I was in Germany all of the sudden.” Move D also heard the EP from one of the radio shows, and the noted underground producer was influential in earning Fred another date in Germany in Moufang’s own hometown of Heidelburg.

Part of the garden in which the interview took place

Although things were by now looking up, Fred hadn’t moved past the darkness that had been lurking inside him, and he admits to making a considerable misstep with his follow up, the 4th Dimension EP. “It was an egotistical record, ” he says. “Right now, people want it, but at the time they didn’t get it. They sent me back half of the boxes from the distributor. That was bad — I hadn’t made anything on the record.” He hadn’t helped himself by leaving off all of his contact information from the releases and thereby preventing people from getting in touch for bookings. With the records originally meant to be last-ditch gasps before throwing in the towel, the accidental discovery of an audience for the music was an eventuality Fred had not planned for. With additional pressures building now that there was actually a demand for new music from him, the party lifestyle that had hung in the background for so long during these developments began to catch up with him.

Feeling himself unraveling and needing more clarity to deal with the increasing pace of events, Fred finally decided that sobriety was the next step and discarded the unnecessary baggage. He also made a record that expressed the pain of going through these trials, and if the New Horizon EP still stuck closely to the sound his audience had come to expect from him, the thematic titles on it dealt bluntly with pulling back from the edge and his new vision for his future. It was also his next success, and according to Fred there’s been no looking back since then. While he confesses to being a “workaholic,” in his words, it’s likely that the load he took on himself since 2008 would be enough to keep anyone busy: two more acclaimed full albums released on his own label plus more EPs, a continuing series of compilation EPs featuring acclaimed friends like Levon Vincent, Move D, DJ Qu, and more, a growing number of remixes for other artists spread across many other imprints, and of course all of the mixes, podcasts, and other promotional work that keep touring DJs busy.

Fred P. in the garden

Coinciding with the release of his most recent album last year he’s also spent much of his time on the road, and it was only this past spring and summer in between consecutive trips abroad that he found time to put out the long-delayed Structures EP on his label as well as strengthening his relationship with Japan’s Mule Musiq with the release of a rare solo EP not on his own label, an honor he’d previously reserved only for Hamburg’s Laid. While it seems like a big step for him, Fred insists that it developed naturally, and he’s taken his recent successes in stride while continuing to release some of his strongest material to date.

With Fred P’s sound now firmly in place for his expectant audience, he feels it’s time to shake things up a bit. His DJ sets, very notably the one at Labyrinth, have certainly begun to look further afield, and he says it’s time to branch out in the studio as well. “First is going to be Earth Tones 3. I’m also going to keep the Fred P thing going,” he says, “but there’s going to be other different stuff too. The next project as Black Jazz Consortium is a mostly vocal house record with singers. I’ve always wanted to do it but never found the chance until now. It just came together finally and I had the chance to get it done and get it out.” It’s a theme that repeats itself in Fred’s way of looking at things.

He suggests that afterwards listeners will hear a purely techno project from him; it’s not completely a surprise considering it’s so frequently found in his recent sets. “There’s also going to be other new projects and releases by other artists on the label.” If his recent C.O.M.E. compilation is any indication, these ideas are off to a promising start. Featuring talent both new and known, a collaboration with Aybee of Deepblak, and an undisclosed number of new aliases for Fred, it follows up other recent co-productions with Jonah Sharp and Move D and finds him broadening his base with a list of names old and new. With a full slate of releases for his label as well as more of the familiar “Fred P Reshapes” set to surface, the future continues to look up for one of New York’s brightest current stars. Stay focused, act natural, and go with the flow: it’s an approach that has served him well, and we can look forward to more as Fred P continues to move forward onto new ground.

A few weeks ago I was watching a Boiler Room episode and one of the DJs dropped a Skudge track. As usual, someone in the chat was immediately asking “I.D.?” Typically the response is a little slow as people rack their brains, but in this case several answers appeared straight away, mostly to the tune of, “I don’t know the track, but it’s definitely Skudge.” I couldn’t pinpoint the track either, but it was pretty clearly Skudge — looping synth interplay, dynamic percussion just the tiniest bit off-kilter, everything sleek and dynamic. The Stockholm duo are revered by a range of producers and fans for this kind of reliability, a type of heads-down focus that recalls two of their clear influences, Jeff Mills and Robert Hood, and ensures most everything they release is worth hearing. Earlier this year, they marked the release of their first LP Phantom, and have since followed it up with two EPs: one of remixes, the other of original material. The other thing about Skudge is they can be pretty tight-lipped, but it seems less about reticent hiding than a desire to simply let the music speak for itself. In advance of their live performance at Blkmarket Membership on October 14th in New York City, LWE contacted them about life post-Phantom, and it appears their day-to-day is business as usual.

One thing I noticed about Phantom was — and I don’t mean this negatively — apart from the intro, outro, and interludes, it sort of feels more like a compilation than a fully-flowing “concept” album. Was Phantom composed in the same way as your EPs? Were you setting them aside/consciously producing them as LP tracks? What were the differences between compiling tracks for the album and compiling them for the EPs?

Skudge: We stated that we didn’t have any concept [for] the album, but most of the tracks were made in the same period and we were thinking LP instead of EP while making them.

With your first LP out of the way, do you have plans for another?

No, we don’t have that at this moment. We’re focusing on the EPs right now.

Your remix packages tend to be very well-curated. How do you go about choosing who remixes your material?

