Booka Shade - A Darker Shade Of Neon - Interview - Features

Booka Shade are arguably the most famous German music export since Kraftwerk. Starting life as a synth-pop duo, they slowly but surely gravitated towards harder techno sounds, threw off the shackles of being a major label act and started to create their own vision of electronic music. The rest, as they say, is (dance music) history. Riding the crest of a wave that saw them as both label bosses and musical creators, Booka Shade released their second album Movements to almost universal acclaim. Named as album of the year by Resident Advisor, they clocked up a staggering 200+ shows across the globe. So with the release of their latest, most personal album, The Sun & The Neon Light, looming near on the horizon and preparations well under way for upcoming US shows, Walter and Arno spent some time talking to Electronic Beats about difficult third albums, inspiration and not conforming to people’s expectations.

So you must be pretty busy right now…
WALTER: Oh yeah. We are getting so many calls from people, the people we are working with and stuff, ‘Can we do this, can we do that.’ It’s like, hey, we leave NEXT WEEK! Ha ha! Just get it ready, hee hee!
ARNO: Its funny, we always have this immense pressure when a tour starts, any band does, the lights, sounds, visuals. We would obviously have forgotten something if there was no stress!
WALTER: t’s different than with the Movements tour, as there we perfected as we went, it got better and better, but now, we just don’t have the time. It has to be at the point that for the first show, Coachella, it has to be perfect.

Do you feel pressurised having Coachella as the first show?
ARNO: Pressure?! Ha ha! What pressure? (They both fall about laughing). We do a little bit, yeah. It’s a bit better now, we now know the gear works, we had a secret show last weekend outside Berlin where we tested everything. But you know failing is ok, it’s human, and we needed to take that risk because everything with our set up now is new. After the last tour, everything was really well, basically crashed. You could really feel the equipment falling apart by the end of the tour. Now all the music, arrangements, all of the equipment, the lights, everything is new but we feel less pressured having done one show already.

So is this your difficult third album? Or your perfect third album?
ARNO: Hmm. The production was like you say, the difficult album! It was our second album proper, and looking back, sure we had some horrible times. In January, for example, we wanted to throw the whole album away and start again, we just didn’t feel how everything should come together. We loved the songs, but we just missed that overall view. At this point our tour manager, who until then had heard nothing, heard some of the stuff. We thought we might as well play it to him, as we were going to start again, and we played him the stuff, and he listened to it and came back, and was like ‘Are you guys crazy?! You have all these great songs, and you’re going to throw them away…’. So we then spoke to our staff, all the guys at Get Physical, and the feedback we got was that there were just a couple of changes needed here and there. So we made them, and suddenly there was this picture. It was always there! We were also just a little bit stuck with which single to start with, and once we had this, the picture was in place.
WALTER: So we decided to go for the more planetary thing, which funnily is actually not really a single but more like a club track, and after Numbers and all these more song-based things on DJ Kicks, that kind of music, we wanted to do something different, and people perhaps didn’t except that. We don’t like to always give people the same Booka Shade sound.

When I heard the album, it wasn’t what I expected, but after a few listens I got into it much more.
WALTER: Yeah, after Movements, it was a funny time. We didn’t plan for it to be such a huge success. We didn’t intend to have an album with four or five worldwide club hits on it. I remember the day we played Pukkelpop and when we played In White Rooms people were just going really crazy… I mean Arno was starting to cry, and I was standing there just thinking how can we top that? Is there any way to do that better? This was a really big question for me, a turning point in the production of the new album, because we then said it just doesn’t make sense to try and do an album with seven club hits, to do just the same thing again. So we had a drastic change, a break, and said let’s go back to what we really like, more cinematic stuff, our other sides, more deeper atmospheric stuff.

With tracks like Duke?
Exactly, very much John Carpenter inspired. But you know the Sun & The Neon Light feelings, we really experienced that on the tour, we definitely had those much darker parts. Copacabana, for example, was really written at the Copacabana… you know that’s not a story, that’s really true [the song] and you can see that our state of mind was not in the best shape at that moment. You know to write song like that, when the sun is shining and you are actually at the Copacabana…. but all of those experiences went into this album and then there was the birth of my son which was very important for me, so from that point you really grow up again, it’s the next level of your life and…

You see that there is more to life than music and clubbing?
Exactly! There is a lot more going on around you and this reflects in the album. It shows musically that you know we want to go more into songs.

So it was clear before you got to the studio that this was not going to be another Movements?
ARNO: Well, we worked on the album for about 15 months, but in-between we had DJ Kicks, we’ve had the shows, the DVD, we had a lot of different things going on. It was a constant songwriting process, but yeah, we knew we didn’t want to do a pure dance album, that was for sure.
WALTER: There were a few things that were perhaps present on the old album, elements of In White Rooms and Mandarin Girl, and we just had to scrub them out, get rid of them!
ARNO: We had the chance to be working on a particular sound very early on, first with Freemind by DJ-T then with our own stuff. That then transformed into this blueprint that was later called electro house, which is just now being beaten to death, all the sexiness has gone. It’s like the kind of riffs we started to use, there are lots of people now doing that, so why should we continue doing that? We need to look for something new and it took a long time to find, let’s say, a new musical language. ‘Duke’ was one of the first songs that gave a hint of how the album should sound, this darkness, tension, a slower beat and a minimalist melody.
WALTER: Also the playing live. At the beginning we thought we’re a club act, we have to have that punchy sound, and then the audience started to get bigger and bigger, and then we played concert halls and then we said “OK, we can do other things now in the show, it’s not really necessary to play four-to-the-floor all the time, but we missed the songs.” So we said, “well why not try and do a track with an orchestra, having these strings coming in over breaks and things.” These were just ideas for the live show which started to become a bit deeper, a bit more soul-orientated.
It all depends though. At festivals, for example, where there are so many people and you have just 50 minutes, we do try to make the biggest impact. Like at Coachella, we’re playing in the dance tent, so we are going to really go for it. Even there though, we are going to try it out with these big strings and try and do something new.

