Interview by Dan Prince
Stephan a huge welcome to DMCWORLD. What has been the finest piece of new music you have heard since rolling out of bed?
Hey Dan! That would be Mark Pritchard’s June Mix for NTS radio…
https://soundcloud.com/markprtchrd/nts-radio-mark-pritchard-mix-june-2016
Exciting times for you at the moment thanks to the release of your new EP ‘Outreach’ which marks your debut on Nicole Moudaber’s MOOD imprint. Three brilliant tunes make up the release, please talk us through your music…
Yes, totally and I feel honored that Nicole picked me for her label. I met her for the first time somewhere at the end of last year as Pan-Pot invited her to play with them at Watergate. I’ve admired her music since her release ‘Break It’ on Kling Klong back in 2011 and I love the album she did with Skin.
My EP starts with’Outreach’ a dark, relentless and somehow funky chord monster. It’s followed by ‘Phantom Move’; it has so much energy and whenever I play it in my live set the whole room is pumping. You have to see it. With’Resonant States’ I wanted to do something more old school-ish, it’s a bit Berlin, a bit Detroit and reminds me of my first warehouse raves. That raw energy, but still keeping those nice moments.
People are claiming this year’s ADE was the best yet. What were the highlights for you over in Amsterdam?
The highlight for me was definitely our Second State showcase at De Marktkantine. What a night. The people went completely nuts. And Awakenings pres. Adam Beyer was crazy…the Gashouder is an incredible location, can’t wait to play there for Awakenings on NYE.
Okay let’s rewind for a moment and discover where this musical journey began. What is the earliest memory from your childhood?
When I was 3 years old, me and my parents lived in a small apartment. A friend of the family lived in the flat right next to ours and she was playing the piano. Both she and my parents have told me since that I always went to her, sat on the couch and asked her to play something on the piano to me. They also told me that I was able to remember the notation because if I didn’t like what she was playing, I showed her what she should play for me. Since then I’ve been in love with the piano and it hasn’t changed so far. The king of all instruments because of its diversity and you can literally play everything on it.
You were 14 years old when you got your first PC and the software X-tracker, what were your first impressions of this new technology?
I was stunned. I learnt to play the saxophone as a kid – I sucked – and if you play sax, you always just play one voice of a piece. That means you always miss the other voices and there’s no harmonic context. I actually wanted to learn the piano as a kid but we couldn’t afford one because my parents just built a house back then. In my teenage years I was able to buy my first PC and quickly also got that X-tracker software in my hands. Back then computer magazines came with floppy discs full of shareware. No internet back then. Anyways, that software changed everything. All of a sudden I was able to ‚write’ music with four voices and that is enough for a melody, harmonic context and one track of drums. So, I was able to write a whole track just by myself. That was amazing because the only other option to do that would have been to be in a band. But there were just rock bands, saxophone isn’t really an instrument you miss in a rock band and besides, I already was way more interested in electronic music. So I became my own band.
True or false? You played a gig at your school with this software trying to emulate your heroes M.I.K.E. and Yves Deruyter?
Well, it wasn’t about emulating them but they were a big influence back then and I tried to sound like them with my ‘productions’. Actually TRIED has to be in capital letters, because I wasn’t even close but it was so much fun and you have to start somewhere.
The best and worst thing about living in Berlin?
That city is amazing and if you want to do electronic music, there’s no better place at the moment. Everybody is there or at least visits Berlin very regularly and it’s not that difficult to get in touch with the people. Besides, the city itself is changing all the time and I find this very inspiring. The worst thing about Berlin is that my family are 700km away.
The last GREAT…
Film you saw?
That was quite sometime ago…the last great movie I saw was LA Crash. I was also surprised by ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’. But all in all it feels to me like cinema is stuck in a hole at the moment because of a lack of good and entertaining stories. It’s just all about vfx and the good stories are told on tv at the moment.
Album you bought?
Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool
New restaurant you went to?
Salt’n Bone (Berlin – Prenzlauerberg), the spare ribs are not from this world.
