Session Transcript:
Superpitcher
Red Bull Music Academy, Toronto 2007

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

Poster boy, wild child, groovy guy and all-round party person, Aksel Schaufler (aka Superpitcher), joins himself to the Academy couch alongside fellow Köln-creature, Academy team member Torsten Schmidt. Rarely in one place long enough to call it home, ‘pitcher drops by to discuss his brand of shiny rave tunes, guaranteed to make any party go with a punch. Find out about his youth in the boring countryside, musical influences, first releases and lack of live performances below.

RBMA: »Good morning. So you have to bear with us because this is going to be an awkward one for us. Cologne, as you may know, is a really small city somewhere on a continent far, far away. And despite a million people living there you always end up [with the] same kind of people. Everyone sleeps with everyone and, yeah, it’s small world city life as it can be, and from the small world, we usually don’t speak in English so that might be again a little bit awkward. Please welcome Mr. Aksel Schaufler, also known as Superpitcher.«

Superpitcher: »Thank you.«

RBMA: »So, searching for what? What are we searching for despite the 33 Queen?«

Superpitcher: »Love, maybe?«

RBMA: »That’s not a bad start. So where does one look for love then, apart from all the wrong places?«

Superpitcher: »Everywhere. You have to look everywhere. For instance?«

RBMA: »So where have you been looking over the last six months or so?«

Superpitcher: »In Japan, San Francisco, Madrid and New York.«

RBMA: »And did you find any?«

Superpitcher: »Some. Some. Some little love.«

RBMA: »What’s little love?«

Superpitcher: »It’s too hard to explain in English for me.«

RBMA: »So it’s more momentary love. I bet in San Francisco they gave you a lot more love than you could handle?«

Superpitcher: »Kind of, yeah. They tried everything.«

RBMA: »So, first and foremost, you still, despite all the production people might know, you still consider yourself a DJ?«

Superpitcher: »As well, yes, and a producer. I was starting to produce music, I was doing that way before I started to DJ so it’s the more important part for me, I would say.«

RBMA: »You would rather move, in comparison, to a laptop ’live’ gig person?«

Superpitcher: »I could never do that, sorry.«

RBMA: »So why?«

Superpitcher: »Maybe I saw too many of these live acts playing on laptops on stage in clubs, which were not really interesting. For my music it was impossible to present it like that, I thought. I would need a band maybe.«

RBMA: »And a band can be a terrible thing to watch as well, right?«

Superpitcher: »Exactly.«

RBMA: »So when you said you produced way before you started to DJ, this was before you even lived in Cologne, right?«

Superpitcher: »That was when I was still living in the south of Germany, only boring countryside and you really need to find something you can hold onto, otherwise you probably die. So I was really lucky that that one friend of mine gave me one day an Atari computer and sampler where you could like sample for one minute or something and that’s how I started. And that was the best thing that ever happened to me, I would say.«

RBMA: »Your first release actually was far, far away from Cologne as well. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came about?«

Superpitcher: »Right, you’re talking about this first release? Yeah, that was totally amazing because it was a label from New York City called WordSound, Brooklyn, and they were doing this kind of new dub music based on hip hop beats and using the techniques of dub, very slow and gloomy sound. I was really into that for the moment but it was probably around ’96 or ‘97, something like that. I was working for a radio station in South Germany, very small, and it happened that I interviewed these people from Brooklyn while they were on tour and they told me to send music to them. So I did that and two days later they said they want to do it. That was my first record.«

RBMA: »Do you by any chance have that somewhere with you?«

Superpitcher: »That’s the thing, I couldn’t find it. I really wanted to bring it but I was moving and it got lost somewhere at home.«

RBMA: »And your mum’s still got a copy?«

Superpitcher: »She should have one, yeah, but she’s too far away.«

RBMA: »But most people that might know the current output of the last couple of years of your music, and Cologne in general, might be surprised of what that music actually sounded like? Do you maybe have some sort of example of stuff that drew you into this love of however that was called back then. More on the dubby side of things?«

Superpitcher: »Yeah. The biggest inspiration for that was really the old ‘70s dub music from Jamaica, which I’m a huge fan of. And we could play something like that, right?«

(music: Horace Andy – Quiet Place (version) / applause)

