Area 709

In an industry where major players seem to come and go, DJ T. – real name Thomas Koch – stands atop a twenty-year career that shows no sign of slowing down. He is a globetrotting international DJ, a pioneering dance music journalist, a respected producer and remixer, and one of the primary figures behind one of the industry’s most consistent and respected labels, Get Physical Music.

Thomas is in Houston as we begin our conversation, en route from Rio De Janeiro to Monterrey, Mexico. “I played a huge rave in Rio on Saturday,” he begins. “The first two or three days it was raining like cats and dogs – really, really stormy and windy and cold, and so I actually stayed almost the whole week in my hotel room. The gig was good though – it was a huge hall, at least four or five thousand people there.”

Now more than a dozen weeks into a major international tour, Thomas is keenly aware of the differences between dance floors at his many destinations. “Especially when I’m going to new countries in South America that I’ve never been to before, like Ecuador and Peru, you always ask yourself the questions, ‘what will the scene be like there? How will the people dance? What will they look like and dress like?’ but nowadays it’s pretty much the same wherever you go in North America, South America and Europe. Of course, in Asia it gets a bit different. I can remember when I was playing in Jakarta, Indonesia, the whole mentality of the people was a bit different – their temperament, I suppose you could say. Before I started to play, the promoter was telling me that the people there are a bit more distant, a bit more quiet, and so if they start to move at all and not stay completely still, then they’re really having a good time.”

“I was playing for three hours,” he continues. “It took me the first hour to get them shaking a bit with their hips and tapping their toes a little bit. By the end of the set they were all dancing – which I guess meant they were going crazy!”

Too quickly, our conversation is cut short, as Thomas has a flight to catch, and our Skype connection has been giving us difficulty. Fast forward 48 hours and 400 miles, and we re-join him after the Monterrey gig. And how was the gig? For Thomas, who was still recovering from a stomach bug picked up in Peru, the evening went well, assisted by copious quantities of that well-known stomach remedy, Jägermeister.

“I was still feeling a bit unwell from South America, so I tried to take it easy yesterday evening with the food, but then in the night the party was so good that I just had to drink, you know? I hope it’s not killing me today.”

“Jägermeister was a drink that has been popular in Germany for decades,” he continues. “Forty years, sixty, seventy, I don’t know. It was always a drink for old people – so the whole marketing and promotion of it, when I was a boy, you could see it in every magazine and on TV. The ads had people, maybe 55 and older, holding a tiny glass in their hand, and saying a special saying. It was always ‘I drink Jägermeister because…’ and then there was a silly reason for it.”

“Much later, when electronic music was exploding, around 1991-1992, the German techno kids were adapting it for their after hours parties. One thing about it was that the people were drinking it, knowing that it’s actually good for the digestive system in a way. I mean, it’s got special herbs in it and stuff, so it’s one of the drinks that you can digest better than some others, I think. But I guess that only applies for smaller amounts,” he adds with a chuckle.

“In Monterrey it’s a good scene,” Thomas observes. “I would say Mexico – as with all of Central and South America, really – has one of the most advanced crowds. Mexico, together with Argentina and Peru, I would say these three countries have the most European crowds. They’re really well informed, they’re used to having international DJs every weekend, and I would say they are pretty much up for it just as much as Europe is, too.”

Given Thomas’ history as a dance music journalist and author, it seemed natural to ask him how he’s seen the industry change over the years. “Well,” he replies, letting out a long, slightly pained sigh. “This is something you could write a whole book on.” Given that Thomas has contributed to a number of books on the subject, one must take him at his word – and so the question is rephrased within a slightly smaller frame of reference.

“Well,” he finally allows, “what is not developing in a parallel way is the scene of the producers, the DJs and the labels. We have a big, healthy scene worldwide, but it seems that the culture of the clubs and the events, and the amount of people coming out to see this kind of music, is shrinking since the 1990s. That’s a phenomenon I still don’t get in a way, really.”

“Yesterday I was talking to somebody about this,” he continues. “I told him that, especially in Germany, you have this island of Berlin, which is kind of an island within the whole world for the moment, for there you have this super-vitalized club scene, and you can go out 24 hours the whole week and on the weekends you have a choice of many 150 different venues in the whole city, and maybe 40-50 of them are offering electronic music every Friday or Saturday. I mean, even living there, I couldn’t name them all, so I could spend a whole year going out in Berlin to different locations every weekend and I still probably wouldn’t know all of them. But that’s Berlin. In the rest of the country, and the rest of the bigger cities, except perhaps Munich, the underground club culture is shrinking and less people are going out. The reason for this is not only the financial crisis and that people have less money, you know?”

