this DJ Blogs Himself

Author: blogshimself

  • Künstler Treu – Humuhumunukunuku-apua’a (2001)

    Künstler Treu – Humuhumunukunuku-apua’a (2001)

    Alternative title: Proclaiming the summer of Trip Hop!

    As much as I love music, let’s be real: There are very few records that end up making a substantial dent in the big picture that is life. There is music that gives you pleasure, music that makes you experience feelings you’ve never felt before, but “life changing” is usually an exaggeration by lazy writers that should be reserved for tragic deaths, expensive dinners and an annoying person’s experience with psychedelic drugs.

    And when I say that Künstler Treu’s “Humuhumunukunuku-apua’a” – an oddball downtempo EP from 2001 that pretty much nobody cares about – changed my life, I’m sure it’s gonna sound like an exaggeration, too.

    And yet, “Humuhumunukunuku-apua’a” truly did change my outlook on DJing and my ambitions with regards to music. It reignited my passion for slower genres like trip hop, ambient, downtempo, whatever you want to call it, and it even prompted me to start “The Dadbod Experience”, an alias dedicated to playing exactly that kind of music. If only for a while, it motivated me to peek out of the narrow hole of DJ-friendly fast and freaky music that I’d dug myself into. And it made me realise that there’s so much more cool stuff to find if you just give things a chance. 

    Finally, it made me realise that there really aren’t enough people hitting the crates and looking for this type of music. While the Dadbod Experience is on an extended hiatus and people are still waiting for an often-teased trip hop EP (please, somebody tell me they’re waiting, I beg you!) “Humuhumunukunuku-apua’a” still feels pretty life changing and fresh as hell to me.

    Good mold days

    But first things first: how did I stumble upon this obscure record and why did I give it the time of day if it was so far outside my wheelhouse at that time? Well, during the pandemic I was working at the 2nd hand vinyl department of Berlin’s HHV record store. Our job was to go through boxes of records that our bosses purchased, grade their condition, and price them – and around that time, when loads of music people were in dire straits looking for a quick Euro to make rent, great record collections to be bought and resold by vultures like us were abundant.

    One of the most memorable of these collections belonged to someone who had been a resident of Berlin’s Tresor club in the 90s. That means that they didn’t only have good taste, but they were also given promo copies by every hot label of their day, including Tresor itself. In that collection I found white label copies of every single album by Drexciya and its members, holy grails of Detroit techno and electro, as well as incredibly rare German tech-house 12”s. 

    The bad news was that the records had wasted away in a humid basement making some of them moldy and all of them stinky. That meant most needed some cleaning and some were unsalvageable. The good news: None of my colleagues were interested in working on the collection, so I had 4,000-ish records to look through all to myself. I probably shaved a few years off of my life expectancy with all the mold I inhaled but that seems like a small price for diving into such a unique collection.

    Sidenote: It sounds strange, but meticulously going though someone’s record collection feels very intimate. You get to know the twists and turns of their tastes, the crowd pleasers, the guilty pleasures, their favs and their friends. You see the ones that never got touched, the ones they were gifted with sweet dedications written on them, the ones they sought out 2nd hand and the ones they clearly cherished/ shredded. It made me think. Will anyone ever truly know me the way the record store clerk who puts my records up for sale after my death will know me? 

    Either way I felt like I knew that DJ, and that I could trust their taste. So when Künstler Treu’s “Humuhumunukunuku-apua’a” fell into my hands, I hesitated. With its aggressively German-sounding artist name, its lack of online interest and its obsessively design-y cover, it screamed “early 00s-minimal-house-slop” at me. But since it was in that interesting collection, I was still intrigued. And once I pressed play I was hooked.

    Fishing for compliments

    “Humuhumunukunuku-apua’a” is not only the title of the record, it is the national fish of Hawaii. For one thing that will let you know you’re in for a very Zen experience. You’re a tourist roasting in the sun by the beach sipping a fruity cocktail with a little umbrella in it, or you’re a happy fish drifting through harmonic coral reefs in the Pacific ocean. It’s going to be chillll.

    But beyond the general Zen-ness, Humuhumunukunuku-apua’a is deeply connected to 50s exotica and easy listening – genres that are traditionally obsessed with Hawaii, or rather the concept of Hawaii as this tropical 1950s refuge of rest and relaxation. This whole vibe is very much par for the course for loungy 90s “electronica” or “acid jazz” artists. From Kruder & Dorfmeister beginning their legendary entry to the DJ Kicks series with ocean sounds to Luke Vibert not only sampling loads of 1950s hammond-heavy cruise ship music but actually creating a full album with BJ Cole, who is a master of the most “How does a person in the West see Hawaii”-coded instrument, the steel guitar – that whole scene was digging 1950s holiday music.

    But while references to these original lounge vibes often feel ironic when other people make them, Künstler Treu manages to fuse these seafaring vibes seamlessly with elements from IDM and ambient in such a refreshing way that makes me want to catch scurvy on a jetski. There are traces of soothing guitar chords and Wirtschaftswunder choir loops, there are unusual rhythms, but the pastiche never overtakes the ambitious yet chill musical vision.

    But back from the Pacific to a warehouse in Friedrichsfelde Ost. After finding this record I listened to it countless times in the next hours. Working with records every day, you get a kind of “seen it all” attitude. But “Humuhumunukunuku-apua’a” made me giddy and excited, made me want to swoon in my office chair, even though the bpm counter was substantially lower than what I was used to. Since the YouTube-rip I listened to back then has disappeared, I uploaded a rip of my somewhat noisy copy for you to be able to recreate the experience. There are individual tracks to this EP, and I have my favorite moments (among them the opener “Maus Day”, “Keine Kännchen auf der Terrasse” and “Pink Carpet”), but the whole really needs to be ingested in full for the complete experience.

    Who’s that Treu?

    In spite of – or maybe due to – his extensive discography, the man behind Künstler Treu remains a bit of a mystery to me. If you take his Discogs at face value (which you probably shouldn’t given that he says Künstler Treub is based in Hawaii), Achim Treu started releasing music in 1979 and he’s still on it today. A seasoned guitarist, he was part of a bunch of experimental DIY-tape projects in the late 1980s and found a broad audience in the 90s as part of Berlin’s downtempo scene, both solo as well as with groups and bands, most prolifically with the duo Dauerfisch. Until today he’s putting out music that’s difficult to pin down, from Synth-Pop to noise experiments, with AI generated artwork and little promo behind it. Beyond his releases, he’s found success as a composer as well as a touring musician with bands like Mutter, Der Plan and Alec Empire. He’s also been active as a radio DJ and blogger. And he looks a bit like Sacha Baron Cohen.

    While his vast output over countless CD releases, compilations and remixes promises a deep rabbit hole for the right rabbit, my surface-scraping analysis gives me the feeling that Humuhumunukunuku-apua’a is a bit of an outlier. Lightning in a bottle that’s been floating in the oceans for decades with a secret message. I am happy to be convinced otherwise though.

    As I am writing these lines, a monumental heat wave with several consecutive days of record temperatures has washed over Berlin. During these times I find myself blasting this EP loud as hell, wishing that I had a balcony stable enough for a hammock. I don’t think that this record will sound as special to many people as it does to me. But I think it’s a nice feeling to really fall for an obscure piece of music that swims under so many people’s radar. It’s easy to fall in love with Steely Dan, but Künstler Treu? You should try it!

  • Höhner Feat. Hans Nieswandt, Justus Koehncke, Mathias Schaffhäuser – Die Karawane Zieht Weiter (2000)

    Höhner Feat. Hans Nieswandt, Justus Koehncke, Mathias Schaffhäuser – Die Karawane Zieht Weiter (2000)

    Alternative title: The gods of Karneval

    I can point to the exact time and date when “Die Karawane Zieht Weiter” morphed from a curiosity, a little novelty running gag in my shelves to make fun of, to one that I can’t live without. It was on the 25th of December, a few minutes before midnight when I played “Part 1: Indeep” of Mathias Schaffhäuser’s “Kara-Ware-Mix” of “Die Karawane zieht weiter” at Cologne’s lovely Gewölbe club. What followed is too weird to even begin to describe (TLDR: conga line).

    Here’s the quick context: Gewölbe is probably the most prestigious club in Cologne and they take pride in booking smart DJs that play sets with some depth. It’s usually a somewhat House-y affair with some Techno nights sprinkled in, which in my experience reflects the median of the city’s scene. The collective Phonovision, which my friends HiHat and Various Identities co-run, hold a residency there, and it’s probably fair to say that they represent the harder end of Gewölbe’s spectrum. And once I’d mentioned they booked smart DJs for clever sets you probably already guessed that I’d never really expect to DJ there. And until last Xmas, you would’ve been right.

