My first time in Tbilisi, and I was really impressed. The people I met were wonderful, strong and proud, the food was incredible and the club was incredible too. It was built with Berghain and Panoramabar in mind, but for me it was on par. The party was so intense and sweaty that I did not go to the toilet once in all those hours, even though I got handed drinks all the time.
April 1996. Seit seinem Eröffnungs-Wochenende vor einem Jahr bin ich Resident-DJ in einem Kieler Club namens Tanzdiele. Ab und zu lege ich mittwochs auf wonach mir gerade der Sinn steht, oder donnerstags Soul, gelegentlich springe ich auch freitags ein, wiederum Soul und Disco. Musik, mit der ich in den mittleren 80ern als DJ angefangen habe. Hauptsächlich bin ich aber für den Samstag zuständig. Dann spiele ich in erster Linie House und Techno, gerne mit Ausflügen in deren Vorgeschichte. Resident-DJ heißt die ganze Nacht auflegen, allein. Unter der Woche von 22 Uhr bis 3, am Wochenende von 22 Uhr bis 5. Eigentlich gibt es eine Sperrstunde, aber das sieht man in der Stadt nicht so eng. Es dauert also oft auch wesentlich länger. Ich spiele jeden Samstag, und manchmal an den anderen Tagen noch dazu. Das macht es mit dem Studium etwas schwierig, aber noch kriege ich es hin.
Der Club war schon vor sehr langer Zeit ein Club, dann ein Billard-Salon mit Spielautomaten, dann eine Cocktail-Bar. Es hängen zwei wuchtige JBL-Boxen über der Tanzfläche, mein Arbeitsbereich ist daran angrenzend in den Tresen integriert, der sich ungefähr durch die Hälfte des Ladens schlängelt. Ich verfüge über zwei MKs und einen etwas überdimensionierten Ecler-Mixer. Es gibt keine Monitor-Boxen, ich mixe halb über die Tanzfläche, halb über Kopfhörer. Der Club fasst ca. 100 Leute und es gibt jede Nacht Programm. Der Freitag läuft gut, deswegen muss man Samstag zeitig kommen um erst einmal wieder aufzuklaren, da die Ausrüstung in Zeitraffer altert, die Instandhaltung hingegen in Zeitlupe. Ich habe ein paar hundert Platten hinten im Büro deponiert, um weniger heranschleppen zu müssen, bringe aber trotzdem immer zu viel mit. Es gibt Slipmats und Kopfhörer, aber die taugen nichts, bringe ich auch mit. Ich wohne nicht weit weg, aber weit genug, ziehe aber trotzdem alles mit einer Sackkarre aus dem Baumarkt und einem viel zu schweren Alu-Flightcase hierher. Zurück nehme ich dann manchmal ein Taxi, je nach Erschöpfungszustand.
Meine Gage bewegt sich etwas undurchsichtig zwischen Eintritt, Umsatzbeteiligung und Getränkeumsatz und ist ziemlich elastisch. Der Eintritt liegt bei 5 Mark, das finden viele Gäste ziemlich übertrieben. Mein Rekord liegt bei 400 Mark für eine Nacht, aber da war es auch wirklich voll und ging sehr lange, ansonsten eher 100 bis 200 Mark, manchmal auch weniger. Das Publikum ist etwas unzuverlässig. Meistens ist es gut bis sehr gut gefüllt und man sieht vertraute Gesichter, die jeden Samstag wiederkommen, weil ihnen die Musik gut gefällt, und weil es gut bis sehr gut gefüllt ist. Zur Zeit gibt es keinen Club mehr in der Stadt, der bewusst eine Nacht einem Musikstil widmet, und das mit amtlicher Auswahl. Dieses Missverhältnis hilft, aber oft reicht auch eine private Veranstaltung, auf die sich alle einigen können, und das Publikum und die Gage dezimiert sich erheblich. Es gibt auch keine richtige örtliche Szene für die Musik. So ungefähr 20 Leute in der Stadt kennen genauer, was man auflegt, dem Rest gefällt es einfach, und man tanzt gerne dazu. Die Angst, alles könnte nächsten Monat wieder vorbei sein, verübt daher stetigen Druck.
