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Philipp: Patrick was born on the 21st of May in `70, and me, I was born on the 16th of December in the same year. Patrick was born in Zurich and I was in a town called Saarbrücken, which is close to the French border, kind of near Frankfurt. Patrick moved from Frankfurt to Saarbrücken when he was about 10, we met at 15 and then we went our separate ways for university.
Family
Philipp: Patrick`s father listened to a bit of jazz but he didn`t really have a musical family.... Read more
Philipp: Patrick was born on the 21st of May in `70, and me, I was born on the 16th of December in the same year. Patrick was born in Zurich and I was in a town called Saarbrücken, which is close to the French border, kind of near Frankfurt. Patrick moved from Frankfurt to Saarbrücken when he was about 10, we met at 15 and then we went our separate ways for university.
Family
Philipp: Patrick`s father listened to a bit of jazz but he didn`t really have a musical family. Patrick`s father used to run an insurance company and his mother was a schoolteacher. And was my family musical? Actually no, not at all. It would be nice but it`s not like that. My father was a truck dealer – not drugs, trucks! (laughs) My mother ran a boutique for expensive clothes for little kids, which was nice when we were growing up. Basically because my parents were never there, I had older brothers and cousins looking after me. I was hooked on records; I maybe started out with AC/DC when I was 7ish, 8. Patrick started to listen to jazz and that, his parents had a really large record collection but he wasn`t allowed to touch the records for good reason - we would always scratch them! My older brothers listened to a lot of hard rock, when I was really young it was like Queen and AC/DC, then my musical taste at 14-15 was Tears For Fears, The Cure, a lot of dark electronic stuff. I was really hooked to early pop electronic bands, and a lot of well, I can`t call it gothic but it was dark. Patrick was into Janis Joplin, a lot of rock. We met at 15 and I was more into electronic stuff and Patrick was more into rock. As for us meeting, we`re never really sure if it was in a swimming pool on a diving board or if it was in a tennis court. The only thing we did when we were young was sports all day. And then we`d hang out and everyone would tape music for eachother, we`d make nice little music tapes and stuff.
MUSICAL ROOTS
Philip: I played just a little bit of drums and a little bit of keyboards. I had big keyboards and I used to go to school but at some point it was getting too strict. When I didn`t do my homework, the teacher would throw me out of class – homework wasn`t really my thing. I was just doing drums for fun, never in a band or anything. I knew a guy from school and he would teach me bits and pieces; it would be ridiculous if I called myself a drummer. Patrick never played with any instruments, he just played with himself. (laughs)
FIRST PROJECTS
Philip: My first full-on clubbing experience was in `89 and at the time I had older friends, they had these Chicago tapes and were into the whole acid house sound. I was totally hooked from the beginning. We used to start driving to Frankfurt all the time around `90, `91 to hear this new music, but then there were also a few people DJing in my hometown so I went out there too. So around `89-91 was not the beginning of our career, but it`s when we first got hooked to purely electronic stuff. I moved to Switzerland to study hotel and tourism and Patrick went to Frankfurt to study economics. That`s kind of around the time when techno records started being sold everywhere so we always bought records. We would meet up – I drove to Frankfurt quite a bit and he came to Switzerland – and we would play records to friends and afterparties with no pitch turntables. So it sounds like I`m a grandpa when I listen to myself, like `Yeah, you know, back in my day ` We never wanted to be DJs, never ever, we were just so completely hooked. I DJ`d a little bit in Switzerland and Geneva but I don`t know who booked me – they must`ve been crazy – at the time, I was awful! My first gig was playing to 800 people and I couldn`t even mix, and I was totally on acid, which was a strange start but still, it was just a fun thing, it was never meant to be a career by any means. In `95 I moved back to Frankfurt so we were reunited again, and because no one wanted to book us, we started our own nights. We worked with very underground artists that had the same spirit at the time; they were much older but they liked our energy and what we wanted to do. We used to have performances at the beginning of our parties, really wild art performances, just to break the ice. We had a lot of our parties at art galleries, one of the most famous underground galleries offered for us to do parties there. Of course we never made any money but to this day, for us these were the best parties we ever did or ever played – I can`t imagine we were good DJs but the energy Our guests were very unknown at the time but are quite famous now – Ata from Playhouse, Ricardo (Villalobos) - it was all good friends for no money. Normally we had two rooms, one would be the chill-out room, it was really calm and easy music. For this one party we rented this really nice underground club – we went to the woods and cut down 50 young trees and put them in our chill-out room to make it like a jungle. We put green lights behind it and we made a little beer garden inside the room. We were the only guys there to clean it up in the morning; you can imagine how fun that was! It was crazy. We wanted to present something different. At the time, I don`t think very many people did it with such love, we were never doing it to make money. But then some of our parties we would get over 1,000 people. We never used any ads for the parties; we didn`t have any money at the time, so we went out 3 or 4 weeks every night and would invite every person personally – we would make a tour of every bar, every club extending invites. We never put flyers up or left them anywhere; we just gave them out personally to people. Sometimes we used galleries a couple times but generally we`d use different venues all the time.
