Apparat: Useless Information

Sascha Ring is sickeningly lucky. The Berlin producer, known as Apparat, is one of those rare people to whom one cannot help but be drawn; into whose orbit one imagines it would be possible to fall very easily. He is possessed of the magnetism that is, I suppose, the cornerstone of celebrity.

Outside the South Bank Centre, where The Line Of Best Fit met Ring, blue-shirted city workers craned their necks to work out who this vertiginously tall, appallingly handsome man was. Women want to marry him, and men want to be him.

Ring’s career is even more startling than his appearance. Having started out DJing hard techno in Berlin a decade ago, the focus of his work has gradually shifted away from beats towards the string-heavy atmospherics that characterise his breakthrough Walls. His forthcoming album, due on Mute later this year, looks set to continue Ring’s journey towards a synthesis of digital production techniques and natural, song-based compositions.

That is not to say, though, that Apparat has jettisoned club music entirely. We spoke to Ring before one of the last shows supporting his DJ KiCKS compilation – a record that demonstrates Apparat’s unparalleled ability to control a crowd, and that underscores his position as one of the world’s great DJs.

I think I saw the first night of this tour, at Berghain.

Oh, you did? That was crazy, the whole crazy snow. Everybody was freezing their asses off. Half of my guestlist didn’t come. Until about 2 o’clock there was nobody there, and I was thinking, ‘What’s going on, this is my hometown!’ But it was alright by the time of the party.

Also, Berghain is strange, because outside the door is kind of hard. Even if you have people on the guestlist, sometimes the bouncers won’t let them in.

Is there a door policy there, or is it just random?

I have a friend who works there, and he said that usually they try to have a ‘mixed audience’. I have no idea what that means, but I guess if they have too many people of ‘one kind’….

Too many guys, too many girls…

I guess that might be the easiest way to see it. But I think also, of course, it’s just about if someone acts shitty.

Sometimes if they don’t like the face, they won’t even let your guestlist in. And then obviously when you’re playing, your phone rings with someone who can’t get in. So you have to deal with this shit before you go on.

Tell me about Bloc.

That was officially the last Moderat set. We’ve said that three times already, but that’s it now. It was really amazing, because everybody who ever did something for or with Moderat came with us. The whole crew, the video guys. So we were like 18 people travelling to Bloc, and we were staying at the festival site, not at a hotel. We were completely part of the whole thing for three days.

At some point it went a little out of control. The first night was great, I got completely wasted. Friday night I played, then I disappeared while the Modeselektion stage was still going on. I left the stage without even packing my stuff. And I got completely drunk with some cool English people somewhere, but then next morning I realised, ‘Man, where is my stuff?’ That’s never happened to me before. It ‘s some kind of an alarm signal, I guess. But it’s also a good sign! I had a good time.

And then next day of course we had the Moderat set, but by that time I was already out of my mind. I was just happy to survive.

The Saturday night was fantastic.

I did like it, but it was almost hard work for me. Just standing there!

There were some people in the flat opposite us who were up for four days. They started on Thursday and didn’t stop until Monday.

And they’re probably not even the exception!

Where do you go after this?

One in Dublin, one in Istanbul, one in Hamburg, and one in Spain. All over the place. And then it’s time for something else, I guess.

So has the new record been written on the road?

Well even with Moderat, we mostly only play at the weekend. So there’s always four days off in Berlin, and I used to spend all those days in the studio, more or less productive.

Then also, in the beginning of 2009, I went to Mexico with Josh from Telefon Tel Aviv, and a friend of his, Fredo. My drummer came as well, and we did some recording. I wrote half of the new record in Mexico, which was really cool.

I was there for two months, and I didn’t even know if I was going to be able to do any work. But suddenly I just got really inspired. I only worked for maybe four or five hours a day, but it was fucking productive.

What was it like being in Mexico for that length of time?

I really like it. Of course it’s kind of rough, with all the drug crime. Basically that’s going on in the north, but still there’s a bit of a dangerous vibe.

Good dangerous?

It’s not really in your mind if you’re just hanging out. Because Mexico has a really strong music scene. They really know what’s going on. We played a fucking crazy Moderat show in Guada la Hara for like 8,000 people. I didn’t understand what was going on.

