For the past eleven years the German electronic music production duo known as Blank and Jones have been filling the airwaves and dancefloors of the world with their uniquely popular-yet-legitimate take on underground electronic music. In a scene where the chasm between underground legitimacy and mainstream radio acceptance seems at times to yawn a hundred kilometers wide, Piet Blank and Jaspa Jones have managed to plant themselves with one foot firmly on either side of the divide. Their albums consistently chart across Europe – all eight of their albums and thirteen of their sixteen singles hit the top 50 in their native Germany – while their productions and remixes consistently find their way into the boxes of underground DJs across the globe. Little wonder, then, that some of the biggest names in modern music have been so keen to work with them.

It’s an improbably sunny Tuesday afternoon in Cologne as I catch up with Piet and Jaspa, and equally improbably, I’ve managed to catch two of Germany’s biggest electronic music-makers in the process of assembling… a barbeque. “It always rains in Germany, so when you have the choice to do a BBQ, you should do it,” Jaspa says enthusiastically. “Especially since we are always traveling on the weekends, we don’t often get the chance to have a BBQ with friends, so that’s why we’re doing it today – we can’t wait to get the grill going!”

Of course, with their collaboration with New Order’s Bernard Sumner climbing up charts around the world and a global tour kickoff just a few days away, Blank and Jones have been putting together a lot more in recent days than barbeques. While they’ve always been popular, recent years have seen their appeal start to reach far beyond the confines of traditional underground dance music circles.

“We don’t necessarily see ourselves as a dance act,” Piet explains in answer to my question about just how they’ve managed to build such broad appeal. “We love music, and we see ourselves as electronic musicians. Of course, most of our music is presented in a club context – a place where people dance – but music-wise, we grew up in the 80s, and there was this kind of anything goes. It wasn’t limited to a certain style or a certain beat. DJs in the 80s played new wave, they played crazy electronica, they played Kraftwerk, and then they played crazy electro hip-hop beats from New York. This is how we grew up, and this is how we understand music.”

One indicator of just how broad Blank and Jones’ musical interests are can be seen in their many collaborations with artists such as The Cure, New Order, Pet Shop Boys and Sarah McLachlan. “We don’t ask a lot of people to work with us,” Piet explains. “We’re very selective. But if we try to get someone to sing with us in the studio, we can be a pain in the ass,” he says with a laugh. “We try everything to convince people, and we’ve been very lucky with who we’ve been able to work with. It always takes some time to get these people involved, and you have to be very patient. For example, the track we recently did with Bernard [Sumner], we were working on that track for nearly a year and a half. That’s one of the things – you have to be very patient.”

As Piet and Jaspa see it, staying connected to the underground is a full time job. “Luckily, we are very well connected through our club gigs – we have a lot of people that will come up to us and give us CDs with their tracks on them, or people that will send us links through Myspace, but on the other hand, because we’re also DJing with other people’s records, we keep an open mind, we’re buying records every week, we buy records online, we get promos sent to us every week, we like to discover new sounds.”

Speaking of their recent collaboration with Glenn Morrison, Piet says “We found out about him from our agent in North America. Last year they sent us a link to his site, saying ‘hey, check out this website, we really like it, we’re thinking of taking on our roster, what do you think’ and as soon as we heard the music we totally loved it, and immediately thought of offering him a remix. We thought ‘hey, why not give people a chance who don’t have a huge, huge name.’”

“We always try to involve the people whose records we’re playing,” Jaspa adds. “Those are the people we’re most likely to ask to do a remix for us.”

But while Blank and Jones are one of the most bankable global brands in mainstream electronic music circles, the duo insists that there is no major corporate marketing machine behind their actions or decisions. “We always do what we love. There’s never any marketing calculations. We’re for real,” says Piet. “We don’t have a manager. Every decision we make, we make it ourselves. You’ll never hear us say ‘oh, I’m sorry, I think our management made a mistake’, because our management is us. We decide what the artwork will look like, which company we want to release our work. That’s a big part of our freedom that we really like,” says Piet.

The duo’s belief in independence and self-sufficiency also extends to their work in the studio. “We engineer and produce all our own work,” Piet explains. “What we did this time for our brand new album, we used for the first time, a mixing engineer and a mastering studio in London – that’s the first time we got help from someone outside our studio.”

As one of the most enduring acts in the industry, Blank and Jones have seen dance music’s popularity ebb and flow both in their native continental Europe and around the world in recent years. “I think you always have waves, where it comes and goes,” says Piet. “Of course you can still make money these days, but the thing that happens to rock music also happens to electronic music. These days, sadly, you don’t earn the money that you make from your productions – you have to go on tour.”

To Piet and Jaspa, the problem is compounded by internet downloading. “All people who are in the music business struggle because of the illegal downloading issue, you can’t deny that it’s a big problem for all people who want to make a living from music,” Jaspa notes. “The sad part in this is that these days even people who are actually producers, who are not entertainers, who are not performers, they have to go out there and try to earn money by DJing, and that really weakens the scene,” adds Peit. “People go out to the club and say ‘this DJ was really boring, I really love his productions, but his set wasn’t very entertaining – and not everybody is a good DJ, just as not everybody is a good producer. That’s really a sad part these days. If you look at the heavy metal scene, they are so supportive, so loyal in comparison. Electronic music has a big fan base, but so many people in our scene seem to go straight to Bittorrent to get their music for free. That’s the sad part – some producers have to shut down their studios, because they can’t afford to make music any more.”

As Piet and Jaspa explain it, their upcoming tour is likely to introduce clubgoers the world over to an entirely new side of Blank and Jones music. “We’re going to introduce our brand new album, ‘the logic of pleasure’, on this tour,” says Piet. “We’ve prepared special club edits of all of our album tracks, because we still think there is a big difference between listening to a CD at home or in your car, it’s totally different to listening to music in a club. That’s why the CD sounds more for listening at home, or outside the club, whereas our club versions do the job for the main room.”

Rather than being a static show repeated in identical form each night of the tour, the deo plan to evolve and develop their set in between gigs as they tour. “We’ll be playing exclusive tracks and things we develop while touring,” explains Piet. “That’s the good thing about these software synthesizers – wherever we are in the world, we can do a track, on our laptops, we always have everything with us. If we have an idea, we can do an edit of a track that we like, and go out there and play it the same night. We also have some very special visuals with us for the world tour that were designed by Paul Morley, the same person that did the artwork for our new album.”

As our conversation wraps up, Piet notes that the most important part of their tour will be coming through the front doors of the club at each stop on their tour. “We hope to see a lot of people in a good mood to party,” He says. “That’s our reward,” Jaspa quickly adds, “for being in the studio for so many months!”