Album of the Week: Emika, Ostgut Ton and the sound of Berghain

Album of the Week: Emika, Ostgut Ton and the sound of Berghain

12 November, 2010 | 9.28AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: album of the week, berghain, emika, ostgut ton, panorama bar

It all began, as so many things do, one Sunday afternoon at Berghain.

Emika—a British producer signed to Ninja Tune, a resident of Berlin, and a die-hard fan of the iconic club—had a flash of inspiration when she heard the flick of the faders on the lighting desk during a breakdown in the DJ’s set. What if she recorded the sounds of the space itself—its concrete walls, its looming expanse, its metal trim—and gave them back to the residents to make music with?

The idea finally came to its full fruition this week with the release of Fünf, the fifth-annivesary compilation from Ostgut Ton, Berghain’s in-house label. Residents and friends of the club (including Marcel Dettmann, Shed, Steffi, Nick Hoppner, Ryan Elliott, Prosumer, Dinky, Soundstream, Cassy, Ben Klock, Luke Slater, and Margaret Dygas, among others) have taken Emika’s sound set and turned her site-specific audio back into powerful, sometimes pummeling techno and house. The feedback loop is more than a fitting tribute to the space itself; it’s a testament to the creativity of the whole Ostgut team, a reminder that creativity needn’t be left at the coat check.

We spoke to Emika to find out more about the project; read on for a fascinating account of sound, space, and inspiration.

Emika, “Cooling Room”

How did the project come together?

I’ve been going to Berghain since I first arrived in Berlin three years ago, and I’ve been very inspired by the DJ sets and the music they produce. I was just there one day, and Nick Höppner was DJing, doing some kind of sophisticated breakdown. You could hear the party and the lights above moving, and I could hear the switches on the light-rig desk, and I started thinking, there’s so much sound here that you never hear. I thought it would be interesting to record those sounds and then give them to the artists and see what happened. So I started as a fan, I guess.

So then you suggested the project to Nick?

Yeah, I went to dinner and told him about my idea, and I thought he’d say, “Yeah, we did that five years ago,” but instead he said, “Great! We can do it for the compilation.” It was just a drunk idea—I’m always there, creating melodies over the beats to go home and write, and it’s kind of where I go to just think and come up with ideas.

Do you go every weekend?

Yeah. [Laughs]

What’s your favorite time of the night or day there?

Sunday from 6am to 6pm in Berghain, and sometimes in Panorama Bar when I want a little break.

Marcel Dettmann, “Sourcer”

How did you do the actual recording?

I had my laptop and a digital recorder and about 20 different microphones. I’ve never done anything like that before, and it was really a case of trial and error—find a sound source, record it, listen back. If it didn’t sound good, try a different mic, try a different mic, try a different mic…

I really wanted to capture everything as it sounded there. But then there were some sounds which were really quiet, and you constantly had the big reverb, and it was a little bit too much, I was thinking, for people who want to make house music, who don’t want this big sound.

I tried not to have a concept; I tried to just listen to a lot of the music that the residents produce and then find imitations of sounds they use in the space, so that I could form a library. I guess working at Native Instruments has me in that mindset of wanting to put a good product together—you want people to open it and just be like, “Wow, let’s make music.”

Do you create sounds for Native Instruments as well?

Yeah, I work as a sound designer. We’re always trying to think of the customer and the music that can be made from what we’re doing. People always ask me if I had a big concept for this project, and I didn’t, really. I studied sound art at university for four years, and I got really sick of concepts. I loved the concepts, but I’d listen to the music and be really disappointed, so I learned from that—to grab an idea and then just work. I didn’t want to sit at home and conceptualize, so I just got my hands on as many microphones as possible and just kept working until I felt it was ready to give to everybody.

I tried making loops myself and I included those, to give people a head start in case they weren’t sure what to do. I met with all of the artists in Berghain and I played all the sounds on the Maschine, triggering all of them so they would have some idea of how it sounded—

And how it would sound in the space, right?

