Collabs3000 '2025 EP': https://mute.ffm.to/collabs3000-2025ep
Collabs3000 'Metalism': https://mute.ffm.to/collabs3000-m20

World: javier@analog-a.com
North America: john@analog-a.com
Latin America: larissa@liminal.ag
Italy: alex.ravizza@vivoconcerti.com
MGMT: roland@rlcgmbh.com

Chris Liebing is synonymous with techno. His legacy is long assured, but his craft never stops evolving. Whether as label head, podcast curator, DJ or producer, he continues to challenge himself and his audience to explore new realms in the electronic world. And often ahead of the curve, too, from the early, hard-edged and loopy 90s sound which is back en vogue today, through his more stripped-back turn of the millennium minimalism and onto the cinematic atmospheres and broader alternative electronica of his latest albums on Mute. It's no stretch to say, then, that Chris Liebing's story is closely connected to the story of techno itself. 

Liebing is considered a global techno ambassador, but his ambitious album projects and direct club tracks excite and innovate as much as any new school star. A proudly forward-thinking attitude ensures that is the case as his DJ tools and studio setup constantly evolve. He continues to be an early adopter of emerging technology, too, just as he was with vinyl controllers, Traktor and when leading the way with full hybrid/live DJing. 

These days, Liebing incorporates an ever wider sphere of sound into his own work. After an eight-year break from full lengths, 2018's Burn Slow on Mute was a creative rebirth that received critical acclaim and confounded all expectations. It was a melancholic mediation on gothic moods, looming apocalyptic landscapes and optimistic broken-beat techno that drew from his childhood love of Depeche Mode, Gary Numan and the New Romantic movement. 

Remixes for Depeche Mode and Goldfrapp followed alongside a collaborative single with Charlotte De Witte, and 2021 brought a second album on Mute, Another Day. It found Liebing exploring all new ways of expressing both his euphoric and melodic side, all with high-grade technical skill and meticulous sonic craft with a range of collaborators from Miles Cooper Seaton to Polly Scattergood. This exceptional form continued into 2023 as he returned to the club with his Love Those Who Fight With Passion And Faith EP on CLR, a passionate and politically charged call to the dance floor that joined Liebing and Luke Slater’s remix of Depeche Mode’s iconic ‘Ghosts Again’ in the first half of the year. 

Born in Giessen and active ever since the 1990s, Liebing has always platformed the talent around him as much as himself: a long time before they were commonplace, he famously helmed his own CLR podcast. For many years, it was the scene's most influential series, with a who's who of international pioneers at the helm. After that came the equally important AM/FM radio show, but now following a hiatus, the CLR podcast is back and pushing a fresh techno agenda, as is his iconic label of the same name.

In its first chapter, CLR stood for Chris Liebing Records, then Create Learn Realize, and now Create Learn Repeat - a subtle evolution that is at the heart of everything Liebing does. The label will always be synonymous with exciting techno and is now back hosting parties and festival stages. 

Though his music is underpinned by pulsating menace and a stomping sense of drama, Liebing himself is friendly with a famous smile. It is the music that motivates him and the freedom that comes with increased experience. These days there are no limits, no expectations, but a continued love for the art and craft of techno that is taking him down all new creative pathways.

Seth Troxler is one of electronic music’s most instantly recognisable artists. He has carved out his own unique path as a cultural commentator, art curator, restaurateur and entrepreneur. Descended from a family of cowboys and Baptist preachers, Seth is part African-American, with a singular approach to viewing the world through the prism of contemporary music culture.

Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and raised in suburban Detroit, Seth learnt the art of DJing initially from his stepfather (then a college radio DJ) and later from working, at only 16, behind the counter in legendary Detroit record store ‘Melodies & Memories’. It wasn’t until Seth made the decision to explore new horizons in the mid-2000s, moving to Berlin fresh out of his teens (after debuting at Panorama Bar at just 18 years old), that his DJ career really took off.

Since the move from Detroit to Berlin, then settling in London for a number of years, and now with his time divided between Ibiza and Berlin (Round 2), Seth has established himself as one of the world biggest DJs (voted the world’s number one DJ in scene bible Resident Advisor and gracing the front cover of Mixmag three times). He’s equally at home playing to the smoke-filled dance floors of some of the world’s most discerning nightclubs, such as CircoLoco, fabric (London), Nordstern (Basel), The Lux (Lisbon) or Blitz (Munich), as he is headlining the world’s largest festivals, like Glastonbury, Movement, Roskilde or Sonar.

Right from the word go, Seth has been as passionate about food and contemporary art as he is about music, and these two interests have resonated at all points, and in parallel, to his music career. A multi-faceted modern artist: he has held residencies at talismanic music institutions, run numerous record labels, and pursued his own solo recording career (including the recent ‘Play In The Dark’ collaboration with the Martinez Brothers on Crosstown Rebels, and ‘Lumartes’ that kick started CircoLoco Recordings in Summer 2021). Furthermore Seth has found the time to launch the successful Smokey Tails’ restaurant in London, to create and host his own party during the Rio Carnival, and then to stop everything and to take the time out to climb Kilimanjaro for charity.

More recently Seth has focussed his creative energies on his ‘Lost Souls of Saturn’ www.lostsoulsofsaturn.com project, alongside Phil Moffa and further opaque participants, that sits firmly at the intersection between futuristic electronica, contemporary art and technology. In 2019 Lost Souls Of Saturn presented their audio/visual installation Transmission at the Saatchi Gallery in London, after its premiere during Art Basel in Switzerland, and collaborated with the Met in New York and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2021. Lost Souls Of Saturn are currently recording their second album and conducting further experiments in augmented reality and virtual reality, which will be revealed soon.