It was an anniversary for a club, and they had a party in the venue, but it was basically us and some local guys, and it was really fucking crowded. People really know their stuff. It’s really cool.

Also, I have some friends in Mexico, and it really felt like I was living there. People would come to my house, and we would go to a bar. I was actually just hanging out with Mexicans.

It’s a cliché, but it’s the only way to really see a new country.

Definitely. This year I was in Thailand for two months, and it was just not the same. In Asia you are on holiday, and Asian people just serve you – but you’ll never really get in touch with them. But in Mexico, we had an afterparty at my house, and there were so many people there that I didn’t even know. It’s really cool.

I guess it’s a little closer to our culture, and that’s why it’s easier to adjust. It’s still really different, but I really love it. I was considering moving there for a while. It’s really my thing.

So the new record is on Mute. Who approached who?

Well we have a bit of a history with Mute. I used to do Shitkatapult with Marco, but I’m not doing it anymore.

You’re not working with them at all?

No, not for about five years. At some point I just realised that I really needed to be in the studio, not reading contracts.

So we split, but everything’s cool. Daniel, who works with Shitkatapult, is my manager now, so everything’s still connected. But they always knew Daniel Miller as well.

I always wanted to get out of the electronic music world a bit. It’s not really any different these days – if you release on an indie label or an electronic label, in the end it ends up in the shops somehow. But I always felt limited to this electronic thing, and I always got booked in clubs, and I played in electronic tents at festivals. And I thought it would be good to try and get out of this a bit.

So my Daniel gave the record to Daniel Miller, and was like, “Fuck, we need that.” And he was really fighting for it.

But at the time we wanted to start our own label, like a blank sheet of paper.

Specifically an ‘Apparat label’?

Kind of, yeah. But Daniel really liked it, and he kept on calling, so eventually we thought it would be a good idea. And now I really think it is a good idea. Mute is definitely a place where nobody tells you what to do. Everybody asks, and it’s a good relationship.

We were just talking about how when I was about 11, and I lived in East Germany, we had these tapes that had been copied like 20 times already, and there was a lot of Depeche Mode.

So I got in touch with Depeche Mode when I was 11. It’s crazy that, even when there was no real music market, this was the stuff that I got to hear. And it’s on the label that I’m on now, which makes me feel really good about the whole situation.

Apparat – Ash Black Veil by TLOBF

Was there any homegrown scene in East Germany?

I think it was probably quite similar to what happens in South America. They obviously have more freedom, but they don’t have strong music media telling them what to like. In Germany, America, England, you have all these important magazines, and everyone thinks, ‘Yeah, we have to listen to James Blake because that’s the new shit.”

These people get it, because they read blogs or whatever, but they’re more free from those influences. Obviously in East Germany there was no internet, so people had to find different ways. It was word of mouth, I guess. There was a strong music scene, and people were really trying to find good stuff, but it was so hard.

There were so many ways. Like, you’d find out that this band was the hot shit, and for some reason your grandparents were going to West Germany, so everyone would ask their grandparents to go and buy this certain, special record. And of course your grandma would bring the wrong one, and it was just so disappointing! Well, I only know these stories, I was too young.

But there was a music scene, and the fact that it was almost illegal to listen to this kind of music, it made it feel more exciting.

How do you feel about James Blake?

I definitely think it’s a really innovative thing. I’m a producer, and I’m kind of a nerd, so I listen to music in a different way. And it’s definitely, from this point of view, really impressive. It’s a cool approach.

But listening to the whole album, it doesn’t really catch me, somehow. I was saying earlier, when I listen to the Bon Iver record, it’s so pure and honest and simple, it totally touches you. That’s the thing James Blake did wrong – too many effects. Even though the vocals are loud, and in your face, somehow they don’t go that deep.

Probably the main reason is that he was thinking too much about it. For me, it’s not a record that touches me. But still, I can totally understand the hype. It’s well done, and it’s new.

Do you think your focus is moving away from the production side of things?

Totally. It got boring for me. Like eight years ago, when it was first possible to make a record on a laptop, it was so exciting. There were all these programming languages, but at the time a lot of this stuff you had to do yourself. You had to programme plugins. It wasn’t like today, with 15,000 plugins to choose from. A lot of the stuff I did myself, and I really learned how to programme. I lost days and weeks, just because I was nerding around, and it was a really exciting time.

