Alter Ego: We're Techno, Not A Rock Band
Author: Jonty skrufff
Sunday, December 12, 2004
"Names and labels are changing a little, but I would say the whole movement where we come from, is still the techno movement," band member Joern Elling Wuttke explains.
"There still are a lot of good things coming out of techno, for example, take someone like Sven Vath, who was and still is a big influence on us. He was always playing our music from the start and we recorded some stuff with him on his label Harthouse, and he's now running a new Cocoon club in Frankfurt, which is an amazing place. A lot of big new stuff is still happening from the techno scene. I have no problem calling my biggest influence techno; I would still also say Alter Ego are a techno project. We are not a rock band."
The "we' he's referring to is himself and long-term Alter Ego partner Roman Fluegel, though he also uses the term in the wider sense of the German electronic music scene, nowadays increasingly centred around Berlin.
"The music scene here in Berlin is not really about money, it's about having fun and really experimenting with music," says Joern.
"Everybody is recording with everyone else and everyone can make a living out of it without having to work with big record companies."
Making his name in Frankfurt, Joerm moved to the new German capital three years ago to get closer to a girlfriend, though admits he'd probably have relocated anyway.
"Basically half of the old Frankfurt scene has now moved to Berlin, in fact, the whole German electronic scene is really amazing at the moment," he continues.
"There are lots of older people involved in it, many are over 30, and have been making electronic music or running labels for over 10 or 12 years now."
Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): Did you immediately realize the potential of Rocker when you first created the track-
Alter Ego: "No, we knew in the studio that it was a big track, but we didn't expect the reaction. It came about because we hadn't made an album for seven years because we had a lot to do with our labels and doing remixes for others. We also had a big rave hit in 1999 called Betty Ford and started doing a lot of live shows at raves but then we started getting a bit tired of that and about the Germen techno scene in general. So we set up a very nice, small club for electronic music, near Frankfurt, called Robert Johnson.
The basic idea when we went back into the studio was to do a low profile album for the DJs playing in the club, specifically not rave anthems but rather slower, rougher special tracks for this special club, and for ourselves, of course. The third track we produced was Rocker, Sven Vath played it on the Love Parade weekend in Berlin, everybody freaked out and that was the first time I started really expecting that it was going to be huge. It wasn't planned at all."
Skrufff: I know the Love Parade weekend didn't happen as a full on event this year . . .
Alter Ego: "This year it was the Love Weekend and it was more about the clubs- all the clubs got together in Berlin, I think there were twelve clubs doing partiesover the weekend till Wednesday. You have every DJ from the whole world there, playing there and we did a Playhouse showcase at the Watergate club."
Skrufff: Do you guys DJ as well -
Alter Ego: "A little, Roman is DJing more than me, but I don't think we have the time for that much, because it's a special job, and we are really musicians first. We're presently spending a lot of time working on our live PA and over the last four months we played over 40 live sets all over the world. We stop playing live in mid-December to take a break until Fe Tags