The second edition of our podcast series is mixed by our friend S-Max from Wiesbaden, Germany.
Triphouse Rotterdam Podcast 002: S-Max by Triphouse Rotterdam
Please tell us a bit about your personal background and how you came in contact with electronic music
I started buying house records in 1989 and started deejaying in a local club in 1991. This was in Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Before that I listened to experimental indie-stuff and hiphop. When I was a kid, I listened to Jean Michel Jarre so electronic music has always been around me. As a dj I would play the first Warp-releases and Underground Resistance and mixed that with some hiphop. I loved the rise of breakbeats, later called drum ‘n bass. I met an Irish dj coming from London. He was involved in the squatting/ free-rave-scene. He lived in Wiesbaden in 1992 and introduced me to a lot of other music-genres, like dub. We started deejaying in other German cities like Cologne, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Mannheim. At the time it wasn’t too easy to get info about music at all. We were surrounded by dj’s playing trance, who were following Sven Väth’s musical style, of course! But i realized, that I couldn’t miss the quality of a groove, some funk, whatever that means to every individual. Music is a feeling and words can’t hardly communicate what sound can. So, talking about music, we are trying something that ultimately is impossible, right? Anyway, I felt that records from the US and Great Britain touched me, but early German and Belgian techno mostly didn’t get me at all… “Just need a good beat”, like Dee-Lite said!
Together with Pete (Losoul) I founded the “Superbleep 6000 DJ Team” and the regular Superbleep night in 1994. We had really good guest dj’s like Matthew Herbert, Daniel Bell, Roman Flügel, Johnny Fiasco, Boo Williams, dj TRAXX, Chris Duckenfield, Ricardo Villalobos (at that time he organized illegal parties in a town close to Wiesbaden, so he invited us to play there and we invited him). That was between 1995 and 1999. We would regularly play in all kinds of nice clubs in Frankfurt, including the legendary Dorian Grey, located within the airport.
I started making tracks myself in 1993. The first release was in 1996 on Zehnkampf. Very soon I had the honour to remix Ectomorph (from Detroit) whom I deeply respect for their work. I did the first ep on Below, a label that also released an early record of Ricardo Villalobos – his name translated into German : Richard Wolfsheim…
The last years you have been visiting Rotterdam on a frequent basis, but not many people know you have roots in our city. Can you explain where your love for ‘stroopwafels’ and ‘vla’ originates from?
I grew up in Wiesbaden, educated by my Dutch grandma, who originally is from Rotterdam. When I was a kid, we would regularly visit her family there. So I know things like de Lijnbaan, stroopwafels and poffertjes for more than 30 years now. I learned Dutch playing with kids on the beach of Katwijk at the age of 3 or 4. So there is a deep connection with the city of Rotterdam and the Netherlands and I have to say, I miss it right now, although I just moved to the super-fine city of Vienna!
The Boogizm label which you run together with FYM has been a steady outlet for some of the most freaked and forward pushing electronic music for almost a decade. What is the label philosophy and can you tell us more about your future plans with Boogizm?
In 2000 Manutchehr “FYM” Ghassemlou and myself founded BOOGIZM-records, then distributed exclusively by KOMPAKT to release stuff, we really believe in (at that time I already released several EPs on other labels, but the tracks I found really hot were mostly not the ones, those people would choose), and soon artists like Daniel Bell, Cristian Vogel, Mike Shannon, Akufen, Ark, etc, that we really respect, contacted and pushed us. Collaborations for instance with Ark started and that ultimately led to the release of the “Seizmic Stealth Smurfz EP” on Daniel Bell’s famous 7th City records and our several EPs and Fym’s album on the Paris based Telegraph label and Karloff, run by Falko Brocksieper and many other releases including my several electro EPs on Over-X. We continue releasing tracks on Boogizm following our very own aesthetics, ideas and philosophy – we only release stuff, which is funky and interesting to us. This may sound simple, but is not that easy to follow – I learned pretty quick, that many labels and distributors follow a different, more economic-based approach – and of course, now with mp3, vinyl sales dropping down etc. everyone is rather cautious with pressing records – including us! We still focus on vinyl, although several shops sell our mp3s. Within those almost 10 years we got so many demo’s from all over the world – i was really flashed, when we got first demos by well-established artists and artists from countries that I didn’t even expected to have a scene for this kind of music. But almost nothing really made the Boogizm-test! Instead I approached dB from Vienna to do one EP and we asked Ark and Mike Shannon to do remixes. Later I spent one week in the studio with Daniel Bell remixing one of my tracks, but decided not to release it.
Right now Fym focusses more on music business, so we started to plan new releases. I got contacted by a Berlin based vinyl distributor, our website www.boogizm.net will be updated very soon and we are working on new material. At the moment I am busy doing several remixes, one project I really like is a British label called Smorgasbord, which puts together artists from the 4/4 house and minimal- and the broken beats / dubstep / wonky / UK garage scene to remix each other. In my case it’s Spatial remixing me and vice versa, which will be released on vinyl. I still prefer vinyl and love to spin records, the human touch compared to sync-buttons giving no space to any kind of liveliness! But I’m aware of the fact that this is a question of taste, and there is no right or wrong! And of course, this is just my point of view – Fym might verbalize this differently! Common is our general understanding of love and light, that I wish to shine on and through all beings! May all beings be happy!
For more info on S-Max and the Boogizm label check out the following sites:
www.boogizm.net
www.soundcloud.com/s-max
www.play.fm/radioshow/boogizmradioshow
www.myspace.com/smaxfromboogizm
www.sw-tch.com