Yeah. They were all really speechless, basically. So I handed all the sounds over, and then I didn’t really hear from anyone and felt quite uncomfortable going there, because suddenly I was like this girl that was like, “Hi! I want to be friends with you and make music with you!” I’m an outsider, and everyone kind of wants to get involved in the club and the scene, and I got very paranoid about people misunderstanding my intentions. I call myself a sound designer, and I studied, but I didn’t really feel like I could wear that title because it was all theoretical.

I guess half of it was wanting to do something as a fan, because they have inspired my music so much, and the other half was wanting to see, can I actually do this kind of work? Because maybe no music would have happened, or none of them would have liked it, or maybe the recordings would have been rubbish or my editing would have been redundant in some way. A lot of it was to test myself.

Can you go into more detail about what you recorded? I know there are some slamming doors and things like that. Was it mainly an issue of “active” sounds, like things you were striking? Or was there ambient noise as well, like just room tone?

That’s an interesting question. That was a big dilemma I had: if I do this [hits table], then that’s me making the sound, it’s not really the space. So half of the library is me triggering sounds, so like in the cloakroom, there are these things that the jackets hang on, and they all swing back and forth. There’s a girl who works there, and she was imitating putting coats up and I was just capturing that.

They have lots of tools there, so I took the tool kits and I was hitting stuff, and I made a specific percussion library. And then other times I was just recording the atmosphere. It changes with the weather outside, so if it was windy or raining… I started in the summer and it got cooler into the autumn, and the atmosphere changed.

I put contact microphones on a lot of things when parties were happening. There’s a big mirror backstage which vibrates, and for some reason they have loads of glasses stored backstage, so I had microphones on all the glasses and recorded these really nice resonances from glass and from the mirrors.

Then I also played the recordings through the PA and recorded them again, so they had the sound of the space, amplified. I also just recorded the mixer—like, you can just make noise, using the PA, using inputs, rewiring things badly and stuff. So I thought for the really gritty electronic stuff, you can get it from the big PA.

I also made impulse responses, so that if people wanted to use synths, they could put “the sound of Panorama Bar” on their synths…

Shed, “Boom Room”

Could you explain a little about what an impulse response is, for those of us who don’t know?

Yeah, sure. It’s really complicated, and something that I don’t fully understand. I just know that you can do it and I have some experience doing it at university. But there are people that do that as their job for their whole lives, so it’s a real science.

I tried with a gunshot and also with frequency sweeps. If you play a sweep covering all the frequencies, beyond the ones audible to us, in theory, it makes the space resonate, and then you capture the space resonating. You can put that into various software plugins, and that translates it into an algorithm of space. Then you can take an image of that and put it onto other sounds.

So basically it tells you what kind of delay there is in the room, and the frequency falloff, that then can be mapped onto other sounds virtually.

Yeah. There’s a lot of programs that convert it for you. Depending upon the kind of impulse response, it depends on the algorithm that’s created, so if here’s a lot of really low frequencies, that’s going to influence the algorithm so when you put that reverb on a different sound, it’s going to enhance all the low frequencies of that sound, so your brain’s like, “Wow, that’s a really big, deep space.” It’s just a case of imitating and imaging.

You basically have a gunshot or a frequency sweep, and—if you can picture music being played loud in the club, and it’s suddenly turned down, there’s that moment after which is not really audible, it’s kind of felt. It’s about capturing that, and you have to cut the gunshot out or the frequency out, and you’re just left with the decay of the big sound.

It’s one thing I’d like to go back and do again with a proper team and proper microphones, because it was guesswork. [Laughs] I just made the loudest sound possible and recorded the most dramatic decay. But it’s not very realistic. I’d like to get an impulse response made that’s just of the space, rather than the effect of a sound in that space, something that’s less dramatic.

When you play back the sounds on the PA, so you have the resonance of the room being played back in the room itself, does that have strange acoustic qualities?

Yeah, it does. Any natural resonance, like bass tones, gets multiplied. So they become louder. Every time you record it and play it back, it becomes more present. It would get to a point where it gets degraded and it’s all distortion. Sometimes it sounds great, and sometimes it’s totally unusable.