But at some point I just got sick of it, because I felt like the search for the sound was done. I have always liked mistakes. If I was programming stuff, and there was something going wrong, sometimes it was just in a nice way. But these days I can make that happen even more, just by putting microphones in the wrong place.

And that’s what I was really doing on the last album. Of course I did edits afterwards, but I really wanted it to have a human, organic feel to it. Because that’s what I miss in electronic music.

Do you think technology helps you to achieve that, or is it holding you back?

Now it helps me, because I’m turning away from it! I know that I don’t want to sound like this anymore. If I go to a club, I still understand club music. Sometimes it gets me, but it happens rarely, because most of the music sounds like it’s just tools. People produce it as DJ food. And that’s not really music anymore – it’s just entertainment.

But maybe I’m talking this way because I’ve always been like ‘the emotional guy’, and there’s a real lack of emotion in dance music.

Do you still build your own instruments, and your own plugins?

Not really. I even forgot how to do it, which is a shame. I try from time to time, but if you don’t practice you forget this stuff.

But I programmed the software that we still use for the Moderat show, about seven years ago. I built the whole thing before Ableton Live existed, because there was no live software. The guys from Modeselektor still use it, and we use it live for Moderat.

It seems like now everyone is building their own Max/MSP patches.

That’s good, it’s a different kind of creativity. But I just don’t think it’s possible to do something completely new anymore.

How do you fit in improvisation in live performance? Do you think there’s more scope for improvisation in DJing than in the live set?

In general, in electronic music, there’s not that much room for improvisation. Some people go onstage just with drum machines and start from zero, but I don’t think that really goes deep enough.

I’m still searching for a way somewhere in the middle. My live set is completely divided into loops, and I can do whatever I want with them, but most of the time I end up doing the same thing because it just works.

I think also, I’m not a good enough musician to improvise onstage. I hope that changes with my band, who are really good musicians.

But then for Moderat, we always played the same set because of the visuals. But sometimes we would play a song for four minutes, and sometimes it would go on for eight minutes, so there’s definitely some kind of improvisation. Not in a jazzy, crazy way, but it’s definitely necessary to have some freedom.

The Moderat sets are pretty firmly divided into specific songs.

That was our choice. We wanted to do something more like a concert, more like a presentation.

And is that what the new Apparat set is going to be like?

Pretty much. The record is mostly mellow. It’s not really possible to have transitions. It’s going to be pretty old school. We’ll play a song, and then people will clap or boo.

Is Raz Ohara still playing with you?

No, he’s not. Raz is an amazing guy, and I had such a fun tour with him. But now it’s only me singing on the record. And I think maybe it should be focused on one singer. I don’t want to be like the crazy band leader guy, but the concept right now is that it’s me, I mostly sing, then it’s a band of new people.

One of the guys, his name is PT, he helped me produce the record. He is a very gifted musician, he can play every instrument. He helped me make the album a bit more musical. Because I approached it in an electronic way, like cutting patterns. But he came at it like, ‘No, fuck this,’ and started cutting stuff off the grid and so on. And I was like, ‘Oh god he’s destroying it!’ But in the end it’s about what you hear, not about what you see.

So is this a collaboration, or is this your record?

Well it still feels like it’s my record because this is the first time that I’ve made a completely song-based record. I wrote this music mostly at home on the piano, or the synth, or whatever. This is the first record I could reproduce even if I lose the harddrive – because I still have the idea in my head.

With electronic music it’s really hard, because you have to reprogramme everything and it’s all about the sounds. But this time it’s songs. I came into the studio with songs already arranged. Of course I’m really happy to have found PT and to have the band, but in spirit it still feels like my songs because they happened in my head, then we went to the studio and formed them.

So Apparat is still you; it’s not ‘Apparat the band.’

I think it’s always going to be my project. But I also really like the idea of having a band that I stick to, and we grow together. I want a community feeling on tour. Who knows, maybe the next record is completely a band album, and them I’m just a part of Apparat. It’s all about development and change at the minute, so who knows, maybe that’s where it leads.

Where did you find this PT?

My manager connected me with him. He’s a guy from Berlin. He’s mostly in the German independent scene. He has a big studio, and big German bands record there. So he’s like a real musician, on the other side of the musical world. And it’s really cool to meet in the middle.

