"Beautiful" out now: found.ee/Rhye_Beautiful

Our new EP 'Temporary Love' is out now. Listen on Spotify and download on iTunes. More info: www.TheBrinksMusic.com

Independently Together

Label > https://beatsofnonation.bandcamp.com/

Radio > https://refugeworldwide.com/

@dombird, @jad-lee and @luenfree

Bookings: info@dnzagency.com
Benelux: karel@burst-artists.com
Asia: jonathan@warungagency.com

Phil Weeks is a house music purist. Whether DJing or producing, the Parisian with the huge personality delivers raw beats influenced in equal measure by
classic Chicago house and nu‐school French flair, underpinned with a hip‐hop attitude. His long running Robsoul Recordings also defines him as one of the
most skilled label heads in underground house music.
In the studio Phil is dedicated to classic hardware like Akai’s MPC 3000 sampler and Roland’s TR909 drum machine. He has released more than 250 tracks and
remixes since his debut in 2000, working with labels including 2020 Vision, Music For Freaks, Brique Rouge, Detour, Adult Only and his own Robsoul, which
is responsible for the majority of his original output. 

Phil’s work can also be found in the collaborations Fries & Bridges (with Hector Moralez) and PS Project/Bubba Beats & Kid Piston (with DJ Sneak). Production highlights include Phil’s three albums ‘Love Affair’ (2011), ‘Yeah I Like That’ (2003) and ‘Raw Instrumental’ (2012), alongside style‐defining singles ‘Hypnose’, ‘It Put Me Well’ and ‘All Day Every Day’. The music has been
heavily supported by international dance press including achieving accolades such as MixMag’s and De‐Bug’s ‘Album Of The Month’, while DJs ranging from
Danny Howells and Yousef to Mark Farina and DJ Sneak consistently play his tracks. Behind the decks, Phil has racked up enough air miles to take him around the
world several times over, with appearances at the world’s leading house clubs ‐ Queen’s Club, Sankeys, Circus, Ministry of Sound, Back to Basics and Stereo are
all regular haunts, alongside his Paris residency ‘Get Underground’ at the infamous Rex Club.

Phil has also fully embraced the relationship with his fans and house music fans in general – whether through his popular ‘Underground Chronicles’ video diaries
on Youtube or his personal relationships on Facebook.
Despite his success Phil isn’t one to brag. To him it’s all about keeping proper house music alive. Which just goes to prove Phil Weeks is a house music purist.

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


Simon Squires (SQUIRES) has performed as a DJ in the Queensland clubbing scene for over 10 years... 

Over the past decade, SQUIRES has supported some of the finest Local and International DJ’s. His reputation for compiling supreme warm up sets has seen him recently preparing crowds for acts such as Kolombo (Lou Lou Records), XXXY (Rinse FM and Ninja Records, Justin Jay (Dirtybird) and Bodhi (Blackbutter Records)

His experience and talent has seen him invited to play in Ibiza, Spain at the laid-back and funky ‘Savannah’, and also ‘Maria Magdelena’ in Bali. It’s hard work but someone has to do it! 

SQUIRES has even been endorsed by one of his childhood hero’s, with Techno & Progressive House Icon, Danny Tenaglia, selecting one of his Techno mixes as number 3 out of 5 when he picked his Favourite Amateur DJ Sets.

SQUIRES specialises in House, Tech House and Techno, and his favourite dance music labels include Defected Records, Dirtybird Records, Pets Recordings, Off Records, BOSO and Life and Death.  He is always on the search for new and exciting music, venues and opportunities to enhance this hugely popular scene.

BOOKING INFO: 

Email squires.simon@gmail.com

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