Feature: Efdemin breaks his silence

Feature: Efdemin breaks his silence

20 November, 2008 | 4.03AM

• Written by: svnvt
• Filed under: Music News: curle recordings, efdemin

Patience is a virtue, but often in electronic music when artists hit the big time and record label offers come flooding in they take the money and ride the hype wave until the end.

Not Efdemin. Since his self-titled debut album blew up last year (it was voted one of the finest albums of 2007), we haven’t heard a bleep or a beat of original material from Phillip Sollmann for nearly 18 months.

Efdemin finally decided to break his silence two weeks ago with a new EP ‘America/The Pulse’ on Belgian label Curle Recordings, and quickly followed up with his debut mix album ‘Carry On - Pretend We Are Not In The Room’ on the same label.

Both releases see Efdemin back at the top of his game, so Beatportal sent Sven von Thülen to Berlin to find out where Efdemin has been hiding.

Do you know the ‘Carry On’ movies?

No, never heard of them.

It’s a series of British comedy films from the 1950s and ‘60s that were pretty low budget and sexually crude. They had titles like ‘Carry On, Don’t Lose Your Head’ or ‘Carry On, Follow That Camel’.

Really? I didn’t know about them, I have to check them out [laughs]. The title of my mix CD has nothing to do with anything like that.

It was more like that I had only about 10 minutes left to come up with a title for the CD, and I was searching the internet for synonyms of words I like. ‘Proceed’ is a word I really like and one synonym for it was ‘carry on’. So that’s how I came up with the first part of the title. The second part then came rather quick. I like it, when the meaning of something is not quite clear and when there are many possible interpretations.

The album was supposed to come out in October. What happened?

I had to do the whole thing again because I wasn’t happy with the first mix. It had a completely different tracklisting. I had 40 licensed tracks to choose from and to be honest I wanted to license even more.

I was a real pain in the ass for the boys at Curle. When they asked me to do a mix CD I agreed under one condition: that I could have a big reservoir of tracks to choose from.

It’s my first commercial mix CD and I didn’t really know where to take it musically at first. So I asked for a whole range of tracks. A lot of techno and more abstract things as well.

After finishing the first version to meet the deadline I wasn’t really happy with it. So I called Curle up and asked for another two weeks and sat down again and started from scratch.

I recorded the final mix maybe 20 times, until I was completely confident with it. Now that the CD is finally being released, I can’t play the tracks that are on it out anymore - I’ve spent way too much time with them [laughs].

Some of the them are really important for me personally though, like the first one from Pulsinger & Tunakan and the last one from Photek.

They both came out in 1996, the year I finally fell for techno and it’s successors like drum & bass.

‘T’ Raenon’ is the perfect bridge between drum & bass and dub techno which is one of my main influences, although I am not really buying much of the new dub techno stuff that is coming out at the moment.

I have so much of it at home already and you can’t really play it out. Dub techno calls for a special crowd and you need time, which is the biggest problem when you start to travel a lot as a DJ.

Are you referring to the average set time of two hours you have in most clubs?

Yes. The peak time is a bitch. For me, that’s the most uninteresting part of the night.

Don’t get me wrong, of course it can be a hell of a lot of fun. But if you have only two hours to play, you end up hesitating to play deeper tracks and I love to play deep tracks.

The best time for that is usually at the beginning or after the peak time when you can play more musical and erratic stuff. I love that!.

When we had our Dial Records night at the Pudel club in Hamburg I always played the warm-up and I loved it because I could play all these great deep and musical tracks. I do miss that sometimes.

To be honest, it took me the whole year to adjust to this new situation and feel comfortable with what I play. I am very happy that we now have a bi-monthly Dial night at Panorama Bar.

It’s the perfect club for me, which allows me to play anything I want. That’s all I want. Well, a residency somewhere outside Berlin would be nice, too. But I am still kinda new in the game, so who knows what’s gonna happen.

Is your new album going to happen soon?

I don’t know. I took the whole of January off to concentrate on making music but I am not sure if I will really finish an album. We will see.

Right now I have the problem that I don’t finish anything because I am traveling so much. Every time I get back into the studio, I start something new because I don’t really get into the stuff I made last time I was in there. It’s a vicious cycle.

I need so much time and peace to make music, it’s unbelievable. My old studio was perfect for that. I need it back.

What was so special about it?

It was so beautiful with a window and a garden outside. The house, which held the studio, was completely empty so it was nice and quiet. But unfortunately it has been sold now.

My new studio is okay as well but it’s quite cold in there because we don’t really have central heating. And it’s also rather small.

What are the perfect conditions for you to produce an album?

The most important thing is that I don’t travel. Working on my last album I usually hung out the whole day with friends, listening to music, drinking coffee, taking walks through the city, and then, late in the evening, I would start to make music and stay in the studio until eight o’clock in the morning. I repeated that routine pretty much for two months. It was great.

A friend and I used to run an illegal restaurant in the same building as my old studio and after we closed it, we had a few bags full of change lying around in my studio.

I pretty much lived off of that change while I produced my first album. When it was finished all the money was gone too.

I think the new album, whenever it’s going to be released, will be very different from my first one. For the first album I really wrapped my head around my main influences - classic US house for instance.

The last remixes I made got a lot more abstract. I don’t really want to repeat myself. Anything can happen. It’s exciting.

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