Is Berlin still dominated by minimal techno?

We just talked about that today. I told my video guy that a few months ago I had this moment where I realised, maybe this one chapter of my life is over. For me, the last chapter was moving to Berlin like ten or eleven years ago. The city was really rough, lots of gaps between the buildings, then there were random bars. That’s mostly disappeared, maybe in the last three years. But I finally realised it’s gone like two months ago. This isn’t the Berlin I found when I moved there.

That’s the normal way of things. It happens to every scene or city. Gentrification.

Are things moving to other parts of Berlin, or are they just vanishing?

They definitely move to other parts, but this freedom, the gaps where people would just open a bar for summer, even without a license and nobody gave a fuck – this has gone, it’s disappeared. And this is a shame.

Also, Berlin isn’t like London. London is a giant city, lots of districts, really spread out. But in Berlin you can still walk from one side to the other.

Lots of cool people move to Berlin – artists, creative people. But also, particularly in the area I live in, now you have all these happy families. And they’re not people who moved to Berlin eight years ago, had a child, grew up. It’s people moving into the safe areas of Berlin – but then it’s like, ‘Oh no, it’s too loud, call the police, the club must close.’ And this shit happens too often. It’s narrow minded.

Of course, you can drink beer on the street, there’s no curfew, but somehow the freedom vanishes.

Is that reflected in German politics?

Not really. It’s not the politicians’ fault. They came and they didn’t change shit. They tried to ban smoking but it didn’t work. They had no money to send people to check, so after a couple of years the clubs started putting ashtrays back on the bar.

I don’t blame the politicians. It’s just a natural development, because for some reason too many people of the wrong kind move to a certain area and destroy it.

Do those scenes still exist in other German cities? Did they ever?

Not really. There are some people in Hamburg, and there is stuff happening even in Munich, which is a really uptight city. There is some kind of techno scene, but it’s always been different. These are all West German cities, and you couldn’t really have a club in a random location. The police would shut that down.

But the Berlin thing, the illegal party scene, that was unique. And I say ‘was’ because it’s gone, it doesn’t exist anymore.

In a live setting, which do you prefer now – the DJ KiCKS style shows, or the band shows?

Man, it’s all about the contrast. It’s completely different. We just talked about the Moderat tour – it was really great, but for two years we did the same thing, and it was mostly electronic. And this is the reason that now, I chose to release a record that isn’t electronic, and we’re going to play it in a new context. I just need to entertain myself, and change things from time to time.

Also, now I’m kind of fed up with the club thing. I’ve been doing it for so long. I’m always saying, ‘It’s over! I’m just doing the band thing!’ Who knows, maybe in three years I’ll be back in clubs. But for the first time in my life I really feel like I have a major plan. I know I’ve done the record, I’m going to tour with the band for quite a while.

And in the meantime we’ve already started a new Moderat record. We have two very good tracks already. So maybe we go to Mexico and work on the Moderat record. At some point Moderat will come back from the dead, but it will look totally different and sound totally different. I’m not a fan of repeating. Repetition is a basic element of electronic music, but maybe not of an electronic music career.

I watched an interview you gave in Teufelsberg, and you were saying that your manager had told you that you needed to find something else – something that wasn’t music.

Yeah, some balance. I do some yoga. It’s so good! I’m such a nervous character, and the whole fucking nightlife thing wears you out. Then yoga is such a contrast. Again, it’s a contrast. It’s so quiet, and you have to be slow and concentrate on things.

And also, it has this little spiritual element, which I never thought I’d be able to get into. I thought it was just hippy shit. But I got into it somehow. When I was in Thailand I went to a yoga teacher every two days.

Maybe it depends on the teacher too, I guess. I just try to open up and understand, even if it doesn’t make sense initially, I think, OK, let’s trust this guy. And I did that with great results. It makes me feel better.

Do you still do any graphic design?

No. It was my job. I moved to Berlin and became a graphic designer. Then I did that and music at the same time, but at some point you have to decide. And I think I made the right decision, even though now my life is only music.

In some ways though, that work was more rewarding because you do the work, then someone takes it away from you and it’s done. But in the studio, nothing is ever finished. You just give up on something.