TURNING THE PAGES WITH WITH BOOKA SHADE

The wait is over! Booka Shade, one of the dance scene’s most prolific acts, jets into Bangkok for the first time next week to grace the decks at Bed Supperclub.

 

Hailing from Frankfurt, Germany, long-time collaborators and friends Arno Kammermeier and Walter Merziger deliver both live-instrument and electronic music. Since getting together in the early ’90s, the two have created four studio albums of their own materials as well as an extensive discography of remixes for famous artists like Moby, Smokin Beats, Tahiti 80, Hot Chip and most notably Depeche Mode on “Martyr” and Dave Gahan on “Kingdom”.

 

Chilling between the end of their US tour and the start of the Asian leg, Kammermeier gave us a few insights on Booka Shade’s world before their debut show in Bangkok.

 

How has 2011 treated you so far?

This year, we’ve been working on a new album. The previous albums were produced on the road – we’ve travelled a lot over the past few years and they’ve mainly been produced on the road in the backstage area or in hotels with a laptop. This time around, we’ve worked more in an actual recording studio. We have production background and we’re trained musicians – I’m a drummer and Walter is a keyboard player – so we rented studios where we did recordings on our own old synthesizers, a lot of percussion, instruments and piano and anything that would make noise! So the next album, which hopefully will be out next September – but with singles before that – will sound more organic, very electronic of course and it will sound like we are playing live.

 

How do you like DJ-ing?

What’s great about DJ-ing is that we can take music from other people, plug it in and see how it works. It’s very inspiring. What we’re doing at the moment is taking a mix of old tracks, because we have long history with techno and house, and playing a lot of edits from our own tracks. A lot of these tracks are not released and you cannot buy them anywhere. We also work with many different artists, you know, ripping their music apart, tearing it and putting loops from other music in it. That’s a lot of fun.

 

How does it work between you guys?

When we write songs, Walter would start with the product. He’s the songwriter basically. Then I come along and we work together through the details. But on the DJ side it’s the opposite. I look after the songs and make a collection for the set, then Walter makes comments. That’s a nice way to do it. I call it the ping-pong effect, and it’s been like that for the last 25 years.

 

Where did you hang out back in the days?

We grew up in the south west of Germany, and Frankfurt was the nearest city in driving distance. That was during the lovely early days of techno and there was this club called Omen, which later became our cradle, and that’s why we always have this old school trance in our music. We live in Berlin now.

 

Are you excited about Bangkok?

It’s going to be our first time, so we’re very excited. We only know Bangkok from stop-over flights. We hope that a good crowd and energetic people will show up.

 

READING MATERIAL

 

Booka Shade will perform its DJ set at Spoilt at the Bed Supperclub on Sukhumvit Soi 11 on Thursday.

Entry is Bt600 with open bar from 10 to 11pm, or a drink thereafter.

Call (02) 651 3537 or visit www.BedSupperclub.com.