House Is A Feeling

While I think of something else to write about this week, have a read of the full interview I did with Ralf Kollmann, who runs Mobilee, for last week’s RA column (which continues to provoke a lot of responses, around half of which make me wish, in my weaker moments, that writers still had the protection and arrogance provided by nobody being able to reply to their work!)

Anyway I found this an interesting conversation with someone who is at the centre of one of the big labels in house or techno right now. I’ve left out my questions and some of the parts already quoted in the piece but I think the answers flow together well. That said I have zero perspective on living or clubbing in Berlin so others may disagree.

This blog has been a little crazy with Mobilee stuff lately, perhaps, I am not on their payroll though! It just so happened that the Sonar party and the RA piece kind of happened at the same time. The main reason I’m posting this is that I think it’s actually depressingly rare that you get to read an in depth discussion with anyone in the underground house and techno scene. So here goes:

“In the last 3 or 4 years, especially in Berlin, the underground scene has become bigger and bigger. It has been like the new birth of something, and I think this movement all happened around minimal or so called “minimal” music. For us at Mobilee, living in Berlin, it’s really strange what has happened with the minimal hype.

Everything is minimal today. Robert Hood or even Jeff Mills or whoever, they did minimal music, techno is always minimal really. But for us it’s okay if people use the word. They need to put things in a cupboard or whatever. They need to define a style or a feeling, it’s not always music, it’s also feelings. So it’s okay.

In Germany it’s different to the UK scene which seems heavily based around London, in that there are different cities like Hamburg or Cologne or Munich or Berlin and they all have their scene or their media or clubscene. Every city has its own protagonists, like Michael Mayer in Cologne, or even in Hamburg there’s a big house scene, Steve Bug or Boris Dlugosch come from Hamburg.

So every city had and has its own protagonists. The funny thing is that Berlin as a city has always been totally mixed, so there were so many styles existing side by side from the beginning on. It’s a melting pot. I wasn’t born in Berlin, I moved here 5/6 years ago so I have an outside perspective on the city. But I know what happened here in the last 10 or 15 years.

Around 5 or 6 years ago everything started, everything was growing again. The funny thing is minimal is not an original Berlin invention, the people who established this sound and this music all came from outside. Like Ricardo, who moved to Berlin a few years ago. Like Richie and the M_nus crew, they moved to Berlin. Even Zip and the Perlon crew, they are based in Frankfurt. The people who came from outside 6 or 7 years ago, they are responsible for the Berlin sound of today. It’s the same with us at Mobilee, I’m from Cologne.

Maybe this is the reason the music is so popular. There are so many different influences, people are coming from the United States or the UK to Berlin, from all over the world. They are inspired by the city, by the lifestyle. And they create something new together.

All of the people who moved to Berlin, all of the Americans, they also give feedback. In the last 10 or 15 years, Europe and especially Germany has been influenced by Detroit and Chicago and New York. And Americans, being as they are, were never interested in what was going on in Europe. Now I think it’s the first time that something is sweeping back to the United States. I’m sure that guys like John Tejada and Claude Vonstroke, they are inspired or influenced by the new musical movement in Europe and Germany. I think there is a lot of inspiration coming from Europe and from Berlin especially.

As for why people like the sound, I think people like it so much because it was something new in the right moment. I mean, of course it’s not something new necessarily, but for the new generation it’s something new. There were some changes and so on, and it’s not only the music of course, it’s also the way of partying, the way of doing after-hours, the Berlin style, blah blah blah, all of that. It’s all of those things coming together, not only the music.

The music itself is so diverse. My opinion is that minimal music, especially Perlon, Ricardo and Luciano, what they established a few years ago and what is so hyped now, is nothing new. I feel that it comes from the deep house scene. For example if you listen to Dr Rockit or Herbert records from 1995 or 1996, they really sounds similar to today’s so called “minimal music”. I think that the minimal thing has its roots there.

But as I say there are so many diverse sounds. There’s also a lot of techno music that’s classed as “minimal” today. And because almost everything that is popular right now is minimal, it’s difficult sometimes to talk about this word or use it in a conversation. That’s okay though because thankfully we don’t need millions of techno professors who can separate all these different styles. Ultimately it’s all about going out, having fun, and enjoying the music.

And minimal is a trend at the moment. It’s a challenge for all the DJs, the media, and the labels to develop it further. Maybe in 2 or 3 years without having a concept or a plan somebody will find a new word for what we’re doing. It’s like an evolution that’s happening all the time, this is what I think about the infrastructure. But there are always movers in any scene. We always need protagonists or stars to push something and make it big.

As I already said I think that the minimal movement comes more from the deep house side of techno than from any other style. So maybe as a consequence of that it’s going back to towards that style now.

However there are other things happening at the same time, like on the other hand I have the feeling that also things are going more back towards original techno sounds. So you know, minimal was a consensus thing, and it is and it will be. It was a good push for the whole scene, and the underground became bigger and bigger while still separated from the typical dance scene. Now the next step is that maybe there’ll be more clubs concentrating on the more housey side of minimal, and other clubs might concentrate more on the techno side of it.

I think this is really important because one of the disadvantages in the last 5 years is that some people thought “it’s a little bit boring, everyone is doing the same thing”. There was too much of the consensus. Even in the record bags of the DJs this was the case with so many of the same records! Now it’s more diverse again and this is very healthy for the whole scene.

And of course, so called minimal music and its protagonists are also responsible for a new way of going out. Especially in Berlin, with no closing times, a lot of people really like to go out on Sunday, or maybe do open air things afterhours and so on. I think this was a big change in recent years. And especially minimal music, it works very well in the morning hours.

Though it’s also true that there were also a lot of people in the scene who were a little disappointed in the last few years cos even in a primetime set there wasn’t as much energy. Perhaps this is because only a few DJs have been able to play minimal stuff and create a special atmosphere and a special feeling. We all know the names who can do that.

At Mobilee though, we don’t feel that we are a minimal label. It’s really like what I said earlier, it’s okay for us when people say we are but we don’t feel like that. If you listen to all our releases there’s a lot of different stuff. And that house side of techno or dance music, that’s becoming more and more important for us.

That’s the direction we’re going to go in in the future, because we like it. What we are doing is only what we feel, we’re all inspired by what is going on in the clubs. We’re always talking with friends and it seems like everyone is making music all around us. So it just happens, it’s not a plan. And it’s not just like this with Mobilee, other labels or artists all around might pick up a sound this way too. It’s like a wave that hits us all.”