Lampé Refuses to Follow Trends and Finds Freedom Between Genres on Debut Album Passion

After hundreds of releases, years spent developing a sound that deliberately refuses to settle into one electronic music category, and countless hours testing his productions on dancefloors, Lampé has finally made his first album.

The Hamburg-based producer has been shaping the Lampé project since 2018, building a distinctive space somewhere between techno, minimal, progressive, melodic and psytechno. His prolific catalogue has regularly found its way into Beatport charts and Spotify editorial playlists, while support has come from artists including Joris Voorn, Township Rebellion, John 00 Fleming and Oliver Huntemann. Yet Passion, released through his own Alula Tunes, represents something different: eleven tracks conceived as a journey rather than another series of weapons for the dancefloor. 

In some ways, making an album is Lampé's response to the speed with which electronic music is now created, released and consumed. “The world is spinning faster and there are thousands of single tracks released every week, but many people don’t take the time to listen constant to something anymore,” he says. “When I was younger and the CD was fresh, I was listening and following the story of an album for several weeks while finding more and more specials in it.”

That experience stayed with him. Rather than trying to compete with the relentless churn of new releases, Passion asks its audience to slow down. “This was the idea behind the long player: calm down and follow a journey of an album that can be played on repeat.”

It is particularly significant coming from an artist whose catalogue is already enormous. But that productivity has also presented Lampé with a problem. His musical interests stretch considerably further than any single genre, while audiences inevitably develop expectations about what an established artist is supposed to sound like. “As I love to produce a lot of different styles, it was not easy to release some of the stuff that I really love,” he explains. “People would be confused why I’m releasing a beach house/downbeat song as a single, as they are used to other vibes.”

The album format removed those restrictions. “The album was the perfect platform for a continuous storytelling across genres and also a kind of valve to get into a fresh creative process. In my opinion an album is the perfect way to express yourself, as you don’t need to drop only dancefloor-banger.”

That freedom can be heard throughout Passion. The record moves between driving techno, hypnotic grooves and more melodic and emotional territory, reflecting the hybrid approach that has defined Lampé since the project's inception.  

The album itself, however, wasn't initially planned as an eleven-track statement. “When I came up with the idea for the album in March 2026, I already had five tracks that I knew would be perfect for this release,” Lampé says. “All the others came up by inspiration during the design of the flow.”

That process mirrors the way he has always produced. Lampé performs exclusively with his own music, meaning the feedback loop between booth and studio is unusually direct. A missing transition or change of energy during a weekend performance can become Monday morning's studio assignment. “When I play on festivals or in clubs there is quite often a moment when I think that I would love to have another track to make a transition or to raise to the next level,” he explains. “On Mondays, back in the studio, this is the mission to go.”

The seeds of Passion emerged during the previous winter, when Lampé found himself increasingly interested in music away from the harder end of the spectrum. “I was producing a lot more melodic and groovy stuff, as I was a bit bored of the hard beats going on everywhere recently,” he says. “Working on different genres is the way to stay creative and to not get lost in a loophole.”

Listening back through completed and unfinished material, he initially heard the foundations of an EP. “In one of the sessions I felt like this could be a five-track EP, so it extended to the album.”

The resulting record is structured in waves rather than according to genre. Opening with “My Love”, its first section builds towards “Physically” before the unusually titled “Cow da Welsh” provides an interlude. “Hold the Line” then begins another ascent through groovier minimal territory towards the album's melodic side, before “Footprint” and closing track “Beachtime”. 

“The first wave goes up to ‘Physically’ before ‘Cow da Welsh’ does the breakdown,” Lampé explains. “The second wave starts with groovy minimal ‘Hold the Line’ and leads to more melodic stuff before ‘Footprint’ sets a statement about human behaviour. ‘Beachtime’ is the calm down ending that flows back to the intro of ‘My Love’.”

“Cow da Welsh” also provides one of Passion's more playful moments. Its name is a phonetic play on the German word Kauderwelsch, meaning gibberish, and the track grew out of Lampé's frustration with the barrage of digital communication that has become part of everyday life. “Today everybody gets flooded with messages on various channels, email, SMS, WhatsApp, social media,” he says. “The latest trend is to send voice messages with three minutes and more. I don’t like listening to them and sometimes I ignore them. Why not have a short call instead? That’s way more social and personal instead of these sometimes cryptic messages with noise in the background.”

Then life provided the raw material. “While creating the interlude between the first and second part of the album many voice messages arrived and I was pretty annoyed by them, so the idea was born to use them.”

Those voices belong to friends including Fabio Fusco, Konfusia, Mark Dekoda and Diego Straube. Lampé adds with a laugh: “Sorry for sampling without rights-clearance.”

