Mark Ernestus interview at The Wire 312, Feb 2010

The Gene Genie

As half of Basic Channel, Rhythm & Sound and Maurizio, Mark Ernestus is the genetic engineer behind the Techno sound that has become the European heartbeat. But his tweaking of electronic dance’s DNA began earlier, when he opened Berlin’s landmark vinyl store Hard Wax in the year the Wall fell.

By Derek Walmsley. Photography by Will Bankhead

“When I first got involved with producing,” recalls Mark Ernestus, “I remember thinking for myself, what is it you try to achieve, you know. Because you definitely don't want your face or your name all over the place. And you're shy, you'd rather be invisible. I
realise that I really loved the idea to have my genetic code in the genetic code of music. That would be a huge goal, that would be the biggest achievement in a way”

20 years after the launch of Berlin's landmark record store Hard Wax, Mark Ernestus is firmly part of the cipher of electronic music. I meet him at the shop he founded in the late 1980s, where countless titles in its racks have tapped into the code he and
his partner Moritz von Oswad devised for their work as Basic Channel, Maurizio and Rhythm & Sound, from the spacious Techno of the Echocord or Modern Love labels to the smoked out dubstep of Skull Disco. Yet he's a quiet presence even here, waiting politely behind the counter while I flick through the records. I notice one hanging on the wall that I first heard 15 years ago and have never seen in real life, “Ghetto
People Broke” by dancehall vocalist Little Kirk.

Speechless for a moment, I point up at it, prompting Ernestus to give me a capsule history of the track and exactly how much it used to sell for online. It's a typical moment for Hard Wax, where records that proviously existed only as a rumour suddenly become real. Surrounded by such vinyl treasures, it's easy to get distracted from the matter at hand: a quiet man whose impact on electronic music has been enormous.

First, though, he shows me around the store rooms and offices, which are expansive, comfortable even, at least by the standards of most record shops. Hard Wax is not immediately visible from the street, but peer through an archway into the small courtyard set back from the road and you see its large, weatherbeaten logo stencilled on the wall. Factor out the bleak autumnal weather and the muted colours of the neighbourhood, and Hard Wax's small corner of Berlin resembles a typical reggae set-up, its proprietor simultaneously advertising his wares and staking out his territory.

The operation’s layout is spacious enough to allow serious quantities of vinyl to move in and out of the building, and their office complex has expanded onto the upper floors
as their business has thrived. We look around the space that used to be Basic Channel's studio, now refurbished as a vinyl cutting room by Dubplates & Mastering, a business closely linked to Hard Wax. Pristine lacquers are lined up at the back, ready for use on the operation's ex-Motown cutting machine, and a large pair of speakers is mounted on two workbenches in the middle of the room. Ernestus shows me the lacquers, explaining they require careful handling. He's interested in genetic codes, not dirty fingerprints.

After politely checking up on what the Hard Wax team is doing, he selects a place for us to talk upstairs, so as not to impede their steady workfiow. We're surrounded on one side by company paperwork detailing two decades at the heart of the electronic network, and on the other by the vinyl stashes belonging to the staff, the record spines charting decades of dance music through the personal tastes of those who work here — a suitable place for Ernestus to unravel his 20 years in the business.

“One important idea, or what was, I would say, revolutionary about House music, was that it would dump so much of this pop business,” says Ernestus, “names and faces don't matter and so on. It was a very common concept in House and Techno and that's
what was I think quite different.”

Even though Moritz von Oswald broke cover last year with his Moritz von Oswald Trio, Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound were and still are projects shrouded in anonymity. Essentially their modus operandi was a more formalised version of the working methods already commonplace in dance culture when Hard Wax started in 1989. Ernestus rarely speaks to the press but, the shop's 20th anniversary is evidently
something worth talking about. His English is good but he chooses words slowly, leaving ellipses when he's uncertain what he's saying. He rarely generalises and he discourages tho interviewer — and by extension the reader — from doing the same. He doesn't want to speak about his collaborations with von Oswald without the latter being present, but the contours of their work together crop up in the conversation.

