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BORN
I was born in Nuremburg, a very small city between Hanover and Bremen, in 1969. At the age of four, we moved to Kamp-Lintfort, another small west German city close to the Dutch border. Shortly after, my parents split up and my mother and I moved back to Bremen, where I actually grew up.
FAMILY
My mother, back then an employee at a bank, wasn`t really into music. She was listening to all the usual stuff like everyone else but I do recall her liking... Read moreBORN
I was born in Nuremburg, a very small city between Hanover and Bremen, in 1969. At the age of four, we moved to Kamp-Lintfort, another small west German city close to the Dutch border. Shortly after, my parents split up and my mother and I moved back to Bremen, where I actually grew up.
FAMILY
My mother, back then an employee at a bank, wasn`t really into music. She was listening to all the usual stuff like everyone else but I do recall her liking Supertramp. Music wasn`t massively present during my childhood but somehow I remember that I was into music at a very early age. I was making cardboard guitars imitating Gene Simmons from Kiss. Retrospectively, I think I thought about music alot more and with more intensity than alot of my peers.
MUSICAL ROOTS
In school I was always forced to play percussion – my teachers wouldn`t let me do anything else. They wouldn`t give me the flute or any other instrument – I didn`t even get the full kit – just the drum sticks and maybe a triangle! Obviously, I hadn`t made much of a talented impression back then. I guess the late 70`s funk sound and the whole 80`s nu romatic scene were my first musical inspirations. I liked Depeche Mode but I was actually more into Simple Minds. I really loved Prince and the first two Michael Jackson albums, produced by Quincey Jones. Pop music was alot more funk-based at that time. I still think Thriller is a great album. I was also listening to the Cure, which isn`t strictly electronic, but who didn`t love The Cure back then?
The first sounds that seemed so different to everything else I knew on TV and radio was the wildstyle breakdance sound. For me, it`s always been about “good music and bad music”. I never really cared or care about the style – style isn`t relevant. When breakdance hit the streets, I thought “Wow! This is really different.” Although breakdance became commercial later, in the beginning it was street music. I think that was the first electronic music type I really liked, but I wasn`t allowed into clubs because I was underage. Later, when breakdance was already “out”, pop music including all the cheesy hits was what I has to put up with, as Bremen didn`t offer an underground alternative club at the time. There was a lot of crappy music but I was hungry for music and the dancefloor was my second home so I took what I could get.
Around `87-`88, I went to Front in Hamburg with a few friends.. I had heard about this club and “house music” from so many people and started visiting more and more record shops and buying every house record I could find. I bought a compilation called “House Sound of Chicago” and realized what all the fuss was about. I stayed on the dancefoor all night on my first visit. It was the first time I`d heard someone mixing house tracks throughout the entire night without any breaks. I was hooked from then on – I kept on buying records and was driving all over the place, especially to Hamburg at least every other weekend. I didn`t really have the money to buy turntables, I had a normal one but I knew I needed one with pitch control, so I bought the cheapest one I could find for 119 Deutsch Marks. It wasn`t a Technics, just a normal turntable with a little wheel to adjust the pitch. It was a pain to pitch because the knob was was so sensitive. I had to help the record tempo with my fingers so I could mix perfectly, but I guess starting out on a crappy turntable ended up helping my mixing skills.
FIRST PROJECTS
I never really thought of playing in clubs. I was only really recording tapes for myself, and I enjoyed being on the dancefloor and listening to DJs playing. After 3 or 4 years, friends were telling me I should start spinning myself. Soon after, I ended up spinning records for others at a small house party, playing on proper turntables which where a pain to use, because I was so used to mine.
In 1991 a friend and I went to Ibiza for three months. We had spent all year working to make money for the trip. We were trying to figure out how to get a job there and ended up going out every single night and spending all our savings. I met some amazing people at that time; some of my best friends – Toby Izui from from Japan who was there every year for quite a while after, and some people from Munich that I am still in touch with. Actually it`s funny that I met so many people there that are still a part of my life. Something changed that summer; it was the first time I`d had three months off and I was meeting a lot of new people and was inspired and influenced by so many things at the same time. At some point, we gave up the thought of finding a job in the party island and decided to come back to Germany and start our own parties. Both of us had been bartending in a club in Bremen so we asked the management for a monthly Friday night party at the bar. We did a lot of corky theme parties like Heaven and Hell and nights where everyone dressed up as kids! I think our first night was called “Rome is Burning” and we had all the staff dressed in togas. LOL. In Germany we have a saying that when you party late, “you party until the doctor comes”. So we threw a party where we had everyone dressed as doctors and nurses, with sex dolls and everything. It was great fun at the time. So that`s where I started DJing, at Maxx in Bremen. We didn`t throw that many parties, maybe only 6 or so. We started a Sunday night at the front of the club to play some Lounge and house music and soon after the club asked me to do the regular Friday night slot. I invited people from Hamburg and was also invited to spin at their parties in Hamburg as well so the connection grew even stronger.
At first it was just about throwing parties, having some fun and trying share the music I loved with the dancefloor. Bremen was not what you call exciting. We were really the first ones to introduce quality dance music, with other local DJs. Acid Jazz and R&B were popular but we were the first to stick to house music consequently. Some others were trying different nights, with an occasional “house” theme but never really stayed with one theme.
It was in 1991 that we started a regular house night. Slowly and gradually, I started investing more and more time in my hobby and at some point gave up my job as a hair stylist. The owner of the club we were working with changed, the new management was trying to do too many things we weren`t happy with and even though they doubled our budget, we decided to pass and stopped doing the parties. I was toying with thoughts of moving to Berlin back then but decided to accept a job offer from Tobias, my now business partner at Poker Flat, Audiomatique and Dessous. I started an office job at Superstition Recordings in Hamburg and indulged in the world of Artist Bookings.
