M.A.N.D.Y. and their Renaissance Mix Collection

M.A.N.D.Y. and their Renaissance Mix Collection

4 November, 2009 | 8.40AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: get physical, m.a.n.d.y., renaissance

Walter Merziger from Booka Shade bursts into the room interrupting an interview with M.A.N.D.Y. about their new mix compilation for Renaissance.

“Guys have you heard the final version of your CD yet?” he yells, as a few more Get Physical staff pile in behind him, sniggering in formation. “You have to hear it, it’s not right!”

Patrick from M.A.N.D.Y. grabs the CD from Walter’s hands, which has the same artwork as the other unopened CDs on the table in front of us, and sticks it into a nearby CD player.

There’s a deadly silence, as the player whirs into gear. “Eight tracks only, that’s not right!” says Patrick. He presses ‘play’.

Out blast a hideous Euro trance version of Nick Kamen’s ‘I Promise Myself’, a pop song from 1990 (watch the video on Youtube, and imagine the effect).

The five or so in the room howl with laughter, the kind of belly ache, tear streaming laughter reserved for only the funniest of mishaps. Patrick and Philipp (the other half of M.A.N.D.Y.), look genuinely shocked, as they try to understand the gravity of the situation.

Imagine a fan in New York or Tokyo buying M.A.N.D.Y.’s ‘The Mix Collection’, putting the mix on in their car ready for a triumphant cruise through the city’s circuit of cool, only for a Euro trance ballad to ruin their moment. “I swear, M.A.N.D.Y. are really good DJs from Berlin, I guess they’re just experimenting with their sound,” the driver would shout, as his friends abandoned his car for the very last time.

“Is this a joke?” says Patrick, as he dials Renaissance’s offices in the UK. After a few minutes of muffled conversation, Patrick snaps his phone shut.

“Oh dear. The mastering studio sent the wrong CD to the pressing plant, and they pressed this Euro trance album as our album by mistake. That’s the first run of a few thousand CDs...but they’re calling all the CDs back now,” he says, with a grin and a shrug of his shoulders.

All this, in the middle of an interview with M.A.N.D.Y.. But that is Philipp Jung and Patrick Bodmer - you never know what to expect from this pair of techno jokers. You ask for a photograph, and they climb a wall of vinyl, or mimic a huge painting of two wasted clubbers behind them.

In a few hours Philipp will jump on a plane heading for New York City because he’s moving there for a while. Goodbye Berlin.

“I want to take a few months off to do some production,” he says, “But of course I will still be flying around doing gigs, and I’ll come back to Europe for the festival season.”

“He’s leaving me,” blurts out Patrick, before he turns to Philipp and says, “But you’ll always be in my heart.”

You wouldn’t normally associate Renaissance and Get Physical’s M.A.N.D.Y. together.

“Renaissance obviously has very deep roots in the progressive house scene, but they wanted to do something a bit different and they flew to Berlin to meet us,” explains Philipp.

“That’s the thing with us - we’re always up for a challenge,” says Patrick. “We’ve been DJing for 14 years, and we’ve never been ones to stick to just our crowd. It’s much more challenging to play to an unknown dancefloor than at your own club night.”

Philipp continues, “It’s like when a football team goes and plays in Peru and it’s much harder because of the different temperature, humidity, and oxygen levels. You still have to play your game though, and represent yourself as best as you can.”

Total artist control helps, of course. Renaissance gave M.A.N.D.Y. the scope to do whatever they wanted with their double mix compilation.

“We did one CD aimed solely at home listening, but with M.A.N.D.Y. there has to be another, more club orientated side too,” says Philipp, of the second CD. “However, with the club mix, we made sure it could still be listened to at home and that’s part of the hard work that goes into all of our mix CDs.”

That includes 2006’s warmly received ‘At The Controls’ double compilation for Resist, 2007’s Fabric offering, as well as this year’s ‘Get Physical 7th Anniversary’ compilation - all were meticulously arranged in the studio.