    But after HiHat nagged the club’s management for ages, they agreed to have HiHat, Philo (who is a DJ and producer extraordinaire and a Rheinisch local in exile like me) and myself play all night on Christmas day. This was ideal, since I was back in that part of the country for family business anyways, and so were many other people I grew up with. And screw how the party was going to go, I was simply psyched to get a glimpse at these hallowed halls from the booth – well, technically it was a bar night meaning we weren’t playing the large dance floor reserved for “proper” parties, but the spacious bar room. But honestly this did not dampen the fun at all, and actually some very fun parties have supposedly used this space, such as the already legendary Sunday parties called “Research”. Never been, but if it’s only half as good as our shindig you really can’t miss it if you’re in the area.

    A clown car on the silk road

    So why did a conga line break loose when I played this fairly reserved and chill House track with its hypnotizing guitar-y loop, its minimal progression, and its vocals that are so laid back they sound almost arrogant? 

    Well, for one it’s very catchy. But it’s also a cover version of “Die Karawane Zieht Weiter” by Höhner, a foundational piece of Karneval music. 

    For the purpose of this text let’s put Rio de Janeiro and international paganism aside for a second and focus on Germany: Karneval is something Wikipedia calls a festive season, which technically starts in November but is mostly celebrated around February along the Rhine river with differing local rituals and traditions. There are an infinite amount of things to say about it. About its cultural roots, about its relationships to christianity, to fascism, to racism, to misogyny. But what you need to know for now is that for the people who grow up in its sphere of influence, it involves dressing up in costumes, parades, lots of heavy drinking and a very specific kind of music that drifts between somewhere Schlager, marching band music, folkloric drinking songs and pop music. It’s (mostly) as terrible as it sounds. 

    BUT if a lot of your formative memories are attached to certain songs, if you’ve had your first kiss or your first puke with one of those things playing far away, your brain can’t really detach itself.

    Released in 1997, “Die Karawane Zieht Weiter” is one of the most famous Karneval songs, one that brings out nostalgic memories for elderly drunkards, but is catchy and memorable enough for the kids, much like “Viva Colonia”, also by Höhner, or “Superjeilezick” (please don’t dive deeper into this music). 

    Metaphorically it’s about how, when one bar runs out of alcohol, a crowd of people moves to another one. It is also about a thirsty sultan who takes his caravan (in the nomadic/ bedouin sense) to another oasis. A group of boomer Germans singing about their image of the “orient”? You can see where this is going. That metaphor might not be enough to turn the track “problematic” on its own, but the way it plays with “exotic sounding” instruments and harmonies, especially in its intro before it turns full accordion Schlager, are definitely uncomfortable. And I’m not even going to start on this brownface-heavy live video that features a flying carpet routine.

    Diamonds and pearls before swine and nerds

    Given that context the right thing to do would probably be to get as much distance between myself and that piece of music. But as I said: if you grew up along the Rhine river chances are that this song has been hammered deep into your subconsciousness. So when I saw this remix version in a 1€ bin of some record store, it was a no-brainer to buy it. I expected some Euro-Schlager-Hardtrance version of the original which I might whip out at a Karneval gig – until I looked at the artists involved.

    Hans Nieswandt, Justus Koehncke and Mathias Schaffhäuser are Cologne dancefloor royalty. They all emerged during the 90s and became integral parts of the city’s (still) buzzing 00s minimal house and techhouse scene. All of them have done so, so many things, meaning the following summary will be very superficial: 

    Koehncke and Nieswandt got their big break as part of Whirlpool Productions of “From Disco to Disco” fame – something which they don’t let you forget on this EP as they splice moments from that track almost randomly into the A1, A2, and B1 tracks. Nieswandt went on to focus his efforts more on writing than on music, authoring several books and contributing countless articles to magazines like Groove or SPEX for which I also used to write before its end of the latter in 2018. Meanwhile Koehncke’s far-reaching career as DJ, producer and remixer is closely tied to the Cologne’s Kompakt label that has been highly influential and commercially successful in connecting minimal and melodic 00s house with Pop-sensibilities – a task for which Koehncke himself has proved extremely suited.

    Mathias Schaffhäuser, the third of the amigos on remix duties, caused the conga line. Or rather the Ware founder’s remix on B2 is the track that I played to cause the conga line. A1, A2 and B1 are basically Koehncke and Nieswandt screwing around with some disco house loops and synth sounds, occasionally splicing in the unlikely Karneval-sample whether it works out harmonically (or not), almost making fun of the source material, and justifiably so. 

    But on his Kara-Ware-Mix on the B2 Schaffhäuser does the unthinkable: He turns the slapstick schlager vocals of the original into a hypnotic, almost touching electro-y house track that sound almost like the intro sequence to a melancholic yet comedic coming of age set in the suburbs. Schaffhäuser sings the vocals in an almost detached way that is the perfect antidote to the original and manages to evoke the nostalgic association while also severing every tie with that song, and justifiably so.

    The record leaves me with many unanswered questions: Why did EMI put out this official remix record by those three popular DJs years after the original track was released? What was the reception, and what were the intentions behind it? Did it make a splash? The Discogs stats certainly suggest that no one really cared for the record, and that to this day no one really does. But I care, and for one night in 2025 so did the whole Gewölbe dancefloor.

    Sidenote: I did not actually want to play the track, but a friend of Philo’s pestered me for hours after I jokingly mentioned that I had it in my bag. Luckily I gave in. 

    Also I was not even part of the conga line, and I wasn’t able to witness it from behind the booth. While I was mixing in the track my old friend Lewon walked up to the booth, and I saw him for the first time after more than a year, a time during which he became a father, too. So once I’d mixed in the track I immediately ran to the dancefloor to greet my buddy. We were half-drunkenly hugging in the middle of the dancefloor for minutes, and in the meantime the ecstatic Polonäse as you’d call it in Karneval parlance formed around us. I didn’t think the track would go down well at all, so witnessing it pop off through a crowd forming around us while experiencing such an emotional moment with a friend has got to be one of my most intense and bizarre DJ – and maybe even human – moments. Thanks to everyone who was there.

    There were many more memorable moments during that all-nighter with Philo and Hihat, and I’m sure I’ll bring it up again. As a little favor I have uploaded Schaffhäuser’s two mixes of the track to YouTube.

  • Killa Productions – Feelin’ Acid II (2006)

    Killa Productions – Feelin’ Acid II (2006)

    Alternative title: “Now that’s what I call music you can’t make with Splice”

    As cheesed out eurotrance becomes more and more indistinguishable from Mallorca-Schlager slop, and hard-tek pop edits for teenagers with Amazon-bought harnesses and big pants dominate many dancefloors, Europe’s party people have yearned for a RETVRN to something truly groovy, organic and minimalistic. And in the last few years, “hardgroove” techno has filled that void for many.

    Today, “groove” often emodies the same annoying tendencies some people hoped they would escape through it: There is an endless amount of uncreative pop edits, DJ cult of personality, genre-focused Splice sample packs and the generic musical slop that comes along with that. There is also some good old techno snobbery around it, AND don’t get me started on annoying cheesy samba edits – I don’t want to be a culture warrior here but most of these tracks sound like the same bongo loop with a breakdown lifted straight from a James Last record, lacking all the original funk and swing inherent in so much of the latin american music these tracks seek to coopt.

    But generally speaking, as worn out as the “hardgroove” scene feels right now given that bastardized versions of it seem to be popular in pretty much any local shabby party location: while I don’t play much of that music in my sets, I do like a lot of music that came out of that scene and some of the DJs that play it. And this whole movement probably wouldn’t be the same if it wasn’t for the heads behind Killa Productions.

    Killa they produced

    These people are familiar to anyone vaguely plugged into techno: Ben Sims is still one of the global DJ elite’s most exciting figures and basically coined the term “hardgroove” through his eponymous label. I’m no techno expert but it seems to me that you’d need to look far and wide for a DJ and producer that is so well respected by underground and mainstream audiences alike.

    Or maybe you’d only need to look to his partners in crime for Killa Productions: Paul Mac and Mark Broom. If I’m being fully honest, I didn’t stumble over Mark Broom through his amazing discography spanning pretty much every noteworthy techno label on the planet (including friend of the show Cosmic Records), but through a short form video of his popping up in my algorithm showing him jamming on an Octatrack. Through that I found his incredible run of Bandcamp edits, which for a while I played all the time alongside tracks by DJ Swisherman for a little techno flavor in my sets, especially his “Paid in Full” edit.

    I am shamefully less familiar with Paul Mac aka Paul Souter. I know he ran Hardgroove (the label) together with Sims, ran multiple more labels by himself and is a well respected figure responsible for hundreds of fantastic techno releases. While preparing I realised, though, that I own and love one record of his, namely this collaborative 10″ with legend Vince Watson. This track is so amazing, it’s probably among my most played home listening tunes this past year

    Either way, this text isn’t about their solo output but about them joining forces: The name Killa Productions was used by Broom, Sims and Souter as an outlet for their cheekier sample juggling between 2004 and 2006. I assume not all of them were involved to an equal measure all the time since Sims himself uploaded a set to SoundCloud where he lists only Paul Mac and himself as Killa Productions, but Broom is listed on Discogs, so I’m just going to assume that he was involved with production at some point. Like with so many 90s/00s releases where credits aren’t properly given due to fear of copyright holders it’s a bit of a guessing/ detective game.