LABELS & PRODUCTION
Philip: We started production with our friends Arno and Walter from Booka Shade under a name I don`t even want to mention, it was some horrible music! (laughs) Hey, you have to start somewhere. It was always considered a hobby. I started to work for Snap, the band Snap - “The Power” - remember that? I was working for their label, Logic Records. Patrick was working as a painter at the time, and sold his paintings to rich people, like doctors and lawyers. So he made quite a lot of money but he spent it all very easily of course. Then I moved to Cologne to work for Jive Records, and Patrick was working in the internet as a project manager at the time. He wasn`t happy but it was just to try it the normal way, I think. Between `98 and 2000 we didn`t do any more music productions but because I was working in the music industry, I signed some of Arno and Walter`s work. We were always in contact and then in 2000-2001 we got to know DJ T. Because I was living in Cologne, there was some fashion show like Bread And Butter where Patrick and I were playing. DJ T heard us with Patrick from Monza and they liked it so they invited us to be residents at the Monza club in Frankfurt, and that`s how it all really started in 2001. At the time the residents were like Tobi Neumann, Ricardo, Steve Bug, us, and then a couple of guys from Frankfurt. So I think every 6-8 weeks we`d play. T became our good friend very quickly, we loved each other from the very first second, and one day we sat down and the idea of starting a label came up. DJ T used to be the editor of Groove Magazine so he had excellent contacts, and Arno and Walter had a big studio, I had the music industry contacts and background and Patrick had the creative head – there`s a lot of luck if you meet all the right people at the right time. We started off with 3-4,000 Euros that DJ T borrowed for us at the time and everybody still had full-time jobs, none of us thought to quit our jobs, we just thought it should be a hobby. Then the first single, which was `Put Put Put,` sold totally allright so we just continued. Booka Shade didn`t want to do anything under their name for the first half year and then just tried it. It was all very carefully thought out but there was never any pressure. One of our records, the title was `Tonite,` was picked by Pete Tong as the Essential tune of the week three times and then it kicked off. At the time, it wasn`t so often that German stuff would be picked up by the UK. Get Physical was just a hobby, but we ended up putting all of our free time and all of this energy into the label, and the success just kind of happened. It sounds so old and stupid, but it`s really hard work – you`re constantly thinking creatively, trying to find solutions, breaking each other`s balls, going back to the studio again and again and again for the same remix for no money But it worked out well, because everybody was so dedicated – and everybody is still to this day. To run a company with 6 people, especially with us, for five years – I really can`t believe it!
DJING
Philipp: Our first gig in London was at the Key, Mark Meyer from Amato was the first person to book us in the UK. They were really happy with the party. Luckily, we`ve always had really good gigs in London, the vibe in England really just clicked for some reason. We always like to play in London because people are really interested and sharing the same love. It was always a really good energy from day one, but it started really slowly. Then we started doing bigger remixes for Royksopp, Sugababes, Joakim and it kind of took off from there. There wasn`t really a point where it took off in one second; it was always one step after the other. We did our first compilation, the `Body Language` compilation, and that was great for us.
THE FUTURE
Philipp: In January, I`m playing in New Zealand and Patrick`s playing in Australia and then we`re going to meet up in New Zealand and go hiking, horseback riding, only really chilled out stuff. In February we want to book a house in the north of England or Canada and go in the studio with Lopazz and try to work the album, get started. We started our album about a hundred times but when you have gigs in between well, it`s not very inspiring when you come home and you`re completely dead; you go into the studio and you don`t have very much to say, really. So this time we decided to really concentrate and focus – no bookings, no travelling, just music. We always used to work with Walter but now Walter is so tied up with his career and that. We`ve worked with Lopazz for two years already on his album, he`s got so much old gear and he uses a completely different approach so we`re not really sure how it`s going to turn out. But we think it`ll be good.[/size]
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