Hailing from Frankfurt, Chris Liebing is one of the undisputed dons of the German Techno circuit, a driving force behind established imprints CLR and Spinclub Recordings plus one of the stars of the Ibiza summer thanks to his jaw dropping sets at HYTE. New Years Eve sees Chris heading to Rome for the incredible COSMO event where 10,000 people will see him joined by the likes of Joseph Capriati, Loco Dice, Nina Kraviz, Pan-Pot and Ilario Alicante. DMCWORLD checks in…
Interview by Dan Prince
Chris a huge welcome back to DMCWORLD! Where on planet earth are you right now?
Hey Dan, I am in a place where I am often, in a Lufthansa lounge in Munich drinking some good red wine – life could be worse.
The finest piece of new music you have heard today?
I did not really hear much music today, but yesterday I watched the press conference of Depeche Mode for their upcoming tour on YouTube and they had a little piece of their upcoming album as a sneak preview, maybe a minute, and I was absolutely amazed by that. That´s a very fine piece of music.
Where has this summer gone?!? Halloween is long gone and we are now gearing up for Christmas and New Years Eve!! But what a night and day you have on December 31st super-starring at COSMO NYE&NYD Festival in Italy alongside the likes of Loco Dice, Nina Kraviz, Pan Pot and Joseph Capriati…you played for COSMO last year right? Tell us a bit about the atmosphere and scale of the Rome event.
Well Rome is seriously one of my favourite cities in the world, I love Italy and I love going there. It has become sort of a tradition to start my year in Rome, which I think could not be any better. The production of Cosmo is always amazing, the location is one of its kind and I can just tell you that it´s such an honour and pleasure for me to be able to start the new year in one of my favourite countries to play in, for my absolutely truest fans. I am very humbled that I can still do this and I look extremely forward to it.
10,000 people partying in 4 different venues all within 100m of each other, COSMO really know how to see the New Year in. What DJs are you looking forward to toasting in 2017 with?
First of all my partner in crime and friend Loco Dice, with whom I have spent an incredible year together. Next to of course Dubfire who is one of my best friends in the DJ circus and I hope to play a little bit more with him. Joseph Capriati, Nicole Moudaber, Black Asteroid, Speedy J, Adam Beyer…it is such an amazing thing that over so many years we are in this circus and have such a good time together. We really like each other and I think that´s something you can´t point out too much. I really look forward to toast with all of them and more. I am also making new friends in the DJ business, so let´s toast!
The Italian scene has had a huge resurrection in recent years after a time in the wilderness. What do you put Italy’s blossoming club and event scene down to? Back in the late 80s and early 90s there was nowhere better…
I just think that Italy has known how to throw parties and how to party since more than 2.000 years now. There is quite a culture and quite a passion for getting together and having a good time with each other. Isn´t that what it´s all about? Isn´t that why we are here, to have great experiences and to share them? What much better is there, than to share your emotions when you are listening to music and dance? The Italians have always been extremely good at that and I think that those little ups and downs that you see over the years are just normal fluctuations in how people behave and go out. Clubs close, clubs open… There is a passion that you cannot get rid off and you should not get rid off and that is quite an amazing thing in Italy. They show us how we should live together and party together.
If you had the slot at midnight at COSMO on NYE, what track would you play to ring in the New Year?
I would have to think about that extremely well, but the first thing that comes to mind is that there is a really amazing new remix by Dense & Pika. I am not sure what the title is, but it says “right here, right now” and I think that this is very suitable. I would like to remind the people, especially at midnight on New Year´s day, that the only place to be is right here and right now. That would be a message I would like to spread in this moment. The future is merely a concept, the past is gone and just an illusion in our head, so right here and right now is the place to be.
Is there anything you can tell newcomers to COSMO about what to expect on NYE, without giving too much away..?
First of all, if you are a newcomer to Cosmo I wanna congratulate you that you have chosen a really amazing place to celebrate your New Year. Come with an open mind, with a smile on your face, stop worrying about life and just enjoy what the evening will bring you. You will experience an amazing sound system, a lot of artists in a very good mood, a lot of great music and obviously an amazing Italian crowd that knows how to party.
ADE has gone down in history as the best yet, you sir did the quickest trip to Amsterdam ever thanks to a family holiday in Los Angeles. Please tell us the story…
Oh that´s nice to hear that ADE has gone down in history as the best yet! I have two children and this year their school holiday coincidentally fell together with ADE. I like to be in Los Angeles, especially Venice Beach and I usually take my kids there whenever I can, so we went for two weeks. When I planned this trip I wasn’t aware of the fact that ADE is right in the middle. So when I heard that I play on the Saturday, as I always do, I knew that I have to fly in and out. I did that with great fun and passion actually. I left Los Angeles late Friday night, arrived in Amsterdam and had a little photo shoot for Mixmag together with a lot of other great DJs, which was about the PLAYdifferently Model 1 mixer. Right after that photo shoot I basically went to the venue and met up with Speedy J who I played the Collabs session with and we ended up playing for nine hours straight through. At eight in the morning we had to stop – we seriously had to stop, even though we would have gone on longer, but the venue was closing. So I packed my backpack and raced back to the airport where I boarded the plane back to Los Angeles at literally nine thirty and I arrived back in LA on the Sunday afternoon at four, picking up my kids and actually taking them to a concert in Hollywood with Cold Cave and Moby, where we were invited backstage. And this is how my Sunday night after ADE finished, backstage at a rock concert with my kids in Hollywood. Looking back to that weekend it was just a hell of a ride and so much fun.
But once you got there, how was the HYTE party with Speedy J?
