Label of the Month: Running Back

Photos by: Noukie
 

Running Back began as a lark. Gerd Janson, then a university student on break, decided to try something out. He'd been spending a lot of time at Wild Pitch club in Frankfurt, getting more and more into house and disco. Already a bit of an overachiever at that young age, he'd been working as a music journalist alongside his studies and had built up a decent rolodex of contacts. 

His friend, Thorsten Scheu, had experience working at two regional institutions: the labels Playhouse and Force Inc. The two of them figured, why not? Without really having any clue what they were doing, they founded Running Back. That first year, the label released precisely one record: Inner Love (Give It Up) by Scheu, under the name Second Life. 

Nearly 25 years later, that half-baked idea has grown into a proper institution, something bigger and more complex than what most people mean when they say "record label." Running Back has released hundreds of records, including era-defining EPs like Todd Terje's Ragysh and headsy favorites from Leon Vynehall, Roman Flügel, Theo Parrish, Move D, KiNK and many more. But that's only one arm of the operation. 

Running Back is the nucleus of a family of labels, distributing records and managing releases for, among others, International Feel, Sister Midnight (Roman Flügel's label), Sofia Records (KiNK's label) and Acid Test, the label run by Oliver Bristow, Running Back's label manager and Janson's right hand man. Even as it continues to expand, the whole thing remains a surprisingly DIY operation, run by a crew of full time staff and a cast of freelancers out of what Janson calls an "office/warehouse" between Frankfurt and Heidelberg. 

Photo of Oliver (bottom right) by: Rok Tržan
 

"Oliver is running the daily business," Janson told me last week. "I'm in my ivory tower, living the life of a professional party DJ. I could not do it without Oliver." 

Bristow smiled. "There is the rare occasion that Mr. Janson is packing records on his own," he said.

Janson looked a little hurt. "Not that rare!"

Oliver laughed. "OK," he said. "Gerd is often packing records, picking up everyone else's slack."

Janson sighed. "I guess I'm a workaholic." Surrounded by a formidable armada of keyboards, synths and drum machines in a sunlit studio, he leaned back in his chair and spooned his bowl of yogurt and apricots. "That's not even all of it," he said, as if even he found the scale of it all slightly ridiculous. "We have two cutting lathes upstairs. We got those during COVID. There was a shortage of cutting lathes, all these delays with the vinyl pressing plants, so we thought it would be a good idea. That's another project that's slowly bearing fruit." 

Even without these elaborate side hustles, Running Back is and always has been an extraordinarily prolific label, with impressively diverse output and a fiendishly high strike-rate. Last year alone they put out something like 20 records, ranging from club-ready house 12-inches to unusual projects like the phenomenal Marcel Dettmann - Edits+Cuts, a collection of private edits the Berghain resident had made for himself over the last 20-odd years.

Edits+Cuts is a good example of Running Back's special sauce. On a simple level, it's just a killer record, a treasure trove for DJs especially. But there's something deeper going on here, too. We all know big DJs have private remixes that never get released, made just for themselves and maybe a few friends. There's just something cool about getting 19 of them at once from a guy like Dettmann, almost like he shared a private Dropbox folder with you. All the better if there's one or two you heard years earlier and always wondered about (I know I'm not alone in feeling that way about his edit of Junior Boys' "Work"). Also worth considering that many listeners, especially younger fans from outside Germany, underestimate the influence of synth pop, EBM and kosmische music on techno. Edits+Cuts documents that connection and breathes new life into it.

The multiple levels within a release like this are no accident. Janson says he's never had a business plan, for the label or for himself. But he does think very closely – philosophically, even – about the larger purpose of having a record label at all, and how he can use Running Back to make the most valuable contribution possible. 

"There's a bigger discussion about if one still needs record labels at all," he said. "The old transmitter model, sender/receiver, where the label connected the artist and consumer, that's all changed. Today artists can supply their music immediately, without having someone else telling them what to do. This renders the label a bit pointless, really. So, for the label to justify its existence, you need to do something more than just feed records to DJs. More than just releasing 12-inches to keep the DJ boat afloat."

Probably the best example of this approach is Tony Humphries' Running Back Mastermix: Kiss FM Zanzibar Years, a mix from this year that may be Running Back's crowning achievement so far. Not satisfied with being a basically flawless house and disco party mix by one of the best to ever do it, Mastermix is a historical document, a portal to a time and place few of us got to experience firsthand. Maybe this is Janson's old instinct as a journalist creeping into his role as a label curator. In any case, Mastermix brings to life a bygone moment in dance music history in a way a magazine article or documentary never could. Put it on, close your eyes, and you can imagine what it sounded like on the dance floor at the legendary Club Zanzibar in 1983. 

Why don't more labels do stuff like this? Well, beyond basic lack of imagination, one simple reason is that it's an absolutely insane amount of work to pull this kind of thing off. Securing the legal rights to re-release dozens of records from 20, 30 or 40 years ago is, to put it lightly, a process. This made Mastermix something of a Sisyphean task for Running Back.

"That was heavy lifting," Janson said. "Oliver might have nightmares from all the licensing and paperwork he had to do. It took a long, long time. I can't say for how long, because I'm a DJ, and for DJs time is a fluid thing."

Oliver laughed. "At least four years." (He wasn't joking.)

Both Janson and Bristow seem to happily accept that what they do should be hard work. Maybe, on some level, they enjoy the slog. For Janson, these sometimes Herculean efforts are fueled by a combination of the need to elevate the basic purpose of a record label and a much simpler urge: to make stuff he thinks is cool. 

"I used to study history," he said. "I'm a music journalist. I'm a fanboy. I do most of it for myself, releasing what I would have liked to have as a record buyer or a fan or a collector. Also, maybe I have a bad conscience about being a professional tech house DJ, so I try to even it out with these big ambitious projects."

Janson's love for uncomplicated bangers is as strong as it's ever been, as evidenced by his party-rocking DJ sets and the steady output of club EPs on Running Back. But he also envisions the label as a way to pay homage to the best parts of dance music history, the clubs, scenes and especially the artists that inspired him – an ethos he compares to the reissue label Numero Group. 

"We try to do that as much as we can, to the best of our abilities," he said. After a moment, he added, with a barely perceptible smile, "...while releasing Boys Noize 12-inches in between." 

Listen to Running Back's 'Label of the Month' chart below: