Riding in with the power to deliver sunshine to world’s rainiest open-air events, Monkey Safari brings rays of light to whatever dance floors they cast their shimmering spell on. 

The past few years saw the brothers swinging to new trees, retiring their previous labels to focus on their new label 'Hommage.' It were the years of transformation for the German producers, developing and tailoring a sound suited perfectly for the unique club nuances while still keeping the core elements of melodic chords and grooves synonymous with the duos productions. 

During this time, Monkey Safari unveiled their remix for Marc Houle’s “Pepper” on Richie Hawtin’s label Minus and their hugely successful “Cranes” and “Walls“ EPs that presented opportunities for Monkey Safari to work with some exciting musicians, such as Wolf + Lamb and Kölsch, techno heavy weights Guy Gerber and Josh Wink, as well as one of dance music’s most iconic producers, Moby. 

Monkey Safari remixed a track for Moby & The Void Pacific Choir, returning the favor after Moby’s successful rework of the duo’s track “Walls” last year. Their next releases continued in the same fashion, featuring remixes from Paco Osuna, Chloé, John Digweed & Nick Muir, UNER, Guy Mantzur, Victor Ruiz and more, while signing tracks from amazing Blond:ish, legendary John Tajada, and others on their Hommage imprint. 

The duo’s efforts in the studio have transcended to their DJ sets with stand out shows at Time Warp and Awakenings Festival. On top of a heavy touring schedule at world renowned clubs and headlining slots at festivals, the duo released their album ‘Odyssey’. Monkey Safari produced the same kind of tracks for this album they were playing as they toured nightclubs and festivals around the world, rather than simply a listening album. 

In 2018 Monkey Safari carefully handpicked remixers they saw as most capable of continuing their vision for the album. The ‘Odyssey Remixes’ featured reworks of the original album tracks by the master himself, Carl Cox, international stars Hernan Cattaneo, Guy J, Musumeci, Tensnake and Reboot, studio geniuses Dubspeeka, Hannes Bieger, ROD, and Phil Moffa, as well as up-and-coming talent Avidus and Trivmph . 

Monkey Safari’s third album comes in perfect time for the summer sunshine of 2019. The duo follow up their last album, ‘Odyssey’, with this warm, inviting collection of music designed to brighten your day and complement the glorious sunny days that bless us during the summer. Sven and Lars learned some valuable lessons from their last long-player, and the new album ‘HI’ comes from a far more relaxed, easy-going place. An organic project that came together quite naturally, their third album sees the duo in high spirits ready to bring a large dose of positive vibes and emotional depth to the party. 

2020 and 2021 sees Monkey Safari moving closer to legendary brands Get Physical and Anjuna Deep, starting with a remix and a multitude of EPs on the labels. Watch out for more news soon! 

The German outfit has been on an incredible run of form with promising developments in all of their endeavors and exciting news still to come. Be it a fresh remix or EP drop, DJ set or party, Monkey Safari will be sure to touch all scopes of dance culture with no signs of deceleration on the horizon. 
Their mandate remains the same, sending sunny vibes to make even the darkest dance floors smile.

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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


Indie Electronic Duo. Adelaide.
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