How was it to work with an orchestra?
Well, we have actually worked with an orchestra before because we also do film music from time to time, and stuff for adverts. Also, when we were doing major label pop, we had the chance to work with orchestras then, so it’s not completely new for us. It’s always a great feeling though.

Did you conduct?!
ARNO: Ha ha, no not conducting! Walter did the string arrangements, then a guy we have known for many years, a conductor, wrote the sheet music and conducted. We did it here just outside Berlin with the Brandenburg Orchestra. A great hall with a 40-piece orchestra, it was amazing. We didn’t want it too big though; we didn’t want to go Hollywood!

How do you feel about touring the album, considering how many shows you played on the back of Movements? Your commitments are different now...
ARNO: I am afraid…! I am afraid that it will be very long. It’s more dates, more midweek dates and it is planned as far ahead as December, so we know for the next seven months what we will be doing. It’s roughly the same process every time, you start with Europe, then you go to America which is, of course, the most important market, so you have to go a few times, first with a small tour, then a bigger one. In the autumn we go to the smaller cities, these more rural Texan places.

What is it like touring the backwaters of America?
WALTER: Well we did Calgary in the past, which was really funny.

Do people get the music there?
WALTER: Well, in the DVD (Booka Shade Moments Tour DVD) all those people at the beginning, going absolutely nuts, that’s in Calgary! That is Calgary! People were chanting “Booka Fucking Shade, Booka Fucking Shade”, it was very crazy.
ARNO: I am really curious to see how somewhere like Texas will be…

Austin could be fun…
ARNO: Yeah, exactly, but before we have only really played big shows in LA, Miami these kind of places. We will be playing at Lollapalooza, which is really a kind of rock-based thing, I mean we are playing directly before Nine Inch Nails…! We’ll have to wear our metal clothes.

And you are playing Glastonbury, too.
WALTER: Yeah, we are headlining the dance tent. I mean if you told me five years ago I would be even playing at Glastonbury… All these people that support us, like being on the iTunes pre-sale list, I mean it’s just crazy, and the only reason is that the head of iTunes guy is a big Booka Shade fan, a big supporter. It’s the biggest platform for downloading in the US, and ahead of a tour there, for us that is just amazing…
ARNO: “It just goes to show how far you can come with independent structures, and what we love is that we made the right decision a few years ago when we said we don’t want to work with major labels anymore. We were fed up with it, we needed to find some other way to promote and release our music. We strongly believe that it’s a great time now for independents; there is so much you can do with the Internet, places like Beatport for example. We have had so many offers from big companies wanting to use our music, offering us a deal and we can say, you know what, apart from money, what can you offer us? We don’t need that, we have our own structure. However, we are also completely reliant on the people at Get Physical, the label, because really, we have nothing more to offer than the music itself. It’s like the guy from iTunes, we can’t give him any money, he just likes us! That’s really good, that’s healthy. We have the rights, if someone wants to use our music, they have to speak to us!”
WALTER: “On the last album, we spent €5000 marketing it. That’s it. Philipp from M.A.N.D.Y said to us if you are really honest with yourself, and you are doing the music that you are really into, be it free jazz or whatever, you will be successful. For a long time we felt like a pinball of the music industry. All this chart success and all this stuff in the end was not making us happy. I mean we did some really fun stuff, but there was other stuff that was just getting worse and worse. In the end we felt like we had Big Brother watching us all the time, and we just said that’s it, enough!”

Links & backgrounds

TOP

|print|comments close

Tags for this article:

Berlin, Booka Shade, Coachella Festival, Get Physical, Glastonbury, M.A.N.D.Y.

latest articles from

› see all

Gareth Owen

21 SAUCES OF INSPIRATION - Nic Offer of !!! (Chk Chl Chk)
!!! (Chk Chk Chk) are the New York based, LA born agit-pop-funk band who are just about to relea...
!!! - Strange Weather, Isn't It?
Punk funk seems such an outdated concept now. Just like Nu-Rave, Indie-dance and a whole other h...
Ostgut Ton turn Five with a very special release
Ostgut Ton, the record label of Berlin's techno Mecca Berghain / Panorama Bar, are releasing a v...
Phonica re-rub a Bob Holroyd classic
Phonica Records (the label of our favourite record shop) are re-releasing Bob Holroyd's classic...
Phonica turns seven!
Seven is the lucky number apparently, and we hope it brings luck to possibly our favorite record...
Mark Broom - Acid House
Mark Broom is one of those figures who have bubbled on the periphery, seemingly forever. His lat...

Booka Shade - A Darker Shade Of Neon - Interview

12/06/2008