We ask people that we like and if two remixes fit well together, we have a finished release.

What’s your work rate like? You’ve consistently put out records every few months; do you record a lot of tracks in say, one session? Or are you actively working on tracks day-to-day?

We work on tracks and remixes every week, mostly we work on one track one day and listen to it the next day with fresh ears, and then we try to finish what we started. There is an archive of unreleased Skudge material.

You have a really well-defined, recognizable sound. Do you have any plans to add new gear, try a new recording process, etc.? Or are you satisfied with your setup? Do you feel any pressure to stay true to what you’ve recorded already? If you decided to make something radically different, would you use a new moniker/new label or anything like that?

Yes, we are satisfied with the setup. We have some sort of idea we are working with, but it’s important for us to always go further and try new things. We haven’t thought of making a new moniker, but why not!

How do you approach remixing other producers’ work compared to producing your own original material?

We extract the sounds of the original that we like and make it skudgey.

How does the studio setup translate to your live set? Do you do anything differently? Are your sets planned out or are they more like jam sessions?

It is a jam session with a tracklist.

Do you feel involved in any kind of scene in Stockholm? How do you feel about the current state of dance music there?

We don’t feel that we came from a certain Stockholm scene. Skudge was created in a basement in the north west of Stockholm, while other people were sleeping. The interest of dance music is growing, that’s exciting.

As much as I’d generally classify you as “techno,” you’ve been remixed by Appleblim and remixed Instra:mental, who both lean more toward that UK bass/electro hybrid sound. Are you inspired by/do you feel close to that group of producers at all?

We are like all kinds of music and it inspires us. Variation is necessary for us.

What’s coming up for you: new releases, touring, etc.?

We plan to release other artists as well as our own stuff and remixes. Stephen Brown is next up, and more to follow. It will be a nice surprise.

When LWE started its podcast series back 2008 it was impossible to tell how the series would progress; but its basis was in providing our readers with quality music, not just the handouts of the biggest names we could find. Now that we’re about to reach our 100th regular podcast it seems safe to say we achieved this goal, pleasing and challenging listeners and occasionally landing a few big name podcasts as well. In celebration of our fast approaching 100th exclusive podcast, LWE’s staff has taken a look back at the first 99 and showcased some of our favorites so far. What’s more, we’ve made all of the podcasts featured here available for download for one more week, so you can grab the archived mixes one more time. Because of the limits of the article we couldn’t possibly cover all of our favorite mixes, so we look forward to discussing your favorites in the comments as well.

LWE Podcast 01: Terrence Dixon
For me, Little White Earbuds’ first trip into the now-overfished seas of podcasting remains one of this site’s most memorable. Appearing at a time when “raw” and “Detroit” emerged as critical buzzwords in electronic music journalism, Terrence Dixon presented a spin on midwest retro that wasn’t dogmatic, but doggedly individual. Lo-fi and often abrasive, this tough, edgy mix sprawls from timeless cosmic techno to date-stamped acid house (see D-Mob’s “We Call It Acieed”). Uniting the selections is a snarling machine funk that mirrors Dixon’s own often-aggressive production work. Befitting an artist tipped by Clone as “maybe the last real Detroit techno innovator,” and whose track “Rush Hour” inspired the name of one of dance music’s most crucial institutions, Dixon’s LWE mix didn’t sound at all rote or trendy then and, even though melanges of prickly house and flickering techno are a dime a dozen today, this mix throws quite a few punches that still surprise. [Chris Burkhalter]

LWE Podcast 05: Tama Sumo
When LWE launched its podcast series, Tama Sumo was one of the first people I approached about doing a mix. Having seen her play the Panorama Bar garden not long before, I knew she was an ideal candidate for the task. But even that preview couldn’t prepare me for the mix she turned in. Weaving between multiple eras of house, silky deep joints (Agnes’ remix of “L’Aurora”) and more banging tech turns (Kerri Chandler’s “Hexadecimal”), Chicago jack tracks (DJ Funk’s “House The Groove”) and new wave torch songs (the “Innovative Mix” of Dee D. Jackson’s “Automatic Lover”), Podcast 05 is a thrilling ride that hits all the pleasure centers. For my money it’s an even better mix than her Panorama Bar 02 CD, even if the mixing is not machine tight. It’s one I’ve played when getting ready for parties, when I need cheering up, and when I’m just craving a reliable listen — because it’s just as fresh and enjoyable today as when it first hit my inbox. Tama Sumo quickly set the bar for LWE’s Podcast series as high as it could go, a benchmark only our best mixes since have been able to touch.
[Steve Mizek]

LWE Podcast 29: Black Jazz Consortium
“I woke up out of a deep sleep and started mixing out of a pile of records.” This is how Fred Peterkin begins to describe the recording of LWE’s 29th mix, and given his role as one of contemporary deep house’s foremost authorities it’s as fitting a situation as any. While deepness for deepness’ sake can seem to come out of one’s ears after awhile, with Fred it’s a different story all together. This mix is deep but never stagnant, slowly emerging out of REM cycles and perfectly escalating energy over its two hour runtime. The inclusion of movie quotes put it over the edge, turning an excellent mix into something truly special: a mix that stays with you past subsequent mixes and long after the unreleased material has been released. The era between its release in 2009 and now has seen house music become increasingly focused back to its roots (both geographically and temporally), and while Fred holds high the traditions of New York house, he makes pushing music forward a priority. Fred has only improved as a DJ since this mix emerged (indeed, his recent set at the Bunker remains a very bright highlight of the year so far), but I keep coming back to LWE’s 29th podcast and suspect that I will continue to for years to come. [Chris Miller]

