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BIo: Max Graham has always forged a path of his own, over the course of his career he’s drawn from multiple influences to create a sound that is a unique combination of Techno, Progressive and Trance. From his signature emotive releases to his famed story telling dj sets he flawlessly fuses genres everywhere from globally renowned festivals like Tomorrowland to his trademark ‘Open to Close’ sets in the best clubs in the world. Max’s love for the art form of mixing and his obsession with finding new music can be heard in the hugely successful CD series ‘Cycles’ and popular radio show ‘Cycles Radio’
It is this dedication that ensures the audience at his shows is always taken on an incredible journey.

<a href='http://gigs.gigatools.com/u/BanditShae' target='_new'>Pete Bandit & Jason Shae's Upcoming Gigs </a>Saturday 27 July, 2013 <a href='https://www.facebook.com/events/349477211826165/?fref=ts' target='_new'>Welcome to the Future festival, 't Twiske, Amsterdam, Netherlands</a> <a href='http://www.gigatools.com' target='_new'>Powered by GigaTools</a> 	
Jason Shae:

Buying his first turntables in 1998, Jason Soesman became interested in playing vinyl after playing at a friend’s house for the first time. It was there and then where his journey began. Getting his hands on Richie Hawtin: Decks, EFX & 909 in the year 2000 there was no turning back.

Summer of ’04: it was time for a change. Jason decided, together with the three afore mentioned friend...s, to combine DJ’ing with live elements. It was the first stage of creating of their very own live-act: Jason & the Argonauts, taking up all available time and a lot of effort.

Within two years since their great investment, they’ve developed themselves into one of the key Minimal acts in the Netherlands. Next to their appearances at stages like Voltt, Mono, Phonocult, Rockit, Less=More the four also acquired a residency at the Magnetronik-nights held at Club Poema.

Although heavily committed to the live-act, Jason is still discovering new ways to expressing himself through playing hisvinyls. Jason Shae’s DJ sets can be described as French Funk, Chicago House with a hint of Berlin stripped down house. Due to the use of Serato he can easily combine material from the boys of Jason & the Argonauts with records from other artists.

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Pete Bandit:

Pete Bandit started DJ'ing fourteen years ago, in 1995 to be exact. Most of the other artists in the SQUZ agency actually learned how to read in that same year, but that's a whole different story. Pete's experience with music, both playing and producing it, is unprecedented.

As a producer Pete Bandit has also been quite succesfull so far; being part of the Le Chien Perdu and Jason & The Argonauts producer teams, Pete has released on several national and international labels, with a lot more to come. Lately Pete has been in the studio with multiple projects, including with Jason & The Argonauts member Jason Shae. This latest project seem to work out great again and we can't wait untill the first release will hit the shelves.

Pete Bandit's fame as a DJ is growing larger gig by gig. Stealing the heart of every partyfreak, bassaddict and musiclover with a great, steady, rocking groove that takes us back to the Chicago, Miami and New York sounds from back in the days. Of course, he isn't just copying, he is reinventing...

It is warm, upbeat, energetic and most of all, irresistible: The Egbert-sound. Egbert VanderGugten is an ordinary Dutch guy, except for the fact that he is THE Dutch techno-act at this moment. In his loft in Rotterdam, Egbert produces one great dance floor track after another. However, no dance floor can hear it. The only witness to the magic he creates are the four walls of his loft until the Dutch techno legend Secret Cinema (Jeroen Verheij) finds him online. Verheij pulls Egbert out of his loft and gives him, at age 20, a stage to perform on and a record label. It turned out to be the start of an international victory tour. Having hardly recovered from his first two releases in the Netherlands, Sven Väth calls from Frankfurt: ‘Can Egbert deliver a track for Cocoon, stat.’ Vreugdevuur becomes one of the most prominent releases of 2009 and after that things go fast. Really fast. The loft quickly becomes history when Egbert closes the main stage of Time Warp, crushes Awakenings for no less than a dozen times in a couple years and graces Club Womb in Tokyo. Additionally, he is a frequent guest in Cape Town, Budapest, Ibiza, Melbourne and Singapore… Not bad for a guy who before his first release only flew in a plane once. But understand that wherever Egbert comes, all (let me repeat: ALL) hands will go up, and they will stay there. 

“Very proud of him to be the youngest Dutch techno-hero bringing quality music to
dance floors across the globe” - Rocco Veenboer, Awakenings

Egbert sets a new standard when he singlehandedly performs for 6 hours straight in a sold out club Melkweg in Amsterdam. The question is: what is someone who achieved so much in such a short period of time going to do next? No worries. Aside from the fact that he still has a countless amount of tracks waiting to see the world (thank you, loft), Egberts’ ambition and energy are limitless.

The entire world is his next stop.

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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