Chris O'Donohoe grabbed Kristian Beyer of Ame for a scoop and chat in the Bernard Shaw before his set at Stereotonic last Friday to see how he's getting on after another very successful year on the club and studio circuit...

Chris O’Donohoe: You’ve been around for a while at this stage. Do you feel like you have established yourselves as artists now?

Kristian Beyer: It’s hard to say you know? For me it’s like I’m still the same as five years ago; I still feel the same as before. I meet people I used to be a fan of and they treat me the same as them. It’s like “ah I like your music” so this is very familiar for me now. As an artist I still learn every time and I’m still in development so I think to be established means not being progressive. I feel accepted and respected now maybe.

CO’D: You seem to have a very considered approach to releasing music. Do you consciously try and keep the amount of your releases to a minimum?

KB: Yeah. Because I also have a record shop, I know how it is, some producers release a new record every week and people get fed up. I think the artist can’t even think about what they’re doing. The process of developing a “product” it’s a lot of talking and making decisions and thinking about “is this something that can be still around in two years” you know? Not something for the moment. That’s why we will only have a couple of releases and remixes but not that much. It’s just a natural way for us.

CO’D: Do you ever feel like your style is being copied by others?

KB: It’s hard to say, people say this a lot. I was in America and in record shops they had divisions like house, deep house, tech-house and there was Ame-house and I was “like what the fuck is that?” I asked the guys in the store and they said that it was stuff that sounds similar to you so I looked at the records they had and I wouldn’t say any of these records were close to us. But the thing in America is that over the years they were really intolerant to anything else but when I was in New York I spoke to a lot of native New Yorkers and they said when our break through track made it in New York two or three years ago it was exactly the point where they were ready for something new because they were all fed up with all the same songs. So I think this was actually the right time and moment to do this and now they are really open to European music and not like 5 years ago.

CO’D: How do you see yourself fitting within house music?

KB: I grew up with techno music and house music so I’m somewhere in between., house and techno. But I can go to a good house party and have fun and I can go to a good techno party and have fun and so actually I see this in the clubs I’m playing in. I’m playing in techno clubs and I’m playing in house clubs so when I’m in a techno clubs I probably play a little harder and when I’m in a house club I play more housey. So I would say I’m somewhere in between House and Techno.

CO’D: How you feel then about the push towards deeper sounding house and techno from people like Sebo K and Efdemin etc?

KB: I think that’s good you know. It’s always a question of time, I think there was a time when the music became too cold and maybe too hard and that’s only the reaction to this. But if there’s too much deep stuff it will go back to something else you know? I’ve been listening to house and techno for 15 years now and it’s always like a process. We have known Sebo K for a long time and he’s from Berlin and he’s influenced by something that’s popular in Berlin now, that’s house at the moment so he’s doing that kind of music.

CO’D: What was it like to be involved with the ‘Shut up an dance’ project?

KB: I really like the people who are doing Berghain and Panoramabar. They are really interested in cultural things and one of them, one of the owners; he used to be a ballet dancer so he is very close to this. In Panoramabar can you party together with some famous artists and some ravers from East Germany, they don’t care who you are and that’s what I like. The location for Berghain is really industrial, like something from the Second World War so they thought it would be an interesting location to have a ballet.

CO’D: How do you feel about the minimal / tech-house sound? Does it interest you at all?

KB: You know you find interesting stuff everywhere, the problem is the quantity of releases became more and more over the years. The good thing about electronic music and the technology is that it makes it possible for everybody to release music. You know everyone can press a button, it’s not a problem anymore today so there’s much more crap releases. I have a record shop so I go through a lot of releases and I will always find something, something in it, some good minimal techno records or some good house records or some jazz records (laughs) or whatever. There’s always something good but you have to pick out the good stuff you know? The stuff you like. The problem with minimal / tech-house is that there are too many releases and I see that in the reaction of the customers directly in the record shop that there fed up with stuff, there is too much stuff. It’s like if you have to go through 50 releases each week and every week a new label.

CO’D: So in your shop how does the business side of things seem to be going at the moment?