It was just incredible. The vibe from the beginning to the very end was just smashing. I am not sure what happened that night, but it was an extremely special one. And for those who missed it, you can re-live it as I have it as a podcast on my weekly AM/FM show.
HYTE had a stormer of a year in Ibiza yet again, undoubtedly one of the island’s strongest nights. Did you enjoy the White Isle this summer?
I have never been on Ibiza as much as I have been this year. I almost played every Wednesday and even though it became quite exhausting towards the end of the season to travel to Ibiza on Wednesday additionally to the rest of the summer touring, it was more than worth it because the HYTE crew that expects us on Ibiza is such a special crew. So many nice people and they make up for all the downsides you have travel-wise. So on the last gig we were all certain that we will miss not coming back on the following Wednesday and I already look forward to next year.
Let’s nip back to Los Angeles for a moment, I hear you were doing some surf action?
Yeah, I love to surf, even though I can´t do it very well, but I am learning. Luckily I get to learn from some real surf heroes who are willing to teach me also next time I will be there. Amongst the surfers – which is a fun side fact – Techno has become extremely popular, which is great, I love it. I mean, I walk alongside the boardwalk on Venice Beach and like longhaired, blond surfers come up to me and want to take pictures with me. That never happened to me before and I am very grateful for it. I love surfing, it teaches you about life. As some of you know, I am a skier and this is the next thing I want to approach. Venice Beach is just great for that.
Where have some of the stand out gigs been for you this summer?
I would wanna mention Awakenings Festival, that was one of the big ones. Just like last year it was simply out of this world, the organization, the crowd, everything was just perfect. Sonus Festival in Croatia – I definitely never wanna miss that. I started two or three years ago to play two gigs in a day, a daytime gig and a night-time gig and it has proven to be such an amazing ride to do this. The people are just with you, they wanna listen to what you play at daytime and they wanna listen to what you play at night-time. It´s so much fun and it´s such a great country, so that was definitely a standout as well. Another one was Zurich, the Street Parade, where I spent the whole day playing together with Loco Dice and we had so much incredible fun. It was the 25th anniversary of the Street Parade and I have to say that this was the best Street Parade I have ever been to.
What is coming up next from CLR release wise?
I haven´t really made that public in the past one and a half years, but I actually stopped CLR. It was in the same time when I stopped the CLR Podcast and turned it into the AM/FM podcast. I wanted to concentrate on my own music again and I knew that I could not fulfill all my promises towards the artists anymore, solely on a time issue. It had become a lot of work and I was just getting too busy. I didn’t wanna disappoint any of the artists, so I basically decided to stop the label for a while and focus on my own music. So at the moment there are no new CLR releases, but don´t worry, it´s not dead, it´s just put on ice.
Okay let’s rewind for a moment and see where this musical journey began. What is your earliest musical memory from your childhood?
Oh that was so early. It´s funny, because now I get to re-live some of these moments with my daughters. I think my first musical memories were musical themes or soundtracks to certain children TV series. There was a German TV series called “Robbi, Tobbi und das Fliewatüüt” for example and I was very amazed by the soundtrack or theme music of this and I still remember the feeling it gave me. That was my first impression, the feeling that music was able to give me and the memories that would come up with it. And then it started to grow, my brother who was four years older had a huge record collection and I had the room next door, so I was listening from very early on to early Genesis and Prince and all kinds of things. And then I developed my own musical taste, which is mainly based in the 80s with the New Romantic scene with OMD, of course Depeche Mode – I am the biggest Depeche Mode fan, but also Rock and Punk stuff, leading into Nine Inch Nails and all these things. I used to be a big Queen fan too, so my musical taste was always quite varied and it has been until today.
At what age did electronic music first appear on your radar?
That must have been around `90 or `91, when the first Rotterdam records came out, like “James Brown Is Dead” and “Who Is Elvis?”, all these things that first got me attached to electronic music. But what really got me from the beginning on, were the Eye Q and Harthouse labels in the beginning or middle of the 90s with their absolutely amazing Trance records. In case you are not aware of those, just google Eye Q Records on youtube and listen to all these tracks, Odyssee Of Noises, Icon, Cygnus X, all this stuff, pretty amazing music, still today.
Was music ALWAYS the route you wanted to take in life or was there another career you were interested in?
Honestly music saved my ass, I had no idea which route I wanted to take. I spent the first 20 / 25 years of my life mostly doing sports, playing tennis, playing American football even, skiing a lot, going to school and trying to figure out what to do with my life. I never really thought that I could live the life that I am living now. I never really had that intention in my mind, but the music basically just took over and led me there and I am very grateful of that to be happening. In hindsight I can only just recommend to everyone who is thinking about what to do in your life: do what you have fun with. Do not follow the safety or security of money or whatever, do what you enjoy and the rest will come.
You started your DJing career mixing up Hip Hop, Soul, Pop and House. Who were some of your artists on your playlists back then?
Oh anyone, anyone you know, ranging from Peter Gabriel to Arrested Development and everything in the middle. There was the German Euro Dance with Snap and all this stuff, ranging to even old school Hip Hop with Grandmaster Flash. Everything was involved.
Who are some of the producers doing it for you at the moment?
I would definitely say Marco Faraone, he does an amazing job as a producer right now. Dense & Pika are doing a really good job. They prove that they are handling their equipment quite well.
And finally, what has been your proudest achievement of 2016?
I think my proudest achievement of 2016 is that I am still sitting here, healthy and happy after these past eleven months, which I think has been one of my best DJ years ever so far. I am really excited about what I am doing and I think that is something I can be proud of.
https://www.facebook.com/chrisliebingofficial
Tickets for COSMO available here…