LWE Podcast 42: Anthony “Shake” Shakir
For his fans, Shake just has the Midas touch. His mixes distill the same unstable, incandescent energy that inhabits each component in his own productions. How does Shake pull this off time and again? Within the last ten or twelve years, during which the dominant clubland aesthetics have called for mixes to have fabric-style edgeless polish, or Panorama Bar-esque unassuming functionalism, Shake has stuck to his guns. He revels in what can be created by jamming two partially compatible tracks together in a brightly kinetic collision. LWE 42 furnishes several good examples: exuberant mixing forces the bleeps and other midrange elements of the first three tracks to talk to one another – even though the frayed textures created when some of the other components combine would have dissuaded a DJ more obsessed with showman-like precision from hurtling them together. Perhaps even more importantly, Shake, like few others, creates mixes that work as a whole. Peven Everett’s “All The Time” is not a track I would reach for as a DJ, or even one for which I might muster much enthusiasm if it landed in my in-tray for review; and yet as the giddy counterpoint to the murkily psychological fare that entangles it on both sides in Shake’s mix, it works great. It’s these ecstatic moments that elevate Shake head and shoulders above the fray, and the fact that LWE 42 wonderfully conveys the rare (as hen’s teeth!) mix of physicality and narrative sensibility needed to create such moments makes it one of my favorites in the series. [Colin Shields]

LWE Podcast 59: John Roberts
Casual listeners to John Roberts’ debut album Glass Eights might have been surprised to hear the lascivious come-ons of KC Flight’s “Summer Madness.” But beneath the buttoned-up, wallflower appearance of Roberts’ own music is an house badass just dying to flex his muscles. The point is proved by his LWE mix which ploughs a furrow I’d like to christen “sensitive thug”: the aforementioned “Sex For Daze” mix rubs up against Robert Owens wittering on about how he’ll be your friend, while “Jack Your Big Booty” is frottaged by the DJ’s own elegant composition “Porcelain.” By the time Italo tearjerker “On and On” brings the mix to a close, one realises that it is in fact merely an extension of Roberts’ own perfect synthesis of rough-house drums and Dial aesthetics: this is what happens when thugs cry. [Peder Clark]

LWE Podcast 62: DJ Qu
While we’ve written countless words on this site about DJ Qu’s inimitable production style, we tend to gloss over the fact that DJing is no small part of what this guy does. And his Little White Earbuds podcast proved beyond all reasonable doubt that the front end of Ramon Lisandro Quezada’s production alias is no false signifier. Dude can mix, but what we got here was a good deal more interesting: where plenty of other producer-DJs let their club sets bolster their 12″ output, Qu’s beats on our 62nd podcast sound very much in the service of his obsessions as a house-head. Those beats — then-exclusives which would go on to assume highlight status on Qu’s long-in-the-works Gymnastics album — mostly rub shoulders with a tightly interconnected circle of like-minded producers, from globetrotters like Jus-Ed and Nina Kraviz to unsung Exchange Place heroes Joey Anderson and Nicuri. But rather than simply restate Underground Quality, this podcast traveled truly recast these now-familiar sounds: New York house found its dark side, and Qu’s signature swirling rhythms (to borrow his words, “Thump and Vibe”) emerged from their cocoons as the stuff of anthems. [Jordan Rothlein]

LWE Podcast 63: Silent Servant vs DVS1
I’ve been listening to techno for over twenty years; my musical education and explorations included huge doses of the purist Detroit and German variety, so it has always held a special place in my heart and ears. I frequently used to listen to a tape of Jeff Mills live at Liquid Room to lull myself to sleep in my mid teens and even though my tastes have mellowed slightly from the hard-as-nails techno I used to prefer, I love hearing techno played properly. Silent Servant and DVS1 bring all the right ingredients to this mix that make techno such a joy to listen to. The mixing is tight, the tracks sound both timeless and futuristic (classic techno like this could have been made any time in the last 15-20 years and still sound like it’s fresh out the box), and there is a raw, tribalistic energy conveyed that keeps things moving and interesting. I love how Silent Servant mixes up the old and new, introducing old cuts to new ears and vice versa, while DVS1 goes mostly for cold, steely look at more recent releases. To me this epitomizes late night, heads down techno and it’s my favorite in our series. [Per Bojsen-Moller]

LWE Podcast 70: Elgato
I’m not sure what it means that my favorite mix in the podcast series is one composed entirely of old tracks; a determinedly “retro” mix seems the kind of musical dessert that shouldn’t be held above perhaps more “adventurous” endeavors. But really, fuck it. Just listen to this mix. Maybe it’s the novelty of a podcast by one of 2010′s most audacious and universally acclaimed new kids on the block making deeply experimental house music turning out to be an orthodox set of old garage from both sides of the Atlantic. Maybe it’s the fact that the selection is unparalleled, mixing both realms of garageland into one cohesive singularity that feels as deeply, intrinsically UK as it worships at the altar of classic American house. Maybe it’s because it capitalized on what seemed like a looming trend of incorporating house and classic garage into bass music, predicting what would soon become the overarching theme of 2011. Maybe it’s… fuck it. Just listen to this mix. [Andrew Ryce]

