'Movements' of a Sound - 3/22/2007

Booka Shade is an electro-house breakout - but don't say that around them

By Dennis Romero

While the mascara-crazed new-wave revival known as "electroclash" has officially gone out of business (thank you, Lord), the term "electro" somehow survived as an orphan of the fad. These days, the word is often incorrectly uttered to describe music that has remnants of electroclash's retro-synth flavorings (or, even worse, to describe electronic music in general). Unfortunately for newbies, there's already a genre called electro, and we'd rather not show any disrespect. Original electro of the early '80s was breakbeat music for breakdancers, produced by some of the most visionary artists in pop history (Afrika Bambaataa, Cybotron, and even gangsta-rap king Dr. Dre, as part of the World Class Wreckin' Cru).

A better term, "electro house," has emerged for today's four-on-the-floor, faux-hawk fans. Although not perfect, it acknowledges the hybrid nature of the genre while it avoids paving over an influential period of black music.

Electro house's biggest breakout act is a reluctant member of the scene, who prefers to simply be known as an electronic-music artist. It also happens to be dance music's most talked-about group of the last several months: Booka Shade. Along with unleashing a critically acclaimed album, Movements, late last year for the domestic market, the Berlin-based duo of Arno Kammermeier and Walter Merziger also cofounded a record label, Get Physical, that has sold more music than any other on dance music's dominant download site, Beatport. The pair is also a fixture locally on KCRW (89.9 FM). The Booka Shade sound - crisp yet fluid, retro yet sleek - is the sound that every up-tempo DJ seems to be trying to spin and every e-music producer seems to be emulating.

"Within this niche, by word of mouth, people believe in the quality of music and like to support us," says Kammermeier, 38. "We're very proud that we have the capability to work in an indie structure."

It's as if the collective imagination of global dance music has been reflected in Movements, which captures Berlin's techno resurgence (the glitchy "Pong Pang"), New York's '80s obsession (wistful synths on "Darko"), and the global underground's tech-trance fusion (the repetitive, expansive melodies of "In White Rooms," and "Mandarine Girl"). In fact, Booka Shade has a reverence for trance that's rare in this era of ecstasy backlash.

"Nowadays people ask us about our roots, and we say definitely there are trance roots, and sometimes they laugh," says Kammermeier. "But when we say trance, we mean the original electronic music from Frankfurt on Eye-Q. It was melodic but not commercial. It was underground. Trance had this nice repetitive feeling that you hear now in a lot of Booka Shade songs. When you listen to 'Mandarine Girl,' this is very euphoric, and when we wrote it, it reminded us very much of the early '90s."

Kammermeier and Merziger are lifelong friends who moved from their Saarland homes near the French border to Frankfurt in order to make new wave and then techno and trance in the early '90s for labels ranging from EMI, which signed them to a short-lived deal, to Harthouse, the first home of trance. Soured on their major-label experience, they dove into dance music full-time until becoming disillusioned by the mainstreaming of e-music and super-club culture in the late '90s. The two turned to film scores for shelter. In 2000 they met up with fellow dance artists Thomas Koch (a.k.a. DJ T) and Patrick Bodmer and Philipp Jung (a.k.a. M.A.N.D.Y.) and partnered with them to form the Get Physical label, ushering in a new tech-based, Berlin-bred generation of music (including M.A.N.D.Y.'s own popular, industrial-flavored techno).

Booka Shade wants to continue to distinguish itself from sample-crazed, software-bred, cut-and-paste beats. "We are musicians, and we rely on what we can do with our hands," says Kammermeier.

That also holds true for performances, at which the duo generates sounds using four laptops, synths, electronic drums, and visuals. "If you come to the show, you will hear 'Mandarine Girl' or 'Body Language,' but always with a different arrangement," Kammermeier says. "That's very important for us."

One thing you might not hear is electro house.

"A lot of people call what we do electro house," he says. "That's an expression we don't like to use. For us it's just electronic music or, if we had a drink, we call it sci-fi house. It's not in our intention to cultivate electro house, but to come up with new concepts and ideas."