FELIX DENK, SVEN VON THÜLEN: The sound of the family. Berlin, techno and the turnaround. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2012, authorized interview material for the book

How did you get into electronic music?

I discovered music very early on as a child: as a way of being able to live in my own world, which was often incompatible in terms of perception and interpretation with the world of the other people around me. I found the object of my passion in the piano. I didn’t have to explain myself when I played, I had the power of interpretation, for me it meant freedom and joy, something that came out of myself. Later I took lessons. After a year, my piano teacher passed me on to the conservatory. The music education there followed very authoritarian rules. These were people who projected their own intentions into their students, who wanted to train them to be their tools, to break your own will in order to make you malleable to their ideas. They want to determine how music should be, what you should and shouldn’t do. At some point I reached the point where music had become a formal constraint for me, a competitive sport, the opposite of what music meant to me. I was lucky enough to come across music in the mid-70s that – unlike conventional pop and rock music – had a classical aesthetic, but was not academically contaminated for me: Kraftwerk, Cluster, Neu!, Can, Tangerine Dream New Music, which exerted an incredible fascination for me from the very beginning. I wanted to play with sounds like that. And back came the feeling of being able to do it according to my own rules again: without anyone behind me telling me what was right or wrong. That’s how I got into electronic music. And that’s how I stayed in the music and with myself.

What were your artistic plans?

Making something, even if it sounds brittle and unfamiliar, but just the way you hear it in your inner ear, has always been important for my musical path. In the period between about 1978 and 1982, there was an abundance of inspiring modern musical styles and groups that had a lasting influence on me: the spectrum ranges from Throbbing Gristle, Tuxedo Moon to Der Plan, DAF, Residents, Human League, Yello, Giorgio Moroder and Soul Sonic Force, while at the same time I was inspired by classical minimal music by Steve Reich and Philip Glass. I had a rhythm machine. I let it run for hours and played sequences on the piano. I always loved the repetition. Repetition has something very euphoric for me. I found an energy in it. Repetition allows you to control and lose control at the same time. You are fully concentrated and in meditation at the same time. Your head and body start to fly! You become free. I experimented a lot. I got my first synthesizer, recorded the noise and voices from the radio, played to records that were playing or recorded back and forth with two cassette recorders.

How did you find your arrival in Berlin?

When I came to Berlin from Nuremberg in 1986, electronic music didn’t exactly seem to be the music the city was waiting for. The zeitgeist in West Berlin was Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld, those were the role models. Unfortunately, I didn’t look like them, nor did they reflect my attitude to life: when I arrived in the city, I felt too small, too delicate, too spun, too uncool for this city.

At the Hochschule der Künste, I tended to meet people for whom their previous conservatory existence had produced the result desired from above: they mostly felt like little classical music machines. At least my parents were reassured that their middle-class child was doing something nice and meaningful. I had a lot of freedom. I didn’t feel any existential pressure or fear of what I might become one day. At the HdK I was able to use a Fairlight computer, a phantom machine that I theoretically knew had a significant influence on the sound of Trevor Horn, Heaven 17, Yello and Art of Noise. The TU/HdK was one of the very few universities that had it. You had to sign in, like on a tennis court, to be allowed to play it in the studio. Unfortunately, nothing really worked because none of the people in charge at the time were familiar with the technology or could maintain the equipment professionally. So I mostly worked with the few pieces of equipment I had, which had the positive effect of maximizing my own creativity in terms of quantitative and qualitative limitations.

How did you get to know Kid Paul?

I met Paul at the Ufo. He was 13, I was 26, and the first set I heard from him was brilliant. He had a great selection of records and was technically on a high level right from the start. An excellent DJ is like a conductor: he draws from the score, i.e. his musical material, and arranges or dramatizes it in a stringent way so that it results in an unmistakable sonic and emotional event. What impressed me about Paul right from the start was the way he was able to develop arcs of suspense, his individual sound signature, his enthusiasm and the seriousness with which he approached his vocation. We soon became close friends and musical companions. And learned an incredible amount from each other on a musical level. Over the years, we were also united by the increasingly contradictory feeling of being at the celebrated center of the emerging techno hurricane on the one hand, but at the same time feeling a subliminal, strange, growing distance to what we were experiencing at the time that could not yet be defined … today I would call it: being different in the collective being different.

Tell us about your impressionsüs from the UFO Club 1990-1991…

It was an incredible feeling of happiness for me to have a place where I could listen to new music every evening and process every piece of information anew with a childlike curiosity. I felt like I was part of a big family there. For the first time in my life, I really felt completely validated in what I wanted and what I was doing. And meeting people who were on the same wavelength. Being an artist and being an audience were one and the same. In the “regular” clubs that were popular at the time, such as Dschungel or Risiko, I felt more like an admitted spectator. But I wanted to be an active part, to participate, to shape, to share responsibility. And that’s what we were in the UFO. Almost everyone who wanted to be. There was no distinction between someone just dancing, just doing the decorations, just serving drinks at the bar, just DJing. It all seemed to be one. Day by day, a dream took on a more concrete form and became reality!