LWE Podcast 72: Aroy Dee
Too often when a DJ uses their podcast to spotlight their own label/productions, it distracts from what could be a satisfying mix. And although Steven Brunsmann aka Aroy Dee’s podcast from early this year starts and ends with his own R-A-G trio and features several other M>O>S recordings, it never feels like he’s doing listeners a disservice. Brunsmann’s podcast, taken from a Panorama Bar DJ set late last year, offers a stirring journey through Chicago house and Detroit techno alongside equally significant modern productions. Pulling out lesser known older tracks from The H-Men, MD III and Reel by Real, he slips in and out of textured, moody techno from the likes of Soulomon, Paul Bennett and even the gloriously off-kilter “Bowls” by Caribou. Even when he groups two unreleased (at the time of publishing) tracks from M>O>S together, D’Marc Cantu’s “Set Free” and Brunsmann’s own “Beauty,” the quality of the tracks dispel thoughts that their placement is merely a sales pitch. This podcast is just what it is, a snapshot of Brunsmann’s DJing on one killer night. [Kuri Kondrak]

LWE Podcast 76: Anton Zap
I’ve been through probably 10 to 20 variations on “buses at dusk” trying to describe this Anton Zap podcast. That’s basically the wave it’s on. The Russian producer put together a bunch of unreleased (at the time, anyway) material from his Ethereal Sound label and a few other odds and ends, but the end result is a lot less about singular tracks than fluid, drifting atmosphere. It’s casually engaging but never boring, just subtly switching moods and shades — the BPMs are steady, there are lots of soothing pads — it’s like some kind of deep blue motor. Maybe try thinking of a ride down a post-twilight boulevard: blocks of muted light in apartment windows, closed businesses where the front is neon-lit and then fades off into blackness in the back, faceless people doing that downcast end-of-the-day trudge. It’s one of our moodier, more evocative editions. [Steve Kerr]

Kassem Mosse has always been a bit of an enigma. There are pictures of him around (though not many), and he’s got a strong internet presence, partly due to his “critics’ darling” status. He even has a Facebook page. Yet the mystery of Kassem Mosse endures, largely due to his music. Surely any producer whose tracks seem to be evenly distributed in a tempo range covering about 50 beats per minute is operating on a different tip from most. His sound appears to be wildly diverse as well, from slow-mo, bleary-eyed tunes to wiry, jacked-up workouts and back again, often on the same slab of wax. It’s this ingenuity and unflinching output that has earned the man born Gunnar Wendel acolytes from across the dance music spectrum, from UK scene-makers like Instra:mental and Joy Orbison to Omar-S and the Laid crew. But it’s his work for Workshop and Leipzig-based Mikrodisko where Wendel has let his freak flag truly fly, where his sound becomes as swampy and amorphous as it can be. We caught up with Wendel in July after his set at The Bunker to chat about context, his newest projects, and to solve the mystery of the facial-haired stamps.

How did you think your set at The Bunker went?

Gunnar Wendel: I think it went quite well. I can’t really judge from a spectator point of view, but I’m very self-critical and there’s always something that I don’t like or I would like to do better. There’s always something you can improve, because there are always changes in the set up. Al these changes keep it interesting for me, but I also have to be able to adjust to the situation. So it’s always different.

I saw you had a lot of gear up there. Had you planned on using those things?

Yeah. I contacted the promoters ahead asking if they could secure some stuff I could use. I wanted some things I know, things I know how to work and I can use, because it’s difficult, obviously, to bring so much over from Europe. If I’m in Germany it’s easy, I can take my own gear with me. But traveling to the U.S. is difficult when you have lots of gear, especially because of these power and voltage issues. It’s much easier if you have something on location. My experience has been that sometimes promoters are confused with those requests and they don’t know what I mean and they cannot get you anything. But I’ve gone to some places where you could get the most amazing gear and we didn’t know beforehand. We did it on the night. And it always works well.

I like it that way. It’s all so different, you know? If you get different types of gear, it will set a different flavor. It’s like an additional flavor. The ingredients are similar, but if you get a 909, you will have a more harsh, banging sound, as opposed to if you get an 808. It gives you a different experience.

So do you allow for a lot of improvisation in your live sets then?

Yeah, definitely. I like to keep it as open as possible, because otherwise it would be really boring to me. Obviously I don’t want to bore myself, so I try to structure my live set in such a way that I can respond to what is happening and to each situation, because you never know what crowd you will get and what the space will be like. Sometimes it is a bit more crass, sometimes it is a bit more house-y, or a bit more laid back. I can adapt to the situation. I like to be able to change the tracks in a way that they suit the situation as it is.

I also just use tracks that I’m working on, unreleased material. I rarely play stuff I have released. I played some in New York, but that was like an encore, so [laughs] it’s OK to do it, I guess. But usually I’m not fond of doing that because I don’t like this rock attitude where you have these songs and people want to hear those songs and you have to play all of those songs all the time. That’s not something that interests me. I’m more about improvisation and trying things out on the spot.

Do you think that you’ll keep honing some of the tracks from this live set and that they’ll see eventual release? Or do you like to keep stuff back for just live performances only?

