Berlin-based duo Booka Shade, aka Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier, have carved out a reputation as one of the most celebrated electronic acts to come out of Europe over the past two decades. 

With their beginnings in Frankfurt and their sights originally on synth-pop, the duo Booka Shade quickly gained a strong following within electronic music, and in 2002 the pairing formed the now legendary dance label Get Physical Music (together with M.A.N.D.Y., Thomas ‘DJ T.’ Koch and Peter Hayo), where they would have a platform for their own music. 

Three years later, in 2005, their EP’s ‘Mandarine EP’ and ‘Body Language’ - the latter co-produced with M.A.N.D.Y. - launched Booka Shade into the stratosphere with both EPs becoming international successes, whilst the following years soon welcomed an extensive body of work featuring a combination of stand out albums and singles that quickly achieved further global success.

Since their break-through performance at Sónar in 2005, Booka Shade have earned huge recognition with their innovative live shows, even being named one of Resident Advisor's Top 5 live acts in the world in 2010. They have opened for legendary acts such as Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk, whilst headlining stages at the likes of Coachella, Glastonbury, Rock Werchter, and Red Rocks just to name a few. In recent years, the band has appeared amongst the likes of DJ Mag’s ‘Alternative Top 100 DJ List’ (2018), whilst their notable live sets have led to key mentions amongst a host of distinguished festival reviews and round-ups, including placement within DJ Mag’s ’10 Unforgettable Sets From The History Of Exit Festival’.

Booka Shade were also inducted into Pete Tong's BBC Radio 1 Hall of Fame, having received strong support from the station throughout their careers, playing at both the ‘40 Years of Radio 1’ celebration with Annie Nightingale and the ‘20 Years of Essential Mix’ party, whilst also mixing Pete Tong’s ‘All Gone Ibiza’ compilation album. 

The duo’s fan base is in no way restricted to electronic music enthusiasts, with great success playing slots at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Lollapalooza, and more by utilising their massive crossover potential, which is as evident in their billings as it is in their remix credits, including acts like Depeche Mode, Moby, Hot Chip, Kings of Leon, Woodkid, The Knife and many more.

Add to the mix their Blaufield Music imprint, founded in 2013, and it’s clear and easy to see the pairing's musical knowledge not only as producers but also adept A&R’s, with releases to date on the imprint from both emerging and established talent alongside their own productions resulting in a string of releases and collaborations that can be regularly found amongst the upper end of Beatport’s Top 100 charts and championed by many of the industry’s biggest names.

Twenty years, dozens of EP’s and six albums later, Booka Shade have become more than a household name, they have become synonymous with the spirit which drives electronic music and have set a precedent to which electronic music is still held to today.

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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


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