Posts Tagged ‘Berlin’

11 Questions – Alex Niggemann

Monday, March 7th, 2011

Alex Niggemann

Dusseldorfer

At the age of fifteen Alex Niggemann‘s older brother took him to a techno party in Düsseldorf which was a turning point for the young musician, pointing him away from the sometimes limiting discipline of classical piano and towards the world of electronic music. Since then, residencies in his home town grew to a move towards Berlin and all that great creative city had to offer.

Alex found work as a studio assistant to DJ T, running errands, capturing vinyl, mixing tracks and archiving records. This led to fellow Get Physical stalwarts Booka Shade discovering they had a promising producer in their own ranks. A lauded remix of Booka Shade’s “Darko” followed on a vinyl only release alongside Tiefschwarz and Radio Slave.

After finishing his engineering degree things began to snowball for Alex in 2008, during that summer he was signed to Supernature the home of UK duo Audiofly. They released the Black Rose EP in 2009 followed by critically and commercially successful releases on 8bit charting highly in many end of year lists.

Gigs across the globe followed and in the spring of 2010 he launched his Soulfooled label in the aim of responding quickly to artist needs and creating a platform for artists to release music quicker. The music represents Alex’s standards across old school disciplines of Chicago and Detroit orientated sounds.

Ahead of Alex joining We Love in Miami, we’ve asked him to answer our 11 Questions all about his past present and hypothetical future. You can download an exclusive mix he’s recorded, here.

Is there one book that you have read that has been life-changing for you?

Electroschock by Laurent Garnier. It totally changed my view of that glamourous DJ-life I had before.

Did your parents encourage you to work in music?

Yeah always, my Mom especially when I was I kid and wanted to learn piano. After my interests passed to house and techno music she wasn’t that happy… but my dad continued supporting me until he died unfortunately last year. Without him I wouldn’t be where I am right now! RIP Daddy!

How did you begin to work professionally in music?

It was a hobby for me until I graduated school. I had to decide what I wanted to do for living. So I moved to Berlin and started to study audio engineering to increase my technical knowledge about producing music. When I did the remix for Booka Shade on Get Physical, I knew that I made the right decision. That was the point where I got professional.

How do you apply your past experiences to what you do today?

Everything which you have done or which has happened in the past influences your life. As I also had a lot of really bad experiences, I think this definitely made me withstand things better and reminds me to not give up until I’ve reached my aims!

Reaktion

Where is your current studio and what is it like?

I just built my new studio on the 1st floor of my flat in Berlin. I spent a lot of money to make it perfect. It is a room in room construction, with all the finest acoustic elements to make the room with all the techniques to sounding perfect.

How much have you had to consider marketing issues since embarking on your career and how has that affected your creativity?

Well, I would say I’ve spent a lot of time with updating social network sites etc. I think the internet is an important medium, which more and more becomes an entertainment medium. But at a certain point of the career which I have right now, I cant do it on my own anymore. I mean, I still post / tweet a lot of things, I think it is very important to keep in touch with your fans, but for all other things I have my press agency. I definitely think that press and social networking became one of the most important things in this business, as there are too many “self-called” DJs / artist you have to stand out from! But all the marketing doesn’t effect my creativity as I do it most of the time when I’m on flights or in hotels, where I usually don’t produce.

How would you describe your work?

Just one word! Travelling! Playing and producing isn’t work for me. I still have a lot of fun doing that.

Who were your teachers?

Me, myself and my brother, who taught me the first skills in DJing. I mean I had some idols I was always and still looking up to like Ken Ishii, Steve Bug or Emmanuel Top, but they unfortunately couldn’t teach me anything personally because I didn’t know them. So I was learning most by trial and error, until my studies where I refined my technical background.

Your home is burgled but fortunately the culprits are caught and your possessions returned to you. What would you deem a suitable punishment for the burglars?

Show them how it’s when someone steals their possessions and let them life without them for a while.