»That rocks. That kind of rocks more than this kind of new things supposed to rock. Like Justice or… just for me, you know? (applause) Yeah, that’s the thing, what really got me was how they did, that was just the dub version of a reggae song by Horace Andy and how they just stripped down the original beautiful record sound into just rocking shit like you just heard and do it in a radical way and kind of doing the first remixes maybe, you could say. Just by leaving most of the original track out and strip it down to the bass and the drums. So we hear the a-side now, the original reggae song.«

(music: Horace Andy – Quiet Place)

»Oh boy. And how that sounds.! You don’t hear bass like that anymore.«

RBMA: »The compression is missing a little bit. All compressed to death.«

Superpitcher: »Right, yeah. So that was a huge, and still is, inspiration for me and my music.«

RBMA: »Where’s the connection to the next 7” there?«

Superpitcher: »The thing is that late-‘70s, ‘70s, the punk people were really into reggae as well so, surprisingly, I have this 7” by The Slits, which was a girl punk band, can we say that? And they did a cover version of the song Man Next Door in 1980. We should just listen.«

(music: The Slits – Man Next Door / applause)

RBMA: »Slightly out of key singing may be a theme for the next hour or so as well? Now you’re stuck here, or at least it feels like you’re stuck when you’re a teenager down in the South of Germany, and not many people know the vast majority of Cologne people, like other major cities, actually have not been raised there, right?«

Superpitcher: »A lot of people we know, yeah.«

RBMA: »So how did you make your trail up there then? I guess it wasn’t the cathedral.«

Superpitcher: »As well it was the cathedral, because it’s a damn beautiful cathedral, but it was more like I think I’d been there two times visiting my older brother who was living there already and there’s a certain atmosphere like you said in the beginning. It’s a small city, there’s this good vibe, it’s hard to describe something you feel, and it was very fast, very clear that I wanted to move there.«

RBMA: »What was your brother doing there and what’s he doing today?«

Superpitcher: »He’s a painter. He paints.«

RBMA: »And he’s still somewhat loosely associated with another collective that’s relatively influential these days?«

Superpitcher: »You mean Dial? We are all friends and since he moved, he moved to Berlin two years ago, and one of the Dial people who is actually an artist, Carsten Jost, they are friends and so it happens that he did record covers for them.«

RBMA: »Cologne is a bit of an arts city as well, which is I guess partly credited to the great work of the Royal Air Force in flattening it and the people having to find some kind of beauty outside of the architecture. There’s loads of galleries and all that stuff and it’s a bit incestuous in that way, there’s certain areas where you don’t meet that many people with regular jobs. I’m not complaining, but…«

Superpitcher: »I never meet you in Cologne, by the way. This guy…«

RBMA: »That’s true but that’s partly because you’re never in Cologne either, right? That’s probably another thing with the whole traveling. How much do you spend of a regular month abroad?«

Superpitcher: »At least half of the time, but it’s always a little different. Sometimes I just have two weekend shows and sometimes, like the last month you do these bigger tours for ten days to Japan and having longer weekends, play three times, and I think it’s kind of half of the month on the road.«

RBMA: »Usually, the half of the month when other people you would be friends with go out so you never get to see them in a way?«

Superpitcher: »That’s true, I never see my people.«

RBMA: »How do you keep a social life then?«

Superpitcher: »Spending much time on the phone and whenever back in town we like to really celebrate that and do dinner parties or just drink.«

RBMA: »So you’re always part, or when you travel, you’re seen as some kind of ambassador for a) the city and b) this anonymous, infamous Kompakt thing? How did you get in touch with that in the first place?«

Superpitcher: »It was right when I came to Cologne, they already had their first record shop, which I think at that time was still called Delirium, it was another name, they took it over. I bought my records there but I just came to Cologne, I was very young, very shy, and I don’t talk much. I buy records and I leave. And it was then that I met Michael at a techno party in Cologne when they first started Total Confusion, this weekly party which was happening for around eight years. We just saw each other and that was it. We were just talking and starting to get drinks on the bar and that was the beginning of a truly great friendship. From there on he was asking me if I would like to work at the store. At that time I was only just doing music and working at the… I showed movie, I don’t know how you say that, at the cinema... I got money from that, and I started to work there and became friends, very, very close to all of the people at Kompakt. Then they found out that I do music as well and they wanted to hear stuff so I let them listen to a few things and they really liked it and that was the beginning.«