    I had stumbled over Killa Productions’ “Good Life” edit ages ago on a Discogs bender, but had kept it in my “to be downloaded on SoulSeek” list since I didn’t want to spend 30€ on it, given that I already own the classic Man Alive which is the objectively superior edit, even if its overplayed.

    So when I found the group’s entire discography well organised in a kind person’s SoulSeek profile I thought “why not download all of it?”. And I’m glad I did. Because Killa Productions’ output is of such amazing quality and versatility that I didn’t just become obsessed with it but that it opened my eyes to a fantastic kind of techno I didn’t really acknowledge before.

    While it’s hard to pick a favorite among them –“Women Beat their Men” especially is just constantly stuck in my head – “Feelin Acid II” is the one that never leaves my bag. I don’t have many records where I immediately play the B-side after the A-side is finished, but this is one of them. Like other Killa Productions, “Feelin Acid II” hinges strongly on prominent samples, but this EP can stand on its own feet as one of my favorite techno releases ever that can gel well with classic ghetto house, driving techno or anything you throw at it.

    Acid preachers and Jungle Brothers

    The massive A-side flips “The House of God” by DHS with its menacing preacher, and then slowly unfolds into a mad wall of sound, hard-hitting drums and acid basslines. Even playing it for the 10th time it still feels somewhat unpredictable to me, but that makes me love it even more. So far it goes down a charm in any setting, from nerdy heads at Humboldthain to gacked up teenagers at Club Ost.

    The B-side features two tracks sampling “I’ll House You” by the Jungle Brothers, probably one of the first house songs I was ever really into, back when I dug through the Tribe Called Quest back catalogue on Lime Wire looking for viruses to put on my mp3 player. Both B-side tracks (the B1 is basically the vocal version and the B2 is the “dub”) are a little less unhinged than the A-side but no less catchy! They both revolve around a tasty acid melody and heavy drums. The acids comes in, goes away, there’s some delay and vocal samples, and in the end you have some of the finest oldschool/ newschool/ house/ techno crossover dancefloor burners ever – especially the vocal version is just so catchy that it just randomly pops into my head in the shower, in the U-Bahn or in the bedroom.

    Imagine a late 80s acid house heater but accidentally the drum machine gets switched at birth to one of a prolific 00s techno producer, and then Dance Mania releases it in the mid-90s. All three tracks are magical, irreverent jacking techno. And while I don’t get the chance to play straight techno or house too often I can say with certainty that I’ll always try to find a way to put this one into the mix.

    Jack had a hardgroove

    To bring it back to the kinds of “groove” that the kids are into these days: Is “Feelin’ Acid II” by Killa Productions, arguably created by some of the people with the largest influence on that genre, in line with what people are into today?.

    In short: Not really, no. While much of the hardgroove slop today seems to ride on the assumption that all you need is thick percussion, rumbling kicks and an occasional dubby chord stab to make your way to a 4 hour Berghain slot, the Killa Productions team embedded their sound in the rich history of electronic music. By stripping down classic Chicago acid tunes and reworking them into soundsystem-friendly anthems they show that they understand the musical lineage of techno, and they understand how fun this music can be.

    And at the danger of sounding like an old head: Maybe that’s the reason why 50 year old dudes that look like the honorable elderly criminal uncs who beat up disrespectful teens in Guy Ritchie movies are still at the cutting edge of this scene.

  • Various – Hardcore Osaka E.P (1997)

    Various – Hardcore Osaka E.P (1997)

    Alternative title: “I found one of the holy grails of Japanese gabber and all I got was another record in my shelf”

    When I boarded the plane back from Tokyo to Berlin, there were between 40 and 50 records in my luggage. I bought that many because I wanted feel like I truly cherished the record buying opportunities that Tokyo, probably more than any other city on that planet, has to offer. But if I am honest, not many of those were records I could have only gotten in Japan. The majority of the purchases pushing me over Spring Airlines’ strictly enforced weight limits was pressed in Europe or the US. 

    There was stuff that I already wanted or that I would have found interesting wherever I came across it. Many of the records were extra cheap due to the weak Yen, and I loved getting them with the extra patina of having brought them home from Tokyo. Also I was on a spending spree. I had bought a new suitcase to fill it up, not to come home with it half empty. I had 2.000 € of possible overdraft in my bank account and I was going to use every penny. So why not buy every random Dance Mania record I was able to get my hands on?

    Still, there were some records I got in Tokyo that I would have never found elsewhere – for example Izumi Kobayashi’s “Tropicana”, this strange and amazing house compilation that apparently celebrates the opening of a new club in Osaka in 1993 or this odd hard house EP about drinking beer.

    But my most cherished proper Japanese souvenir on wax wasn’t any rare Shibuya Jazz-Funk, melancholic City Pop or even oddball House, it was a Gabber 12” called the “Hardcore Osaka E.P”, which waited for me in Shimokitazawa’s Disk Union, which is a truly magical place.

    An unmarked white Label with a stickered paper sleeve, I was immediately stricken by the name paired with a steep price tag (I think this record set me back around 60 Euros). And once I saw a shoutout to legendary German 90s producer Speed Freak on the small sticker on the generic sleeve next to a crude drawing, I knew that I would probably have to take this bad boy home with me. 

    Gabber? I hardly know her!

    I’m not usually one to splurge on Gabber records. Sure, I love a lot of genres surrounding Gabber, there are many Gabber records in my collection, and I own more than one item of Thunderdome merch, but I would not dare consider myself an expert in the field. Don’t get me wrong: I know what I like within Gabber when I hear it. But I struggle to identify certain strains, trends and eras. I’m often not sure I could tell a Lenny Dee track from one by the Dream Team or Marc Arcadipane. And I couldn’t tell a Gabber track from Rotterdam to one from Frankfurt or Glasgow or, well, Osaka.

    To be fully honest: When I first listened to the record I was disappointed. I hoped that with a name like “Hardcore Osaka” the contributors Oilhead, Stingers, Waxhead and Yam Yam – all of whom were and occasionally still are active in Japan’s Hardcore scene – would opt to infuse the four tracks with an unmistakable “Japaneseness”. Whether that meant vocal samples in Japanese or Koto chops or whatever, I’m not sure what I imagined. 

    Unfortunately that isn’t the case. “Hardcore Osaka” uses tried and tested samples, classic vocals and rave stabs. Fortunately, “Hardcore Osaka E.P” does not need its regional novelty to stand up to its peers from the other side of the globe. Each of its four tracks is a perfect distillation of some of the trends that shaped the genre’s trajectory in Europe. From Speedcore-adjacent hectic aggressiveness (See A1 for example) to impossibly catchy rave simplicity.

    Also the vocal in track B2 sounds like it’s saying “Fuck DJ Hörde”, which gave me yet another reason to throw myself into the icy lake and spend 60 Eurinos (DJ Hörde is an amazing DJ & producer & m8 of mine who you should check out!).

    Another reason why I had to buy this record – I’m not gonna pretend that it didn’t matter to me – is that this is clearly an extremely rare and sought after record. If it wasn’t for the fact that this is a very pricey piece of DIY history by some Japanese guys, a record of which according to Discogs only 200 copies exist, only 120 of which were commercially available, a record that has gone for 500€ on Discogs in the past with no copies currently available, I’m not sure I would have splurged, even if I do love the music. But it is, was, has, and I did, and I couldn’t be happier to own this holy grail of Japanese Gabber!

    (Funny side note: The white label says it’s “Made in Germany”. Would love to know the background to this. Did Japanese pressing plants in the 1990s not want to press this type of music? Did they not have capable engineers for cutting and mastering? Or was this a general thing for 12”s released by Japanese labels in the 1990s? I saw that catalogue No. 02 of the Bass2 label was pressed in Czech Republic by Gramofonové Závody, so it appears they were trying different suppliers.)

    To hakk or not to hakk

    Either way: Now would ideally come the moment in the text where I tell you about playing this one and the crowd erupting into ecstatic cheers. About flexing on some old heads with this unique piece of vinyl. About, well, some sort of satisfying conclusion. But I can’t, at least yet. At this point I’ve carried “Hardcore Osaka” with me to around 6 gigs in 3 countries without playing it a single time. I’m not sure why I’ve lacked the bravery to do it so far. 