Like Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room.”

Yeah, exactly! Oh, I forgot about him. He’s great! Back at uni, I studied people like him—I have all these ideas and I know this stuff is achievable, but I wasn’t really sure I could do any of it myself, so I just brought a load of microphones and had some people from Native to help me. We were there Monday to Friday for a couple of weeks, and Saturday nights for parties, just experimenting, really.

Is Native Instruments going to offer an Ostgut Ton sample pack?

Some people in the company have asked me, but I wouldn’t like that. Being a fan, I intended it to be for the residents there. I really made it for them; I didn’t make it for the consumer market. I would personally like it to stay just for the people I made it for.

However, we’ve had so many nice mails from fans, people that can’t come to the club or live in another country, people that genuinely want to hear how it sounds. So I need to speak to everyone at Ostgut; maybe we could put together a smaller collection. There are thousands of samples, so maybe put together 50 or 100 for people to hear, because we’ve been getting loads of requests for them.

I never thought it would get to be good enough for everyone to make music with. Then there was the question of, will everyone make good music with it? Then there was the question of, have we got the money and the means to even release this, and now it’s got to the fan stage. So we kind of have to think on our feet again.

Dinky, “Twelve to Four”

What were your reactions when you finally heard the finished music?

I was totally amazed. It’s like, the proof is in the pudding, I guess—I felt like I did a good job, people managed to make music, the sounds obviously inspired people. I was a little bit nervous that everyone would do really experimental sound art, because they could, because it invited that kind of response. But everyone took the sounds and did exactly what they wanted, which is to make dance music—make people dance, have a good party. The thing that surprised me the most is how original every track is.

When I was in the studio with Nick, and we listened to all the tracks, I could almost pinpoint exactly which track was from which artist. For me, that just highlights how special Ostgut Ton is. They don’t have a strategy, they don’t do A&R; none of that happens there. They’re just grown-up people making music. No one is guided, and that’s what surprised me the most—how inspired everyone’s music is. You can basically start with whatever sounds you like, and it’s all about what you want to make for people to hear. It showed me even more how creative and unique Ostgut is.

I’ve been at uni where we would all have to record stuff and make music, and we’d come back to the lesson a few weeks later, and everyone sounds the same. You have to write a big essay, and the essays are very interesting, but it all sounds the same. So I was surprised to have such a diverse range of music come back. That’s when it got really exciting, when it was clear that it was going to be an interesting compilation, not just another remix compilation.

You have your own track on there, too.

Yeah! That was so hard, that was like the 12th track that I tried. For me, it was enough to just listen to the sounds. Because I spent so much time there, I really couldn’t switch into producer mode and make music with them myself. I didn’t know what effects to use or how to edit them, and it felt wrong taking a sound from the cloakroom and a sound from Panorama Bar and putting them together. Also, I don’t make dance music. I didn’t want to put myself on stage with them, I just wanted to give them sounds.

But Nick and I discussed that it would be nice to have an intro track that doesn’t use a lot of effects, and that can give people an idea of how everything sounded. So the sounds in my track don’t have any post-production on them. Just raw audio. I think there’s maybe one delay. But that just got mastered, I didn’t compress EQ or anything. All the bass in there is natural bass that I found. I didn’t really have a musical ambition, and then Nick said, “Come on"… And the whole thing turned into seven vinyls.

It’s such a fitting concept, because so often you hear people describing Berghain-style music in terms of the space itself—the concrete, metal, the architecture.

That’s what I’d heard as well, from reading Marcel Dettman and Ben Klock interviews and what they said about the club, that obviously triggered some inspiration with me. There’s so many records that I’d hear there, write down what they were, buy them on Beatport and listen to them at home, and think, this is not the same!

That’s when I realized this space must really influence its people. When they’ve been DJing for 12 hours and they go home to make music, they’ve kind of got this impression in their head. That in itself is a really interesting feedback cycle. I just thought it would be cool if industrial techno was made with the industrial environment that they live in.

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