Das Publikum setzt sich aus Studenten und Individualisten zusammen, letztere zum Teil noch nicht so lange nachts unterwegs, viele aber auch schon wesentlich länger. Der Zulauf von Leuten aus den anderen etablierten Clubs der Stadt und den Touristen von den Fähren ist übersichtlich, wird aber toleriert. Das Verhältnis auf der Tanzfläche männlich/weiblich ist ungefähr 50/50, beim DJ- und Tresenpersonal ungefähr 30/70. Die Schwulen in der Stadt gehen mehrheitlich auf schwule Veranstaltungen, Afrikaner kommen meistens sonntags zum Reggae, Türken und Araber meistens wenn Hip Hop läuft. Es werden viel Alkohol und Drogen konsumiert und manchmal gibt es Ärger, aber nicht zu oft. Sobald es draußen wärmer wird, halten sich viele Leute auch vor der Eingangstür auf, oder beim Döner-Imbiss gegenüber, aber in der Gegend ist nachts eh viel los, und Nachbarn, Ordnungsamt und Polizei lassen uns weitestgehend in Ruhe. Noch.
Die Flyer für meine Veranstaltungen fertige ich mit Fotos aus Büchern und Zeitschriften im Copy-Shop an, ökonomisch schwarzweiß. Montags mache ich mit dem Fahrrad eine Runde durch die wenigen Plattenläden der Stadt und verteile sie dort. Ein paar großformatige Exemplare hänge ich dort auf, wo schon seit Jahren die Leute nachts vorbeiziehen. Meine Platten kaufe ich, wenn es das Monatsbudget erlaubt, bei Wochenendausflügen in Hamburg, oder telefonisch bei Hard Wax in Berlin. Den Rest des Bedarfs versuche ich mühsam in den lokalen Shops zu decken. Das mit dem Internet gehe ich vielleicht später im Jahr noch an, aber noch beziehe ich alle Informationen über Musik über den Besuch anderer Partys, Bücher und Zeitschriften, Radio oder Tipps von Freunden.
Februar 2017 bin ich seit 14 Jahren in Berlin, und immer noch DJ. Ich schreibe selber über Musik, ich betreibe ein Label mit, und ich arbeite bei Hard Wax. In den Jahren dazwischen hat sich so ziemlich alles verändert, was meine Tätigkeiten ausmacht.
Aber erzählt mir bitte nicht, dass früher alles besser war. Es war bloß anders.
A charity night at Berghain, raising money against the anti-gay laws in Russia. The place was sold out and I played as aprt of a Hard Wax staff contingent. Of course recordings are not allowed there, but I decided to play a set of gay music and it went down a storm. I am particularly happy that I could make Being Boring work on the Berghain floor. So I re-recorded it the next day exactly how I played it.