You have to make one species of animal extinct. Excluding insects, which species would that be?

As I think, that every animal has its function on mother earth, I wouldn’t do it, because the natural balance will be broken. If the question would be only about a species including us, I would say human. As we are the most useless species. The world could life in its balance better without us!

If you could spend one week in any period of history, which period would you choose?

It would be the epoch of Rococo, as in this time most of the most brilliant  creative people have lived. Such as Mozart or Goethe!

Thanks Alex. Connect with him on twitter and facebook. Download his mix, here.

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We Love Space 2020Vision Summer 2010 – Mixed by Ralph Lawson

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Perfect vision

As always we love to spread the love. This summer a free compilation album will be handed out to visitors in around our venue to showcase talent and tunes from the formidably enduring label 2020Vision. Based in Leeds, owned and operated by Ralph Lawson, his team of dedicated and genuine music lovers have shaped the imprint into one of the most respected house labels in the world. Since it’s inaugural pressing in 1995 the label has achieved it’s status of quality and consistency from the point of view of both artists and the record buying public alike. At We Love we are delighted to have not only a talent such as Ralph, with a label so prestigious as 2020Vision at our disposal to compile this compilation – but also from a promotional point of view being able to provide you, our patrons, an objet d’art at no cost to yourselves is such a simple but effective way to give something back. As Mark says: “Simply the best promotional tool we have used in years, a back page advert in popular monthly music press is around £4000 and 10,000 fully finished CDs costs around £3500 delivered. Do the math.”

Ralph will be playing for We Love on the renowned Space Terrace in Ibiza on June 20th, July 25th and September 12th. There will also be a special appearance from Ralph’s live project when he will roll into Space along with Danny Ward, Fernando Pulichino and Julian Sanza in the form of 2020Soundsystem on the 22nd of August. Their album Falling released last year struck the demanding task of a cross-over electronic album being a clear picture, a representation of the artists involved, a “thing-in-itself” and balancing that with enough dancey, trackey elements for the underground to fall in love with it. We’ll leave it to Ralph to explain how the We Love 2020Vision mix came about and his thought process behind the selection…

“The label mix album came about as an idea from Mark Broadbent from We Love last year with the first one featuring Steve Lawler and Viva. It worked out well for everyone as it profiles the DJ who mixes, their label and also provides clubbers with a soundtrack to their night at Space as a present. I have worked for We Love for many years but in the last couple of years it has really started to click for me on the Terrace. I think firstly there was a move towards my style of House music in recent years and secondly I have enough experience under my belt now to know how to play it and get it going off. It is always a high pressure gig playing at We Love and it takes quite a few attempts to learn how to do it right.


Label compilations are very very hard mixes to do. For a start there are fewer tracks to choose from on a normal mix and also you have to represent as many of your artists as possible which further tightens the selection. Then they have to be put together into a smooth flowing mix! Not an easy challenge. I also wanted it to be as fresh as possible so I chased up producers for exclusive up front material. I also had the idea to include a couple of my favourite remixes from Blaze and Layo & Bushwacka so I had to ask permission for those. As 2020Vision is all about having ‘perfect vision’ we include many styles on the label and I needed to highlight this. The CD starts with Nu Disco from 2020Soundsystem and Crazy P which is actually much slower than House so I worked in tempo changes. It then picks up the pace into House and some more techier moments before leaving people with ‘Lovelee Dae’ by Blaze as a kind of happy last tune to go home on.


