Booking requests:
chris@stilvortalent.de
Management:
music@stilvortalent.de

Circus Company is an independent French label, founded in 2000 in Paris.

Easy to distinguish, this is about fun, not just Techno. The mission is the joy to administer a demand-oriented blend of groovy House, funky Tech and deep Progressive through the ear straight into the ass of the disposed dancer. With fresh ingredients and a proper portion of humor, nothing gets just parboiled here, but well stirred and neatly seasoned to taste.

Whether pulsating clubs, underground events, tropical beach and jungle parties or dusty festivals, Katja and Markus know how to elate the crowd with their diversified sound, which is always positive and far beyond the boring stereotyped. 
For now both are active as solo artists under the names:  Komorebi and Question Mark

First things first, but not necessarily in that order!
chick-dick@hotmail.com

https://avalonemerson.com/andthecharm

Now one of dance music’s most respected DJs, Avalon Emerson first made a name for herself in the storied warehouse scene of her birthplace, San Francisco, before relocating to Berlin in 2013. Over a decade of performances at the famed Berghain led to appearances at numerous festivals around the world which all cemented Emerson, and her evocative, genre- and decade-spanning sets, as perennially in demand. 

In 2020, she released her first full-length collection: a contribution to the longrunning DJ-Kicks series (which Resident Advisor described as “The sound of a well-honed DJ at the top of her game.”), nestled alongside a steady stream of remix releases for the likes of Four Tet, Slowdive, Robyn and more.

Next up was 2023’s Avalon Emerson & The Charm, an instant classic which saw Emerson exploring her singing voice and more traditional songwriting outside of the boundaries of her dance music work.  Created after a move to New York, the resulting & The Charm album was released to critical acclaim, landing on numerous critics’ best-of-the-year lists.

The stage is now set, then, for her to carve out a wholly unique path, and with the help of new label home and indie giant, Dead Oceans, Emerson is poised to connect her various musical endeavors to create an untouchably rich output of material. First up is Perpetual Emotion Machine, consisting of songs created for her DJ sets, delivered via a living, evolving project and announced ahead of her worldwide tour.

For Rune Reilly Kölsch, Kompakt has become a great label to call home. In 2013 the German imprint celebrated 20 years of record releases at the cutting edge of electronic music, championed in June by one of the most genre re-defining albums and personal music projects for an era: Kölsch’s landmark long player, ‘1977’.

A melodic autobiography on black wax, the Kölsch project has seen 36/37-year-old Rune take stock of a diverse and successful production career and draw upon his own personal beginnings: a nostalgia for childhood, family, friends and the confusion of applying his split-cultural heritage to what it means to think of ‘home’. As Rune freely admits, “being half Irish, half German and living in Denmark – it was all one big messy period of my life.” 

Born to hippie parents in the freetown of Christiania (a commune-like autonomous borough of the Danish capital Copenhagen) his childhood was spent surrounded by creativity. His mother was an artist whose family had roots in German politics and his father a singer songwriter who travelled through Asia playing music in the early 70's. Kölsch, however, did miss out on building friendships and found solace in making up “this imaginary world that I would spend days in,” before the family moved to Germany – a period of memories, relations and characters from which ‘1977’ derives its titles.

For Rune, the tracks he began building from 2010 took in this personal reflection, his being “completely locked in to reminiscing about what shaped me as a kid and into the individual that I am now” – contemplating his unique past to form the brickwork of ‘1977’, one of the most future-facing techno albums of recent years.

Influenced by hip hop, pop and the incredible legacy of Jeff Mills and Derrick May, Rune started producing in 1995, embarking on a string of success stories. In 2003 he released the multi-million selling, saxophone-infused ‘Calabria’, that saw collaboration requests pouring in from artists as diverse as Nicki Minaj, Shakira and Flo Rida. He then set up Tattoorecs – releasing pioneering underground tracks with no titles, just tattoos for artwork, that garnered critical acclaim and support from minimal and techno trailblazers such as Sven Väth, Richie Hawtin, Magda, Tiefschwarz and Ricardo Villalobos.

This appreciation of the complete musical spectrum has gifted Rune with a devotion to groove and melodics and with it the dexterity to input real creative change to the genres he reveres, not least his beloved techno. “2010 was the year of the ketamine house wave, where the music was 118 bpm and everything was extremely boring”, reflects Rune. “I wanted some melodic techno, some energy back in this scene. People needed the energy to express themselves and go crazy for a bit.”

This notion faced opposition, even from within Rune’s close circles. But it was Kompakt founder Michael Mayer who had the insight to see what Kölsch was trying to achieve. Rune’s conviction that vibrations and melodics are the key to human response had tipped the balance, underlined by his experience as a hip hop DJ where he “needed something to catch me and drag me in. And that’s what techno should do!” Here too he drew on his love of Jeff Mills and Derrick May, recalling how “they used to make mistakes all the time. It would be a big mash of all kinds of stuff, but at least something was happening. That’s what I was missing and that’s what I’m trying to change with the Kölsch project.”

The result is ‘1977’, a personal collection of dancefloor destroyers that are continuing to send clubs and festivals across the globe into melodic supernova. Take this video of Kölsch’s set at Belgium’s I Love Techno festival, one of Rune’s 2013 highlights, where “people were doing sit downs, singing along to all the tracks”. Watch it. It puts the hairs up on the back of your neck. “The response was overwhelming,” said Rune in a recent interview with Mixmag (who named Kölsch as one of their ‘Stars Of 2013’), as “when you think about it, it was just a bunch of childhood memories with a kickdrum underneath.” 

Elsewhere he’s ripped up the airways with an acclaimed Essential Mix for Pete Tong on BBC Radio 1, delivered his incendiary soundscape to Singapore’s world-renowned ZoukOut Festival, boomed his live show through the heaving basement of London’s XOYO and played the hallowed Space Terrace – in his words “a boyhood dream since I started going to Ibiza in 1999. That was what I wanted from life!” So opening Amnesia in 2014 with Joris Voorn will be a bonus then...

While these are reasons enough to keep the beaming smile beneath Kölsch’s trademark black fedora, his humility remains just as striking. While tracks like ‘Goldfisch’ have taken pivotal positions in the set lists of world class DJs from across the dance music spectrum – traversing the underground with Seth Troxler, while simultaneously providing credible new euphoric highs for the likes of Axwell – Rune remains joyously down to earth. All despite producing, with ‘1977’, an album that has crossed as many cultural and musical boundaries as his own childhood past.

From the face-twisting melodic drive of ‘Opa’ and ‘Bappedekkel’, to the chord-surfing piano groove of ‘Der Alte’ and the euphoric crescendos of ‘Lorely’, ‘Oma’ and ‘All That Matters’ (all hits in different countries), the fact remains that whether in your living room, on the dancefloors of the world’s greatest parties, or simply in your headphones on your way home, Kölsch’s ‘1977’ has re-defined techno and become an achievement that speaks for itself. 

Words: Phil Dudman – Clubs & Live Music Editor, Mixmag


Bookings
Worldwide: sam@klsbookings.com
Asia: samy@mihn.hk

Concrete is the Paris’s best venue for techno and house music lovers. Located on a three-level boat docked on the Seine since 2011, the team throws parties that go all night or all day or both, soundtracked by French and international DJs. 

Concrete is open Friday, Saturday and occasionally for the 27-hour party-festival 'Samedimanche', running from Saturday 11pm through Monday morning 2am. The club also manages the Concrete Music record label, Hors Serie parties and the huge Weather Festival. 

www.concreteparis.fr

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