LABELS & PRODUCTION
I had already been working on some tracks with different people in 1992. I did a couple of 12”`s with Gerrit (Humate) and another one with my friend Henry Stamerjohann, who has recently (and finally!) released a track on Dessous. I decided to buy some equipment with a bank loan and set up my own studio slowly and worked on music by myself. After 4-6 months of working at the Superstition office I decided to quit to concentrate on producing. The first few productions set my course - Tobias really liked the them and wanted to release them. I was a bit unsure as, like the mixtapes from years ago, they were more for me, not to impress others. But he was insistent on releasing the tracks and finally released the tracks on Superstition. It was a daring step for him as Superstition was known as a techno label with a touch of trance. My stuff was more minimal, with a Chicago, Detroit touch It wasn`t really well produced because I didn`t know that much about producing but I didn`t want to fit in with the mainstream so I was doing my thing, wanting to stay interesting for myself mostly. Rising High was interested in my work, they decided to re-issue some of the tracks so I did a few more mixes for them. So my first ever releases were licensed by Rising High – which was one of my favourite labels at the time.
I had a kick start, but it didn`t really help my career. Not that many people were interested or noticed that anything was happening besides hard techno / trance. I did a couple of more tracks for Superstition and a few parties but the rest of the label was moving in a different direction than I was. Not feeling comfortable with being part of a collective that had nothing to do with me and the music I was into, we decided to form a new label and forum for other artists who shared my musical taste and to give them a platform to express themselves also. I had been thinking about doing this on my own but he suggested we do it together, as I didn`t have the expertise and experience of running a label. We founded Raw Elements which was distributed through EFA for three years. Raw Elements was considered experimental music back then.
After three years, I knew something had to change as things weren`t really going anywhere. A friend of mine, Vincenzo (who had released on Raw Elements before) was coming back from New York after studio session with Alexi Delano. I really wanted to put their tracks out, but they were more disco-influenced and didn`t really fit on Raw Elements, which was home to more of a Chicago house sound. So I started Dessous, a label that I ran on my own until our ninth release. We rethought Raw Elements and decided to start all over again with a new fresh concept. That`s how Poker Flat was born, with `Loverboy` as our first release.
The plan we had with Dessous took off. The first release sold a lot better than Raw Elements. Then we moved Poker Flat to the same distribution and were happy with the results from the very first release. After 8 releases I figured it was too much work to do on my own, alongside DJing. When you start a label, the first few release is a walk in the park - you release the records, pay the artists and that`s it. When you have to deal with back catalogue too there`s no room in my life for anything else. So Tobias stepped in and became my partner with Dessous as well.
Back then and for years to go, in Germany (and of course worldwide) everyone was still into trance and hard techno was getting bigger and bigger. The music I was producing or playing at that time was far from popular, 2nd floor material. People were already calling it minimal house / techno though I never really thought it was minimal.
DJING
I have a great time DJing and love what I do. My agent, Goli (Geist) who I`ve been working with for the past 6 years, really knows how to screen gigs. I can rely on her judgement on what to skip and which new experiments to definitely try out. I never play anywhere I feel displaced, which is brilliant. Agents that don`t really care about much besides the money aspect, can really burn you out. I think it`s really important to have someone on your side that screens the offers and makes sure every gig – tiny or big- makes sense for both the artist and the crowd /club.
FABRIC
Before I ever played at Fabric, I had heard a lot about the club I remember my first slot ever was from 10 until 12.30. I remember wondering what the gig was going to be like at that time of the evening. At half past 10, there were already quite a few people in the club and a lot of them had already headed for the dancefloor, something I didn`t expect. Sometimes it`s best to do the first set because you can start from scratch and you can build up. I had played quite a few gigs in the UK before but playing at Fabric really helped to build up my profile in the UK. Not only that, I think Fabric has really showed the UK press (back then severely anti –German) that a lot of good music was actually coming out of German studios. Fabric was the first to bring a lot of German DJs over to the UK and opened London`s and consequently the UK`s eyes and ears to what was happening in Germany. Noone back then was paying ANY attention to German producers. Our own press hardly noticed us. Lol.
At Fabric, especially in Room 1, you can`t really see anything but silhouettes because it`s so dark, but you can definitely feel the vibe as you`re so close to the crowd. You can hear the noises from the dancefloor as well. It`s so easy to work in the booth because of the professional set up the club has which is unique and one of the best I have experienced anywhere in the world. Fabric is great because you can concentrate on what you`re doing fully without any distraction – a DJ`s heaven. You can experiment there as well – you can play deeper or move into harder techno if you want to and people go with the flow. The sound quality is so intense, once you hit the dancefloor it`s hard to leave!
THE FUTURE
I did some tracks with Clé from the Märtini Brös which are being released on Poker Flat. We`ve signed some really nice stuff from Oliver Ho`s Raudive project for Poker Flat as well, which I`ve done a remix for. I`m still hoping one day I`ll get my album together. I started 3 years ago and even though I have some tracks I really like there`s still not enough for an album. It`s so hard to take time off - when you know you`re going to be in a great club in a great city, with great people there are so much possibilities and so many people you would like to reach and share music with it`s difficult to say no and to take 4 months off. I only have 4 days at home at a time max, so for now I`ll concentrate on a few 12”s and keep my fingers crossed for an album release somewhere in 2008![/size] Show less
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