Modeselektor ‘Happy Birthday’: Album of the Week

Modeselektor ‘Happy Birthday’: Album of the Week

21 September, 2007 | 2.50AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News:

Modeselektor are back with a brilliant new album on Bpitch Control. ‘Happy Birthday’ threatens to unleash the German duo on the mainstream thanks to its raw urban beats, gritty incendiary lyrics and stunning musical parts. Not to mention the album’s bizarre artwork. 

Beatportal is currently running a competition to find the best imitation artwork, check out the entries so far by clicking ‘View Gallery’ above.

We caught up with Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary in Berlin to find out more about their album and the technical tricks that helped produce it.

‘Happy Birthday’ is quite different to everything you’ve released before. How has Modeselektor changed in the last two years?

We have been on tour for the last two years almost constantly.

This, in our opinion, changes our sound automatically due to new experiences and new influences.

And the album is probably also quite different because we produced it in one run. We finished it in only a couple of months.

That’s surprising considering the fact the album is so diverse. What’s next classical music?

Maybe, who knows?! But we actually already did take a look at Bach. World music is a big field and it’s very interesting.

‘Happy Birthday’ also features lots of hip hop and grime which is something we will be exploring further in the future.

When you made the album, did you look at it as one record or as separate tracks?

Both. But in the first place we looked at it as separate tracks.

A track builds up like a sculpture or a picture.

You work on it, change details until you like it enough.

In the end, all the tracks came together somehow anyway and we turned into an album.

‘Happy Birthday’ is a unique piece of art that can satisfy listeners anywhere.

With some tracks we wanted to create a club feeling and they are therefore more dancefloor orientated, and then there are tracks that we used to tell a story.

Some of the stories were told by interesting collaborators - can you reveal a little about how each of them liked to work?

It was really interesting and inspiring to work with all these different artists.

Sometimes though we felt like we were taking care of a flee circus.

To work with Otto von Schirach was really cool - we got to know him last year at the Detroit Music Festival and had a lot of fun.

To work with Puppetmastaz has always been on our list.

Siriusmo, Apparat, Paul St. Hilaire and TTC are friends.

The Maximo Park hook up was fate really, a coincidental meeting. One of the guys from Maximo was wearing a Modeselektor shirt on a cover shot for NME magazine.

We contacted them and found out that they really liked our music.

We then asked them about a collaboration, met them at a gig in Berlin and set everything up. 

And, of course, to work with Thom Yorke is a great honour!

It still feels unreal though when we look at the credits on our album.

Modeselektor’s music always seems to have a dirty electro bassline – what equipment/software did you use to create the bassline on ‘The Black Block’?

We usually work on a track for such long periods so in the end we don’t know how the hell we made that bassline.

On ‘Black Block’ it’s a combination of a Korg MS-10 and a Moog filter.

Is the Korg MS-10 your favourite bit of studio equipment that you used on ‘Happy Birthday’?

Actually no, our favourite kit is a VST synth called Unique by Sugarbytes. It’s the best - thanks to the guys who programmed it.

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