Monika Dietl and her influence on you?

Monika Dietl was just as important as the most important artists in the city. Without her, I wouldn’t have known that there were others doing something similar to what I was doing.

I was thunderstruck when I heard House from Chicago on their show for the first time and realized that the musicians there were working with the same cheap instruments I was. There’s nothing better than that. There was a lot of exciting music coming out of Chicago. From Detriot. From England. From Belgium. From Germany. I felt like I had a lot of friends all over the world without knowing them personally.

Your connection to the GDR…

Most of my relatives lived and still live in the East. Through my many trips to the GDR, I got to know more and more people there, students, writers, actors, people from the church environment. When things began to change there, I wanted to be part of it. It was a personal matter for me. Many of my friends had done a lot to ensure that the GDR was on the way to transforming itself into a new kind of socialist state. Between October 89 and December 89, democratic structures developed there that had never been seen anywhere else in the world before. I was considering continuing my studies at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in East Berlin and had already asked the relevant authorities whether and how this could work. Whether I could live in East Berlin with my West Berlin passport, or whether I would have to become a citizen of the GDR.

As a political person, November 4, 1989 was the biggest day of my life. It was a Saturday, rainy, cold and there was an incredible sense of expectation. I stood there in a huge crowd at Alexanderplatz. Nobody knew what was going to happen. 100,000 people could have simply walked to the Wall or to the State Council building. What would the police have done then? Everyone knew that this day was something special. I was in a place with many like-minded people who wanted a different state that was just as far removed from the old GDR as it was from the old FRG. And the opportunity to take history into my own hands seemed within reach.

What doöembodied techno music forüfor you in the early years from 1989 to 1992?

The music embodied the fact that everything could be completely different. That was a perfect match for me. The means of production are cheap, accessible to everyone and on this basis a wide range of individual creativity was still possible, which saw itself less in competition than as mutually enriching elements of a musical world. Techno was absolutely a democratic, free music. We inspired each other, but nothing sounded the same. Style dictates only came later, when the mediocre and calculated began to rule again.

I don’t have to cooperate with a system that I don’t like. I can build up a circle of dissidents.

The early techno scene felt like this. More fun and less dangerous, of course. But you could find something that was autonomous, not yet occupied, not yet controlled and channeled. Everyone who was there could agree on a social motto: We are different. We do something that mainstream society doesn’t understand. But it never went so far as to generate an explicitly political component. For me, too, the political side took a back seat from 1990 onwards, because there was simply no time or energy for it: the music began to explode in me and out of me, as it did for many others. Moreover, in my eyes, the great political vision had been completely extinguished by the takeover of the GDR by the self-satisfied, victorious FRG. That was a bitter disappointment. All the more energy now flowed into the techno world. I didn’t want to be deprived of it, I wanted to live in it with all my skin and hair!

Your behaviorärelationship with Jonzon and your joint projects?

I always enjoyed working with Jonzon. We had two projects. Vein Melter was a longing project. To pretend we were living in Chicago and making music there. “Hypnotized” was the first Vein Melter song, which came out on Planet Records. With Futurhythm, on the other hand, we tried to put ourselves in relation to Chicago house: “We’re from Berlin, we like the Chicago sound, but we’re developing it in our own new direction.” We were different musical identities, we sounded different depending on the project.

We were full of awe. DAF was of course an incredibly important group, and when Gabi Delgado said he would like to release our songs, we looked like little kids. The first Futurhythm came out in 1991 on BMWW, Brutal Music World Wide. The hit on the record was a bone-dry acid piece. One beat and a 303. We couldn’t believe it when we were listed at number 7 in the groove charts for 1991 with “Injection”!

We were dazzled by his name. He said: “I think you’re so good that I’ll not only give you a record deal, but even a publishing contract.” So of course all the rights were gone. Unbelievable in hindsight, we were grown men, where were our brains! On the other hand, legal matters were neither important to us, nor did we understand them. Making art is also a learning process in this field.

Mark Reeder and MFS?

What MfS had done before was less specific and musically not exactly earth-shattering. Futurhythm was a “star purchase”, so to speak. That was JL’s big goal: to get Futurhythm away from the “big company” BMWW. We wanted to leave anyway, because the billing wasn’t going well, but there was still the contract. Jürgen arranged that for us with Gabi.

Mark had a philosophy about how this music should sound. He put all his energy into discovering and releasing music.

Mark came up with the idea and asked if we were interested. We were hooked. It was already about a statement, a new sound ideal, a style manifesto.

“Tranceformed from Beyond” was a new kind of mix album. It wasn’t compiled and mixed by a DJ, but Mijk (van Dijk) and I rearranged and recorded every track, sometimes changing it beyond recognition and then composing them together. Most of the tracks came from the MfS catalog, all the others, for example Quazar, were licensed from Mark Reeder.