Auto-Repeat – Auto Disco Sylvester – You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) Banji Boys – Love Thang Rageous Projecting Franklin Fuentes – Tyler Moore Mary Junior Vasquez – Get Your Hands Off My Man Junior Rafael – 4 All Da Men In My Life Jamie Principle – Cold World Ryuichi Sakamoto – Love And Hate The Children – Freedom Aaron-Carl – Hateful Long Fellow – This Is Penis 2 Body’s – French Kiss Jimmy Somerville – Comment Te Dire Adieu I.M.T. – The Devil Made Me Buy… DJ Sprinkles – Glorimar’s Whore House Outrage – Tall ‘N’ Handsome Pet Shop Boys – Being Boring Hercules And Love Affair – Blind The Ones – Flawless Carl Bean – I Was Born This Way Patrick Cowley & Jorge Socarras – Burn Brighter Flame
Right, we’re going to set it off with “Set It Off”. Basically with “Set It Off”, growing up in New York in the 70’s and 80’s, I grew up with my parents and my brother – my brother being a DJ since 1980, and there were a lot of musical roots in my household. I was always around music. Mostly disco and electro, stuff like that. Growing up with my parents in the 70’s, they were really big on disco and I was hearing everything from “Ten Percent” by Double Exposure to so many underground disco records, like from 76, Jimmy and the Vagabonds, or Crown Heights Affair. Old school disco. I always had roots in the family. My father also had a pretty big rock collection from the late 60’s – Sabbath, Zeppelin, psychedelic rock. That was played probably when I was really younger, but 74/75 my parents were already getting into disco at that time. The roots of the music were always there with me and I would buy records on the occasion. I remember buying Fatback Band’s “King Tim III” which was pretty much the first rap record, Michael Jackson – “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”, “Let’s All Chant”, stuff like that. I was like 7 or 8 years old buying this stuff but I was never really into DJing at this time. My brother was the DJ. He was the one buying the records and DJing. He knew what was going on musically. I would say when I really first started to pay attention to music a lot, but I still was not a DJing, was around 83/84, and I was around 12 years old at the time and I was getting into graffiti which I was actually documenting on subway trains by photographs. I was travelling from Brooklyn to the Bronx. I was going everywhere with a camera – all four boroughs that had a subway system. The records at that time were a lot of electro stuff that was being played. A lot of freestyle like C-Bank’s “One More Shot” or “Al-Naafiysh” by Hashim. I still didn’t really know who the artists were and stuff like that, but I knew the records and heard them all the time on the radio. Around 84 I went to a break dancing club at a roller skating rink to watch a bunch of people battling, and I heard “Set It Off” for the first time. I don’t know what it was with that record but it fit all the movies I liked at that time: New York movies like The Warriors, Death Wish. It was just this dark record that was kind of like the soundtrack of New York City at the time, when New York City was just like in urban decay. On my way somewhere with my parents you would see all these abandoned building like in Berlin in 1945 in certain areas. Then taking the train to the South Bronx and seeing that…I have such a vivid memory of being on the Pelham subway line going to see one of the most famous Graffiti writers in New York called Seen, who was in the documentary Style Wars, and I befriended him when I was probably like 13. He used to airbrush t-shirts in a flea market. I don’t know why music always has a place in a moment that you can remember a certain situation. I can remember being in that flea market and then playing that track. It was just like the track of tracks. It was the soundtrack of graffiti, of New York, the rawness. When I got into techno in about 1990 and I went to trace back all the records that I’d been collecting and I would go back and listen to that record it just sounded so current. Not current to what techno was, but on the production level. When you listen to other electro records or freestyle records from that time, nothing has that 808 feel like “Set It Off” does. That production is just sick. The bassline. There’s really no other record from that time period, apart from maybe “Hip Hop Be Bop” or “Boogie Down Bronx”, that should have been the soundtrack to The Warriors. It’s just an amazing track. The irony of whole record being my favourite record is that it was produced on a label located in Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, so that record was made probably two miles from where I lived. I guess Walter Gibbons produced Strafe, but it was made in Brooklyn. It’s a 100% Brooklyn. That record… the build up, the vocals, just everything about it…I could listen to it over and over again on repeat mode.
Would you say they produced a prototype with this? It’s a lot darker than most of the electro productions around that time.
I think it’s definitely the prototype for a lot of the future electro stuff that was coming out through the techno scene in the 90’s. Anybody making electro music at that time had to know that record. You have “Planet Rock” and you have “Clear” by Cybotron but that record just stands out for me. It’s such a better record. I love the other records but when I hear “Set It Off” the goose bumps come up. It sounds like something from a John Carpenter movie. It could be from “Assault On Precinct 13”, even if you can’t mess with that soundtrack. It is in the same mode as that. It gives the same feeling, and the same vibe and mood. Those eerie chord strings in the back and the bassline. You can’t mess with it.