That was from the label perspective. I also needed to keep an eye on what works for We Love so I had a rule that all the tracks had to be playable at Space on Sundays. I picked a couple from the last year or so that were big for me on the Terrace last year such as Art Of Tones – Call The Shots and Mark Broom – People. Then I included ones I know I will be busting this year that aren’t out yet like Audiojack – Motion Sickness and Simon Baker – The Trick. I Imagined arriving at Space and heading upstairs to the top floor for a drink on the roof before where I could hear a tracks like ‘Ocean’ and then ‘Love on the line’ before heading down to the covered Terrace as the House starts to thump. A big turning point in the mix is the Radioslave track which is an epic production under his Panorama Garage moniker. As I was mixing the album I visited Berlin with Mark and Sarah Broadbent and we went to Panorama and Berghain. As luck would have it Matt Edwards (Radioslave) delivered his track for the album as I came back to the hotel and I put it straight on the headphones in my hotel room. After a night at the infamous club it totally hit the spot and I listened to it about 5 times in a row enjoying it more each time. Of course it had to go the CD and it marks the moment at a night at Space when the crowd is now ready to go and needs the beats tougher. The strings give a classic feel to the mix and really stand out.


I have a rule that I have to DJ my mixes live. I just feel they are more spontaneous and have a more natural feel that way. I can always tell when they have been pieced together one track at a time. I used Traktor Scratch pro to try mixes and then used Ableton on an Allen and Heath 4D to do the final mix but on the jam page so I could still DJ it. I did it like that so I could edit afterwards. It was recorded at 2020HQ in Leeds.” Ralph Lawson

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We Love… Savana Potente – Die Musik Ist Kollektive Vorstellungswelt

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger to his friends) had to contend with not being the only famous son / daughter of Germany in Torino, Italy last weekend. In conjunction with our friends at Savana Potente; Ellen Allien, Marcel Dettmann and Ben Klock flew in from Berlin to sample local cuisine and indulge in a techno marathon taking place over two clubs in the historic city. Here is a taster of the film we’ve made of the night (and day) with some screen shots to whet your appetite…

Like all good nights in Italy, it began with fine food

Queue in the park outside Chalet Del Valentino

Marcel Dettmann in the mix

Smiles everywhere!

Dania questioning Marcel Dettmann

Love from the crowd for Ellen Allien

Location for the after hours...

Ben Klock plays at the after party by the river

Have a look at this short video created to promote the event online. The soundtrack is composed exclusively and originally by Jozif to complement the visuals. The musical brief was to make something that sounds like Star Trek on drugs yet is fluffy and acidic and with something four-to-the-floor for “the heads”.

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Jeff Mills – Fireside Chat, Part 2 of 3

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Apologies for the rather long wait for part 2 of this short series, it won’t be so long until part 3 we promise. There’s not much intro needed to (cliché as it is) one of the godfathers of techno music. Incase you do, check out the informative intro in part 1. In this transcript (part 2 of 3) of a recent interview he has given to the Red Bull Music Academy Radio. Listen to the radio show in full here or download it here. The accompanying tracklist is as follows:

Jeff Mills – Landscape (Utopian Dream) – Tresor
Jeff Mills – Blue Print – Tresor
Underground Resistance – Eye of the Storm – Underground Resistance
Underground Resistance – Predator – Underground Resistance
Underground Resistance – Base Camp Alpha 808 – UR
Underground Resistance – Final Frontier – Underground Resistance
X-101 – G-Force – Tresor
X-102 – Ground Zero (The Planet) – Tresor
X-102 – The Rings Of Saturn – Underground Resistance
Jeff Mills – Perfecture (Somewhere Around Now) – Tresor
Jeff Mills – The Bells – Axis
Jeff Mills – Transformation B (Rotwang’s Revenge) – Tresor
Jeff Mills – Robot Replica – Tresor

His Jeffness

His Jeffness


Other than my trip to Berlin to perform with Final Cut we did not have too much information as to what Europe was like. We could only hear what Kevin, Derrick and Juan were saying about what was happening in the UK, Belgium and places like that. It was the time when the invention of the fax machine had just come out, we thought that that would be an interesting way to communicate with people. So we developed a way of communicating through the fax machine by distorting letters and images. We knew early on that there was a lot of potential for a certain type of fan base so we got into merchandising and started making t-shirts. We treated that at the same level as the music – we started exploring.