    Maybe it’s because a lot of Gabber I love often doesn’t really translate well to a dancefloor because it lacks a low end compared to the Happy Hardcore I’d play alongside it. Maybe it’s because I’m subconsciously afraid to ruin this expensive record. After all, I have no qualms to scratch up a VG Hard Trance 1€ banger from the flea market and say “OToh I love when a record has lived” but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t feel different if that record would be a month’s rent.

    The closest I came to playing it was last December when my friends over at 16Pitch invited me to play their annual Christmas party at beloved Berlin basement/ fire hazard Zur Klappe. 16Pitch stands for vinyl only 170 plus bpm sets, and for packing out Klappe to its fullest capacity on a random Tuesday. While this crew is now content with throwing 1-2 parties each year, that just means their amazing and open crowd is even more hyped than usual, so I wanted to do something special.

    In the past, whenever I’ve played for that crew, I brought my tightest happy hardcore heaters in order to match the gang’s polished modern free tekno and DJ Henk’s dubplates of SoundCloud hard trance. This time, though, I wanted to do something special. Though I only had an hour I planned a little journey through hardcore history, starting with some proper awkward early nineties gabber vibes. From Hardliners’ “Give me a motherfucking breakbeat” to “Wonderfull Days” to Scooter’s “Crank it Up” this tangent was so much fun and I feel like the crowd was also fully on board – it was probably helpful that on Zur Klappe’s dodgy sound system my low-end-less Amiga-produced gabber didn’t sound all that different from the more modern stuff.

    Still, as fun as that journey was, “Osaka Hardcore” did not grace the turntables. But, it’s also nice to know that my copy of the record has not reached the climax of its journey yet. And if you’re ever in the crowd and you suddenly hear that classic “Amsterdam” sample come in, better give me some cheers and Hakk it up so I know it was worth it.

  • DJ Deeon – Induced EP (1995)

    DJ Deeon – Induced EP (1995)

    Alternative title: Going back to my roots, yeah!

    I have a confession to make: While writing my review for DJ Funk’s Pumpin’ Tracks EP I left out something crucial. When I bought it a year ago in Tokyo, I was excited to own it. But I actually wasn’t super excited to listen to it. I bought it more out of a sense of duty than actual musical interest. I know, I know, and I’m sorry.

    You see: Funk had just passed, you don’t see his records everyday, and I felt like my “career” as a DJ and producer is built on the back of Chicago legends like him. Our collective Raiders was founded on a shared love for the seminal Dance Mania label, for Detroit ghettotech and electro, for Miami bass and for Baltimore Club. Our parties were known for showcasing those music styles. Funk’s music, and some variation of “Pump It” was played at pretty much every event. I had to own that record. But did I really want to play it?

    Around that time, I was playing very different music in my club sets. It was mostly nostalgic happy hardcore, 00s hard house, energetic speed garage, some techno-adjacent trance, and the odd pop edit. I still love all of these styles of music. 

    But I also feel like I’m fully back on the sauce when it comes to the OG Chicago business that ignited my passion for fast, freaky and simple house music in the first place.

    Reigniting a passion through a mediocre gig

    My personal renaissance with the Chicago OGs started around last august when our collective did a takeover for Sensus festival, around 2-3h away from Berlin. This lovely small event by a tightly knit Berliner crew brings together the city’s electronic music nerds, graffiti writers, art school kids, and speed freaks on an abandoned airfield for a real family affair.

    Every meter I’d bump into friends, friends of friends, and soon-to-be friends in a way that made me feel at home like few other festivals have done before. I am also proud to call myself a resident of the Sensus these days but that’s another story.

    Either way: we took over a woody outdoor floor and invited some lovely friends, namely divas Camilla Rae and Hedda, who played incredible sets. But I was also looking forward to DJ Nortside and myself playing some ghetto house vinyl for the early shift to pay respects to the roots of our collective. That meant dusting off some of the old Dance Manias I hadn’t played in a while. 

    Honestly, the 2h set was fun, but it wasn’t stellar – in my memory it only really started catching the crowd once we moved away from our scratched up Chicago records and started playing more eclectic modern club tracks and electro. However, the whole process of preparing for this set and witnessing Nortside’s amazing bleepy selection really got me fired up. I was keen to dig into that music again. And to also go beyond the classic bangers driven by raunchy repetitive vocals that dominated my collection.

    Hold up, wait a minute!

    Fast forward to me preparing the texts for this blog, and I started writing about the DJ Funk EP (I had some footage from Japan about it after all), I became curious about the label behind it. What else had come out on Cosmic records, that odd UK label with the handwritten label designs, that had hosted some of ghetto house’s biggest stars comparatively early in their careers?

    I knew I had another record from the same label, DJ Milton’s “Hittin’ Hard EP”. I had dug it up ages ago while working at one of HHV’s Diggin Days events, and bagged it for free, of course. It’s one of these strong yet bleepy Chicago EPs which due to its lack of catchy vocals it never truly made the gigging rotation. Either way, looking into Cosmic I stumbled over DJ Deeon’s Induced EP, which is the focus of today’s ramble.

    The standout track, the one that made me want to actually write about Induced, is “On Da Run” – an incredible song which I have simply out of my head, and it’s been MONTHS. It consists of pretty straightforward drum programming and some delay-heavy vocal jamming, presumably by the man himself. It’s never really in pitch, it seems mostly improvised, and it’s among the best things I’ve ever heard. The whole track has a truly haunting and psychedelic quality to it that I just can’t shake. As simple as it is, it’s one of my favorite discoveries of 2025.

    Beyond “On Da Run”, “And I Sexxx” is another highlight. It delivers everything you want from a 1995 Deeon track: Catchy vocals, a simplistic bleepy melody, fat toms, and a fairly long arrangement making it a joy to mix. Tbh it doesn’t stick with me in the same way “On Da Run” does, given that it doesn’t have that vibe of someone chanting in a dense forest at night while you’re running for your life. But at the same time it’s probably much more compatible with most sets.

    “The Funk Electric” is a tightly sequenced drum machine workout without any melodies or vocals whatsoever, a real barrage of 909 toms. It honestly doesn’t make an impression on its own, but it probably kills as a tool to transition between two large vocals or melodies. “Sex Part 1”, finally, revolves around some chopped up wobbly synth sounds in different rhythms. It’s short, unfortunately, but if you like the type of ghetto house tracks that sounds like you’re shaking a thin sheet of metal – think time for the percolator – this one feels right at home.

    Why is this quartet of tracks one that I keep thinking about, that I keep playing at home and in club settings? I think it has something to do with the label responsible, which we should finally take a look at:

    Cosmic ghetto house music

    Cosmic Records, which released the Induced EP emerged from the club night called Lost, started by Techno legend Steven Bicknell and “infamous UK promoter” Sheree Rashit. Lost, “one of the longest-running and most respected underground techno nights in the UK” began in 1991 and grew a label extremity in 1993, which has remained active in various intervals until the mid-2010s (cool interview with Bicknell here). 

    While mostly a vessel for Bicknell’s own productions, Cosmic and Lost always maintained a strong connection with Chicago and Detroit, and was probably the first notable Euro-label to give a platform to artists from the emerging ghetto house sphere on its “Club Track” sublabel.

    After Funk’s Pumpin’ Tracks, the Discogs numbers of which look like those of a successful release, Cosmic saw EPs by Deeon, Milton and even Hip-House-hero-turned-Ghetto-god Tyree Cooper (his T.C.X. is one of the most stunning tracks I never get to play out). For those artists Cosmic is an outlier, given that around that time they mostly released on Dance Mania and occasionally other Chicago-based labels such as Rockin House, Underground Construction or DJ Funk’s own label projects. 

    One thing is for certain: these artists leaving the Chicago sphere at the time led to some great music. All of these Cosmic releases are absolutely worth seeking out. I’m projecting here but given that Lost was generally pretty tapped into European Techno, it makes sense to me that the artists would aim to use these releases to put out their more hypnotic and minimalist cuts, while keeping the sample-heavy party starters for Dance Mania et al. Like, I can understand why Deeon would release “On Da Run” with Cosmic as opposed to Dance Mania where it was originally supposed to come out.

    Tacking on a dance mania rant as if this isn’t long enough already

    If you’re into the Dance Mania sound you also know another reason to seek out these records besides the music simply being great. It’s because they weren’t released by Dance Mania.

    Let me put it this way: The more you enjoy the music put out by the label in the 1990s, the more annoyed you get with the often jarring decisions made by the label when it comes to their releases. Chief amongst their offences against DJs who love their music is their obsession with cramming too many tracks on each side of a record, meaning that these often already flimsily mixed and strangely mastered tracks lose the little punch they had to begin with, because there’s four of them on an EP.

    The label made countless head-scratching choices and it seems that each nerd has another record that they feel Dance Mania screwed up most – often by fading out the best track you ever heard after 2:50 minutes because they needed to squeeze something else on that record.

