Experimental techno artist defies expectations
While innovation and experimentation are the supposed hallmarks of electronic music, the genre’s fans can be a notoriously narrow-minded bunch.
If a DJ or producer deviates too far from the form’s set boundaries, he’s asking for trouble.
Such was the case when Thomas Brinkmann, an experimental techno DJ and producer based in Koln, released his LP “Lucky Hands late last year.
While the album featured plenty of propulsive rhythms and synthetic textures, apparently, some listeners were disappointed by the record’s flirtations with pop music.
“It’s quite funny.especially in the States, Brinkmann told The Daily Star Egypt over the phone from a tour stop in Tel Aviv.
“I think people took it in the wrong way.
Then again, Brinkmann, who appears in Cairo at the Rawabet Theater on Sunday, has always done things his own way – both in the studio and in the DJ booth.
“I’m just doing it the way I feel, he continues. “I was getting a little bored of straight beats.
In the late ’90s, he created expansive, stripped-down dance tracks filled with rhythmically funky clicks and pops.
The sound was the musical equivalent of a building design by the late architect Mies Van der Rohe: minimalist and user-friendly, yet deceptively elegant.
Brinkmann also made a name for himself as a fearless DJ innovator by carving notches and grooves into his records and playing them on a custom-made turntable built with two arms.
In many ways, the producer helped spawn the minimal techno movement that in recent years has bumped progressive house and trance off European dance floors and become the continent s dominant sound.
That sound, which mixes the propulsive repetition of Detroit techno with gloss and ambience of top-shelf trance, is also making inroads in the US, where minimal DJs like Michael Mayer and the Chilean-born Ricardo Villalobos play slamming proto-house for increasingly packed clubs.
Still, Brinkmann scoffs at the term minimal.
We ve been using this fucking term for ten years – it s totally empty [and] it s become a brand, he says, perhaps referring to European super clubs like the Ministry of Sound, who have started picking up on the trend.
Even the church was doing minimal in the Middle Ages with bells.
If you take DJs like Ricardo Villalobos, it s becoming a kind of trance. It s becoming a bit [like] ecstasy. It s just to make the ass move a little, he says.
“That can be a pretty weak crowd sometimes.
Brinkmann’s singular approach can also be seen in his latest endeavor – a tour of the Middle East.
Sponsored by the Goethe Institute, the musician is hitting six cities in the region at a time when many of his DJ brethren are playing it safe in clubs back in Europe.
Despite his innovations as a DJ, Brinkmann has ditched his turntables and vinyl in favor of performing his own tracks on a laptop.
I m playing my own stuff with a computer. It s a real pain in the ass to carry records around, he explains, adding that he laid down a club set for a very responsive and open-minded crowd in Beirut earlier this week.
And for sure I will play a club set in Cairo, he says.
The tour has also meant some unusual venues, says Brinkmann, referring to a tour stop in Ramallah.
It was like playing in a prison, he says, noting that the Israeli military was erecting fences nearby.
It was surrounded by walls.
Thomas Brinkmann, with DJ HazeAt the Rawabet Theater, DowntownChampollion Street, near the Townhouse GalleryNovember 59 p.m.