I do keep stuff just for live performances. Some of the stuff I eventually wind up releasing, but often I prepare that material and I take it to a live set. I just have so many other ideas to work on back home that I don’t go back to actually finish it, and I end up just keeping it for a live set. There are certain things that work in a live set but that don’t work when you make them into a track. That’s the reason why I don’t like people recording live sets. I personally don’t like to listen to them that much because I hear all the mistakes and I think it doesn’t really translate. If you listen to these recordings then you don’t know the audience, and you don’t know the context. You don’t know the situation, so you cannot properly evaluate why somebody is doing what they’re doing. Like, “Why is this part going on for so long?” If you have a particular groove and you’re riding on that groove, it might be cool, and it might work on that specific night, but it might not be something that you want to listen to at home, right? Because it’s something that happens right there on that spot. It’s a reaction to what’s going on. It’s not something that you are producing for listening. I think that’s something is hard to get across and it probably doesn’t translate so well.

I agreed to do the Trilogy Tapes release because I like the work of Will Bankhead, and because they said it would just be a limited cassette. I’m usually not much into the idea of limited editions, but in this case it worked for me because I don’t really want to have that many live recordings out there. I wouldn’t have agreed to put this up as a download somewhere. I have some other recordings of live sets that people want to put up and I shy away from that. I mean, you can see the reason, the promotion, stuff like that, but I’m just not… it’s a different thing. You know what I mean?

Right.

It’s not a finished recording. It’s not something where you can say, “Yeah, I worked on this. I added these details. It has a certain meaning; I put a lot of work into this.” It’s a recording of something that happened that night, and I think it’s better if it stays like that. If you were there and you don’t have a recording of it, then what you have is a vague memory, and that is really all you need. I think there is a certain beauty in vague memories. You don’t need all those recordings that we have of everything nowadays. I mean, who listens to all those recordings anyway? I wouldn’t. I have some recordings of my sets, but I never listen to them, just as I never really listen to my music once it is released, honestly. Do you know the live recording from Tokyo?

Yeah.

That’s one thing I agreed to do, but only under the condition that I could edit it together with the live recording that I did from the space. We recorded the floor sound at Module so you can hear the audience and you can hear the sound from the mixer. It’s mixed together, so it’s not just a recording from the floor. That wouldn’t sound so great, so the recording of the audience is mixed with the output from the mixer. This way you relate more to what is going on. You can understand certain situations.

So when you are in your studio producing tracks that will be put out, do you try to account for the different contexts in which people will listen to your records?

No, because I can’t. I have no control. I cannot control the context in which people will listen to them. Sometimes I might think about adding things that you wouldn’t necessarily hear depending on the situation. You might not hear some things on headphones that you would in the club. Background bits, like [makes rustling sound]. Maybe some silent voices somewhere that you wouldn’t hear unless you are listening to the track very loud. I remember I did this with one track where there was some muted spoken word parts in the background. It’s pretty much silent, just one or two parts, and then it gets a little louder. I like the idea of being in a club where a track like this is being played, and then suddenly you hear a soft voice coming from somewhere, but you’re not sure if it’s coming from the recording or if it’s somebody just talking behind you.

I have some recording devices that allow me to record different places. I also like the idea of putting recordings of a space into a track, but one that isn’t necessarily the type of space where you would listen to it, so you have sort of a clash. But I cannot control context. It’s not like I sit down and think, “OK, this is going to be something for home listening.” I don’t really do that. That’s not something I care much about, actually. I’m happy that people listen, but I don’t sit down and think, “I’m gonna make a real banging club track.” I have certain sounds and ideas and I want to see what I can do with them. Whatever I make should work as a track in itself. These sound recordings I was talking about have to tie in. It has to match somehow. It has to have a certain aesthetic that fits that track, even if it’s not necessarily focussed on a particular situation. The record that I did for Laid has this bit on it that’s taken from a live recording. That’s from a live set I was playing. You probably know it: there is this one loop at the beginning and at the end which is the sound of the audience taken from a live recording. Dor from Laid approached me during a live set in Berlin and asked me to release this track. It was one of the parts of my live set and the guys at Laid were like, “Can we have it?’” and so yeah, well why not? When I finished the track I wanted to keep the idea of the live set, so you still have this relationship of how it actually came about, you know?

That was a track that played with classic house tropes in a way that you never had before, and you haven’t since. Was that planned out?

I’m happy people see it that way, but I don’t think that it is like that. For me it’s not something that tries to be a big house track. But yes, it uses some classic sounds. It’s an interesting question. I wasn’t planning on making a proper house record, but I had the basics of the track in my live set and maybe I was thinking that it would fit well with the label and that gave me an idea. I knew where it was going to come out, so I wasn’t finishing it just because I wanted to finish it. It was based on the fact that they asked me to do it, and I think in that sense there was an influence of going in that direction, because I could have taken it in other ways as well. This was just one of the possibilities. I tried to integrate some details that are based on me playing live. Like, it’s not done on a computer, it’s not automated. I like to have these kinds of human elements in it where you can… well, you probably can’t hear it, but I know it’s there. [laughs]

And then I can say to myself, “This is something I did myself. I’ve been working on it and I made it sound like this, and not some plugin.” It’s not one of those randomizer plugins that does it either. No, I do it. There is some kind of… I don’t know, human agency or something. It’s handmade, or something. I like to have an element of that in what I do. A personal element. Maybe that’s a better way of putting it.

How did you get into electronic music in general, and house and techno specifically? Was there like some sort of big moment that made you think, “I want to make house records now,” or were there some records that you heard when you were younger that really inspired you?