    Either way: This is of course complaining on a high level. Pretty much anything on that label past ~DM50 is historical. And if you are in the business of crate digging and chasing used 12”, you know that records by few labels are as consistently beaten up as those by DM (even in Japan!).

    Dance Mania’s decisions can be frustrating at times, but these records were being played and loved. They lived. But I am simply happy for us DJs but also the musicians that there are labels besides Dance Mania, labels like Cosmic records, that have put out out this incredibly forward-thinking and game-changing music at that time.

    RIP DJ Funk. RIP DJ Deeon. RIP Paul Johnson. RIP to everyone whose name isn’t up there. And finally I wanted to say Free DJ Milton but it appears that he is in fact back and released a track called “Let’s Juke” just a few months back! So Euro-promoters, do it like Cosmic did and bring these legends over the Atlantic while it’s still possible.

  • Space Cube – Kool Killer Vol 3 (1993)

    Space Cube – Kool Killer Vol 3 (1993)

    Alternative Title: Amateur Hour!

    There is a tendency among record people to obsess over the shittier version of something good. Of course you love the Beatles, but do you know there’s a 60s group of Surrey teenagers who contributed one track to a compilation of local rock bands that is recorded in a shed? Steely Dan is great but have you heard of that Swiss Library record that contains a 1:30m version of a pretty promising Disco-Jazz track? Sure, we all love Egyptian Lover, but have you heard of this Milwaukee Hip Hop crew fronted by a Scientologist that dropped one obscure 7” in 1985 about how crack is bad that now costs 1.800$?

    I’m half jestin’, but if I am honest, I am very much guilty of this. There are local Christian Funk bangers from tiny German labels that I like better than some objectively superior US classics. And I handily prefer the Rap-O-Clap-O version by Cora & die Popspatzen over the one by Joe Bataan. 

    If you’re a fan of a certain type of music there is simple pleasure in witnessing people imitating it and, while fucking up, developing a whole new type of sound. Call it outsider art or schadenfreude but certain ways of failing make your music special.

    Who cares about the rares?

    However: When it comes to fast-paced electronic music from the 1990s, this love for local amateurisms doesn’t seem to exist in the same way as it does in other genres.

    Sure: certain subgenres, especially tech-house and minimal, have embraced their regional weirdos, often hyping up rare oddball labels and quirky DIY-releases. You could argue that many of these EPs going through the digger-hype-cycle are simply serviceable takes on established genres that are somewhat interchangeable and rarely add much unique flavor. And that their desirability is rather derived from their rarity than their musical appeal. But at least people care.

    In the communities surrounding happy hardcore, rave music and jungle, people seem to care less, especially about music from beyond Great Britain. To me it seems that, the closer a track is to the original UK rave communities between 1990 bleeps and 1996 roller, the more likely that it’s gonna enter a kind of canon making it desirable to own and play. And everything that strays too far from that path is a failure that people don’t really care about outside of highly specific circles.

    As someone based in Germany who loves digging for rave music, this has put me in a predicament: I love the artists and labels that originated these sounds, but it’s pretty rare to stumble over a stack of Impact or Homegrown 12”s in the €-bin of a dusty Berlin antiques shop (though it does happen), because breakbeat hardcore and happy hardcore were simply not massively popular genres in Germany – at least compared to stuff like techno, acid, house and hard trance. And even within the niche genre of hardcore a lot of German stuff is much more adjacent to Frankfurt acid escapades and in full honesty a little stressful for me.

    Sure, if you know where to look there are loads of terrible major label euro trance records that house a pastiche “happy rave” remix with an amen break on the b-side to cash in on that particular craze between 1994 and 1996, and occasionally these are even sort of good! Sometimes there might even be a dilettante attempt at Jungle which I especially love – see this one for example by Jam & Spoon who are now much more remembered for their contributions to trance than their jungle experiments.

    So: the major labels were content with ticking some ravey boxes to market what I would endearingly call cheesy Euro-slop. Is that all there is in continental Europe?

    Any German jungle in guy?

    No! There were some magnificent pockets of nerds in the DACH region (Germany, Austria & Switzerland) that were inspired by the UK’s buzzing scenes, and that had the talent to not only imitate these genres but to add to them and as outsiders become part of hardcore history (not the podcast). 

    There are several examples for these types of artists that have earned the respect of their British peers, some of which I hope to cover on this page. I would have to mention the likes of Martin Damm (aka. Biochip C. or Speed Freak), Ilsa Gold, Atari Teenage Riot, and many more but in my view the real heroes are the subjects of today’s text, Space Cube.

    Space Cube is a project by Ian Pinnekamp, later known as Ian Pooley, and Thomas Gerlach, later known as DJ Tonka. Both of them are now known as German house royalty with Pooley having done remixes for Daft Punk and Tonka calling himself “𝙶𝚎𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚢’𝚜 𝚏𝚒𝚛𝚜𝚝 𝚑𝚘𝚞𝚜𝚎, 𝟸-𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚙, 𝚓𝚞𝚗𝚐𝚕𝚎 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚍𝚛𝚞𝚖 & 𝚋𝚊𝚜𝚜 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚍𝚞𝚌𝚎𝚛” in his IG bio. But before they became house-hold names haha with interviews on VIVA and chart listings, they had several joint music projects in their late teens and early 20s (between 1991 and 1996-ish), the most prolific of which was called Space Cube.

    I remember hearing them first when Young Lychee bought this one at AudioIn before Covid straight from the turntable of the person sorting through a new stack (this was before they established their protocol for new records) for 30€, which was an unbelievable amount to me at the time, but I still envy him for it. I truly fell in love with Space Cube later when I heard the classic track “Session” in this mix by Mathis Ruffing and Souci, you can still see my stunned 5 years old SoundCloud comment. 

    Crashin’ for a “Session”

    “Session” is the cult classic off of Space Cube’s “Kool Killer Vol 3”, which is the subject of today’s text in case you didn’t notice, and that’s truly justified. It’s so god damn fun and raw and DJ-able, and still gets a crowd going today with its Flavor Flav sample – sidenote: it’s funny how prominent Chuck D is sampled pretty much everywhere while I can hardly think of Flavor Flav samples in dance music – and its perfectly sorta-cheesy-but-not-too-cheesy Pet-Shop-Boys-sampling breakdown. See young Young Lychee and young myself having a ton of fun mixing it over here. As a Discogs-rando put it in 2006: “This is certainly one of German hardcore’s finest moments.”

    While “Session” is the objective standout of the EP, it has one problem: It’s so perfect that you’d never think it was made by a duo of 20 (!) year olds from Germany’s Main area. It fits so well between a Vibes & Wishdokta B-side or a DJ Sy banger that you’d never in a million years think that this wasn’t made by someone from Cornwall or Leeds or whatever. 

    That’s why I am also particularly fond of another track from Kool Killer 3, “Dschungelfieber”. It’s not that this track is any less professional, but with its use of German vocals it scratches that exact itch of wanting to find the German version of something cool, while still being incredibly competent.

    Cards on the table, though: I have to say I usually forgo the dark and acid-laden original version on Kool Killer 3 in favor of the duo’s own reimagining of the track on their remix EP on the legendary Riot Beats label. A guaranteed floor filler that will put a smile on people’s face not only through its Dschunglist vocals (If you know where they are from please write a message), but also through one of the most fiercely chopped breaks I’ve heard on a German release.

    Another highlight is “Time To Kill” with its iconic sample of Peter Schilling’s stellar 1982 NDW hit “Major Tom”. This one abandons Session’s boiled down ecstatic energy level in favor of a more cut-and-paste breakbeat rave approach that almost leans into slapstick. Through its more chaotic vibe this one feels a little more dated and its synth programming is more in line with some of the stressful German hardcore from that era. But as anyone who loves UK hardcore will be able to tell you: hectic mash-ups of absurd samples that shouldn’t work together but somehow do is also a staple of early British rave music that Pooley and Tonka nail perfectly.

    If this is something you’re interested in, I’d also recommend tracking down the other “Kool Killer” releases by Space Cube since they are a bit more on the mash-up ironic side of things with their unexpected samples and sudden switch-ups.

    “Suddenly”, finally, is a great track, too, which has the unfortunate fate of having been put on a record with some of “German hardcore’s finest moments”. It’s very catchy and serviceable but I simply always forget it exists. Writing this text has made me keen to close a set with it, though, since it really is a perfect track for when the lights have turned on in the club and the people yearn for one final campy hug before heading to the train station.

    I could go on about Space Cube, about their other releases and about their home label Force Inc. (objectively the most forward thinking rave music label in Germany between 1992 and 1996-ish) forever, and I’m sure I will in future articles. And I’d also love to find out more about their relationship to that project given that they made all this amazing music when they were SO young, and their later polished music could hardly be more different from Space Cube’s raw, demanding, sometimes ironic, and not always DJ friendly edge. 

