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Vice Blog

INTERVIEW - APPARAT

Apparat (A.K.A. Sascha Ring) makes electronica more suited to daydreaming in your bedroom than raving in a club. Last week he was in Paris to promote his new album Walls and he talked to us about the European ecstasy revival and why he hates dance music.

Vice: Why do Germans only listen to minimal techno?
Apparat: I miss the variety of music in Germany. It feels like there was some kind of ecstasy revival that made the music change. Now the people are really into repetitive drug music. Maybe it's cool for younger people, but I've heard it all before. Right now it feels like most of the clubs sound the same. You can never find a cool concert with different kinds of music, at least in Berlin, since it's such an "electronic" city. It all fucking sounds the same, and that's not my thing.

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Paris kind of has a similar problem with Ed Banger. Every club plays the same song. Do you think it's all hype?
It feels like France is really in the Justice mode, which is cool. In Germany we have the minimal problem.

But you've bridged the gap. Your shows with the Ed Banger crew worked really well.
A while ago it seemed like people were opening up. So when we did parties in Berlin we applied that concept of putting completely different music together, and it seemed like people really appreciated it. I thought it was a new beginning. But then everything changed - maybe because of the ecstasy revival, and now you can't be successful if you try and switch things up. It seems like people want some sort of conceptual thing. They want to get what they expected.

Yeesh, that's lame.
Well, look at the current music industry. Fifty percent of the most popular music is really only cover versions of old songs, so there's a lot of recycling going on. Then again, if you try to solve the problem by doing something different, you'll only get heard by a small amount of people. But it's been like that forever, and innovators don't really aim to be pop stars, so I guess there's still a small group of people who don't care, and try something different.

So do you hate dance music?
I'm always the one who argues against dance music, but still I play in clubs every weekend, and there are DJs playing after and before me. When I'm in the club I see that there's a reason for dance music; it belongs to the context.

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I can listen to a 12" at home and I'll be like "Fucking hell, I've heard this 500 times before and it bores me." But then you can listen to the same record in the club, and you're a little drunk and it makes sense. But it's kind of sad that you need to be drunk to enjoy it. In the end it's not the music entertaining you, it's the context that's feeding into your base, instinctual level.

What are you into at the moment?
Well there's Christian Fennesz who makes pretty experimental stuff, just like drony, noisy music but there's always a real complex, and melodic sounds in the background. It has pop appeal, and that's good. It explains why he's successful. It's like noise, but then if you listen closely you hear a nice song in the background.

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