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Although they’re currently still enjoying releasing the biggest club hit of the year with their genre-crossed electro-house anthem Rocker, German electronic duo Alter Ego continue to align themselves firmly with techno. Specifically, the underground, original, ideas based concept techno of the kind that first took hold in Germany and beyond in the early 90s.
“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 February, then we start playing all over England hopefully. I’m looking forward to that but we’re really tired at the moment, because we played everywhere from the Detroit music festival to Japan at every big festival and loads of clubs. It’s a lot of fun, but we never did that before, that intensively.� Skrufff: I guess your newer fans will be expecting loads of tracks like Rocker, Is Rocker changing peoples’ expectations of what you play? Alter Ego: “It’s not really changing because we already have like a small fan base. There are a lot of people coming to see Rocker maybe, but the good thing is that a lot of those people have also heard the album and they are really having fun from the first track onwards. We’re playing nearly the whole album, and often at bigger raves we normally only have half an hour or fifty minutes to play, so we play the more energetic tracks off the album. I think that is received very well and it’s not just about Rocker. Rocker has very good reactions of course, but then Betty Ford is also always one of the biggest tracks. But I think the people are expecting to see something they never heard before and something really mad. We really try to do something really different and really noisy and at the moment we go on stage feeling more like a noise or a punk band. We want to have fun and we want to improvise a lot. We don’t have any computers on stage, so we do a lot of stuff live. We do live programming and we play the keyboards live, and Vocoder and everything. It’s a lot of fun and it’s a lot of improvisation. We’re not really a typical dance floor act.� Skrufff: How much have you been inspired by the ‘80’s electroclash scene ? Alter Ego: “That’s been our main inspiration because we are really children of the 80’s, and when you are young that’s your inspiration. The first time I went out clubbing in the early 80’s in Frankfurt I was listening to a lot of new wave stuff. Stuff like Joy Division, also, German new wave stuff like DAF, also stuff like the Velvet Underground, psychedelic 60’s music and garage stuff. During the early 80s in Germany we had a big 60s psychedelic revival, so there were clubs all over the place where DJs played 60’s garage tracks. That was a big influence. I had a guitar band at that time, and also made a record when I was 19 or 20 years old. We also toured with the Wedding Present and with bands like the Stone Roses.� Skrufff: Is DJ Hell somebody you’ve crossed paths with a lot? Alter Ego: “ No, not really. I respect what he’s doing, but he’s from Munich so, he’s doing his Gigolo stuff. I think it’s very special what he’s doing. He has his own style. We met three or four times a year and we are having a good party but it’s not really that we influence each other from a musical side. He’s really a retro guy, you know. His influences are still very 80s, I would say only 80s, also with the whole look of Gigolo and everything. He was really a new wave kid.� Skrufff: Is the goal to become big in America? Alter Ego: “We’ve toured there a little and we go on tour in America next year, because we have a record deal there starting in two months, and we are bringing out our album there next year. A lot of people are touring there, such as Ellen Alien or Miss Kitten; I talked to her and she said she played Rocker and people were really freaking out and they had never heard it before. I think for the new album and for our harder more rocky style set, that America is a very good market. I have to say I’m not the biggest American fan at the moment though. The whole culture there is difficult for me. We were there recently and the way the people look and people behave and everything is not really my dream surroundings.� Skrufff: Are politics and social issues important to you? Alter Ego: “Yeah, I mean we are coming from more of a left (wing) scene, especially in Germany; the independent and the punk scene were always more from the left side. We’re coming from working class surroundings and we are really European. There are some political goals we’ve reached here with the Green Party in Germany, for example, that we are really proud of that, and in America you don’t have that at all. Also when you go to the supermarket there, and you look for some healthy food or some little quality stuff, you can’t really find it, or you have to pay millions of Euros to buy it. It’s really hard to tour there, it’s difficult.� Alter Ego’s Rocker is out now on Skint Records. http://www.robert-johnson.de http://stream.netbusiness.co.uk:554/ramgen/skintVideoStreams/AlterEgo.rm
(Alter Ego’s rocker) Interview by: Jonty Skrufff (Skrufff.com)
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