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Fatima Yamaha’s now classic single ‘What’s A Girl To Do’ taken from the EP ‘A Girl Between Two Worlds’ saw the light of day in 2004, but it wasn’t until 10 years later that a re-release made the song truly explode. 
For many years, Fatima Yamaha was shrouded in mystery, known only to be a project led by “a young lady born to a Japanese father and a Turkish mother”. By now we all know Bas Bron is Fatima Yamaha. The Dutch producer has many guises, but Fatima Yamaha is his most enigmatic.
The album ‘Imaginary Lines’ was released in 2015 and followed the success of ‘What’s A Girl To Do’ with the fabulous single ‘Love Invaders’. Later followed by another banging club anthem ‘Araya’.
His live shows unfailingly live up to the highest expectations, offering refined house and techno complimented by virtuoso synths. But after years of selling out tours and headlining the most prestigious festivals all over the world, Bas took a year off touring to focus on new material and other ventures.
He directed, produced and made the soundtrack of the short film ‘Heian’ and recorded lots of other tracks, for many different projects. But this autumn there will finally be a new Fatima Yamaha album; ‘Spontaneous Order’. Bas shows his versatility on the album, effortlessly moving form harsh dancefloor tracks to spacious ambient drones and funky electronic pop tracks.

The Italian-German composer, DJ and founder of the record label 99CHANTS. He has been releasing music since 2010, but it took self- evaluation and a re-examination of his priorities for August to lean towards the future and follow his most experimental inclinations.
In 2023, his output is harder than ever to define, stretching across genres and disciplines to chafe the heart of the human experience.

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


LOST IN THE FIRE FEAT. THE WEEKND: http://smarturl.it/LostInTheFire

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.

Buenos Aires, Argentina
Progressive House

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