Bookings - International/Rest of the World 
roman.trystram@caa.com

My new Album 'SEROTONIN' is out now: https://armada.lnk.to/Serotonin

Kevin aka Phaxe has gone from a no-name to an international player of the Progressive Trance elite within no time. Dropping his artist name Phaxe in 2007 provokes few, if any, reactions. Only 4 years later he has become a synonym for upper-league party music. Highly acclaimed live sets all around the world, applauded releases, and remixes for some of the scene’s biggest names tell an impressing success story. A story that makes the man from Copenhagen repeatedly being described as a “Progressive Prodigy”.

Looking back, the evolution of Phaxe`s sound is the history of a perfect storm brewing. It starts with excessive party weekends in the late 90s, awakening his interest in electronic music production. First creative steps are taken in front of a Nintendo gaming console. Eventually this new passion leads to a professional audio engineer training in 2006. These 3 stages of Phaxe’s career are still very noticeable today: His music is to-the-floor, playful, and high-quality in terms of sound.

This irresistible mixture is first to be heard in 2007 when a Phaxe track is released on IONO Music. One year later things take off: The title “Swing King” gains euphoric feedback from both party freaks and DJs worldwide. Within no time Phaxe is producing together with artists like Audiomatic, Morten Granau, Vice, Zyce, Flegma and many others. Great compliments are given to him when the still young producer is asked to remix some of his early Progressive Trance idols like Haldolium, Atmos and Symphonix. His long awaited debut album is signed on the prestigious label Iboga.

In addition to his solo activities, Phaxe keeps up a creative dialogue with some other producers - resulting in a great variety of sound and styles. Together with Morten Granau he is known as High & Mighty, delivering deep Progressive House. The name Sinister Silence stands for a mutual project with Dan Hessner and uplifting Progressive Trance. Last but not least there is O.T.B., a collaboration with Martin Daltoft of Vice.

Despite his impressive success story Phaxe always keeps a humorous and friendly attitude which is very noticeable when seeing him on stage. In this very situation his unbroken passion for Progressive Trance rubs off on the audience through vibrant sound waves.

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My latest tracks: spoti.fi/3HkrHQb
Follow my label:  @deepwoodsrecords & @wanderlust-music

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PRETTY PINK - risen from the deep & dark woods of the Harz in Germany, a charming pink lady made a serious way through the steaming and raging international club zone to manifest her belief in the very finest tunes of tech, deep- and the most unique secret selection of house-music.

Shahrukh Saleem
The Not-So-Famous DJ/Producer from Pakistan's Capital

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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Not many artists are lucky enough to release a track that defies genre classification and reaches into mainstream culture, with people enthusiastically embracing its melody and adopting it as if it were a football anthem.
His track “Rave” has become an instant classic, a timeless piece of music gaining more than 100 million streams (becoming the most clicked Techno track ever).
Since 1996, a landmark year for him thanks to the worldwide success of his track “Zoe” produced as Paganini Traxx, Sam Paganini’s stylistic experimentations have gone from strength to strength, leading him to collaborate and release his music on several record labels like Plus8, Cocoon Recordings and Drumcode, reaching the highest spots on Beatport’s Techno Chart several times. His unique musical journey has achieved great success both on the underground circuit as well as on the mainstream channels.
In 2016 Sam founded his own record label JAM as a new platform to play out his vision of techno music. At first an outlet for his own productions releasing 3 albums and nowadays also a platform to discover new talented Artists.
Beside his studio work and production time, Sam’s DJ appearances are among the most requested by promoters worldwide: his sets are characterized by powerful grooves and have been described as “Sexy Groovy Dark Techno”, which speaks volumes, literally, on what to expect from his performances.
He has taken the stage at legendary clubs such as Berghain (Berlin), Output and Cielo (New York), Rex (Paris), Fabric (London), Crobar (Buenos Aires), Exchange (Los Angeles), Fuse (Bruxelles), Stereo (Montreal), Pacha (Barcelona), Fabrik (Madrid), Amnesia (Ibiza), Privilege (Ibiza) and Cocoricò (Riccione) just to name a few, and at Festivals like Awakenings (Netherlands), Nature One (Germany), Mayday (Germany), Tomorrowland (Belgium), Sziget (Hungary), Sonus (Pag Island), Time Warp (Germany), Ultra (USA). KAPPA Future Festival (Italy), Dour Festival (Belgium) and Monegros (Spain).

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