Dutch/Turkish award winning Dj, record producer and sound designer Ummet Ozcan has stamped  his name on the global electronic music scene with numerous Beatport #1’s and flaunting a prolific catalog of festival anthems. 

In 2014 he delivers a number of solid chart breakers like ‘Raise your Hands’ and  ‘Revolution’ which comes with a classic Mad Max style music video. The massive 2015 tune ‘The Hum’,  in cooperation with Belgium star’s Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, appears to be one of his biggest workings til date. And there are more highly successful joint efforts with other renowned Dj’s with the likes of Calvin Harris, Tiësto and Steve Aoki. 
Rewarded for his relentless dedication he lands the 19th spot in DJ Mag’s Top 100 DJ’s in 2016, the greatness that is Ummet Ozcan, only grows bigger.

Growing up in the known epicentre of dance music, The Netherlands, it isn’t difficult for Ozcan (1982) to plug into dance music at a young age. Since achieving his first major success in 2011 with ‘Reboot’, a firm #1 on Beatport, the veteran DJ’s major hits have been sampled in his peers’ radio podcasts and played at festival mainstages all over the world. In 2012 his genre-defying #1 smash hit ‘The Box’ is one of the most played records at EDC Las Vegas, while a year later his W&W collab ‘The Code’ is one of the most popular tracks at Ultra Music Festival 2013, followed by the remix of Fatboy Slim’s ‘Eat Sleep Rave Repeat’ together with Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike. In 2014 and 2015 Ozcan sees another amount of his tracks reach the highest chart positions. ’Smash’ and ‘Superwave’  become instantaneous hits, racking up millions of YT views and making it to #1. Also more recent titles like ‘Lose Control’ and ‘Stars’ are sure shots. 2017 brings a number of great releases and a critically acclaimed remix of Axwell & Ingrosso’s ‘More than you know’.

A success story that’s about to enter new grounds as In March 2018 he launches his own imprint ‘OZ Records’ which is a homebase for global Ozcan releases and for other talent. Also 2018 gives birth to his software developing company called ‘OzSoft’ that will be focused on providing gamechanging digital tools for the producers community and beyond. The first release that will make waves is the highly anticipated ‘Genesis Pro’ synth plugin.

With this latest achievement Ozcan passionately proves to be a jack-of-all-trades and keeps contributing greatly to the ever expanding dance music society. 

-- Management: Newjam Management: michel@newjam.tv http://www.newjam.tv/ 

-- South East Asia bookings: Robb@supermodifiedagency.com
-- USA bookings: CSheldon@wmeentertainment.com
-- ROW bookings: Jesper@aceagency.com

VIV.C003
Jeremy Olander - Stylus

Stream on Spotify vivrant.ffm.to/cme003

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Management
BC DGTL
alex@bc-dgtl.com

Agent
Analog
john@analog-a.com

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


Hot Since 82

Yokshire based DJ & Producer.

@KneeDeepInSound

Management: Jamesd@anglomanagement.co.uk
Bookings: SHogan@wmeentertainment.com
North, Central and South America:
andrew@liaisonartists.com
mariesa@liaisonartists.com

Dutch DJ and producer duo W&W, formed in 2007, continues to push boundaries with their high-energy fusion of big room, trance, techno, and hard dance. They’ve earned over 12 million monthly Spotify listeners, and have a decade-long presence in DJ Mag’s Top 25. Known for their anthemic festival hits, they perform at the biggest worldwide festivals and have over 20+ million followers across all social media platforms. W&W’s imprint label Rave Culture has become a staple in the modern dance scene, shaping the sound of Mainstage EDM with relentless energy.

Greg Nicolson 1 is following