RBMA: »There was overall a very casual and non-pushy approach, so you wouldn’t recommend buying a bottle off vodka, going to the next bar and pestering everyone so you sooner or letter get released on that label?«

Superpitcher: »I wouldn’t recommend that and it’s something I actually could never do. Things just need to happen, I think.«

RBMA: »Could we hear some of that early stuff, or do you remember which was the first thing that you played to them?«

Superpitcher: »This was only one thing, I can’t find any more.«

RBMA: »It seems to be a common theme?«

Superpitcher: »If you have lots of records and you move to another apartment, it’s somewhere but I don’t know. But the first thing was in ’99 they released 7”s, one every week, 52 7”s called Kreisel 99. And my first release for Kompakt was one of these which I don’t have. And after that there was my first 12” called Heroin and I thought we could listen to that, right?«

(music: Superpitcher – Heroin)

RBMA: »You had some sort of an epiphany there in realizing how certain things make sense now that you re-playing this way?«

Superpitcher: »Exactly. It makes sense to me now.«

RBMA: »We’re glad we could be of assistance there. That’s probably pretty much the polar opposite of an approach than things that we witnessed, let’s say, last night. You can’t really tell the essence of that in 15 seconds and then hop on into the next thing.«

Superpitcher: »Exactly, and that’s one important thing for me in especially electronic music, that I like to really have an evolution over six minutes. As a DJ I like to play the tracks long because I like to play music which tells you something, has something to say, so it’s totally different than this fast style.«

RBMA: »But where do you draw the line between repetition and interesting or trancey sort of state and plain boring?«

Superpitcher: »It’s a thin line. Everything can be boring easily, I guess.«

RBMA: »You worked for a record distributor and obviously as a DJ you have to listen through a lot of material. How do you make those decisions? How do you develop that mechanism of like: “OK, I hear that, that’s gonna be interesting if you hear it for ten minutes,” but you’re never gonna do that in a shop or online or wherever?«

Superpitcher: »It’s again, it’s something you get a feeling for, I would say. Still you somehow can be wrong if you listen to a record in a shop or at home and then you play it in the club and you never want to play it again. That still happens, especially with the enormous output of records these days, especially in techno and minimal techno music, there’s so many labels, especially in Germany. It’s like they grow on trees. This really boring, clicky, minimal records like 20 every week and maybe two are really interesting somehow, three.«

RBMA: »Sometimes in Cologne when you get really drunk and you have to vomit in the street and you stand against a wall and you look up and see the plaques near the doorbells you’re like: “Oh, another three labels here already,” and on the Sunday you’re at the airport or at the train station and you’re like: “You too? You travel with records too?” How many labels are they you think in Cologne alone?«

Superpitcher: »I don’t know how many. Many moved actually to Berlin, it would be a bigger number if you would find out how many there are in Berlin. In Cologne there are probably something between 10 and 15 now. You think maybe I forgot some?«

RBMA: »So what’s your personal approach towards quality management when you say there’s all that stuff, way too much in the first place, and with everything that you put out how much do you add to it? OK, you got a new track, will I release this, will I put that on that pile of the 20 new records a week? What’s the process before you decide yes, I will release this or no.«

Superpitcher: »You mean release? Because I don’t release records, I don’t have a label.«

RBMA: »I mean, if you give it to someone to release it?«

Superpitcher: »Can you repeat the question?«

RBMA: »When you get something finished you take it from the studio, you take it upstairs, then do you really take it upstairs or do you keep it back for a while?«

Superpitcher: »I see what you mean, yeah, it sits there for a while. In my case it takes long and then probably somebody first comes down the stairs and listens to it and then I feel right about it. As soon as I make somebody I really trust or like, make them listen to new music, I feel then I exactly know if it’s right or finished or something is missing. Strange, because I work very alone normally on a piece of music.«

RBMA: »What’s very long in time?«

Superpitcher: »It’s always different but I don’t work fast. I don’t do a track in two hours like some of my friends who are very good, like Wolfgang Voigt, Mike Ink, one of the main Kompakt guys. In his best time I he did like one groundbreaking techno track every morning between 9 and 11, you know? Every morning. I’m not like that. It takes days, sometimes weeks.«

RBMA: »So how can we picture the environment you work in there right now?«

Superpitcher: »Right now after first working in the record shop and the distribution at one point the traveling got too much and there was no time anymore to really go to the studio so I don’t work there any more. I just used the studio there in the basement.«

RBMA: »The basement took quite a while to build?«

Superpitcher: »A few years, yes.«

RBMA: »Why?«

Superpitcher: »Why? Because it was just a rotten basement and then the idea was turning it into really nice, professional studios. And it’s not just one, it’s like four studios and a recording room and it just took time. But that was like always the main idea of Kompakt and also where the name comes from that they wanted in the best case everything under one roof. You have studios in the basement, you do the music in the same house and you sell the music in the shop, which is just upstairs, and you assure ways of working and communication and finally it’s like that. No, it’s great.«

RBMA: »But as well as all the greatness it has also been the aim of quite a lot of jokes and funny accusations. What are the worst things that you heard, especially when you travel, because from the outside looking in it usually looks kind of different from being in there?«

Superpitcher: »I can’t remember the worst thing, there have been many funny things.«

RBMA: »What makes you laugh the most?«

Superpitcher: »Let me think. One was so funny. I can’t remember it. What do you hear? That’s more interesting probably.«

RBMA: »That’s a long story. It’s got a lot to do with side partings and schaffel and all that kind of stuff.«

Superpitcher: »Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but most of these people are unhappy.«

RBMA: »Sometimes it doesn’t really help to put loads of city eagles on stuff as well and talk about funny things about being German in a certain way as well.«

Superpitcher: »I mean, there’s nothing really true about that stuff, that’s for sure, and the eagle is just the Cologne city sign.«

RBMA: »So for the record, we got that out of the way as well. So despite all the city crests and the eagle, there’s also a certain part of melancholy involved as well?«

Superpitcher: »Yeah, that’s what I like.«

RBMA: »What do you like about melancholy?«

Superpitcher: »It makes me feel good. It’s true.«

RBMA: »So what exactly? Then today must be a perfect day for you, kind of.«

Superpitcher: »Today? Yesterday, I felt very good.«

RBMA: »So you woke up this morning in a hotel and what exactly made you feel good there?«

Superpitcher: »I was so alone, you know, and traveling just makes you feel very melancholic because you meet so many people every night. Then you find yourself back alone on a plane or something or in a hotel, that makes you think. Thinking can make you quite melancholic. Then, most of the time I feel good, otherwise I would be depressed which is not so good.«

RBMA: »So what are your best attempts of walking or riding the melancholic train without hitting the wall of depression?«

Superpitcher: »The really true best thing for me is to go to work, to do music in that state.«

RBMA: »It’s a very pop-ish approach in a way as well. Without melancholy we wouldn’t have great pop music.«

Superpitcher: »Without broken hearts obviously too. I think there’s some truth in it. You don’t need to make yourself sad to do something good but many things I know, they came from people who were actually quite sad when they did it.«

RBMA: »So you’re not deliberately let’s say looking at the most beautiful and unattainable women in the whole room and try to get with her so that you know you’ll get your heart broken and can therefore do another track the next day in the studio?«

Superpitcher: »No, I would never do [that]. That’s exactly, what is it, it’s too much of a concept, that’s not working like that.«

RBMA: »Maybe subconsciously you do already anyway?«

Superpitcher: »Probably.«

RBMA: »What were the pop records that you liked?«

Superpitcher: »I like a lot this ‘70s pop and rock records, like Roxy Music, T Rex, what else? Maybe we should listen to something? What do you think? There’s so many, I mean, it’s sometimes hard to remember all of them.«

(music: T-Rex – Cosmic Dancer / applause)

»Lovely. I love that song.«

RBMA: »And with most things, sometimes worlds may be a lot closer to each other than everyone in the world thinks? You got glam rock there and at the same time people on the total opposite end of the spectrum were doing a lot of things with strings as well in, let’s say, the African/American contingent.«

Superpitcher: »This is not so far away in a way. To me, from Curtis Mayfield or Philly Soul, the soul of it, and I think Marc Bolan was inspired by that as well, that we can hear. We should also listen to one Philadelphia soul piece, too, let’s see. The Delfonics. «

(music: The Delfonics – Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love) / applause)