Extremely well travelled, constantly searching and experiencing, Seth Troxler continues to follow his own unique path.

Being one of the most in-demand Techno DJs of our times, Ben Klock needs little introduction. His name has been closely associated with Berlin’s legendary club Berghain since 2005. His monthly residency has formed the backdrop to his international success, providing an invaluable platform for his ability to create a room rather than just play to it.

Much of his early career was marked by marathon sets – a signature that played a considerable role in nurturing his skills and reputation – but even the more compressed sets he shares today evidence an intricate narrative and sense of flow that defines him as a DJ. It was these inherent abilities that led him to compile the fabric 66 compilation in 2012, before winning the BBC Radio 1’s Essential Mix of the Year award in 2015.

His releases on Ostgut Ton have become landmarks in the imprint’s history. 2009’s “Dawning”, the first of his collaborations with Marcel Dettmann kickstarted the label itself and remains a stand-out track in its discography. Another release of particular note is the Before One EP including “Subzero”, which many techno lovers still refer to as their gateway track into the whole genre itself. For many, however, it is his album One (2009) that best captures Klock’s talents as a producer. His skills as a remixer have also seen him rework tracks by a wide variety of artists, including Kerri Chandler, Depeche Mode, Robert Hood and Kenny Larkin.

Additionally, Klock curates with great passion his own label Klockworks, founded in 2006. With releases from DVS1, Stef Mendesidis, The Advent, Sterac, Etapp Kyle, Temudo and many more Klockworks became a synonym for unique, high quality Techno.

In 2017 Ben started his own event series PHOTON which is a unique concept show that blends light, architecture and music. Since then he toured PHOTON at special venues in major cities around the world such as Printworks (London), Gashouder (Amsterdam), Arca (Sao Paolo), to name a few. It quickly became a new standard for audio visual electronic music events. In 2023 the project returns after a pandemic induced break with a brand new visual and artistic concept.

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


From early breakout hit "Phat Dope Shit" in 2002 to "Heavy Heart", a new collaboration with Skrillex and Fireboy DML, Dice has always been in the headlines. After his debut album "7 Dunham Place" on his own now long-running and well-regarded Desolat in 2008, came the major label follow-up "Underground Sound Suicide" on Ultra Music with guests like Giggs, Just Blaze, and Neneh Cherry, then the agenda-setting and club-focussed house and techno showcase that was "Love Letters" in 2018. 

Add in tens of EPs on Ovum, Minus, Cocoon, to name a few, and his remixes from everyone from Kevin Saunderson to Moby, Black Coffee to Disclosure, Warren G to Basement Jaxx, Loco Dice has always been at the beating heart of the electronic scene. 

His DJ sets, too, always brim with personality, whether in a small underground basement or on an iconic main stage at some of the world's top festivals like EDC Ultra, Tomorrowland and Coachella to name a few, playing to thousands. He has had era-defining residencies at iconic Ibiza super clubs like Circoloco at DC-10 and on the Amnesia Terrace as well at Space Miami. 

His lockdown move has been to unveil En Coleur, a label reserved exclusively for his own music produced at that time. SB Recordings followed. A new label open to all styles of dance music.

Since day one Loco Dice constantly pushes the boundaries of techno and house music production, from his appearance in 2004 PlayStation2 game "Decks & FX" to cooking up his own ideal fusions of hip hop and electronic music with his FKD side project or writing critically acclaimed runway soundtracks for Italian fashion designer Marcelo Burlon during Men’s Fashion Week in Milan for both FW20 and SS20.

Dice's distinctive fashion sense and strong visual aesthetic manifest in his collaborations with Amsterdam fashion label Daily Paper, pro sports hat purveyors New Era and in his own clothing brand Seran Bendecidos. 

All of this and his longevity prove that Loco Dice is undoubtedly an insatiable creative force most interested in the uncharted territory between genres and styles, the elements that link everything together.

ALPHA: k7.lnk.to/AudionAlphabM

MOUTH TO MOUTH 10: http://www.theghostlystore.com/products/mouth-to-mouth-10

Now an established force in contemporary Techno, Mike Bierbach, better known under his stage name Rødhåd is someone who has seriously put in the work. Having cut his teeth DJing as a relatively unnoted (but well loved by those in the know) local in Berlin for 10 years, one could argue that by the time success knocked on his door, he was more than ready for playing the international stage. It was during these 10 years of obscurity when he refined his craft to become the singular DJ he is now. 

Launching his party-series-turned-label Dystopian in 2009 was what truly tipped the ball over for Rødhåd. In a time where the Berlin scene was heavily oversaturated by fluffy, miscellaneous dance music, he & his peers set out to form a platform for real techno. The reception to this was raucous. 

Although he has lauded productions and remixes to his name, DJing is his true forte. Before abandoning his day job as a draftsman in construction “The Red” (as some call him due to his gingered, bearded appearance) was known for playing very long sets in Berlin’s most notorious hideaways. 

With an album, several EPs & remixes for a multitude of different artists under his belt, Rødhåd the producer has received equal praise as Rødhåd the DJ. Dystopian has hosted most of his releases, but in 2018 he founded a new label WSNWG that serves as a home for collaborative productions, excavated in sessions at his East-Berlin studio with his peers such as Lucy, Alex.Do, & Antigone.

Matthieu Estournet is following