Üabout Jürgen Laarmann:

J.L has launched a real trance campaign. He acted as a spin doctor, a kind of techno-Mehdorn who wants to bring a “company” up to speed. He is very talented, had great ideas and an unbridled energy to implement them. Out of his need for recognition and his business acumen, at some point he tried to do everything and control everything – Low Spirit, MfS, Loveparade, Frontpage, Tresor. Jürgen was everywhere and never shied away from being “the bad guy”. He knew the Frankfurt structures and wanted to show them.

He did everything in his power to get us media attention. Part of the MfS package was the Frontpage cover story about me. It was a great platform from which I was able to put into words what I had in mind as a musical manifesto with the “Trancefomed” compilation. On JL’s initiative, I performed at Mayday 1992 in Cologne. Westbam and his brother were on vacation at the time, otherwise it certainly wouldn’t have happened! That was the first big event I played at.

Concert impressions 1992:

I went on my first club tour in March 1992. I got 400 marks for the first few gigs. Not bad at all for a student. In Berlin, of course, there was less money, maybe 200 marks. Or nothing at all if it was an illegal party. The tour took me all over Germany. To Stuttgart to the OZ. To the Unit in Hamburg. To Munich to Babalou. Incredible and unforgettable evenings like in a dream! I also really liked the XS in Frankfurt. For the first time a really good system and a hot, erotic energy. Sven Väth, for example, came with 30 people in tow and greeted me with a majestic gesture, Mark Spoon hugged me to his massive chest. There was a completely different disco culture there and, in contrast to the very anarchic structures in Berlin at the time, there were clearly structured hierarchical networks and business complexes.

In October 92 I played for the first time at the Limelight in New York at a “Disco 2000” party. Just like Jeff Mills and Derrick May were celebrated in Germany, we were lifted to the skies there. The rave scene in New York was darker and two steps harder than in Berlin. That went in a coke-heroin direction. The club was in a former church, with what felt like 20,000 people standing in front of it with book-thick guest lists pinned to clipboards. Inside, everyone was super drugged up, brightly made-up, androgynous people, lots of models. The scenario reminded me of the movie “Liquid Sky”, which I saw in the mid-80s. Everything was grouped around DJ Keoki and the organizer Michael Alig. The technical support was strikingly unprofessional. The PR and visual superlatives were more important to them.

Moby visited me at Limelight and we had dinner together the next evening. I got to know and love New York bit by bit. Two years later, I rented an apartment in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and moved to NYC.

Dubmission was Kid Paul and Paul van Dyk for years. It was a very unique sound. Very energetic, very musical, warm waves with lots of smiling faces. But never soapy and animated, as I experienced in Ibiza, sometimes in Frankfurt or often in England.

Üabout Visions of Shiva:

Many, very credible people can tell you a thing or two about their experiences with PvD…My contact with him came via Wolle XDP, at a “brain party” in 1991. The collaboration was a classic case of “Dear Cosmic, I think your music is so great, my heart’s desire would be to come along and see how you do it.” PvD can then, if he really wants to get to know someone, show his sympathetic side to great effect: he is super nice and modest and combines this with his outstanding musical talent. What’s more, he was still on the fringes of the scene at the time, which I thought was unfair. I brought him to MfS and he became my favorite DJ alongside (Kid)Paul and Jonzon.

Techno as a mass movement:

The past is never a fixed, objective fact. It is always constituted from the point of view of the present, i.e. it is always a personal construct of reflection, a personal determination of position. Perhaps so many people came after reunification because everything around them was changing. Techno was a hope, a projection machine: it had incredible power and invited people to identify with another world. Intoxicating search for and discovery of identity.

During this period from 1990 to 1995, the GDR was gutted, the Treuhand burned and sold off the former national property – so there were the most fantastic places for parties and living. The West German welfare state was eroding – at the same time, techno created opportunities to earn money with one’s own skills and take life into one’s own hands. The social utopia of socialism was ridiculed and disposed of from above. It was deregulated, privatized, capitalized, restructured and dismissed. A radical transformation of the world in line with neoliberalism began and the results of all this are – to this day – presented in unison in the media as “necessary”, “without alternative” and “irreversible”. From the distance of time, one could certainly come to the conclusion that we have given our own answers to this with techno. With a great “sound” that sounded different from that of conforming paint by numbers.

But the conformist always seems to have the upper hand, was more sustainable, had the power to ultimately incorporate techno. First came the trend agencies, which were often recruited from techno people, and later the whole thing was gradually transferred to the one-size-fits-all entertainment industry. We were so preoccupied with our own small, global world that the big world around us and its changes didn’t concern us at all. Or we didn’t really want to realize it so that we wouldn’t have to wake up too early from the big dream … But perhaps it wasn’t even possible to keep an eye on the big picture around us: because back then we thought we had everything we wanted. And they did!