»Nice.«

RBMA: »So the nerd in you would obviously totally see the link between the RZA, Mary J, Missy, Lauryn Hill, but on the other hand Underground Resistance and a certain way to deal with strings in techno music?«

Superpitcher: »Absolutely. I don’t need to be too nerdy about it, you know? I really just love all of this music but I can make the connection as well, easily.«

RBMA: »There’s obviously a big step, it might be kind of easy for, let’s say the RZA, to chop up those strings and the horns because he at least at first doesn’t have to put his own voice there. But putting your own voice over tracks that you produce yourself is a bit of a mission, especially when you are a bit shy.«

Superpitcher: »Especially when you are a bit shy and you cannot really sing, you know? But then at the same time on this first 12” I did for Kompakt there was the first B2 song as well where I was like singing and it was not really that I trained myself to do that. It was also at one point clear that I had the lyrics and was like: “OK, I could try and find somebody to sing it like I think it should be done,” and it was then much. Much more easy and a nice challenge as well to just do it yourself and get it over your shadow and just do it.«

RBMA: »But nevertheless, it’s a bit painful because you make yourself really vulnerable. Especially, if you’re not a trained singer and they’re like: “Ooh, Aksel he can’t sing for fuck”?«

Superpitcher: »Of course, there have been some people that said, you know… Again, the thing of the people you trust, they are on your side and say: “You don’t have to turn up the voice a little bit because you can’t really hear them,” and that helped.«

RBMA: »So for everyone that has seen Jay-Z’s Fade To Black, in a way you were the Kanye West of Cologne techno then? In the same way as he was telling Jay-Z how to do a hook, you were just doing your own hooks and like: “Ah yeah, I can do that on my own.”?«

Superpitcher: »Yeah, I kind of really believe in this kind of thing that it’s really not about knowing about things so much, it’s more about like how do you want to tell or play or do things. I was trained to play piano when I was a kid, I’m not a professional musician, I can read notes now, yeah, but I forgot about this stuff. It’s probably still there but it’s not the most important thing. It’s not about techniques for me, it’s about the idea and what you want to say. So it started with the singing.«

RBMA: »How do you cultivate that certain innocent, child-like approach of playing?«

Superpitcher: »Sometimes it’s difficult. The more you do, the more you know. The more you learn, the more professional you get as well. So at one point, at many points, I tried to get back to that point where I just do music and enjoy what I’m doing without thinking. This gets more difficult. People expect things from you, even if it’s just a few people, it’s different. It’s not that innocent than the first record you do. You kind of try and would like to, to have this feeling back sometimes, but you can’t.«

RBMA: »Always looking for that first kiss again?«

Superpitcher: »It’s a little bit like that.«

RBMA: »So what’s it like when, before we probably listen to this, when people ask you for a remix? Obviously, they have much higher expectations as well because they want to get a certain thing, a certain feel, a certain sound? How do you deal with that?«

Superpitcher: »The same way. Try to get all of that out of my head and do a nice remix. Shall we play a remix or shall we listen to my singing? Both? We could listen to really like the first song I was singing. It could be hard for me. That’s called Tomorrow. It’s not sad.«

(music: Superpitcher – Tomorrow / applause)

RBMA: »So as a DJ you guys play really long sets?«

Superpitcher: »We like to.«

RBMA: »Which is probably not exactly the norm in places where they shut everything down at 2 o’clock. How do you program stuff like that into your set?«

Superpitcher: »Stuff like that? This must be a very special set where you start, maybe you start early like when we do our parties in Cologne. We like to really start very, very low, actually without maybe beats for a while, for the first hour, to really give the people the chance to arrive and have their first drink without too much. And then in this special cases you can, of course, go from something really deep and slow like this one, or if it’s a really perfect night, then you can play on the end something like that.«

RBMA: »As a DJ you tend to get booked these days or for quite a while on the merit of your productions as well and people do expect certain things because of the tracks that you do?«

Superpitcher: »Sometimes people are as well disappointed because it’s still a little bit something else to go out and play as a DJ than [producing]. It’s not just a live show where you present your own tracks because you want to do a good DJ set, you use music from other people. Sometimes I play nothing, no track of mine, sometimes more, sometimes less, but there’s other things in a club, you as well create something like an atmosphere and you go and try and get the people on the same train. As well you have to rock it in a club.«