    For now I’ll just say: Do yourself a favor and hunt down an affordable copy, because there are few joys in life like teasing the beginning of “Session” a couple of times and then finally mixing it in. “JA BITTE”.

  • DJ Funk – Pumpin’ Tracks EP (1994)

    DJ Funk – Pumpin’ Tracks EP (1994)

    Alternative title: How to blow an entire tour’s fees in 2nd hand 7th heaven

    In the beginning of 2025, Young Lychee and myself spent 1.5 months in Asia, playing gigs, visiting friends, having lunch, and running to catch our planes – classic DJ business. The last stop of our tour happened to be Tokyo. 

    Going to Japan at all wasn’t necessarily an intuitive choice for a variety of reasons. For the longest time we didn’t have any tangible gigs planned, and even when we ended up securing a really fun gig with the ATM fam alongside local legends like Kanse or Seimei, the fee certainly didn’t justify the type of money we were spending staying in Tokyo for a week – especially when compared to other stops on our journey. India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and China allowed for pretty affordable living. Tokyo did not. On housing alone we blew around 1k€ for a cozy Airbnb in Kita for a week, which felt like a bargain given that a capsule hotel would have been like 700€-800€ for the two of us.

    So why had I pushed for this Tokyo detour? Why was I so keen to go to Japan? Why did I object to my friend’s carefully worded warnings that spending a week in Japan for a modest fee might be economically inefficient and borderline irrational? I mean it’s not like I had any deep-seated weeb-tendencies beyond a surface level appreciation of Japanese cultural exports like DragonBall, Nintendo, Ramen or Soichi Terada. A now deleted tweet sort of sums it up: “to be a white guy is a constant struggle where you think a lot of things about Japan are interesting but you don’t wanna be all weird about it”

    Need for Heat – Tokyo Dig

    Well, beyond a general interest I knew there was one reason why I wanted to visit Tokyo, and why I wanted to do it right before traveling back to Europe: I wanted to purchase some records. I’d heard so much about Japanese record shops, about meticulously curated nerd dungeons filled with neatly packaged rare records in pristine conditions for decent prices. I remember watching episodes of Crate Diggers in which people were sharing their stories of visiting Japan and coming back with suitcase-loads of otherwise unfindable gems. And that’s not even mentioning the listening bars.

    Obviously, reality as a one week tourist with little guidance can hardly live up to my imagination of Tokyo as a digger’s utopia, as vinyl Valhalla, as 2nd hand 7th heaven. I have to say that a lot of the more specialized cute stores are very much geared to people that aren’t me: There’s lots of rare US hip hop, lots of US disco and boogie – very happy to have snagged a copy of the NYC Peech Boys album. The few stores I found that were focused on 2nd hand electronic music were very firmly situated in the realms of soulful US house. UK genres were not very strongly represented in the stores I hit up.

    However, we did end up having a great time haunting some amazing record stores, and I did find some real gems that I’m still truly excited about more than year after picking them up.

    We arrived in Tokyo late on March 7th 2025, so on the 8th we had our first outing. We saw Shibuya crossing, ate our first bowl of Ramen, got overwhelmed and hit up the Disk Union in Shibuya. I believe it was the homie Thabo, who, among lots of helpful advice and connections, recommended we try our luck with the larger record chains rather than the small shops. I really couldn’t envision a big commercial record chain stocking 2nd hand 12”s, especially not stuff that I would actually like, but once that elevator door opened, we were fully entranced by the massive selection of exactly the kind of stuff we were looking for. Apparently the 2nd hand electronic music section of the Shibuya Disk Union has a good reputation, but generally there was not a single Disk Union I left disappointed.

    We quickly noticed a large section labeled “Chicago” that stocked anything from Rockin’ House to Trax to huge numbers of Dance Mania records, and an especially significant number of DJ Funk records, pretty much all of which we bought. This was not just because DJ Funk was a legendary DJ and producer whose tracks had a profound impact on both of our musical development as well as the development of Raiders, the label we founded. 

    We also wanted to buy pretty much every DJ Funk track on sight because it was March 8th, and DJ Funk had sadly passed away just three days prior. After Deeon and Paul Johnson, he was the third famous originator of Chicago’s ghetto house sound to pass away within just a few years from each other. None of them lived to be 60. The impact of any of them truly cannot be overstated. But DJ Funk – who I saw live at this night at Ipse, to which neither Deeon and Paul Johnson ended up making it, leading to some angry Facebook posts, which was the style at the time – was the one that I always played the most songs of.

    Teachers / Learners

    Sadness and tragedy aside: Out of the 6ish DJ Funk records I bought in Tokyo, “Pumpin’ Tracks” is probably the most classic. It’s an amazing EP, whether you’re into this sound or not. Released in 1994 as one of Funk’s first, the EP probably qualifies as part of the early days of what people would later call ghetto house. The stand-out track – often sampled and remixed but rarely done justice – is of course “Pump It”. With its repetitive and encompassing bassline, its densely layered vocal chops, and its tight drums it rightfully qualifies as a foundational classic of the genre. 

    “Pump it” is really raw with all that the word entails. If you’d want to be critical you could say: Funk is still finding his footing – especially given that his later contributions have perfected this exact type of track, hold your attention firmly and still sound futuristic today. You can still hear the echos of late 80s TRAX records and the Hip House wave in it. If you’d want to be charitable, though, you could say: This track bangs! It is bursting with energy and innovation, and still works well in DJ sets today.

    Beyond “Pump It”, I find the remaining tracks on the EP even more interesting. They are the kind of distorted, repetitive, functional, jackin mid-90s drum machine workouts that get less shine than the hits with the well-known vocals. But they truly embody the rough essence of this era in Chicago music. “Happy Feet” and “Low Energy”, which delivers anything but, follow a classic Dance Mania formula: Distorted drum patterns combined with simple bleeps, occasionally pitched up or down, sometimes thickened with a 303 bassline. A recipe as simple as it is enduring.

    “Knock Knock,” my favorite of the bunch, even forgoes the rudimentary notes and derives all its head-nodding potential from a short loop of swingin’ percussive hits that should get old but somehow doesn’t. Rarely does a track without a melody become such a favorite of mine, but this one made it.

    “Knock Knock” is a good symbol for that entire era of early unpolished ghetto house: It does a lot with very little, because it knows that very little can be enough. While there is obviously so much more to say about the legacy of these Chicago legends, their significance to me, and also about Cosmic Records – the UK label that released this EP and a few others by Chicago OGs in a rare and fruitful burst of early transatlantic cooperation – I have to let myself be inspired by the holy ghost of DJ Funk on this one and not overdo it. This text is rambling enough as it is, and you hardly learned anything about digging in Japan. Oh well. Like and subscribe.

    RIP DJ Funk!

  • Player One – Different Strokes (1999)

    Player One – Different Strokes (1999)

    Alternative title: Another crap night out in Oberschöneweide

    Ravi McArthur is a true diggers’ darling, and I only mean that half disparagingly – look at any of the two dozen-ish releases he’s been involved in on Discogs, and even if it’s not pricey (yet), its “wants” will most likely outweigh the “haves”. And while I am often bemused by the swarm’s decisionmaking process about which obscure and mediocre late 90s Tech House person is next in line to become highly sought after among Hoppetosse heads and CdV creepers, I can fully understand why McArthur’s incredible run of 12”s from the mid-90s to the mid-00s has struck this kind of chord. Take this example: This guy (together with longtime collaborator Tom Gilleron) made a House record named The Poon Tang Clan – How Deep Is Your Muff? and it’s not just good but GREAT.

    So why do people love the man’s work? McArthur’s tracks often manage to thread the needle between classic Deep House sensibilities and sparse, minimal arrangements that can Tech-House it up with the best of them, while alluding to elements from 90s Breaks business, UKG and Electro House in a calm and collected way that does not seem gimmicky. And of the many amazing tracks McArthur produced, “Another Crap Night Out In Eltham” is my favorite.

    Recordselling my soul

    I knew none of this when an original copy of Different Strokes by McArthur’s Player One alias fell into my hands at Recordsale, the Berlin-based record selling sweatshop at which I used to spend my days back when I still aspired to be a music journalist and to smoke weed all day. The task was simple: We had to go through crates of records, find them on Discogs, grade their condition and put them in the system to be sold. It was around that time that I started to get enthusiastic about deeper House and Electro, after being consumed by Hip Hop, Disco, Funk, Jazz and such for years. At that point I was pretty excitable. Give me a smooth Rhodes-y chord progression and I’d probably buy that record for our employee discount, which was fifty percent at the time – or a hundred, depending on who you talk to.

    The working conditions at Recordsale sucked for many reasons, but the vibe among us employees was great, and it wasn’t just the discount and the digging opportunities. I met so many people there who ended up being formative for not only my time in Berlin and my “”music career””, but my development as a person. I remember being introduced to so many things there, like Joe Claussell by the legend Dimitry, to Italo Disco through sessions with Jan, to incredible Reggae Disco bangers by magic man Bogdan, to the depths of late 80s House by my dear friend and early party collaborator Ali, and to Baltimore Club and UKG by my dear friend “Piano Chris” aka Bob Ross from Friends.