As Philipp explains, “We spend shit loads of time doing a mix compilation. When we put together a mix, our main aim is for it to be able to be listened to over and over.

“That means we have to re-edit every single track, and spend many weeks refining each mix, into to the perfect arrangement.

“This is no promo bullshit. If you listen to our ‘Body Language’ CD or our ‘At The Controls’ mix, you can listen to them over and over again, without it getting boring.

“We spend so long programming a mix, that it even becomes almost like pop music. We cut out the intros and beats heavy sections, cut down the transitions and mixes, and make the whole thing much more musically tight.”

Patrick says, “It’s a music driven mix album, which is produced down to the smallest of details. We spent four weeks every single day in the studio working on the mix for Renaissance.”

There’s an abundance of DJ mix podcasts available for free online today, so does that make M.A.N.D.Y.’s job any harder, when compiling a mix which must adhere to the legalities of licensing?

“A professional mix compilation is very different from a podcast,” says Patrick. “A standard DJ mix is usually done in real time, using the latest hot tracks. But for a compilation, you must select music that doesn’t age, and then put it together in a way that can be listened to at home, again and again.

“The difference between a mix compilation and a standard DJ podcast, is like the difference between a film and flicking through endless TV channels. One is a piece of art, the other is quick and easy entertainment.”

For every compilation M.A.N.D.Y. sweat blood. They become monsters who can’t sleep, obsessed for weeks with one single mix.

“We said for the Renaissance one, ‘OK we’ll really only work on this as a day job’, but then you can never really control what happens.

“Sometimes you’ll work on it so much that you end up hating it and thinking it’s awful, or you love it too much and don’t want to stop working on it. Some days, we spent 20 hours on it in one go, refining it, making it better.”

Licensing problems didn’t help the shred of sanity that M.A.N.D.Y. do have.

“We couldn’t clear some tracks for it inevitably, and when one of those tracks is a key track, that screws up the whole mix, so you have to start all over again - I think we have about six versions of the Renaissance mix,” says Patrick.

“We tried to get a Simon & Garfunkel track, and also a track by The Cure but we couldn’t clear either. Even for tracks that we thought would be relatively simple to license because we knew the label owner, like an Emperor Machine track on DC Recordings for example, we couldn’t clear it.

“Although on the flip side, Carl Craig licensed us one of his tracks after just one email, so it’s the luck of the moment really. But that’s part of the long process behind a compilation.”

Philipp jokes, “Well, there is no M.A.N.D.Y. album yet, so at least we put a lot of effort into our mix compilations.”

The studio technique for ‘The Mix Collection’ was intensive. First the boys tried out different mixes in Traktor, practicing different versions of every mix.

“We had to get a feeling for the flow, and then once we had that done, we perfected it in Ableton Live, by doing re-edits of everything, cutting down every track, to make it all fit onto a CD,” says Philipp.

The result is a two-sided coin with perfectly round edges. The first mix offers 17 tracks of blissful electronica that segues into warm moments from Sebastien Tellier and Holge Zilske.

The second mix, cuts through an impressive 27 tracks of body rocking tech house, four-to-the-floor electronic house gems, and the odd quirky surprise from DJ Koze and Gang Gang Dance, all wrapped up in just 80 minutes.

“We could have kept going, but that’s one of the challenges of doing a mix for CD,” says Patrick. “You have to tell your story within 80 minutes.”

Let’s just hope for M.A.N.D.Y.’s sake, that a Euro trance album is not part of their story.

Key tracks in M.A.N.D.Y.’s Renaissance mix

Patrick and Philipp guide us through some of the key moments on their Renaissance mix.

CD 1

Holger Zilske ‘To Them To Me’

Holger Zilske is probably one of our favourite up and coming producers. He makes this amazing sci-fi music, that is minimalistic, but not minimal! I guess you could call it reduced sci-fi music.

It has some elements from minimal, but it’s full of soul and melody. Quite beautiful.

51 Days ‘Paper Moon’

51 Days did one of our all time favourite trancey house records, released on Touché Records. Our first ever release was on Touché.