It wasn’t until maybe about a year after that we had the opportunity to go to Europe together as a unit. So for a year we were working blindly, we were working off of what we imagined Europe would be like. We thought that America would be the same as Europe. We were working with Urb magazine on the West coast and Billboard magazine in New York. It wasn’t until we got a call from a guy whom neither of us really knew, we knew of him, we knew about him. Joey Beltram called us and introduced himself. He said he had just got back from Belgium and had played one of our records and it was doing really good, he had played it to a crowd of thirty thousand people and we should make more things like that. We were like, “Who the hell is Joey Beltram?”, but “OK” so we took his advice, make more things in that direction and see what happens.

Military attire in early Underground Resistance days

Military attire in early Underground Resistance days


We found a medium of attire, which happened kind of naturally. I was dressing that way anyway at the time, some of it comes from Final Cut which was really in that direction, our attire was really more military. Some if it comes from Mike ['Mad' Mike Banks], and the job that he used to have. He used to put people out of their houses, he was part of a team of guys that used to go to a house when someone didn’t pay their bills and he would physically move the people out. So he would have to dress in that way, he wasn’t a police officer, but very close to it. He had that type of experience so we mixed it together. We were both very much into hip hop, Public Enemy and all those other things so we kind of adopted that. We got a couple of offers to perform in New York at the Limelight and a couple of other places. We thought that maybe it would be interesting to hide our faces, so that people had no idea. They wouldn’t look at us as if we were a group of black guys and the music would stand out more than what we look like. It’s America so it’s very big on pop culture, it’s very easy to conclude what we are by what we look like – this is just a country that really excels in that. We thought that by taking that away we would put more emphasis on the sound and what the music is.

Hood, Mills, Banks


Robert Hood came in, we hired him as an assistant to work within the label at administration. He was a rapper, he was a hip hop rapper at the time. So I think we somewhat influenced him when he first came, he was really into rap. We were like, “That’s fine. But your message must be positive!” We’re not into that certain type of rap. So we brought him in and he started to work for us. We set him up with his own setup to produce music. We taught and showed him how to record it how to program it. He began to work on projects with us (with Mike and I) and then eventually started his own label called Hardwax. We worked with him a little bit to get that label started and then he took it on himself. In a week we could produce maybe twelve to twenty tracks and so we decide to do something different, something we don’t remember or didn’t hear coming from Detroit at that time. Things that we more experimental. So we decided to designate so much time to producing compositions in that way, exploring and using the equipment and machines in different ways. We decided on a name of the project as X for experimental. We would treat it somewhat like a college report, your instructor would give you a subject and you would have to report so we adopted this 101, 102, 103 as if it were a paper. So the first project was X-101, there wasn’t really any concept we just wanted to see if Mike, Rob and I could work together in this way – if we were all on the same page. It went really well so we decided to create X-102. This time we had the idea that maybe this release should really be about something connected to all people, not just certain cultures. We chose the Rings of Saturn.

Red Bull Music Academy Radio

Axis Records – Official Site

Underground Resistance – Official Website

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Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

Heroes / Helden

Heroes / Helden

The bleak music of Bowie’s collaborations with Brian Eno provides a fitting backdrop to this film, as his icy soul killer prose perfectly reflected the frozen and fragmented lives of Christiane and her gang: an “alternative family” taking respite in discos and underground train stations of 1970′s West Berlin. Removed from that context, the album is still enjoyable for the sheer quality of the songs. The cliché about David Bowie says he’s a musical chameleon, adapting himself according to fashion and trends. While such a criticism is glib, there’s no denying that Bowie demonstrated remarkable skill for perceiving musical trends at his peak in the ’70s.

