Interview: Meeting Mannheim and Cecille’s Nick Curly

Interview: Meeting Mannheim and Cecille’s Nick Curly

27 April, 2009 | 3.05PM

• Written by: pollylavine
• Filed under: Music News: 8bit, nick curly

Three record labels have helped to put Mannheim on the house and techno map, and two of them are run by Nick Curly.

Curly’s Cecille and 8Bit imprints, along with Mannheim’s Oslo Records, are arguably responsible for kick starting the ‘new’ deep house movement that has swept clubland in the last 18 months.

With an emphasis on percussion and organic drums, the rolling house music that the three labels have released has bridged the house and techno divide in a way that has spoken to DJs across the entire spectrum.

Johnny D, SIS, Robert Dietz, Andomat 3000, Markus Fix, Livio & Roby, Audiofly - all of these artists have topped the club charts via Cecille and 8Bit.

Beatportal’s Polly Lavine met Nick Curly in Dublin to find out more the sound of Mannheim, the meteoric rise of his labels, and his studio set up.

Meeting Nick Curly

Nick Curly is spinning a set at ‘Night Flight’ in Dublin’s The Button Factory alongside Ray Okpara. Where Okpara loosens the crowd with a softer sound that is layered with vocals, Curly lifts them again with deep percussive-driven swathes of music that at times get tough. A guy on the floor says, “I can’t help but feel a little envious of Nick Curly, he’s good looking, runs one of the coolest labels in the world at the moment and he’s a good DJ!”

I ask the Night Flight promoters why they decided to book Curly and Cecille. “We’re just trying to bring good music into Dublin that’s not in the mainstream that we want people to hear. Cecille is gonna be all over the place in 2009 and Curly is one of a number of innovative producers that we’ve booked recently.”

Mannheim is the second largest city after Stuttgart in South Western Germany and apart from giving the world tennis star Steffi Graf it hasn’t really been on the map as a cultural powerhouse. But Cecille along with Oslo Records have garnered the city so much hype that its artists have been dubbed the creators of the “Mannheim sound” - and they’re being credited with the resurrection and renewed interest of deep house.

Given that both labels only started life in 2007, the ferocity that the dance music community has embraced them is astounding. What is fascinating about the meteoric rise of Cecille, 8Bit and Oslo is that they’re based in Mannheim. As Curly explains, “A secret is we don’t really have any good clubs in the town and there’s not really a big scene for our music. For sure we have the labels Oslo, Cecille and 8Bit and there is the Time Warp festival but there is not a really big club scene. We’re all pretty sad about that.”

Curly confesses that he’s something of a ‘workaholic’, which appears to be one of the main drivers behind the 2008 success of 8Bit and Cecille. After 10 years working in the car industry for Chrysler Daimler, Curly realised after six that he wanted to pursue music and went part-time in his job. As he puts it, “I had more time for my music”.

During those four years he took residencies as a DJ in Soho Club in Mannheim and The Loft Club in Ludwigshafen and began producing records with his studio partner and 8Bit label partner Pit Waldman aka DJ Gorge.

It was in 2007 though when he launched Cecille with close friend Marc S of Intergroove Distribution that things really took off for Nick Curly. 

You began your career quite young. Why do you think the hype only really kicked off around you since 2007?

I started playing in ‘Vibration’ at 17. My first records I bought at 15. The main hype began with the first releases in 2007 on Cecille when I began to produce. And 2008 was a really good year for me, as in only one year the label became so huge. It was really amazing for us, I’ve also had some good productions and some good releases on my other label 8Bit.

So many clubs, so many different crowds – how do you tailor your sets?
I play different sets every night but I do have some tracks in my set that I’m playing at nearly every night. It depends on the crowd, the club and the most important thing, the soundsystem. All the tracks that the DJs play are produced on good systems in studios and on a bad soundsystem you can’t hear the full power of a track.

What do you use in the DJ booth?
I use the Redsound Soundbite Pro Looplayer. I only need a loop player and a good mixer, Pioneer or Allen & Heath. I think the effects on these mixers are okay and sometimes I use the filter or the delay effects on them.

What’s your take on Serato, Traktor and Ableton?
I don’t use any of them, I still play using vinyl and CDs. They’re good tools for DJs around the world in many countries who cannot buy vinyl. I’d recommend Traktor or Serato as the best tools for these people.

In the studio we work with Ableton and Cubase. We don’t use any other hardware or equipment.

What’s the future for vinyl now that Neuton & Amato are gone under?
In Germany there’s still a big vinyl market, so I think we are safe here for the next year or so, but I think in 10 years almost nobody will play vinyl. I’m still playing vinyl and I play CDs also.

I’ve heard that a lot of new labels are going to other distributors like Intergroove and Word and Sound. Both of these are big distributors in Germany.

Intergroove Germany is not going under yet. Sure, it is a hard time if a distributor closes and all the labels that worked with them have to find another distributor.

The problem is there are a lot of labels disappearing now because they haven’t found a replacement distributor.

What’s your studio set up like?
Sometimes we work with vocalists, on the first release on 8Bit a good friend of mine did the vocals on the Nick Curly track.

I always work with good friends in the studio: Pit, Gorge or Sebastian Flach. These guys are also very good musicians and can play a lot of instruments so sometimes we record live instruments in tracks.

I played keyboard for nine years but at the moment I don’t really use that skill.

You run two highly successful labels. How important do you think it is for producers to be ‘in control’ of their own label and nights?

It’s not really important. It can be good to have your own label, but it also takes lot of time and it is a lot of hard work to run a label

. If you don’t have one you have much more time for studio work.

What are you listening to at the moment that is in your sets?
Tracks by Romanian duo Livio and Roby. These are new artists on Cecille and I’m really into their sound.

What’s happening in 2009 for you?
I’m continuing to work on a project with Johnny D and Ray Okpara. It’s called ‘Rajo’ and we’ve been at it for the last 10 years.

I’m looking forward to everything new in 2009. I’m also interested in seeing Japan and Australia.

• (1) Comments
• (2527) Views
• Check out Nick Curly on Beatport