We did a B side on a Booka Shade EP called ‘Holy’ under the name P. Young and DJ Pat Bo. We thought it sounded international!

Schneider TM & Kpt. Michi.gan ‘The Light 3000’

The original of this is from The Smiths. It’s an amazing track, that has been reworked into a cover version by Schneider.

CD 2

Kenny Larkin ‘Gimmie’

It was so important for us to start the club mix with Kenny Larkin. Our love for him goes way back - one of the first tracks I ever bought was made by Kenny Larkin.

His album ‘Keys, Strings, Tambourines’ from last year was brilliant, and full of amazing music. It’s very rare to have an old Detroit guy make an album today which is so relevant and good. We have the biggest love for Kenny, and to be honest, any track from that album would have worked.

Glimpse & Alex Jones ‘Cambria’

Glimpse is one of the producers of the moment, we think. He’s a London acid house originator now making totally Detroit sounds.

It’s quite funny, but he recently had an album ready to go and emailed us asking us if we wanted to release it on Get Physical, which we totally would have done. But we were on holiday, so he signed it to Crosstown Rebels instead. We’ll get him for the next one though.

Kenny Leaven ‘Odyssey’ (dOP Remix)

The dOP guys are really funny. One of them is the little brother of one of the Nôze guys. We really like their fun French approach to living.

It’s a very Bohemian style, but also classy, and that’s exactly how their music sounds. It’s sophisticated, but out of control.

Every week it seems, we get given another amazing Nôze remix.

Martin Buttrich ‘Stoned Autopilot’ (C2 Version) w/ Felix Da Housecat ‘Silver Screen’ (Shower Scene)

On the mix, we did a mash up of Carl Craig’s version of ‘Stoned Autopilot’ with Felix Da Housecat’s ‘Silver Screen’.

I met Felix on the plane once, and he was a very nice guy. He asked us if he could do a remix of ‘Oh Superman’, so as an exchange, we asked if we could do a remix of ‘Silver Screen’. Our mash up features the drums of Carl Craig with ‘Silver Screen’ over the top. Maybe we’ll release it as a bootleg one day.

‘Oh Superman’ was originally a bootleg, because in the beginning the label that Laurie Anderson was signed to wouldn’t license us the vocal. So we did it anyway.

Then one day, Laurie Anderson was sitting in a New York City restaurant with her husband Lou Reed, and a DJ played our version of ‘Oh Superman’. She asked him for the name of the artist who did it, and she tracked us down and said she liked it, and gave us permission to release it officially.

Dapayk Solo ‘Geheimtipp 01-B’

We’ve always liked Dapayk’s stuff, and we asked him for some unreleased cuts for possible inclusion on our mix album.

He gave us a bunch which had only be released on limited run vinyl, and one of them was ‘Geheimtipp’, which means, ‘secret tip’. It’s an amazing track!

Gang Gang Dance ‘Bebey’

Gang Gang Dance are one of the most hyped bands of the moment. They make these weirdo beats and strange vocals which sound very modern, yet completely global and chaotic. They seem to put every single type of genre into their tracks, and ‘Bebey’ is one of their best ones.

Dynamix II ‘Bass Generator’

‘Bass Generator’ is proper Miami bass music, a great electro tune from the early 90s. It’s pretty much where DJ T. and ourselves came from, with our DJing. We would have loved to do another 90 minutes of electro tracks like this after this point, but that’s another story.

DJ Hell ‘The DJ’ Feat. P Diddy (Radio Slave Remix) [Piano Acapella Edit]

Radio Slave’s remix of DJ Hell ‘The DJ’ is 28 minutes long, and it’s an amazing track with a Caged Baby piano part. We decided to end the mix with a joke, because on the track P Diddy talks about “how DJs should play the 20 minute version instead of cutting a track down to be a crowd pleaser”, so we cut it down to just 15 seconds. We’re not sure if P Diddy will be happy with that, but, oh well.

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