The film itself is based on the testimony of a teenager (Vera Christiane Felscherinow) who gets involved in drugs at 12, hooked on heroin by 13 and a prostitute by 14 to support her habit. She became part of a notorious group of teenaged drug-users and prostitutes, mainly at the largest train station in West Berlin – Bahnof Zoo. Her story came to light after a meeting with two journalists while she was a witness in a trial against a man who paid underaged girls with heroin in return for sex. The journalists wanted to expose the problem among teenagers in Berlin which was plainly surrounded by strong taboos. Christiane provided an in-depth description of the life of drugs and prostitution that she and other teenagers in West Berlin experienced in the 1970′s. Her interviews were extensive, taking a total of 2 months to produce. A book was eventually published chronicling her life from 1975 to 1978, when she was aged 12 to 15. In 1981 the story was made into a film directed by Uli Edel. Christiane worked as an advisor on the film and much is shot on location in authentic and gloomy surroundings of Gropiusstadt and Bahnhof Zoo. The actors here are genuine teenagers, around 14 to 15 years old. This makes the film so much more powerful and shocking, and much more believable. The effects of heroin on these kids is staggering to behold; they turn into these sickly shadows of their former selves, like zombies, in search of their next fix. And strangely, Christiane and her friends never seem to enjoy the high from the heroin. You will never see such a bleak vision of kids lost in a surreal hell of drug addiction. And to add further to the intensity, the film is long, 138 minutes uncut, becoming steadily darker and seedier by the minute, until the viewer wonders just how long can this young girl go on like this without completely self-destructing. And amazingly, throughout the running time, the film never preaches, never becomes sentimental, as most American drug films often do. The film style is specifically German.

Verite

Verite


It’s interesting to note the film does not glamorize heroin, as soon as the hard drug abuse begins in the film, the mood changes entirely. The uplifting and snappy music of Bowie whom Christiane worships is heard frequently throughout the first section of the film – there is a moment of insight and revelation when Christiane goes to see Bowie in concert – where he appears as himself in the film. After her and her friends fall into heroin addiction the Bowie music symbolically disappears, to be replaced by the eerie Eno-driven sound-scapes. The atmosphere is gritty and dark, pulling no punches with its depiction of Berlin in those days. The days look dark and gloomy to begin with, as the film progresses the day resembles more and more the night. Great locations and beautiful if functional photography complete this unique, raw and graphic film. In it’s nature it completely takes away the idea of the highs and lows of the typical drug film.
christiane3
Some of Bowie’s very best music is compiled here. There are the obviously cinematic tracks – the steely proto-techno glide of ‘V-2 Schneider’, the dark ambience of ‘Warszawa’ and ‘Sense Of Doubt’ – alongside the jagged pop of ‘Boys Keep Swinging’. ‘Christiane F.’ holds one fascinating rarity, too: a version of his finest song, ‘Heroes’, that lapses into impassioned German halfway through (extracted from the German edition of the ‘Heroes’ album). As the faintly ludicrous climax of Bowie’s infatuation with the Deutsche scene, it completes an essential and compelling album. You can download that track here. By the mid-’70s, he developed an effete, sophisticated version of Philly soul that he dubbed “plastic soul,” which eventually morphed into the eerie avant-pop of 1976′s Station to Station, which took the plastic soul of Young Americans into darker, avant-garde-tinged directions, yet was also a huge hit, generating the top ten single ‘Golden Years.’ The album inaugurated Bowie’s persona of the elegant ‘Thin White Duke,’ and it reflected Bowie’s growing cocaine-fueled paranoia. Soon, he decided his Los Angeles lifestyle was too boring and returned to England; shortly after arriving back in London, he gave the awaiting crowd a Nazi salute, a signal of his growing, drug-addled detachment from reality. The incident caused enormous controversy, and Bowie left the country to settle in Berlin, where he lived and worked with Brian Eno. Once in Berlin, Bowie sobered up and began painting, as well as studying art. He also developed a fascination with German electronic music, which Eno helped him fulfill with the work which went on to make up the majority of this soundtrack album.