“For example take the Rhein-Main area with this coordinated system between Frankfurt, Mannheim and Offenbach, where all these new house labels, producers and DJs are coming from – my home area. You have around 25 new internationally well-known labels there, and as well as you have the same number of producers and DJs, but the event culture is not growing with the scene again. It’s stagnating in this area. It’s a bit weird.”

Even Get Physical, Thomas’ own label, has not been immune to the recent industry challenges. “At the moment, we are struggling too,” he admits. “We really have to count every Euro at the moment, like everybody else. The only reason why we’ve been able to survive this long without any problems was that, on one side, we were lucky to always have products that were selling really well. At one stage it was a Booka Shade album, the next it was Samim with his huge ‘Heater’ track, and then his album, but from a certain moment on we were thinking a bit bigger and we were taking the next step after you have become a big vinyl label, starting all these compilation series and developing artists who could release long-players, and we were just setting up this structure to release around eight to twelve CDs a year. Taking it the way labels like K7 or Warp were doing before us, you know?  That kind of structure seemed a good way to survive. So far, all six of us who own and run the label, we’ve never paid ourselves one Euro as owners,” Thomas acknowledges. “We just pay ourselves the money we get as an artist on our own label, but never any money for the income as a business.”

Despite the challenging marketplace, Get Physical has built an impressive name and a quality catalogue of music since its first release in 2002. “The first two years, our sound was uniform, and we had a really clear fingerprint,” Thomas explains. “That came from the fact that the releases of the first two or three years were all produced by Walter from Booka Shade, and from the niche we were sitting in. The key words that were used by the outside to describe our sound were ‘electro house’ and ‘tech disco’. From that moment on, when were taking more and more new artists on the label, we started to expand the range of the label’s sound. There came a point where we were sitting together and asking ourselves, ‘do we want to make it really big now, and just release the music that we like, without border lines?’ This was after about three or three-and-a-half years, and since then you can’t really talk of a label sound any more. We were releasing long players from artists like Raz Ohara, who, while he has a strong link to electronic music…  I mean, Peacefrog was releasing Jose Gonzales, which was a pure singer/songwriter album, and Raz Ohara in a way was the same – so we ranged from pure, functional club music and deeper house up to classic techno, with an even bigger range on our long players. So there’s no label sound any more, it’s just edgy dance music and advanced pop music, I would say.”

The topic then switches to DJing in clubs – and about how Thomas prefers his sets to unfold. “I come from the old school of DJing,” he replies. “When I started DJing and when I had my first residencies, before even techno and this so-called electronic dance music became popular. Back then, you had to learn to please a crowd over six or seven hours, trying to tell a story, moving between different styles, jumping between the BPMs, and so on. This is where DJ culture comes from originally – the DJs didn’t try to focus on one style the whole night.”

“There are different approaches now, and it’s totally respectable for a DJ to define one certain style,” he continues. “But for me, DJing is telling a story with music taken from twenty-five years in music history, and showing people where music has come from. If a DJ is able to play tracks from twenty or twenty-five years ago together with current tracks, and let it still sound homogeneous, then for me that is the king discipline if as a DJ you can do it. I still play a lot of classics in my sets, and I still play very spontaneously, so if I can make breaks in the style, changes in the tempo, and go down and then up again, then those are the kind of sets that I like.”

We next discuss the new DJ T. album, entitled The Inner Jukebox. “My first album was a big melting pot of everything that was influencing me between the late 70s and the late 80s, so everything from disco and funk to italo-house, the early 80s house, and the old school electro sound,” Thomas explains. “For this second album, I wanted to do something that was a bit more ‘here and now’. Also, the whole sound aesthetic, the programming of the drums and stuff, my wish was to make it sound a bit more contemporary than the first one. I mean, the first one was very contemporary because at the time the whole retro sound was very famous, but the second album was supposed to be a bit more about my house and techno roots from the 90s.”

Even still, Thomas admits that the final product is different from what he might have made were he to do it again. “I was asking myself before I started it, ‘do I want to do a pure club album or do I want to try to tell more of a story?’ Now, a few months after having released it, if I’m really honest with myself from my own perspective I failed a bit, in making something that’s in the middle between a concept album and a club album. I actually wanted to make an album that you can listen to in the home or in the car, and some people tell me it’s good for it, but from my own personal perspective it’s still more on the club music side.”

“Of course, you know how it is,” he continues. “When you release something, then right at that moment, you’re completely over it, because you’ve heard it a million times already… but if I had to do it now, at this moment, I would do it different again, with a different musical approach. But it was, of course, a picture of a moment, and all in all I’m really satisfied with it, because it reflects the kind of uplifting minimal house that I’m playing at the moment, so at least it was representing me as a DJ – so that’s still a good thing!”

DJ T. plays Habitat on Thursday, November 12th.