RBMA: »So when this was your first EP, how long did it take you to create stuff yourself that you would play at peak time as well?«

Superpitcher: »I never did really try to do that. A few things came out like you could play at peak time. One of them was this one which is, oh, it’s a bit fucked up this one.«

(music: Superpitcher – Baby’s On Fire / applause)

»That was Baby’s On Fire, a cover version, originally by Brian Eno.«

RBMA: »Outside of Brian Eno and outside of strings, another key element always seems to be, not sure really how to speech it, but a particular sound of guitars that seems to be a common thread as well in things that you play and your own productions as well.«

Superpitcher: »Yes, definitely, I love guitars.«

RBMA: »Any other examples of where that particular guitar comes from?«

Superpitcher: »Yeah, it comes a lot from this record.«

RBMA: »With another beautiful Cologne woman involved as well.«

Superpitcher: »Exactly. The Velvet Underground and Nico. Original Cologne girl before she was taken by New York. OK, check the guitars.«

(music: Velvet Underground – I’m Waiting For My Man / applause)

»Well, these guitars.«

RBMA: »Somehow The Factory presents some kind of comparable surrounding as well because you have people who were definitely into various formats of what you might want to call art or creative, but at the same time they were not really experts at what they were doing either. A lot of that was to celebrate a certain playful approach and dilettantism.«

Superpitcher: »These kind of things give charm as well to many things, stuff like that.«

RBMA: »What is the difference between working on your own and locking yourself into that zone in your studio and once you enter and have to work with someone else?«

Superpitcher: »I never have been working with anybody before, just like one year ago I started to work with Michael Mayer from Cologne and I actually, I really obviously loved it to be totally alone and far away from everything while working. This experience with Michael just showed me how crazy it is to work with somebody if you get along or click or however you want to call it. It’s dynamic and especially fun while working. I didn’t knew that before so I had a good time. While working with Michael I had sometimes really big time fun.«

RBMA: »Kind of weird, you’ve been DJing together for how long on and off?«

Superpitcher: »I don’t know, seven, eight years.«

RBMA: »It still takes you ages to finally end up in the same studio?«

Superpitcher: »We just didn’t, it was so close the idea, we just didn’t think about it.«

RBMA: »Good things might be a lot closer than you think?«

Superpitcher: »Yeah, and as well it’s a nice thing that it could be the obvious thing to do and it took all this time to just happen, which is I think right, you know?«

RBMA: »And you need to have patience?«

Superpitcher: »Yeah. You cannot look too bad for something or else you probably cannot find it or see it, I don’t know.«

RBMA: »Musically, what’s the difference between working with him and when you do stuff on your own?«

Superpitcher: »Musically, we really try to go to other places because we’ve been working on our stuff for a long time and we decided to do something together and at the same time we decided not to offer just a perfect combination of my sound and his sound. We really wanted to leave everything behind one more time, lock ourselves in the studio and start riding on a blank page.«

RBMA: »And getting a little bit more structure?«

Superpitcher: »Yeah. This was helping, you know, to leave many things outside and to go into that more kind of space. But it was a really nice experience to work with somebody.«

RBMA: »So you had to create these different characters to finally bring out something that’s already buried within you and wouldn’t probably go with the melancholic poster boy approach?«

Superpitcher: »Yes, something like that but it was not like these ideas for comic characters, that came while doing the music. It was not really like a concept from the beginning, but this then was helping us to think differently, definitely.«

RBMA: »Can you show how us how that thinking differently sounds?«

Superpitcher: »Yeah, this is just the first thing we did for the album and it’s also the most techno track on the album, I would say. It’s called Two Of Us.«

(music: Supermayer – Two Of Us / applause)

»Woo. Thank you.«

RBMA: »I guess, especially the foreign press will have a few, because it’s everything they love to hate about Germany. It’s monstrous, it’s epic, got a bit of krautrock in there?«

Superpitcher: »Just have to make them like it.«

RBMA: »Or they do already, I guess. This big monstrous machine. Do we have any questions at this stage?«

Participant: »Did you guys try to send a specific message with the album because it’s called Save The World and you have tracks in there like The Art Of Letting Go? I’ve heard Michael wants to move away from the whole minimal sound Kompakt has been associated with for some reason. Was it a conscious thing, are you trying to move away from the common, stereotypical sound the scene has gone with, or…?«

