Meeting…disco flag bearers Permanent Vacation

Meeting…disco flag bearers Permanent Vacation

14 May, 2009 | 11.10AM

• Written by: Jack Spontan
• Filed under: Music News: aeroplane, disco, permanent vacation, sally shapiro, tensnake, todd terje

Contrary to what their label name might well suggest, Tom Bioly and Benjamin Frölich are far from being a couple of layabouts enjoying a long holiday.

As commanders in chief, A&R execs, CEOs, WTFs, OMGs, LOLs, and so on and so forth, of Munich-based label, Permanent Vacation, they have championed the renaissance of the disco genre and led the way, hips-shaking, hands-clapping, in the fight against the mope-around minimal movement.

To say the rise of Permanent Vacation has been meteoric would not be far off the mark. 

It was only back in 2006 that Bioly and Frölich’s lovechild was first conceived. Yet their very first label anthology, ‘Selected Label Works N°1’, boasts a wealth of contemporary classics from the likes of Todd Terje, Tensnake, Sally Shapiro and Aeroplane which proves that the label has massive pulling, as well as staying, power.

We caught up with the Bavarian boys to talk about, amongst other things, angels wearing Brazilian bikinis. It was cosmic…

Congratulations on a mightily hearty first compilation! You could be forgiven for thinking that this was an anthology of tracks collected over many years of toil, yet Permanent Vacation is only three years young. How have you managed to achieve such consistent quality in such little time?

Thank you very much! Glad you like it. Yes indeed, it is a lot of music we collected since our beginning in 2006.

We actually realized this at the point where we started working on the compilation. We couldn’t put everything on it and we didn’t want to do a “best of” kind of thing, so we came up with the “selected label works” idea, by which we compiled our vinyl releases from the last year and some exclusive stuff on a CD.

It’s supposed to be a series and it’s our ambition to release one compilation a year in the future.

I guess there is no real secret about the quality of our releases. We are just very selective and, of course, we have to really like the music and. last but not least, the tracks have to fit the style of the label.

After the Antena release and the success of the Joakim remix and the Kathy Diamond album, which was produced by Maurice Fulton, we were in the lucky position that more and more people wanted to work with us. We got offered a lot of cool music and the producers we asked for remixes all delivered excellent work. So a big cheers them!

Please tell us a bit about your background in music, and how Permanent Vacation came into being.

Permanent Vacation was a vocation: Angels wearing Brazilian bikinis with wings shimmering like mirror balls appeared to Tom and me one night. They whispered with cosmic voices into our ears that time had come to spread rich sounds if not to humankind, at least to a crowd of music lovers and imaginative revellers. This is the truth and nothing but the truth.

So, don’t believe this myth:

Tom was working at compost records for five years and so he had a lot of knowledge about the music industry and he knew what it takes to start a label.

Benji had a record store for six years (it closed it at the end of last year) and had been DJing and organizing parties in Munich for quite some time.

Tom and Benji met in his record shop and soon became friends and noticed that they had a very similar taste in music. They both had the idea of starting a record label separately, but once they got to know each other better it felt very naturally to do it together.

Much of the music you release strikes me on one hand to be varied and diverse, yet on the other, to share a certain vision and ethos. Would you agree? If so, what is the ethos behind PV?

Yes, I absolutely agree - at least I hope that’s the way things are. We always try to keep things open and exciting and we don’t want to repeat ourselves. Although we have signed a lot of artists from all over the world, who all feature their individual style of music, we believe there is a certain vibe or feeling to their music that glues everything together, which creates a more or less homogenous picture for our listeners.

Sometimes when we receive a demo and I am not quite sure about it, I let my girlfriend listen to it and she always senses, if a track matches the permanent vacation spirit. So if you want to release on PV you have to convince her ;-)

Much has been made of Berlin’s reputation in terms of electronic music, however recently other German cities such as Hamburg and Frankfurt are attracting growing attention for their respective scenes. You yourselves are based in Munich and your melodic spin on dance music couldn’t be further from the monolithic techno booming out of the capital.  Do you feel the tide is turning perhaps? Is there a sense of musical rivalry between these cities?

We believe that there always existed a very big diversity in Germany’s dance music scene and every city has always featured a certain sound that reflects the image of the city.

Perhaps, this is a result of Germany’s federal structure: before the Berlin wall came down there was not really a big capital city like Paris or London and so every city had the chance to develop its own scene.

Since that time, Berlin has been becoming more and more popular with musicians and artists from all over the world that has changed it a little bit. But it still has an effect on the music in which city you grew up whether it’s conscious or subconscious. I guess if we started our label in Berlin it would have sounded very different.

On the other hand with the internet and stuff things have become much more democratic and it’s not that important anymore where you are from.

What do you make of all the fuss being made about nu-disco currently? Do you reckon it’s a flash-in-the-pan, or does it run deeper than that – perhaps a neo-classical acknowledgement of what’s come before?

Well, hard to say really. In the beginning everything was very exciting fresh and new and recently there is a bit of a backlash, but I guess that is the normal thing with any hype. Like in any other scene there are very few people and producers, who deliver constant quality and our goal with the label is to release music that lasts longer than two weeks and so we try to concentrate on that

What does the future hold in store for Permanent Vacation? What tricks do you have up your sleeve?

We have a lots of stuff coming up. There’s a new Sally Shapiro album waiting in line, a second Space Oddities compilation, our first soundtrack from a horror movie called Gutterballs, new material and remixes from Kathy Diamond, Tensnake, In Flagranti, Jackpot, Adonis, Dolle Jolle and an EP from our latest signing Candy Blasta, which will be the first band featured on permanent vaction.

We also would like to go crazy on merchandising. Remember the angels in the Brazilian bikinis? They also inspired us to bring out a permanent vacation beach collection.

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