Beat and Rhythm addict. 
Label owner of HUSH and Mistress Recordings.

Rotterdam-via-Berlin based outlet reuniting underground purveyors across the globe as they methodically scan and showcase various nerve centers from the techno Internationale.

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


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.

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