Booka Shade: "We're not DJs!"

For more than ten years now the German electronic duo Booka Shade has been driving the crowds of big discos wild on different continents. In November the project made it to Moscow again, and this time far more people got to see them. One member of the duo - Arno Kammermeier - decided to share his thoughts on the Moscow audience, piracy and the forthcoming album with 44100Hz.

Booka Shade in Moscow

Oh, yes! We really liked "Propaganda". You see, both have their own charms. In a small club the audience is very close, a very intimate atmosphere is established. On the other hand, our fans' enthusiasm is growing. That's great, but there's a real threat to our equipment here. Many times it's happened that fans simply jumped onto the stage and smashed everything!
You can bring far more equipment to festivals. Soon we'll be carrying even more gear with us: more lights and video. That's why we'll need big venues. And I can assure you: it's going to be very cool!

Raz really is a wonderful singer, and we're very glad that he's now with Get Physical. But on the new album we're currently working on, we'll try to sing ourselves. We already tried using vocals on the track Numbers, which was included on the DJ Kicks compilation.
After recording the album we've got a tour with the new material ahead of us. And if we invite someone else to record the album, we'd have to take that artist along with us. We're not particularly fond of that idea.
But of course it's great when different people come together and create something they couldn't have managed on their own. Recently we recorded a whole string orchestra for two songs from the new album. Hearing your own music performed by an orchestra is a very unusual feeling. We've done it before, because we sometimes record music for film or advertising.

We'd done two promo mixes before that. For the BBC, and for an Australian radio station called JJJ. But this was our first commercial mix released on CD. And the result turned out pretty good. In DJ Mag's poll it was named compilation of the year. DJ Kicks is a producer's mix, not a DJ's mix. If only because we're not DJs. We worked our magic on it in the studio: parts of tracks were swapped around, played backwards, the pitch jumped up and down.
Nobody would do that on ordinary turntables.
We have no DJ ambitions whatsoever. Let me give one example to explain why. This year we played at a festival in Detroit. According to the schedule we were supposed to go on almost last, and Jeff Mills was closing the festival after us.

During our performance all the living legends of techno stood and listened to us next to the stage. Derrick May was there, and Juan Atkins, and Richie Hawtin. We played for five thousand people, and they were absolutely losing their minds. And I felt very comfortable on stage, knowing: I know what I'm doing. But if we started DJing now, I'd always know that everyone around does it better than me. And I'd really dislike that feeling! That's why we do what we're best at - playing our own music.

We tried to gather together songs we like, from different eras and different styles, and combine them into one mix that would sound smooth. The time span covered four decades - you can imagine what a difference there was in the sound. We really wanted to make it all sound natural together.

In Russia, as in most Eastern European countries, there's no music market. You can't expect big music sales here - piracy is thriving. That's bad, because artists don't get a penny for their music. And if you're a fan of a band, you should support it by buying albums, not copying them. It seems to me there's little we can do to influence this. So we have to treat it as promotion.
At the same time, playing in such countries is great. The people are very cheerful, and we know there are a great many lovers of our music in Russia. We've already seen this in Moscow. The audience is magnificent!
And I'm sure we'll come back next year and play at an even bigger event. I'm already looking forward to it!