> Ryuichi Sakamoto – Riot In Lagos
The next one is “Riot in Lagos” by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
This is an interesting track that Bones had turned me onto in probably sometime in the early to mid 90’s. He was refreshing my memory on records that were on when we used to go to roller skating rinks, and one of the other records was Kasso’s “Key West”. I remember he was playing all these records and I was like flabbergasted by the sounds and the music and how futuristic it was for 80’/81′. The thing was when I got into techno and I realised what electronic music was, and I’m hearing Bones and Lenny Dee – this is the 808, this is the 909 – trying to get my head around all these machines, and Bones was playing me records later on saying “these are the first 808 records, or 909 drum rhythm records”, and I never looked at the music I was listening to in the early 80’s, like Kraftwerk, as electronic music or acoustic music – I never made that difference in my head. I never sat there and thought “Oh, I like music with synthesisers”. When I heard this Sakamoto record, I kind of recalled hearing it but it didn’t really ring a bell in a big way for me. But it did ring my bell. [laughs] I was like “Whoa! What the fuck is this?” because I guess it’s got that Eastern, Asian kind of melody sound to it. That is a one of a kind record. There is nothing that sounds like that. I have never, ever heard another record ever sound like that. It cannot be copied.
It even sounded different to the sound Sakamoto was doing with Yellow Magic Orchestra.
Yeah. There is another Sakamoto record that I got a little later on, once I realised who he was, that is quite rare. Not many people know it, it’s called “Lexington Queen”. It’s amazing. It was released as a 12” and also a 45 as well. I probably should have been digging a little deeper on Sakamoto stuff, when I was doing my East kind of record shopping ten years ago, when I was looking for all this 80’s stuff. But I heard a few things by him that didn’t hit me the way those two records hit me. But “Riot In Lagos” is just a special record, what a special piece of electronic music. It’s up there with Kraftwerk.
It is pioneering electronic music, but from a very different angle.
Again, it’s got that Japanese sound to it. Whatever Japanese electronic music was in the 80’s, I don’t really know much about it, but this is a brilliant track. Read the rest of this entry »
For me, there are two approaches to recording a mix. The first is to take a lot of time in thinking of a smart and coherent concept, to then carefully select the according music and plan its transitions, and later, record the whole thing and make it public. There are plenty of my sets on the internet where I have done exactly that, with quite some variety of styles and ideas, and for a variety of reasons and purposes, too. These mixes are often schooled by the mixtapes I compiled for as long as I can remember (for girlfriends, friends and maybe some yet invisible target audience). My mixes of that kind have gotten more refined over the years. At some point, I started to mix music, and the amount of people such a set finally reaches has grown considerably. But the method, more or less, has stayed the same.
The second approach is to record a set while you’re playing in the club. Of course, the selection and execution in that context is different. I usually bring as many records as possible that I would like to dance to if I would be attending the club that very night, and then I combine them as it makes most sense to me in the given situation of the party. I try to avoid repeating combinations with each gig. For me, the fun part of mixing is to try and test new sequences. This can run the risk of a hit-and-miss in outcome (often depending on how inspired or concentrated I am), but in my mind, the possibility of failure is far less uncomfortable than relying on playlists of which I have already explored or experienced the success or functionality of. In short, I try to stay open to the surprises the music has on offer, and I try to pass that on to the crowd.
As Modifyer asked me for a guest mix, I quickly thought of doing something I had never done before: a combination of the two approaches mentioned above. At the time, there were no concepts left in my mind waiting to be released in a set (and admittedly, I also had so many other things to take care of that I found it difficult to come up with another or a better idea). If such ideas don’t strike you right away, they are mostly not worth being carried out anyway. What I did spend some thought on, however, was the music I wanted to play at Macro’s imminent label residency at Panorama Bar on the 10th of October 2009. I decided to leave the records in my box in the exact order I would play them at the gig, and re-record the set as soon as possible, with the memory of the proceedings still vivid. And thus I did, a day later. Naturally, the way the set now sounds is different to the live situation of the club; the mixing is tighter in parts, probably less frantic, and I could already tell where to mix in from what I could still remember of playing the music as it happened. Still, it was very interesting to repeat the experience, and it was also very interesting to take a second look at the choices I made in the intensity and immediacy of the night.