Superpitcher: »Yeah, like I said before, it’s not really like we want to move away. We still also love minimal techno but what it became was just a little bit too not-enough anymore and we love all these types of music, like we’ve heard today, from pop and dub and hip hop to disco and house and techno. So when we join together to work on an album it was clear it was not gonna be a techno album.«

Participant: »And also, when listening to the album, I kind of heard a lot more of what I’m used to listening from you, a lot more of your sound on the album than what I’m used to from Michael, more techier stuff. How was the dynamic for producing it? Did you guys decide on a specific type of sound and just went with it or did it just come about?«

Superpitcher: »We just found with this Two Of Us and The Art of Letting Go, which were the first two tracks we made, we saw this kind of a big spectrum where you can go from pop music to folk and techno and while having this new recording studio and all this instruments we found how much fun it is to work with instruments, to play everything on your own and sample yourself and don’t scroll down libraries of software plug-in’s anymore because it sucks if you do it for too long. Software’s great but, you know…«

Participant: »Hi. So do you play guitar or something yourself or do you have roots in other music than electro or techno kind of?«

Superpitcher: »Yes, I play guitar, piano and trumpet. I mean, I was forced to play all these instruments by my parents when I was young so, of course, I stopped as soon as I could to play all these instruments. But now I’m happy that I did and I tried to get into it again, not really professional but I still can do it.«

Participant: »The first song that you played when you were into ‘70 pop, who was that by?«

Superpitcher: »What was that? T-Rex. T-Rex, Cosmic Dancer, from this record, which is all amazing.«

Participant: »Do you have a kind of a love for literature, too, because in your record there is this fairy tale song sung by a woman, I’ve been told. I don’t know German, but I had it explained to me that it’s a fairy tale?«

Superpitcher: »It’s kind of. The song is like a fairy tale, it’s about dreams and, yes, I like literature as well and movies. These two things are very important to me and inspire me a lot. Thank you.«

Participant: »I was wondering about being a DJ as you have been for many years, I reckon, has there been a time in your career when you’ve felt limited in the music you play because of the label that you were part of and the concept of the Cologne scene or whatever that you felt limited in not being able to play all the tracks you really wanted to play?«

Superpitcher: »That’s a good question. I never really was because I was always trying to break all out of that and to really do what I want and this was getting… there were always times where this was more difficult and times this was easy and you can do what you want but there’s been some really rough times where I’ve thought, ‘OK, if I can’t play the music I really love or want to listen to as well’ - I made this decision at one point – ‘if I can’t do that anymore I have to stop doing it, I have to stop playing’. There were some struggles all the time but I think the most important thing is, yeah, you still have to always do as much as possible, what you really want to do while playing music all the while or producing music or whatever. Thanks.«

Participant: »Sorry, another one. You know certain artists say they have this one song that they find so amazing and they have so much respect for and they’d love to make something similar one day but they’d have to grow a lot before they do that? Was there such a challenge for you in such a song or if not a song then some kind of art or technique?«

Superpitcher: »There are a few of them, actually. I also tried to get somewhere close to something I really love, which is after trying for a little while, I had to admit it is not the right way to do it and to work. I feel better to admire or love the things and it will always kind of go into your work or whatever you do. But I thought at one point it’s not really possible to get very close to something you really love unless you’re trying to copy it, you know, which I think you don’t want.«

RBMA: »Want another rave tune for lunch?«

Superpitcher: »You can choose now. Ah, that’s the only one I don’t have here. We play some dub, or we play… you know this one?«

RBMA: »So something you included on a mix CD as well, right?«

Superpitcher: »Exactly, when I did my first mix CD it was so hard to do because you know you have to think of the tracks you want to play and then you or your label has to get the license for these tracks and some of the tracks you really want you don’t get them so you have to change all your concepts. So I was kind of really pissed and was like: “This is the only song I really want to have.” It’s not a techno track, so I tried to get this one first and build everything. It’s on the end of the mix CD and it’s one of the maybe best love songs from the last five or ten years, I don’t know. It’s Sebastian Tellier, French guy, and it’s called La Ritournelle. It’s so beautiful.«

(music: Sebastian Tellier – La Ritournelle)

RBMA: »Aksel Schaufler, meine Damen und meine Herren.«

(applause)