TECHNO HOW? is a brand spanking new depository for interviews with and tidbits on the real people making the inroads in techno and electronic music in the 2010s; much of the material here is exclusive to this site, and we invite you to kick back, have a read, and enjoy - without any subversive strings attached.
ANDREZ BERGEN, the editor of TECHNO HOW?, has written for music magazines like Mixmag and Wax in the UK, 3D World, Zebra and Beat in Australia, and national newspapers The Age (Australia) and the Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan). He's also put stuff together for Fun in the Murky, GaijinPot and Beatportal. Andrez is a published author (he wrote the novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat) and will be joined here by various mates.
One thing you’ll notice about the promotional iconography flaunted by Kurt Knispel for his alterego, production outfit Ein Kleiner Schelm, is a fixation on Mexican wrestling masks.
I first became aware of the obsession when I saw him perform live in Tokyo in 2004, going head to head (or in this case mask to flesh) with Little Nobody.
“I make music with my computer and other electronic devices. Sometimes it sounds nice, sometimes it is unpleasant and mildly grating.”
So declares a simple two-line sentence on Si Begg’s MySpace site – and that’s it. Nothing more.
He’s apparently content to let the music on the site speak for itself, which it does. It speaks volumes, as does the back catalogue of one of electronic music’s most creative, innovative, truly consistent, and genre-twisting boffins, over a career spanning 20 years.
“Sometimes I sing ‘Danger Zone’ in the bathroom. I like the music from Top Gun. When I was a child, I dreamed of becoming a fighter pilot, and to this day, Top Gun is my favorite action movie.”
So declares Japanese producer, DJ Warp – a man better known these days for his prowess behind an array of rack-mounted machines in the grounded environment of a studio setting, rather than living on the edge in the cockpit of an F-14 Tomcat.
I’m going to rear-vision you a decade back, to Melbourne’s (Australia’s) tech-house heyday, when that city was up in the Top 5 international cities for the style, and every international DJ/producer of tech-house worth made his way down most weekends.
On one particular date – it was September 5th, 1998 – we had the Swedish triumvirate of Cari Lekebusch, Adam Beyer and Christian Smith all lined up together to headline at Hardware 13, in the massive Shed 14 down at Victoria Docks in Melbourne.
Never imagined you could slot together two such disparate terms as “weird” and “beautiful”?
Think again.
‘Woklurk Orange’ is one of the more gorgeous EPs I’ve heard this year – weird or not.
“Funnily enough, it has everything and nothing to do with the movie,” Andrez Bergen tells me down a particularly crackly phone line from Tokyo, Japan.
One thing the Tokyo-based 2-member outfit Dick Drone is missing is honesty.
That’s because one member also makes electronic music under a different alias, and would prefer to remain anonymous here.
The other member can’t quite vocalize the truth either, because she’s only two and a half years old…
Steve Law is a dad.
While this news shouldn’t come as any shock regarding someone Steve’s age (in his late 30s), it might surprise those who have known Steve more for his music – which always seems to have been the man’s top priority, under guises like Zen Paradox, Mr. Suspicious, and Mutagenic Mind, for labels across the world like Kk and Psy-Harmonics.