The night itself was a wonderful experience. We had just released the album “Catholic” by Patrick Cowley & Jorge Socarras and its accompanying singles. For the occasion, my label partner, Stefan Goldmann, and I invited Serge Verschuur from Clone Records and our friend Hunee to play. We knew that both would deliver the dynamic diversity we had in mind to celebrate what we had worked on for so long. I was due to play the last set, from 8 a.m. to 10.30 a.m. Unfortunately, I had a severe cold resurfacing, so I took some hours rest before arriving at the club at around 4 a.m. I could tell right away that the vibe of the club was a bit different to other nights there. Dubfire was on for Berghain, and judging from the queue I passed on my way to the entrance, the people interested in hearing him play seemed other than the regular crowd. I didn’t mind that at all, but as I made my way through Berghain, I kept running into friends who were telling me that there was more trouble at the door than usual. The music was different, too. I paused to listen to Dubfire’s set. While the monolithic pulse of the techno sound associated with Berghain was there, it somehow lacked the tension and groove that I need to lock me. I went upstairs to Panorama Bar to check what was going on there instead.
Serge was in the midst of a blinding set of classic and contemporary house and techno. The crowd was well into it. Hunee followed suit marvelously, steering the proceedings to more cheerful shores, and adding some classic disco and anthemic vocal moments. There were smiling faces enough, familiar and unfamiliar, to convince me that the night turned out to be what we hoped for, and then some. As I took over, I had the feeling that I should take another direction musically. I felt very tired and numbed by the fever the flu brought along. To start, I thought that I should kick myself into action with the music, hoping that the dancers would follow my way. Picking Heaven 17 to follow up Hunee’s last record, Code 718’s blissful “Equinox”, was admittedly a bit bold and therefore received some confused looks, but then in the course of the set, things quickly fell into line. Flicking through my box, every next record seemed to be waiting in place, already offering its services to make the night one to remember. When I left the club, near Sunday noon, into the same mean cold drizzle I entered from several hours before, the music continued to thump in my head and there were indeed a lot of wonderful memories to keep. On Monday, I refreshed myself, had a good breakfast and then recorded this set right away in one take, in order to not let any of those memories slip away.
Orphx melden sich auf dem New Yorker Traditionslabel Sonic Groove zurück. Techno in dem es bös zur Sache geht ist zurzeit kein Feindesland mehr, es wird wieder gebollert und gefräst, wo vorher gepluckert und geklickert wurde. Im Vergleich zu der klassischen Phase in den Neunzigern sieht man es jetzt allerdings mit dem 4/4-Gebot nicht mehr so eng und hat dem Berlin-Dub-Update die Tür offen gelassen. Und so kommt er denn heraus, dieser zähe Grind, der vom unteren Drittel der Pitchleiste der Berghain-Decks aus in die Welt hinausging. Archaische Groove-Monolithen, die sich keine melodischen Kinkerlitzchen erlauben und mit strenger Methodik direkt dorthin vordringen, wohin sie wollen. Offensichtlich wissen Orphx ziemlich genau, wie man da vorgehen muss, aber sie haben sich auch noch zwei Remixer dazugeholt, die es definitiv wissen. Während Surgeon einen bratzigen Stepper bringt, neben dem brutalster Wobble-Bass wirkt wie eine wochenlang eingeweichte Lakritzschnecke, hat Pete aka Substance das Metronom angestoßen und lässt darüber metallische Geräusche in Dub rumoren, die klingen wie geisterhaft pochende Feldaufnahmen aus den Hochzeiten zerfallener Fabrikgebäude.
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