Yeah, there were probably some records that inspired me. It definitely was working more through records, which is at a time when it wasn’t as easy to access music as it is now. I’m from a rural area, so there were some things happening around, but if you didn’t have access to go to those places or an incentive to go there, you wouldn’t go there, so I didn’t have any teenage club experience until I moved to a bigger city. In the beginning I had no relationship to house music, but I always had a soft spot for synthetic sounds. It’s something I realize more in retrospect. When I go back and look at music I used to like when I was younger, I notice that they all have these elements in them that I still like, or they have particular drum sounds, or synthesizers and stuff. You know, stuff that I didn’t consciously realize at the time because I didn’t know how they were made, but it’s something that you subconsciously soak up in a way, and then… I started to dig deeper into electronic music.

It was a very long learning process. I’ve been recording things for a long time. I started out doing field recordings, and I have some field recordings I did with a tape recorder when I was a kid, and when I was a teenager I experimented with recording all kinds of stuff in really primitive ways. Overdubs with cassettes and stuff like that. Then I started to collect all sorts of electronic devices for cheap or from yard sales. I didn’t know how to use them, or what their purpose was even or if they were any good. But I learned along the way by acquiring new technologies and sometimes making the wrong choices. It was a very physical thing, maybe because it was such a long time ago. There was, of course, software around at that time as well, and I tried to fiddle around with that as well, but I don’t know. It didn’t catch on to me. I was more of a hands-on person.

Anyway, there wasn’t one particular moment. There wasn’t one particular record where I listened to it and it changed my life. No, I just grew into it. I was more interested in leftfield stuff anyway — anything that had an experimental edge. Then I went back to listen to where that music came from. I just connected the dots from that to all the stuff I used to like from before. Somehow it all made sense in the end.

How did you first hook up with Mikrodisko and Workshop?

Well, Mikrodisko evolved from a crew. We did parties together in Leipzig, and we started to do underground techno parties. It was a collective called Homoelektrik. There was no money involved, we just covered the overhead for the soundsystem, or it would be a free event. No one ever got paid. It was very idealistic. If we had money left we would spend it on a big dinner for all the people who had helped set things up or who had played music. It was mainly locals and everybody did everything, if you played you would also help cleaning up. Sometimes we had guests from other cities, even people that were quite known, but they too would play for the transport money, without fees. It was a really cool time. And then some of us started doing the label.

For Workshop, I knew Lowtec because he had played at one of our parties. He had a partner, Even Tuell, who had another label that was connected to Airbag Craftworks. A friend of mine, Nadine, she knew him as well and played him some of my tracks and then he asked me to do a record for them. One of the tracks on the first record was supposed to come out on a compilation, but that never happened and then they started Workshop and I just happened to be there at the right time. That’s how it came together, it was all through knowing people. I didn’t send out demos or stuff like that, it was just connecting with friends.

Workshop 03 was pretty notable at the time for the fact that two tracks on the B-side were slow, and that’s become like a much bigger thing recently. What attracts you to those slower tempos?

It’s not something that I consciously do. I don’t have a slow agenda. A lot of the electronic stuff I first got into had hip-hop roots. I’ve always been into hip-hop, and if you look at the early Warp stuff, they also had downbeat type tracks that were slow but electronic, and that’s maybe the connection. I didn’t care if these tracks were supposed to work on the floor. I never had this intention of producing DJ tools, so I didn’t bother to produce at a DJ-friendly tempo because it wasn’t something that occurred to me. It doesn’t matter. I just wanted make music and not necessarily as something that would run a party.

Sometimes I just think there are a lot of tracks that sound much better when you play them slower. Some things are really funky when you play them really fast, but then there are some house and techno tracks that, if you play them slower, have more of a groove. I like slower tempos where you can still get the impression that it is fast. You know, all these people that run around and say, “Play it faster, play it louder, play it harder!” Why? The way it feels depends on how you do it. The live set I’m doing now is at 115 BPM. I never had people complain about that and I can still do stuff that is pretty… well, I wouldn’t say aggressive, but driving. It can be slow, but it can still be driving.

I made these tracks slow because I didn’t care so much about whether they would fit in a DJ set. But then again I’m also doing tracks where I don’t know how they’re supposed to be played. That’s one of the ideas of the last single I did for Mikrodisko. It has two different tracks and it’s anyone’s guess how fast they’re supposed to be played. One is really fast and one is really slow.. or maybe they’re both really slow, or I don’t know. You can decide for yourself. I know lots of records where people just wouldn’t know what tempo to play something at. Maybe people are losing this idea, or the notion that this is actually possible. It used to be that you can play a record at 33 or 45 and it could work both ways, and now you have digital files that are just one tempo. You can pitch shift it seamlessly with modern software, but you know, it’s not the same thing. I have friends who would play records that I liked to play at 45 at 33, and you would only know that it’s not the intended tempo if you had a CD to use as a reference. But it was OK. It’s good if you have a choice how to approach, experience and enjoy a piece of music, even if it’s a silly choice like how fast you play a record.

Well this happened to yourself. When Workshop 08 came out there were some pretty heated discussions about which speed to play the B1 at, and I heard it played out numerous times at both 33 and 45.

The original recording was slow. At the time when it came out, it didn’t occur to me that people would play it fast when it was pressed onto vinyl, and to be honest, I believe it’s only because of the sample I used that they do it. Now I’m more aware of these things and keep them in mind, but at the time I didn’t think about it, and then I stopped caring. Whatever people like, play it fast, play it slow, as long as you play it it’s OK. [laughs] Personally, I don’t like it so fast. I like it played slow. I think also it’s obvious because the last track is ridiculous when you play it at 45. Whatever. It’s good if people have a choice and it’s good if they make these choices, so I’m fine with that.

