Festival Advisor is a platform built for festival fans, industry fam, official ambassadors and event organizers to stand united and support one another.

Oh em gee@ description. Hanging out at soundcloud to listen to my kind of music #deep #house #rock #club #techno 

Sander Kleinenberg 2.0



Whether it’s producing, remixing or dj’ing, Sander Kleinenberg has been building credibility on all fronts for over twenty-five years. He has established himself as an advocate of progress and most of all, a pivotal player on the frontier of electronic music. Starting out dj-ing at merely fifteen years old, a young Sander Kleinenberg was inspired by club music and hip-hop culture in the late eighties. This cultural shift inspired his own musical path, which in turn led to him traveling the world and spreading his sound along the way. Many awards, accolades and having performed all corners of the world later you could say it was destiny. 

Often mentioned when talking about the first wave of superstar dj’s from the progressive house wave around the turn of the century, Sander brought a mixture genres and styles to the table like never heard before. Quirky disco, psychedelia, Detroit techno, straight up soul and industrialism contributed greatly to the ever-evolving musical landscape in the ‘90s and 00’s. Sander’s eclectic persona and capability to always be two steps ahead of the rest have resulted in him being an award-winning dj and producer. As time passes by and his career unfolds, the pattern within it becomes more and more visible, Sander is a man on the move, always searching for the “perfect mix” in his own words. Sander’s relentless passion for perfection has kept him away from classification, putting hours upon hours into the enrichment of dj- and producer identity. Constantly twisting and shaping sounds. It’s this search for relevance in electronic musics development that keeps him re-inventing himself in every decade that has gone by since those early days. 

Today Sander looks back at his journey and thought it was time to make up the balance of all the corners of progress his career has taken him. You could call it a full circle type moment settling for nothing else but quality. If you are looking for someone who has searched high and low and has taken that into his current musical identity then Sander is your man. Like a fine wine matured into something wonderful.. Weaving generations, styles and a healthy eye on the future together in a relevant cocktail of musical maturity. Check his Deepest Mixtapes for a deep look into all that excites him and you will understand what he means.

In 2024 after a time of rejuvenation you can find Sander at a select number of dates around the world, revisiting his love for the clubs and countries that accompanied his journey along the way. He has a string of releases on the way marking his comeback to the dance floor both behind the decks and in the charts. It is time to once again rekindle his ability to bring levity and fun back to the dance floors.

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


New York's Electronic Music Festival
https://electriczoo.com

magui lelio is following