What were both of you up to before Brigade? Tell us a bit about your individual journeys with music that led you here.
Julius has grown up in Berlin and he’s been around raves and electronic music forever. He also studied film sound in Babelsberg and worked in that field for a bit. He also taught piano and has got a decent amount of production and mixing credits for other music under his belt.
I (Niels) come from a experimental sound, noise and art perspective. I was never much of a raver but am instead into somewhat academic computer music instead. (Pauline Oliveros, SND, Paul Lansky…) At the moment, my main approach is that I build my own (terrible) music software samplers and effects and then try to learn how to play them.
You usually perform live sets but also do some DJ sets. Do you look at them differently?
When we’re not on tour, we practically live in the studio so our live-sets are great to test out new material, see what works and what doesn’t. Also it gives us much more freedom to improvise around things that we have prepared. On the other hand, DJ Sets are a way for us to showcase what we are listening to at the moment, what our influences are and share these tunes with a crowd. So, there’ll be some crowd pleasers but also a lot of stuff we’ve dug up on discogs or bandcamp.
You’ve described your sound as Kartoffel Disko. What does it mean besides the literal one? 🙂 How else would you describe your sound?
It’s true that we used to produce disco influenced, french house type stuff before covid when we wanted to bring something that was opposed to the industrial techno that was dominating a lot of the events we were booked at.
We still have nothing but love for the original genres we borrowed from but that disco/80s resurgance became a bit of a cliche and I think we both ended up feeling very uneasy about that movement and our part in it. It hopefully taught us a lesson or two about how short lived these hype trains are.
Then, during lockdown we took a step back and made this very soft, easy-listening record that was influenced by acts like The Orb, Global Communication or Air. It’s called “Hard Times, Soft Music” and I’m still pretty proud of it. Now that we’re back in the club we play fairly fast minimalistic, fluffy breakbeat/electro influenced dubby house as a sort of answer to the trance edit wave that is going on at the moment. Our last Fusion set I feel really captures what it’s like to hear us live at the moment.