    Funnily enough, when I picked this record out of some crate I was working on, it wasn’t for “Another Crap Night Out In Eltham”, the objectively monumental slam dunk of Different Strokes, but for “U Wot ?” – a Disco’d-out breaks-y House sleeper with smooth chords and an incredible moment when a some horns come in around 1:50. I just rediscovered this one today and was pretty stunned. It’s funky, it’s class, and it pales in comparison to the magnetic “Another Crap Night Out In Eltham”, which I fell in love with in the years after acquiring the record. 

    “Eltham” is minimalist yet expressive, it’s percussive and tooly, yet full of melodies, it’s moving forward yet melancholic. It builds slowly but decidedly, and when that stab fully kicks in it’s pure ecstasy. I have so many fond memories of playing it out (which given how pricey the record has become I should probably stop doing) but I’ll talk about the first one.

    Crap night chronicles

    The first time I remember bringing the record with me, it was at this event, where our Ghetto-House-inspired label/ collective was unexpectedly asked to take over the night programme of Future East, a lovely festival that showcases mostly Middle-Eastern experimental music. It was a great opportunity to see Istanbul Ghetto Club, and to invite some friends and colleagues like Acidfinky, Zeynep, and Mehmet Aslan to play for us, but it was a bit of an odd vibe. Musikbrauerei is huge, and everyone had just witnessed some amazing live concerts. There was some proper Techno-ing happening downstairs in an arch of the building, but our upstairs floor took a while to get going.

    More annoyingly: This was at a time when I pretty much only played records. I did not know at all how to use Rekordbox, and only owned a handful of digital tracks. Imagine my disappointment, when I wanted to mix in the first record in a B2B with Young Lychee, and the booth was simply not isolated whatsoever, resulting in the worst needle skipping I’ve probably ever witnessed aloud. We ended up managing digitally, at least that’s what I remember. But that also meant: I couldn’t play “Another Crap Night Out In Eltham”.

    Luckily, this wasn’t the only gig I was set to play that night. After this one we were supposed to play together at the magnificent Kaos in Oberschöneweide, where our dear friends and label-mates Turk & Fin organised a soli-party with their Some Lush Frequencies collective. After we finished up the set, Bob/ Lychee spontaneously decided to stay, so I swiftly jumped into a cab all the way to the other side of town to make it JUST in time for the gig. I remember being very excited to play some classic House, and I started with Plez’s “Can’t Stop (Acid Rain Forest Mix)” which with its hypnotic bassline let me forget all about feedback noise. 

    Fast forward to halfway through the set, when I decided it’s time to cue up “Another Crap Night out in Eltham”. The record starts percussive and minimal, and I remember that moment when chords first start coming in not hitting the Kaos-dancefloor as I hoped. But boy, when that stab sound slowly creeps in during that breakdown, always just a little more muffled than you want it to until JUST before the drums return… real movie magic.

    Throughout the set I was pretty worried about my performance, more than usually. One of the reasons was that legend Stella Zekri, who was already popping off at the time, was hanging out on the dancefloor. Her and the SLF crew go way back to legendary parties at Zigraer Strasse, and she was playing before me on this one as a favor. Either way: I have a vivid memory of this track really hitting, which gave me the confidence to initiate an extensive hang afterwards.

    Sitting around some table in the middle of this huge warehouse, we simply talked about music with clenched jaws and big smiles for hours. We talked extensively about Newcleus and early Hip Hop, and when we were about to head back to the dancefloor I remember us being like “Nah, actually let’s just talk about music more”. And that’s what we did until the sun came up and I was booty-called to Neukölln where I drunkenly crashed into a table and spilled tea over some really nice photo books. Great night!

    Stalking a British man on the internet

    Memories aside, what is Ravi McArthur doing now? It’s been around 20 years since his last release, he does not seem to DJ anymore. What is he up to?

    Well, he’s happy. Or at least he looks happy on his profile picture in what I’m fairly certain is his LinkedIn. And why wouldn’t he be? He seems to be an in-demand tech professional in the Greater London area with a great career behind him. And he produced some of the best electronic music ever made. I’d be smiling, too.

    While googling around for this text, I stumbled upon this IG-post by McArthur’s peer Asad Rizvi, now known mostly as Silver Linings. In the text he describes hanging out in Friedrichshain as part of a Euro-tour by the Reverberations-boys in 1998, hitting an Imbiss and the like. I’d like to think that just a few hundred meters from where I’m writing these words now, some young bright-eyed producers ate some shabby Berlin food for a couple of Marks, blissfully unaware that they were in the process of creating some truly touching art, which would reverberate almost 30 years into the future.

    PS: Didn’t know where to fit this but our man did an official loungy Disco House remix for Robbie Williams’ “Rock DJ”, which is probably among the middest things he ever did, but If that is not a fun fact I don’t know what is.
    PPS: When I recently played this record at Cologne’s Gewölbe, it popped off, as it always does, and I remember my dear m8 Anatoli fka Play Boy Joe of Das Ist Das Ja collective running up to me and asking whether I’d spent 300€ on this one. I didn’t but honestly I probably would.

  • Cora und die Popspatzen – Wie wär’s mit Schulfreiem Montag? (1980)

    Cora und die Popspatzen – Wie wär’s mit Schulfreiem Montag? (1980)

    Kool Herc forgive me for I have sinned: I am obsessed with early 1980s Hip Hop from Germany. When the Breakdance craze first hit the old world through hit records played in GI nightclubs, everyone wanted in on the action, especially random Major-Label Schlager producers aiming to ride a wave they knew very little about. This mix between musical ambition, technical ineptitude and the obvious dissonance between the vibe of a regular 1980s German person (stuck up, rule-abiding, bad vibes) and the vibe of one of these original early Hip Hop tracks (loose, generally chill, good vibes) created some fascinating, often terrible music.

    But the very best of early German and European Hip Hop turns these disadvantages into strengths – its inadequacies in production, storytelling and technical prowess making it more real and charming. And few records are as charming as Wie wär’s mit Schulfreiem Montag? by Cora und die Popspatzen.

    But in order to properly talk about this endearing record I want to bring up another record, with which Cora is in competition for the all-important title of “first German Hip Hop record ever released”. And of course,when I’m talking about Hip Hop, I mean that in the sense of Breakdancing, Scratching and colorful clothes just on the tail end of Disco, made for a society struggling to tell apart Kool & the Gang from Barry White. Well, while several records claim that spot for themselves (See for example: Cheeky’s “Erste Deutsche Scratch- & Break-Platte“), as far as I know there are two releases that actually compete for the title, having come out in the same month of 1980 – and both of them are novelty cover versions of extremely popular early Hip Hop tracks.

    No. 1: Rapper’s Deutsch by G.L.S.-United

    This particular record is somewhat dear to me, because it is the ultimate cash-grab novelty Breakdance record, one of many that started flooding the German market around that time. It has so stunningly little reverence for Hip Hop and its origins that you have to kind of respect it.

    Basically, three Radio- and TV-hosts popular in 1980 “cover” Rapper’s Delight by the Sugarhill Gang. Meaning they rap their own vocals on top of the iconic backing track, in which they discuss the different types of Rock music they like. Frank Laufenberg likes 60s Beat, Manfred Sexauer likes 50s Rock’n’Roll, Thomas Gottschalk – who went on to become probably Germany’s most popular entertainer for a little while, and is by all accounts a massive asshole and a creep – likes New Wave.

    The whole thing is kind of a disaster, it sounds like they only did a few takes and none of the three have ever used their voice rhythmically in any capacity. However, Rapper’s Delight’s funky bassline and catchy progression carry even the most arrhythmic middle-aged Germans, so it somehow still goes down alright. However, I’ve not listened to my copy in probably around 6 years. If anything, I’ve pulled it out to show people that “Thomas Gottschalk, who we used to watch on television when we were children, made an early Hip Hop record, and it sucks!” It exudes novelty on a scale so great that you don’t even need to play it.

    No. 2: Wie wär’s mit Schulfreiem Montag? by Cora und die Popspatzen

    Wie wär’s mit Schulfreiem Montag gives an insight into who record executives wanted to market Hip-Hop to at that time: Children. It is possibly the first in a long line of novelty Hip-Hop records for kids that were released in the first half of the 1980s. Pick up a random kids movie soundtrack or a compilation of children’s music from around that time, and chances are you will find a crisp drum computer pattern paired with slightly rap-adjacent vocals.

