Lately we had an email conversation with a guy working for a club music mag here in Berlin. Let’s simply say, for one of the two important mags in town. After having stated that he liked our stuff, he said in the very same mail, that he’d be sorry but that the mag doesn’t usually review neither mp3 labels nor releases. Apart from the fact that he might not have liked our stuff and that he wanted to hide behind the unspoken of policies of the house, we found that statement sooo typical - but sooo bizarre at the same time.

Fact is, in spite of todays myspace and iPod generation, or world reknown DJs like Dave Angel who use DVS systems or - God forbid! - even a laptop only to spin, many of the influential German club music media more or less ignore the devellish mp3 medium. We honestly wonder why?

Well mixed and mastered mp3s sound as good in the club as any vinyl. Plus they sound much better than badly mastered lo-fi vinyls, lots of which are still produced and spit out on the market every f***in’ day.

The burden of carrying heavy crates with felt TONS of the black gold in them is a real mothafuckin’ pain in the ass.

DJing is about to change radically anyway. Already today, many DJs open for this change include their own effect units like the Mini Kaoss Pad, use some sound producing live gear along their DJing, or go for the above mentioned DVS solutions like NI’s Traktor Scratch to be able to be more flexible, spontaneous and innovative than the oldskool kings. In fact; DJing and Liveact(ing) become one.

And to speak of the oldskool and put that into a historic perspektive: without the boldness and openess for new things of  innovators like Grandmaster Flash or Kool Herc, DJing as we know it wouldn’t even exist.

To finally pay our respects to more of these real DJs, namely the scratch wizzards (”what is a DJ, if he can’t scratch”). These always have used every possible angle to manipulate a vinyl in every un-thinkable way. And today even these hardcore vinylistst use control records of a DVS system AND other gear.

So hey, maybe we should stop to limit ourselves to what’s still widely seen as the only way of playing music in a club (or for that matter, elsewhere). Also, we cannot help but to feel that this is not only lazyness of thought, but that there are tangible business interests at stake also. Since, apart from ideologically triggered beliefs, isn’t it pure lazyness of action that the club music industry is unable to think about new business models and so to re-invent itself? They, who don’t stop critizing the majors for their immobility and the RIAA for its demonization of their very customers can’t come up with more than to sell sound-storage-media? A business model which will be dead by the end of the decade!

Some people at least understood. Beatport.com, Junodownloads - and even some artists like Jay Haze with his wrong context thing whatever net label approach a couple of years ago (sorry, Jay;). But even the latter could only make some waves with his netlabel because he had some vinyl releases out in the first place.

Well, it’s time for a reboot guys. And not only so, because today you’ll only get a distribution deal as a label newcomer if you know the distributor in person plus book him on your parties. No, it’s because vinyl is dead.

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Alright, I started to listen to Zimmermann’s music because of Ricardo Villalobos’ praise. I mean, if you hear an artist whom you respect very much musing about another artist whom HE respects very much, it’s certainly worth listening. Especially if the recommending artist is a HE (= veeery well known), and the other a somebody you’ve never heard of before. And no, I haven’t even read the Groove magazin article about the guy yet, since - attention stereotype - his music speaks for itself.

Hypnotic, excessivley long tracks unwind in an ever repeating manner without the idea of boredom crossing one’s mind. And if it does incidentally, it’s a sweet boredom which touches us with a stripped down ennui which is far being blasé - if that’s possible… Plus there often is a reference to latin rhythms hidden somewhere. No wonder that Villalobos likes these tracks. The most astonishing thing though is, that his tracks rock the house - crackling and squeaking as they are. Maybe they awake some deeply caché animal instincts:-? To be serious again, I think it’s his excellent sense of drama that make his tracks stand out from the mass of Minimal bullshit that the club music scene has seen these last years. And the words of a HE of course.