KB: In my record shop it’s healthy but when you travel a lot you meet a lot of people and also a lot of record shop owners and this year it was really depressed for a lot of people. With my record shop it’s a small record shop, it’s just for friends really so it’s like a family and that means that people will always come. It just becomes part of the culture, buying vinyl and hanging around talking about music, this will never be replaced by downloads or whatever. I’m not really financially dependent on the record shop to make money because I can make money with something else but big record shops really have problems.

CO’D: From country to country is there much difference in how people react to the music?

KB: I would say that electronic music over the last ten years became very global. You can be in Moscow and you can close your eyes and you can’t say that you’re in Moscow. It’s a global movement and everywhere there are good parties but at the same time people are different, like Irish people and Scottish people are very energetic and really like to party but the party lasts until 3am so the tend to put a lot of energy into the last two hours. In Berlin it goes for like two days or three days.

CO’D: Do you think that’s a good thing?

In my opinion no, eight hours or ten hours is fine, until eight or nine in the morning is perfect but you should end some time. Like Ewan Pearson said, why can’t you stop at the best moment? Why do you need to destroy everything until only 3 people are left in the club? I read an interview with him last week and he says that his comments follow him everywhere he goes but that wasn’t the aim because he likes to do after hours and stuff like that but actually he’s quite right in my opinion.

CO’D: How does your hometown of Karlsruhe influence you?

KB: I would say that you are always influenced by your surroundings and the place that you live. My friends are there. I could never live in Berlin because I couldn’t work there. You cannot concentrate, you can’t relax, there’s always something happening, all the people in the music business are there, for me it’s a nightmare. I like to stay there for a couple of days but then I have to leave. In Karlsruhe we can concentrate, we can relax, we can think about everything from an outside point of view and that’s what I like.

CO’D: So do you think then that there’s too much focus on Berlin.

KB: Yeah, because I think that sometimes there’s no development in the music there. In Berlin sometimes I have the feeling that everywhere is playing the same music, you can go to ten different clubs and everywhere plays the same. In my hometown I’m only listening to the music in the record shop and I think that’s much more healthy. Sometimes it’s really good to have the opinion of people who are outside the scene. Living in Karlsruhe is like having different ears.

CO’D: Would you like Innervisions to grow or are you happy with the size it is?

KB: As a company we will develop for sure, we will focus more on our net shop and different merchandise. Music wise we will never have more than six or seven releases in a year. We will also start doing CD’s but not an artist CD, it has to be something special so the first project for next year is an ambient CD where we asked producers we really like to do an ambient track for us. We thought it was a good time to bring out something like that and if it doesn’t sell that much it’s not a problem for us. If you get bigger and bigger as a label though you need to keep releasing. Steve Bug is a good friend of mine but I know that Poker Flat has to release a record nearly every week to keep the cash flow going. I wouldn’t like something like that.

CO’D: You’ve released a couple of mix albums over the last while. What for you is the perfect mix?

KB: It always depends. I think the perfect mix CD wouldn’t fit on one mix CD. It would be like four or five hours. I always take a mix CD as a project so I try to be open minded and bring a lot of influences in. We did a mix CD for NRK, which was supposed to be the follow up to a lot of American house mix CD’s so we said ok but that we had to do our view on American house music. Next year we will do a Fabric CD and we will do our vision of techno. At the moment we are also doing a mix CD with Henrik Schwarz on BBE that will be minimal music but our view of minimal music which could be minimal folk, minimal disco or minimal house and techno. But the perfect mix, that’s really hard! There’s a story when Laurent Garnier was doing his X-Mix CD he recorded it live but he is such a perfectionist and he did over 150 takes of the mix but nothing was good enough for him so in the end he just had to choose one!

CO’D: Lastly, you’ve mentioned a couple of projects for future can we expect anything else?

KB: Actually we’ve formed a band together with Henrik Schwarz and Dixon called Innervisions Orchestra. We’ve already done a remix for Underworld and at the moment we are doing one for UNKLE and next year we will start making our own material.

© Chris O’Donohoe