Made in the Shade

by JACK OATMON

As I am often inclined to do, dear readers, this weekend I present you with a conundrum of choice. In a booking coincidence that promises to split the city’s dance-music obsessives right down the middle, there is an alternative to the Switch show that threatens to doom my Saturday night to drunkenly stumbling back and forth between two venues like a rabid and confused bastard child of Garth Turner and Belinda Stronach.

Get Physical Recordings co-founders Booka Shade will be at the lovely Just for Laughs Museum. Booka Shade’s long-running discography shows that leftfield synthesizing and sterile techno beats can have great accessibility and appeal to the uninitiated, culminating in their moody, driving, second full-length, Movements, which is one of the most humanized experiments in fully electronic songwriting that I have encountered. I spoke to Berlin’s mild-mannered Arno Kammermeier, one half of Booka Shade, about his musical aspirations and live performances.

PHYSICALLY FIT: Booka Shade

“People probably imagine that we’ll just have one laptop on stage and that’s all,” explains Kammermeier, “but the show is between a rock show and an electronic DJ set. We have a lot of equipment onstage. I have an electronic drum set and Walter has a keyboard, a mixing desk and a vocoder as well as some effects boards to tweak the sequencers that we have. We have four laptops onstage to control the equipment, but people don’t really see them because we want the physical presence to be seen instead of the computers. We have one laptop for visuals as well, because we always have our own visuals with us, which run in synch with the music. We move a lot work with our instruments and try to bring some energy across.”

I found it fitting that he described Booka Shade’s shows in this way, because the striking thing about their albums (which you may not own, but you’ve likely heard tracks from if you’ve been to many clubs lately) is that the bewildering emotions that spring from the discs belie the music’s synthetic production and inhuman media.

“We are quite natural people and the reason why we called the label Get Physical is because we love moving and dancing and all the positive aspects of the party scene—bringing energy out and just going crazy for fun. The thing we always care about is the songwriting. In club music, some people value the production more than the songwriting, and that’s because those people aren’t musicians. What makes the difference, therefore, is the song and the emotion that you bring across. It is electronic, but we’d hopefully like to tell a little bit of a story, or give a feeling.”

Choose wisely…jack.oatmon@gmail.com