Cheers, Zuckermann

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Apart from the challenge to fully understand and master the new OS (not as easy as the average Mac evangelist will tell you – even if you don’t ask…) as well as Win XP Pro, it appeared that the hardware didn’t live fully up to its design. Unfortunately it’s only then that you take all the forum remarks about the MacBook’s bug list seriously… A striking body temperature (yes, we all know that we like it hot, but hot on metal surfaces is too hot) and the noise level of a fan that doesn’t like to stop working rank among its most prominent features.
Plus Boot Camp 1.1 was far from being a stable matter. And since all our music software ran on windows, that was a problem. We installed Cubase SX 3 and finished a production anyway. We began asking ourselves though, whether we had been overrun by Apples wonderful marketing machinery. The “liberty” to work on both systems at native speed turned into a completely unnerving experience. Windows and OS X just don’t go along well. Just a few examples; indeed it is possible to READ an NTFS partition under OS X – but WRITING is impossible (unless you find a reliable 3rd party software). Then it turned out that Bootcamp can’t establish more than two partitions, one for Win, one for Mac. No 3rd data partition possible. By that time the comments of some long term Mac users not to bother, because his holiness Steve in his endless wisdom had created such a stable system that a data partition is just not needed, OS X will never crash and become useless like Window, didn’t appear to be very trustworthy after we did have some inexplicable system crashes. Having partly been turned into Mac heads nevertheless, our hearts were filled with great expectations regarding the final Bootcamp version under Leopard. Alas, that problem persisted…

Which means an external hard drive is rather indispensable. O yes, and it must be Firewire of course, since the 2 USB ports on our 15,4’’ MacBook “ “Pro” are not so Pro after all and more importantly, completely insufficient in a Studio environment. But thanks for the otherwise completely useless Firewire 800 port.

At least the keyboard was legible, due to the illuminated keys. Very cool! So here we finally had some reason to rejoice. The display was also very well received. Non-reflective, with LED’s (which a lot of PC notebooks still don’t have to offer), an ok resolution of 1440 x 900, and fully legible even when working directly in the sun. So some flaws aside, the hardware did its job. But changing the OS all the time was frustrating in the long run. After a lot of discussions we consequently opted for a radical system change, and so our studio became fully Xed. At the moment of decision, nobody could foresee the consequences, though…
Excerpt: …Cubase behaves very unstable on Mac. The program quits for no reason (unlike Reason) – and it can do so any time. To make a long story short, we are looking into buying Logic now… Many plug-ins were never written for the Mac, so go, get some new ones. One unwanted consequence of that is a lacking compatibility to older projects of course. Etc., etc., etc….

So yeah, time is relative – particularly in relation to the desired results. Since we really, really liked the hardware – and some of the charms Mac OS X has to offer - we had a lot of patience with the Mac and even enjoyed problem solving for some time. But after a while it sucked big time, bottom line being that with a Windows notebook we had spent much more time making music instead of finding out, that Windows on a Mac via Bootcamp is just some kind of a half heartedly implemented compromise. So the only USP of the Mac stays its hardware. And even that is not fully true music wise.

Our résumé: think more than twice before you consider a switch from Windows to Mac in your studio because Bootcamp is out there. Particularly if the only reason you want to change for is the legibility on the keyboard….

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With the arrival of the Intel platform plus Bootcamp, the time finally seemed to be ripe for THAT switch. XP was aging, Vista a pain in tha a**, and very little decent and stylish PC notebooks on the horizon. Unfortunately, time becomes a black hole in the process, and loads of unexpected difficulties arise. So just before you are about to realize that your girlfriend is gone (bad) and your fridge is empty (worse) you can rightly state: “switch carried out, all machines ready to fire”. But by then, the next generation of MacBook Pros has arrived… But lets start from the very beginning.

It was a thrilling notion on one of the first warm spring days last year, me using a notebook as my principal machine again. The power of most laptops being completely adequate today, the first choice was a Sony to begin with. The design, well, slightly organic, but somehow stylish enough. Plus the hardware insight was top for early 2007, a 200 GB disc, 2x 1024 MB RAM, plus a reeeally bright display.

But a “ready for the coffeehouse” batch doesn’t mean it can live up to the necessities of studio work. The reflective display design did indeed reflect all the other LEDs etc. in our otherwise rather dark studio atmo plus the 1280 x 800 pixel resolution is just not enough for 15,4’’ screen – certainly it’s not PRO. But that wasn’t enough to make me seriously think about a change. The thing that really mattered was the keyboard. The letters on the keys completely zoomed out in our studio because of the light grey keys with WHITE lettering on it. That could already become a problem on a normal grey day – well designed, Sony. So that was how it actually started. And after a lot of research it just had to be a MacBook Pro, since at the time being that seemed to be the ultimate hardware. And why not striving for the best - as we do with our music…?
On another beautiful day this wondrous thingy finally lay in front of me, a Core Duo first generation MacBook Pro. The design, plus the look and feel made me and zu Fuss almost bow in respect. What a simple yet refined elegance. But alas, the joy didn’t last long…

Second part coming soon

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