-
-
Ad Space
(728 x 90)
Published on 8/5/08
Video
Less then a decade ago, Arno Kammermeier and Walter Merziger—who had been making techno and house together since the early ’90s for top European labels such as Harthouse, R&S and Touché—were at a crossroads. “By the end of the ’90s, house music had become totally commercial and predictable,” Kammermeier says. “Huge break, huge buildup, the kick drum comes in.… We ourselves did some very shitty tracks—and they were very successful—but it was not fun anymore.” Fortunately, a couple of their pals begged to differ. “They said, ‘No, there are a lot of great tracks!’ ” Kammermeier recalls. “They played all these great songs that we hadn’t known about, stuff like Metro Area and Chicken Lips, people who were combining all these different elements and putting them into a melting pot. Those tracks got us to try and push it again.”
In retrospect, that listening session should rank as one of dance music’s defining moments. Kammermeier and Merziger, who will be playing live at Studio B’s Cut party on Thursday 15, are now better known as the groundbreaking electronic-house duo Booka Shade; those enlightened pals, Patrick Bodmer and Philip Jung, create equally quirky music under the M.A.N.D.Y. moniker; and together with Thomas “DJ T” Koch and production partner Peter Hayo, they all run Berlin’s Get Physical Music, arguably the most influential dance-music label of the past half decade.
If you’ve been out at a club that plays anything resembling house or techno in the past few years, you know Booka Shade’s sound. Like many Get Physical numbers, the pair’s 2005 hit “Mandarine Girl” found its way onto the playlists of venues ranging from dark and dirty minimal-techno basements to bright and shiny megaclubs. It’s the prototypical Booka Shade cut: Elemental yet emotionally evocative, the tune manages to convey both sorrow and optimism. “We call that ‘positive melancholy,’ ” Kammermeier says. “There is always a bit of tristesse in there, because that’s what we like. But we also like to have a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel quality to our music. A lot of what’s coming out of Berlin is mainly suited to 8 o’clock in the morning at some dark after-hours party, but we like to make music which is more for the fun part of the night.”
Besides the happy-sad dichotomy inherent in much of Booka Shade’s music, another dynamic is at work—many of Kammermeier and Merziger’s tracks have a simple, austere quality, yet are almost epic in their feel. “That’s something we constantly discuss, how to make the songs sound as big as possible without stepping into the possible clichés,” Kammermeier says. “It’s not easy, but you can convey a kind of bigness without adding too many sounds. That’s why so many of our tracks take so long to produce. A track might get written in maybe 15 minutes—but the production for it can take six weeks, trying to figure out how to get that quality.”
The grandeur of many Booka Shade tracks is reminiscent of a style that many of the duo’s fans ordinarily shun—namely, trance. “Well, we have to be careful about calling it trance,” Kammermeier laughs, “but lots of our songs really are trance songs, only stripped-down a bit. We try and lose all of those extra layers that trance always has. As a result, no one thinks of ‘Mandarine Girl,’ for instance, as a trance song, but just as a song. It’s a very fine line.”
Fans of creative club fodder pray that Booka Shade travels that line for years to come, but Kammermeier can picture a day when the pair no longer toils in the dance-music milieu. “If it becomes only work, then it isn’t very likely we would continue doing this. But as long as we can stay relevant… We just did very well on a bunch of end-of-year polls—[clubbing website] Resident Advisor choose us at the No. 1 live act, for instance, even ahead of Depeche Mode!—and that really made us proud, because we work really hard. If that keeps happening, then we might be at this forever.”
