When you’re sitting around with your band that you’ve just started, that only you and the rest of the band members care about and are deciding on what form you want your recorded sounds to be released on, please don’t decide that you want to press them to a vinyl. There really is this weird grey space of where and when the pressing of a vinyl record is appropriate. And at the risk of sounding like a proper c^nt I’m telling you now your 3 track debut ep isn’t worth 25 dollars from a record store. Unless you recorded it on a microphone that is stuck inside a dolphin’s blowhole that was still alive submerged in water giving it a bubbling effect that no one’s ever heard, there is a good chance your sound isn’t something that needs to be put into an expensive medium that should be reserved only for greatness. I’m not saying you won’t be great, or your EP isn’t great, but upon first release it just doesn’t deserve to be a vinyl record.
Records are special, people collect them. People cherish them. Just because you can easily press anything to a record these days doesn’t mean your bands deep house demo needs to be released on your home record label via 12inch vinyl with only 50 copies available because that’s all you can afford and probably way more than are going to be bought.
Rant aside, I caught up with Germany’s prized electronic duo Booka Shade. Made up of Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier and described as veterans of the Frankfurt electronic music scene. Booka Shade have released 5 studio albums including Their Most memorable "Movements" (2006), in the 90s they were known as Planet Claire a name that derived from a B-52s song. Almost ten years on from there amazing breakthrough album I was able to "shoot the shit" with Arno about records and record making.
‘I must admit we are not great record collectors anymore, not that we ever really were. We are producers more than we are DJs. And we have been DJs who have been collecting records for the last 30 years or so, but most are from when we were younger and actually went into stores to buy them. So we have a collection. But now you can get so much online, and listen to stuff, old and new, and you don’t always have to buy everything. The internet is the new record store.
Next year we are celebrating our 10 year anniversary of our biggest album movement and of course we will release a collector’s box and we feel there is real value there so we think special package and releasing on vinyl is worth doing. We made that original double vinyl with lots of love, and that in itself is a collector’s item. We haven’t finalised the ideas for it but it will be special. Now days all the music is on computers as I was saying before, you don’t need to have everything in your hands, but some things are special. Its precious, you want to have it, you want it on a shelf.
It might seem old fashioned, but we are kind of old fashioned in a sense. We believe in the power of an album; we love the concept of an album. And the physical sense of the album is less important now, and its due to things like Spotify which has made it easier for people to listen to whole albums, I think it’s been a really good thing, and streaming services are making it more worthwhile when it comes to putting extra songs on releases.
The making of an album in itself is always a lot of work, the famous Brian Eno says production is reduction. It is all about what you take out that ends up being crucial. Especially for electronic music and dance music. It’s never made sense for us to have banging club tunes one after the other. That’s not an album for us though many people do that. And also we can never just have one mood going all the way through on an album, many people do this too and some artists it really works. You know one artist could have a really good atmosphere and take us through the whole album but for us its more interesting to have diversity in the atmosphere, different grooves and tempos, different BPMs of course. A band like Booka Shade has always been known for not only club songs but slow ones too. And those slow songs are very important to us. Also composing the album is a lot of work and we put a lot of time and love into that. We write special interludes to make sure that you are lead from song to song in the right way, that the adjusting atmosphere is done well. I only just listened to the movements album again recently, but I’ve now had to listen to it again because we are going to do a show based around it.'
The future of Booka Shade means new releases with Hot Since 82, who will also feature on the duo's new album. New singles are on the way and most importantly the flavour word of the article. An album is in the works. In the meantime you can get amongst their latest single Wildest Thing where all banging records are sold | streamed
-Jack Cain