After the initial success of the book and the film, Christiane found herself becoming an unlikely celebrity, both in Germany and other countries in Western Europe. A subculture of teenage girls in Germany began to emulate her style of dress as well as making visits to the Bahnhof Zoo station, which became an unlikely tourist attraction. This surprised authorities on youth drug abuse, who feared that despite the film’s bleakness and the many sordid scenes (particularly those portraying the horrific realities of cold turkey), vulnerable youths may have regarded Christiane as a cult heroine and role model. Wolf Heckmann, West Berlin’s drug commissioner of the time: “The book and film have increased interest in drugs in this city. Kids who come to visit used to ask to see the Berlin Wall. Now they want to see the Zoo Station.” The book sold so well (it was translated into most major West European languages) that Christiane remains able to support herself from the royalties. Christiane still receives fan-mail and is occasionally contacted by the German media, wanting to know how she is doing after all these years.

Download: David Bowie – Heroes / Helden

David Bowie – Review Timeline

Original Soundtrack on Discogs

Time Magazine Article from 1981

Christiane F Fan Website

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Posted in Film | 4 Comments »

Door Policy

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Get in

Get in

It is easy to dislike a place that only lets in the rich, but before we get too self-satisfied let’s remember that nightclubs have never been the most democratic of institutions. The domains of cliques and gangs, they tread a fine line between the two meanings of the verb ‘to discriminate’. Trying to keep out those who aren’t regulars, don’t wear the right clothes, don’t get the music or take the right drugs even if done with the best of intentions – creating an exciting other space for freaks and their friends – still tips easily into exclusivity. Even the biggest, most seemingly democratic places contain velvet ropes, backrooms, inner-sanctums, huts and caravans for workers, owners, friends and random people who think that to be there means to be somehow special. Élitism, even if it’s only against those who don’t possess the right subcultural capital, is still an -ism (if not one of the really nasty kinds). – Ewan Pearson

The subject off door policy within nightclubs has reared it’s high-and-mighty head lately. From the basement sweatboxes and grungy warehouses to pulsing castles with palatial interiors, almost every club will have a policy of some sorts. Decisions on which clientele to admit or reject rest largely with the door staff, although the code and system (if any) is generally devised by the management. It can be a hard thing to define – and easier to do so on who not to allow. For example, if The Social in Paris really is for “clueless, aggressive, Sarkozy loving, rayban wearing, coked up posh kids”, it would be hard for a club to define this custom with a notice on the door.

It is a self fulfilling prophecy that if a club is harder to get into, it becomes more desirable to try to do so. Take the infamously ironclad Berghain in Berlin for example. It is ridiculously hard for some people to get into, but is widely regarded as the best nightclub in the world. It might just be so that a policy on the door is not an absurd and clueless arbitrary decision made by steroid fueled meat-heads, but is in fact a necessary attitude in order to maintain the meaning of the “club”.

Open sesame

Open sesame

Some people revel in the unchallenging democracy of an open door policy, such as at Fabric in London. Where the door staff are unlikely to turn anyone away unless clearly inebriated and ask only that business men remove their ties. It’s understandable to have no interest in a venue with which the first interaction you have is to be judged by your style and manner. However, a door policy is what defines a club, creating it’s atmosphere along with the music and location. In essence, the policy establishes the crowd. Surely part of the reason you go to a nightclub is for the people who you will share the night and dancefloor with? Clubs which could easily fill the capacity twice over on any given night don’t because they care about maintaining a special atmosphere and a crowd that cares about the music being played.

With your market analyst head on, you can see that a strict door leads to a loyal clientele and a hand-picked demographic. Where there is a healthy scene clubs can afford to be fastidious. Ibiza is unique in its door style, having a historical reputation of wide admittance (and with the main clubs only open for four months per year) they generally welcome all and sundry. Venues that stretch into the thousands in capacity perhaps help to dilute the undesirables.

In any case, our top tips for getting in would be: Be yourself and treat your surroundings with respect. If you are in Perth, Australia: No Ed Hardy, or dyed rat tails.

Ewan Pearson

Fabric

Berghain

Australia National News

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Posted in Culture | 2 Comments »