Beneath that humour sits a more fundamental philosophy. The album's title is no accident. Lampé summarises its ethos with the statement: “Art and Music should never be a competition, it should be your passion.” 

It's an outlook that runs counter to an industry increasingly governed by metrics, algorithms, visibility and the pressure to maintain constant output. “I always handle music as my hobby and I was never relying on that career,” Lampé says. “I always had another job, even at the times of my old Kularis-project. As soon you focus on music as a main job, creativity goes down and pressure grows.”

For Lampé, stepping away is preferable to manufacturing creativity simply because the machinery surrounding an artist demands another release. “Music is my love and when I don’t feel it, I’ll stay away from my studio or events for a while. You can’t force real creativity and you should not compare yourself to others, if you want to create something unique and do what you love.”

That independence is deeply embedded in the history of the project. Lampé's genre-fluidity might now be one of his defining qualities, but initially it presented a considerable obstacle. “The beginning of this project was pretty tricky,” he remembers. “The music worked well on dancefloors, but all labels refused it, as it was not clearly defined in a genre.”

Rather than reshaping his music to make it easier to market, he created his own outlet. Alula Tunes was born from necessity. “This was also the reason why I founded Alula Tunes. If the other labels didn’t want to release, I had to do it myself, as many people asked where they can get this sound.”

Over time, attitudes shifted. “During the years this kind of music grew and labels opened their doors, so a good twist after a lot of work,” he says. “This shows that you can move things, if you do what you really like. Don’t try to follow trends…”

It's fitting, then, that his most expansive statement to date appears through the label originally established to give that uncompromising music somewhere to exist. “As this album is a very personal thing, I wanted to have full control,” he says. “So, it was the only way to release via Alula Tunes, as it was founded to deliver the music I like and would play as a DJ to the listeners.”

The relationship between producing and performing remains fundamental. Lampé doesn't simply make tracks that might eventually appear in his sets; he makes music specifically because his sets need it. “I produce the tracks for my sets,” he explains. “Sometimes I’m missing a twilight-vibe, as I play through the sunrise, or I have a lot of night-gigs and need more driving stuff. My motivation is to tell a story, like it was in the old times, when sets were way longer than today.”

Last year he put that philosophy through an extreme stress test in Hamburg, playing an eight-hour all-night-long set consisting entirely of his own productions. “At the end I was surprised that I had still more than 150 tracks that I would have loved to play as the club was closing in the morning,” he says. “For me a set is always about the flow.”

The same principle governs Passion, although Lampé is clear that this isn't simply a DJ set transferred onto an album. In fact, he deliberately wants the record to function beyond the club. “The album is made to listen in a row in daily life,” he says. “For a pure dancefloor album it has the wrong structure and it was never meant to work like this.”

Nor does he regard Passion as a definitive culmination of everything he has learned since launching the project. There is no neat arrival point. “It’s a journey that shows variety between niches,” he says. “I don’t like to categorize music into small, detailed genres, as many people do. For sure, every track included a learning but there was no planned goal. Every release is part of the lifetime process.”

That willingness to accept imperfection is perhaps surprising from someone with hundreds of productions behind him. Experience, however, has taught Lampé when to stop. “Through the years I’ve learned how to find the sweet spot to stop working on a track or project,” he explains. “On one point you just make things worse, if you continue to work on it. That’s the shadow side of perfectionism.”

Even now, he can hear things he could change on Passion. He simply no longer believes that changing them would necessarily make the record better. “When I listen to the album today it’s still full of imperfection, but the main idea and vibe is more important than a hundred details more. Even on an album every track should stay one of a kind.”

Ultimately, that brings Passion back to the philosophy contained in its title. After years spent creating music between genres, building his own label when established outlets couldn't categorise him and accumulating a catalogue large enough to sustain an eight-hour set with plenty left unheard, Lampé's debut album isn't an attempt to finally define exactly what he is.

It's an invitation to stop worrying quite so much about those definitions. “Isn’t this what music is made for?” he asks. “Connect people, cross borders and open minds? I love what I do, I don’t want to be in focus, but I’m happy if people share my idea of this.”

And if listeners make the journey all the way from “My Love” to “Beachtime”, Lampé hopes they might emerge from it a little more willing to cross those borders themselves. “I hope the mix of different things grabs people’s emotions on some point, or at least attention,” he says, “and maybe opens their eyes to different genres or genre-fluid electronic music.”

Lampé – Passion is out now on Alula Tunes. Grab it on Beatport HERE.

Read the full interview with Lampé on The Night Bazaar website HERE.