What is the latest with your film score work?
Actually, I hoped for doing another feature movie this year but the movie world is sometimes a very slow one and it can take years from the idea to the final movie. Last year I had the pleasure to write my first score for a feature movie that still isn’t in cinemas yet but will be at some point. The director and I are discussing new projects that will start somewhere in 2017. There is also another very interesting TV project slowly taking shape but I can’t tell you anything about it yet.
You have a lovely story regarding your ‘DOCH’ techno monster and how it was signed. It started with a massive hangover…
Yes, it did! My buddy Philipp Ruhmhardt and I don’t see each other as much as we’d like to. So every time we see each other we go out for dinner, have some drinks and talk about everything that had happened in the last weeks. That night back then was a very long one and we both had a massive hangover the next day, but we wanted to go to the studio and do some techno. Since I was mainly producing tech house at the time, it was somewhat new to me and we just went with the flow. I guess that’s the big secret behind DOCH. You know, when you write music, I guess it’s the same in other arts too, you just have this one shot where everything is new to you and you just follow your intuition. After that it’s never the same again because you start thinking about your music, about the genre, etc. That somehow corrupts you and you can never go back to this one moment. Anyway, we were very quick that day and after about 5 or 6 hours we had the final version of DOCH. I sent it to Tassilo [from Pan-Pot] and Philipll and I went to dinner…half an hour later in the middle of ordering, my phone rang and it was Tassilo saying “don’t give this to anybody. We want to do this on Second State“. Since that call a lot of things in my life changed…
This track changed everything for you, you felt that Tech House was restricting you until then. I hear there was a Watergate moment…?
Yes, totally, there was that moment at Watergate where Pan-Pot was playing and Tassilo played one of my older tracks and it worked well. But the thing was, everything they played afterwards worked wwwaaayyy better and I suddenly understood why. My track was too complicated, not really focussed on the idea of the track and even though it worked somehow, I had the feeling that it wasn’t the easiest thing for the people to follow me musically at that moment. Sometimes I really like to lose myself in an abstract cloud of music and let everything just come out like it does, but if you want to write music that works in the club you have to focus on one idea in my opinion because your music isn’t the only influence at that very moment. There’s also the lights and an earthshaking sound system, that combined with the music keep your senses very busy…so less is more most of the times. I just wish I would follow this more often in my music!
Where have been some of the stand out summer gigs for you with your live set?
I had so many great gigs but a stand out was definitely the WET Festival. It happens in an open-air bath in the middle of the Black Forest in Southern Germany with around 6000 people attending. The atmosphere was just epic and I had the pleasure to play with the likes of Loco Dice, Chris Liebing, Dubfire and Pan-Pot. Another super-cool one was our Second State event at Kompass Club Ghent. It’s an old warehouse and the perfect fit for dark electronic music.
“I like it energetic, raw and I want the audience to be like ‘wtf just happened’ after my performance. Pick the one gig from your life that sums up that quote?
I’d say Amnesia Milano was pretty close. It was the first time for me playing in Italy and the people went nuts from the first second, there was applause, cheering, all the hands went up before I even dropped the first beat. I think I left them “wtf just happened?“ as they did with me.
What is coming out next from you studio wise?
Besides my Outreach EP on Mood, I’ve had the pleasure to do another EP for Carl Cox & Jon Rundell’s Intec label. That one will be out on January 25th. There are a lot of other things coming, but it’s a bit too soon to talk about them yet.
An up and coming producer to watch out for in 2017?
Michael Klein. Not because he’s my label buddy, not at all, but because he’s a great artist with a very clear vision about what he wants to do. It took me some time to understand his approach to electronic music, now I love it. Check him out!
And finally, what is your ambition that you want to achieve over the next 12 months?
Well, 2017 starts for me with playing Awakenings on NYE. Can’t think of a better kick off for the next chapter. I had an incredible year of touring and I hope we can expand this in 2017. Lately, I’m thinking a lot about how to approach an album and I feel I’m slowly getting ready for it. I’m sure 2017 won’t be boring!
