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VIA Ibiza Voice

“Beat presently imposes itself as the martial law controlling all expression. Music is now only music if legitimized by Beat. And the dancehall represents society under disco lockdown”, journalist Biba Kopf wrote those words nearly twenty years ago. His was a comment on his peers – the vast ocean of influences of early minimalist pioneers like Cabaret Voltaire, Non, and Can – being buried by the rising tide of techno music – a descendent clearly rooted in the same common history – but one overtly intent on replacement. At the same time, it was also an essay to the future, to those born after punk, to those in a country that they have seen both united and divided, and to those musicians who have brought Kraftwerk’s idea of a man-machine to life – a future where “disco lockdown” didn’t look as much like imprisonment as it did freedom.

Marcel Dettmann is one such case, his heritage traceable back to the accumulated grime under his fingernails caused by old industrial records long ago consigned to the dustbin of time. Much has been said of Dettmann and his legendary sets at his residency in Berlin at the techno Mecca Berghain. It seems that he’s taken over the role Sasha once occupied, the DJ matinee idol that can even make the boys swoon. Hype aside, the guy came of age in a time when club culture became the center of German youth culture and no other contemporary DJs or producer have expressed that shift better.

Check out the interview after the jump. Continue reading ‘A Chat with Marcel Dettmann’