BLACKOLOR sounds but got kind of parked for the album.So, for me it was not much of a change. It was more an early way of putting sounds into a concept. For me the sounds or tracks of Range EP clued together perfectly back then laying down the foundations of the first proper album. In your first album Wide Noise you already incorporate a concept, right? Is it difficult for you to tell a story through techno music? Yep, the conceptional approach was essential for putting togetherWide Noise.And yes of course,storytelling via Techno is nearly impossible when you don’t have lyrics to transport or accompany a story idea. There is always a huge space for interpretation when you just hear sounds, without having a spoken word. I always tried to transport the conceptional idea via vox samples or phrase from movies or so to push the reception of the sounds in a certain direction,creating thereby the wanted mood or maybe restrict the space of interpretation a bit. I want to work more with lyrics in the future in order to bring more storytelling into my music. Born in Ruinswas a autobiographyalbumabout growing up in the RDA. I read that you had a happy childhood in a ruined background. How do you think that the experience has marked your life? Oh, well, of course it marked my life fundamentally. Experiencing and growing up in two totally different social systems shapes you automatically in a certain way. I feel very lucky to have had the chance to see and experience 2 systems consciously. If I would have grown up in Florida, I think Blac Kolor would never have happened, though You said instead that “Stormfly was more dance-floororiented.”Do you try to have a balance between dance-floor material and headphone one? It depends on my mood. Sometimes I feel a need for some simple bangers just to see the people or myself dancing and not thinking tomuch about it.Sometimes I’m just bored by all the club material and slow down automatically in my productions. But there is definitely no strategic thinking of balancing out these two worlds in mymind.Sometimes I feel ready for some rave, sometimes it has to go deeper. In an interview,you said that“staying unpredictable is themain reason my music sounds the ways it sounds.” Do you think it’s more difficult after so many releases to stay unpredictable? Absolutely,I have to producemuchmuchmoremusic to come to the next release, since a lot of tunes don’t survive my quality assurance anymore. I find myself more and more thinking: “no, get rid of that, you have done that already”. On www.peek-a-boo-magazine.be - 16 - top comes that I get bored from things pretty fast. I feel always a huge tension and it’s rather challenging to find a decent balance between creating new things and enjoying myself and trying to stick with a kind of a typical BK sound by the same token. But maybe that keeps me being productive. Probably, it´s the oil for my engine. You have released a few EPs on one of the most popular and influential labels at the time, aufnahme +wiedergabe. According to you, how has Philipp Strobel’s label changed the scene? As said, not thinking too much about a “scene”, lets me struggling with the answer here. Phil at least teaches the young audience the old stuff in a very consequent way. Other labels (from what we might call “scene” here nonetheless) got an older target group and it’s really hard for them to reach out to younger people. At the end of the day, Phil is just mixing together what belongs together. Berlin helps a lot here, to be successful with this approach. Your last EP has an interesting concept “addressing the oppression, exploitation and eradication of indigenous peoples by the western world.”To follow the concept, you based the tracks on elements of four different tribes. How did you come along with this idea? The basic concept for Roots was in my head for a long time. I think I saw a documentation about how they treated the Indians in Canada, especially their kids, back in the days. That was pretty much the trigger,where I said to myself, do that concept now. I collected a shitload of samples from different tribes all over the world, selected 4 of them (because I love 4-tracker-EPs ) and started to write music around these very snippets. Every track with a different approach but all with 118 BPM. I really wanted to limit myself here. What are your plans for the future? What happened to Weltenbrand? Weltenbrand will come out end of summer 2023 on beloved Hymen (which was my requested label for that concept) and will come with a very special artwork. The whole is much more an art project than a regular release. Stefan from the label and myself really want to create something different here. And I’m pretty sure that it will turn out beautifully. Apart from that there will be a single release corresponding the album a couple of months before and I will probably close my 24U bandcamp series very soon with Volume 10. And I started a few collaborations, we’ll see how this will turn out. http://www.blackolor.de François Zappa © Published by the kind permission of El Garaje de Frank www.elgarajedefrank.es Read full interview on https://elgarajedefrank.es/en/interview-blac-kolor/
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