Why is there always a bearded or mustachioed man on your Workshop records?

They just started with the beards and then it became this running gag. There’s not really a concept behind it. I think we have to stop now, though. It would be silly to have somebody else with a beard after this. It’s three records with beards, sort of a trilogy I guess, but time to look for something else. It’s weird because sometimes people assume I have a beard. I’ve had this recently again, which is funny because it tells you a lot about the assumptions people have just based on some stamp on a record. It’s not a picture of me. The one on the eighth record is a British cricket player from the 19th century. We picked it up when we were in Manchester, so it’s a bit based on coincidence, and again, friendly ties to the meandyou crew from Manchester.

You’ve said that the name Kassem Mosse sort of affords you a bit of anonymity due to mispronunciations and misspellings.

Well it might, in theory. Obviously it doesn’t anymore, so that’s a bit of an issue. It’s interesting because you can still find people who misspell it, so it’s still working to a degree, but in a way you are fixed with that role and that specific spelling now that evolved out of different names and misspellings. Now I’m stuck with it.

The idea of monikers and misspellings of artist names has always been a thing in techno, but now it’s all conveniently located on Discogs. Do you think that takes away some important aspect of house and techno, or is it not really a big deal?

Well, to a certain degree. I mean, there are good reasons for obscuring your identity. The point with techno used to be that it doesn’t matter who did this because you’re trying to just let the music speak for itself, and so the name isn’t really important, or how you write it is not really important. You find it also in the idea of the collective: people involved in the scene should treat each other as equals, it’s not about treating someone as “the star” but rather as someone who happens to be also part of this. If you have different monikers, it gave you an opportunity to hide behind those names, to not be a big name, to remove those preconceptions and judgements. The mutation of the name had a lot to do with doing parties as I mentioned earlier: sometimes we would just make up new names for the next event, or not have any names on the flyer at all.

Coming back to Discogs, you now easily find those lists of all the different types of spellings of a name, which is a bit silly. I mean, who really cares? But in the end it’s something you cannot work against these days anymore. The Internet requires you to have one fixed and stable version of your name. You have to make a brand out of a name. I would prefer if it we could get back to the flexibility. How a name is written or how a name is pronounced is an example of how you typecast things. I mean, in the Internet it’s all written down, but you still you have a level of flexibility in how you pronounce the name because that’s something that people don’t really know when they see it. People interpret it in different ways. I don’t want to have some music nerd who says, “This is the right way to do it. This is the right spelling. This is the correct pronunciation. This is how it’s supposed to be done.” No, it doesn’t matter. As long as you like that music and you know who we’re talking about, it doesn’t matter at all. And the same is true for music: there is no right way, there is no “real” way of doing it.

Take languages. When you Latin-ize a name from other languages, you have all kinds of different spellings, in different languages, and there’s not a problem there. You still know what you are talking about, no matter how you write it. It’s difficult because obviously as a promoter you want to do everything right. Recognizability is also a market interest. If there’s a misspelling, well, I might appreciate it, but from a promoter’s point of view it would be an issue because people wouldn’t find it in their search engines and they couldn’t Google it if it’s misspelled, so you really take care to write it the right way. I think you can clearly see the effects of the Internet at play here. But electronic music it’s not all about the Internet. It’s about going to a party, about what you see, what you experience or what kind of experience you have when you listen to the music, what you feel, what it makes you feel like. That’s more important than just how something is written or how something is supposed to be. It’s a bit boring if everything is set in stone.

You did a podcast for LWE a couple of years ago with Mix Mup as Chilling the Do, and that was an ode to the basically now-extinct chill room. You haven’t really released much of that stuff on record; any reason?

The reason is more that we are still working on putting out a record, to be honest. [laughs] We are working together on another project now that is somewhere in the middle ground between both of us making dance oriented stuff, but not necessarily just for dancing. It will surface soon on Will Bankhead’s label. We’ve also been working on material to release that is more chill stuff, but we simply haven’t finished it. We’ve been doing some remixes together recently and we’ve got some more coming up, so you know, it’s evolving in different ways. We are not really in a hurry because these chill rooms are gone. [laughs] We put it out and it doesn’t make a difference.

The chill room is, to a certain degree, extinct. This also means that there is not a big demand for that type of music. While you have lots of music that is mainly for listening now, with all the retro 80′s synth stuff out there, you are still limited in terms of where to perform it and what type of scene tends to get into it. I mean, techno and house labels are not exactly pushing you to press music on vinyl without a beat in it. A lot of this is happening in an art/experimental context, but that is not necessarily the context we want. Maybe I don’t really want to release this material at all, because I just like to keep these tracks to myself or use them for something else. I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I don’t know if it connects to the fact that these spaces don’t exist. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. It’s a difficult genre.

Have you guys been able to do the Chilling the Do stuff live at all? Despite the chill room’s extinction.

We have certain situations where we can do it, and we do it once in a while, but it’s obviously difficult because the demand in a club is for stuff that makes you move. In Berlin, even in the afternoon people aren’t open to listen to stuff that doesn’t have a beat in it, so it’s a difficult situation. You can do it in an art setting, you can do it in a bar, but we want to do this in in clubs. Not on the main floor, maybe. But on the second. At the opening of a party it might work. We do it sometimes for friends who are into it, but it’s not something that bookers are after. It’s such a strange format. It’s difficult because somehow people have to be able to actually listen. They have to sit back and tune into what we are doing, even if they don’t do it consciously. You really need the right situation and the right space to make it work.