    Cora is a young girl who relatably wants nothing more than taking Monday off. And in order to achieve that goal she covers Joe Bataan’s seminal Rap-O-Clap-O with her “Popspatzen” (Pop sparrows). This is probably top 5 in the “most charming records I own” bracket. Obviously, this is a presumably 9-year old girl. But she certainly delivers her rhymes better than all three middle-aged radio talk show hosts combined. The mundane topic of the vocals perfectly gels with the moody-yet-terribly-danceable chords of Bataan’s noodly Disco-Rap-Classic. The dissonant kids choir in the song’s chorus packs a punch. Everything might be slightly repetitive, but the song doesn’t overstay its welcome. A lot of people might wave their hand at this. But for a highly specific set of idiots, which includes me, it doesn’t get much better than this.

    Funnily enough, I always thought that this release was produced as a cash-in by some seasoned producer on a Tuesday before moving on to the next NDW-Schlager, but actually the story is stranger: In 1970 Marcel Schaar contributed a few vocals for the Krautrock classic Delusion by Swiss band McChurch soundroom, then released his debut LP Dreams Consumed (Engineered by Kraut godfather Conny Plank!) to no one caring before he disappeared for a couple of years.

    He returned to RCA in 1977 with a childrens LP by the aforementioned Popspatzen, which looks like it had little commercial traction. Three years later, out of nowhere, the Rap-O-Clap-O cover, which was possibly his last foray into publishing music. These days he apparently lives in Neu Wulmstorf in the north of Germany, where he fronts “the top band of the German country scene” and plays local events. As of eight years ago, he’s still publishing songs about pubic hair on his SoundCloud. Maybe I should drop him a message.

    I am unsure how I first found out about Cora’s plea for the four day workweek, it might have been through some Facebook post, from which I added it to my Discogs wantlist 9 years ago. Ever since, the 7” was out of my reach and high on my wantlist. Initially I just didn’t want to spend 25€ on a children’s record, then it just never showed up for sale and ballooned in price. Given that it was released on RCA it seems to be surprisingly rare, and due to its special-interest nature copies were always snatched up quickly.

    Yet, I just kept getting this damn song stuck in my head. And I don’t even like Rap-O-Clap-O that much, like it’s not even a top 10 Joe Bataan song. Sidenote: There is even another German cover version of Rap-O-Clap-O from 1980 but this one truly doesn’t hold the candle to Cora due to its very novel decision to have a fake opera singer sing the hook, which is not to say that I don’t own it for archival purposes.

    Either way, ages passed and I had given up hope on a copy. I started digging further into electronic music, faded out my regular bar gigs, which I used to do every other weekend for cab fare and unlimited fancy cocktails all over Berlin, and with that pretty much stopped buying 7”s altogether. The chance to get in on Cora and her Popspatzen seemed past. UNTIL I turned 30.

    For that occasion I organised a little outdoor rave around that classic Open Air spot at Jungfernheide, invited all my friends, and had an absolute blast. At that party, my dear old friend Max Harder aka Wachs Max aka Discoprinz aka one of the nicest people I ever met showed up with not one but two gifts. While the music was playing and people were sniffing drugs laying about on blankets in the dust, Max first handed me a book. It was the legendary Berlin Graffiti-biography Odem – On The Run. I had never actually owned a copy, but this book had still been foundational to my teen fascination with painting things. This was already an insanely great and thoughtful gift. And then, this madman whips out Cora Und Die Popspatzen – Wie Wärs Mit Schulfreiem Montag? and my mind is blown. Like, I knew that he had a copy, but this was a 100€ record at that point.

    Since I have received this, I have to be honest, I have only played it a couple of times at home. I just rarely get the chance to play this kind of music out at the moment. However, I feel like by owning this forever-want, I ALMOST closed the chapter on my obsession with collecting early German rap rares — even though I know there is much more to discover, of course. Now all I need to find is a copy of “Ich bin Durchsichtig” and then I am sure there will not be another record to obsess over ever again.

    PS: Oh, the B-side I was very excited to listen to since from what I can tell it was never uploaded anywhere. Was it going to be another banger? In short, no, it’s a serviceable country-tinged melancholic kids song about travelling the world. It’s fine, really.

  • Dougal & Gammer – Pump Up The Noise (2003)

    Dougal & Gammer – Pump Up The Noise (2003)

    Alternative title: How I learned to stop worrying and love being dumb.

    Who reads blog texts these days? Well, at least one person I guess (that’s you!). Still, you probably know you’re not in the majority, and that’s why I’ve thought a lot about how to kick things off around here. I’d love to use this space to speak about musical passions that I don’t get to showcase much as part of my DJing, but I also don’t want to alienate people who know me for high octane late night hazy closing sets by immediately talking about sleazy Disco made by Krautrock survivors in the mid-80s. We’ll get there, though, don’t worry.

    While I generally want to dedicate each blog entry to a single record, my initial idea for getting this thing off the ground was to start with a numbered list early in the year 2026: “These are my top 10 most played records of last year”. I’d write 2-3 paragraphs per record and get people hyped for more in-depth content, while flexing my rhetoric muscles and showing off my vast inside baseball knowledge.

    However, you’ve seen how long this text about a single record is, and you know very well that it isn’t early January anymore. List season is over and I simply love being wordy too much, so a popular listicle is off the table. Instead, I thought I’ll start with what is probably the most iconic track from my bag in 2025. The track that has released the most endorphins in my body (and possibly yours) over my entire DJ “career”, “Pump Up the Noise” by Dougal and Gammer.

    Happy Himbo Hardcore will never die

    I am a firm believer that for every person there exists the right cult, scam, gambling opportunity or all-encompassing hobby that, if introduced at the right moment, will make them swiftly and willingly throw their life away. That is why I always feel a lot of empathy towards anyone who falls for these things, because I know I am literally one friendly conversation away from blowing every bit of money I have on some esoteric MMORPG inspired by Flamenco or crypto currency, or, worse, become a bike guy. With this preamble I ask you to feel some empathy towards me for how much I love and how often I have played this certified dumb guy track.

    As a certified dumb guy, ”Pump Up The Noise” is easily among my favorite tracks in the world. There’s few feelings that come close to the ecstasy of that breakdown, that simple glorious melody so catchy I can imagine a packed football stadium chanting along to it while it’s stumbling towards euphoric inevitability. Let alone that the whole track with its pitched up generic rap sample is such a joy to mix. When Hihat first introduced me to it, I heard it in the drunken blur of one of our closing sets, probably liked it, but didn’t think more of it – until I started randomly waking up multiple times a week with its lead melody stuck in my brain. Inevitably I jacked it from him, and have been tormenting crowds and dancefloors with it at almost every set around that tempo in the year 2025 – see Hihat’s & my Fusion recording for example, or also Young Lychee and me rinsing it on Rinse France.

    This text is probably not the right place to get deeper into Dougal & Gammer – their joint discography and individual discographies are simply too vast and too mixed for me to claim that I could give a proper overview, let alone a sizzling hot take on them. I will leave it at this: You don’t survive this long in such a volatile business as the hardcore business without adapting – which can lead to some duds that haven’t stood the test of time. The two of them put out such a vast amount of tracks together, especially during the revival of Essential Platinum (2002), some of which is among the greatest moments of synthesis between mid-90s Happy Hardcore, later Happy Hardcore, trance and big room sensibilities, but some of which I would not touch with a 175 bpm ft pole.

    In this case the stars aligned: Between Dougal’s 90s sensibilities, Gammer’s ear for a catchy melody, and what feels to me like the hardcore scene’s desire for slightly less cheesed up alternatives in the early 00s, “Pump Up the Noise” never sounded fresher, and you can expect to hear it at another hundred gigs from me.

    That would have been a good end to the text, at least that’s what I thought. Until I realised that I wrote about the B-Side the whole time, and practically forgot to say anything about the A-Side: Dougal’s & Gammer’s remix of “Jam the Nightclub” is, you know, alright. 

    The original version of the track by Dougal & Reality has become a staple in high energy sets of HiHat and myself, and I still really love how well its melody works with its Darude – Sandstorm style synth. It’s not “Pump Up The Noise”, but it works as a sort of companion piece to it.

    Dougal’s and Gammer’s version replaces the Darudishness with the full on brash and bright synths you’re thinking of when you think of 00s Happy Hardcore, thus sacrificing the original’s coolness on the altar of cheese. It also adds a fun bass sound that feels almost DnB-coded, but for me the damage is done. This remix is fully representative of the kind of technically proficient but in my view often forgettable track that came out in the mainstream days of Happy Hardcore on labels like Essential Platinum, Raver Baby, Next Generation Records, or, to some extent, Quosh – in the sense that I can respect how well its production shoves the emotional square waves down your throat with an extremely high energy level, but it’s missing fun, depth and a connection to its foundations in 90s UK Hardcore.

    If I’m honest, though, even if that track was solid gold, I’d be sitting here rationalising why I never play it in favor of my favorite dumb guy track. SORRY!