How do you decide what tracks go on what label? Do you just send off a couple of tracks and let label heads choose what they want? Or do you plan releases for labels in advance?

Sometimes I have a particular idea for a single release and do certain tracks for certain labels. Sometimes it’s a selection of different tracks that are lying around; I’ll listen to stuff with label heads and they’ll tell me what they like. My problem is that there are a lot of tracks that I like, but I’m not the best judge; sometimes it’s better if someone from the outside helps you evaluate. It can be weird because sometimes you’ll end up with tracks from different periods on the same release. The material for Nonplus I did exclusively for them, intentionally. These are not tracks I would send to anybody else. It’s different from other stuff I release, obviously. Like I said before, with Laid they wanted that one track from the live set, so it was a very particular thing. I don’t want to branch out that far, so I limit myself and I’ve learned to say no to offers because I don’t want be on too many labels, especially not too many similar labels. Still, if I get an offer that is interesting, or gives me an opportunity to move in a new direction, I might do it. For now I’m sticking with Mikrodisko and Workshop. I like to have some focus. I just sent some more stuff to Nonplus, so there’s another EP coming out there as well. Some people who appreciate one type of record I did don’t necessarily appreciate others, but that’s just what I do. I don’t just want to stick to one genre; I don’t think I fit in just one box, to be honest.

You’ve recently stepped up your remix output, having done none before 2010. How do you approach the remixing process?

Well, it depends. It’s different. Usually, it depends on the freedom people give you to work with the material. Actually, I want to cut back on it a little bit. I still have some coming out, but I’m going to take a step away from remixing a bit because… I started doing it because I’ve never done it before, and I wanted to try it out. I was wondering what it would be like to work with material somebody else sends you. What can you do with it? It seemed like an interesting idea, trying to make something out of someone else’s material. I did some completely blindfolded, and that didn’t really work. I did one where I didn’t listen to the original at all and just took the parts and focused on the sounds. Sometimes you get stem files and sometimes you get just sounds. In the end It was so far from the original I could understand why they weren’t so happy about it, so I did another version, but in general I realized I don’t like this process that much.

Basically, if I can have more or less free reign, then that’s good for me. I don’t like when it gets to the point where people are arguing with you. It’s like you are a contract laborer or something. You are supposed to deliver something, and they have a particular idea of what it should be and you are supposed to do it that way. I understand that point, but I don’t really want to do that, so now if people are not really open to just let me do what I want to do, then I’m not going to do it. After doing a bunch of remixes I’ve come to realize that it’s not something that I want to do that much anymore. But I’m OK with the ones I’ve done. This experience is one of the reasons why I started to work with Mix Mup on remixes recently, because I thought it help to have some other input. Like, now there are three people working on it. You have the original producer, and you have us guys, and it makes it even more interesting.

You’ve started a label called Ominira. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Why cassettes?

Why cassettes? The simple reason is that a friend of mine manufactures them, so it’s easy to do. Also, I like that cassettes are so redundant and useless to the techno and house scene. We used to have them as mixtapes for the car, but now that’s rare. Other than that, it’s an odd format, but at least it’s a format, not even an uncommon one in other parts of the world: cassettes are a nice anachronism. And they are not easily accessible. I like that. If you want to listen to it you have to make an effort, you need to have a cassette deck, you can’t just download them and forget about them. I don’t mind if only a few people are making that effort and listen to that music. I want to have liberty to just put out whatever I please, whatever I think is good. You can put out anything on cassette; it doesn’t have to conform to anything. It won’t be all cassettes, though. We have some CD-Rs and vinyl planned as well. There is one 12″ coming out that will be a bit more dancefloor oriented. It will have a track from me on it, one from Kowton and one from Juniper.

It’s an open process. It’s about trying out different things and having a bit more control. If you work with other labels then you always give up control, and that’s cool because somebody else takes the risk. Somebody else has to care about all of the annoying business, but you also give away a certain amount of control. Ominira allows me to do whatever I want. There is no concept other than that the label is not about authenticity, not about realness. Because personally I’m so bored with the notion of authenticity and realness in electronic music. Please, leave that to rock. As far as Ominira is concerned, we just make it up as we go along.

You live in Leipzig, which is close enough to Berlin to go in an out as you please, but still removed. Would you ever move to Berlin, or do you like being outside of the scene for the most part?

Obviously I could move there if I wanted to, but I don’t have any incentive to do so. I like to do my own thing. If you are in Berlin you constantly run into so many people, you meet so many people, which is great but not what I want. I don’t want to be too accessible or work with too many people and take too much influence from a scene. I try to stay away from scenes. I mean, I’ve been involved obviously in this party crew and everything, but even then that crew was quite different from what was going on around town. I like to take a step back and just do what I think is good, not necessarily wind up in a scene and then work on a certain sound or certain aesthetic. I want it to be my aesthetic, not the aesthetic of a particular group or club, so I consciously stay away from it. At this point, it might not even make a difference, because with this attitude I could probably go to Berlin and still not be influenced by it. But I have a good life in Leipzig. It’s easy. It’s chill, so I just kick back. I really don’t have any reason to go there. I’m not really an open person. I don’t approach people to become involved in projects. I don’t pursue people. Just like I didn’t send out demos, or didn’t run after guys like, “Hey, listen to this stuff;” I just don’t do that. So if there is anything going on in Berlin I can go there, but usually if I go to Berlin I will stick with people I know.