We don’t want the song, the melody, the voice... Instead, the rhythm, the groove, the functionality”

The hard facts about Hard Wax seem like a natural place to start. Ernestus attributes the shop’s Iongevity to it knowing the rules of the niche they serve. Vinyl he describes as a “completely different game with different rules”, whose ephemeral nature suits swift, cash-upfront deals. “If the records mean anything, people will have the money to pay for them.” he argues. The more he focuses on hard-headed business matters, the more fascinating the discussion becomes, suggesting that there is a considered philosophy, a materialist aesthetic behind the Hard Wax operation. Ernestus often appears to be happier in the role of a facilitator rather than a music producer, someone who wants to help the system run as smoothly as possible. “I wouldn't want to say functionality is everything,” he cautions at one point, “but somebody makes a killer record, it's 150 copies. The next record is total shit and we won't even sell three copies. There's a seriousness about... the producers, but also the audience, it either works or it doesn't.”

The conversation returns to the late 1980s and his own personal experiences of dance music in Berlin. “The music was happening in real time,” Ernestus declares. “Not only in Berlin but also in the US, UK, Belgium, Holland.” He stresses time and again the role of happy coincidence in the rise of Hard Wax: the shop opening just as House entered a critical phase, when old acquaintances suddenly reappeared in Berlin with connections to the US House scene; and of course new opportunities opened up in the city when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. "I think we opened before the Wall came down, " recalls Ernestus, I have to say I think' because actually I tried to look it up for this anniversary. On the business registration it just says ‘November 1989, to be confirmed’ or something like that. I have a big lapse of memory at that time,” he continues. “You would think that, as they say, everyone knows where they were when JFK got shot..
I remember watching the fall of the Wall on TV, I remember I didn't go there because it was too much, you know.”

From their base in Berlin's Kreuzberg district, Hard Wax began making international connections, tracking down legendary labels in Ghicago, Detroit, New York and Europe through the fax numbers scratched into the runout grooves of records and phone numbers printed on their labels. “Before people were really talking about Techno, House was the thing happening in real time,” he states, “and there was a big gap between what was available somewhere if you found it, and what made it here. There was nobody basically in Berlin focusing.

“No DJ in Berlin could play a pure House set,” he observes of these early years, “because you did not have enough records. You had to stretch it with maybe a Frankie Knuckles mix of a Madonna tune... you had to stretch it like that to do it as House-wise
‘as you could.”

There's no direct political subtext to the rise of electronic music in Berlin,but there’s no denying the impact on its growth when the Wall came down and opened up the unregulated spaces between East and West, where clubs and bars quickly sprang up to scratch the itch built up in East Berlin during the last years of the GDR. “It’s obvious to someone who is there, but you maybe have to bring that to attention: it was the first youth culture, or global or international youth culture, that this generation of East German kids could actively, openly participate in," says Ernestus. “People who were joining from the East bought another level of enthusiasm and energy to the equation.

“You had this whole generation of East Berliners who could listen to West Berlin radio stations,” he continues. “Even before [the fall of] the Wall, there was a whole generation of listeners in the East who had followed this music from these radio shows for years, but just never had the possibility to buy the records or have parties or anything.”

The dismantling of the Wall created a space in which dance events could thrive. “The authorities had really other problems than cracking down on half-legal parties or something,” he explains. “And of course for all police in the East, they didn't know what kind of laws would be coming. if they would be accepted in their jobs under the new unified laws. So the impression I got was that the priority was not to do anything that might be considered wrong.

“The clubs that were in West Berlin for me don't really compare to the clubs of the Tresor or the E-Werk generation,” he continues. "I remember for the first time it felt like, and everybody felt it, yes, this is our place, this s right, this is appropriate for the kind of music... whereas the clubs that were existing in West Berlin, I would think more of the term discotheque, a fully licensed, legal place, everything up to code and accordingly expensive... not a place where you just go wild and play radical music and freak out or whatnot.” The rise of Tresor, the subterranean club opened in the former vault of a department store, was particularly important for Hard Wax. “Radical music for radical location,” agrees Ernestus. “It's probably not the best wording, but yeah.” Was he a raver in these years? “I did go out a lot in that time, not as much as others,” he muses, “and I did enjoy the parties but... not a dancer.”

Before starting Hard Wax, Ernestus ran a bar called Kumpelnest 3000. ‘Coming from the 1980s, a lot of places were almost fascist about the style they represent, the music that's being played... it used to segregate, or to separate, to define, to put a line between you and others,” he says. In response, at Kumpelnest he introduced a relatively radical policy of allowing the staff to choose the music. “It was very important for me that if you work there, there's no boss behind you who comes running and takes off the tape if he thinks it's not right,” he says. “So at this bar, it didn’t matter what was being played, but that was in itself important.”

In the immediate post-Wall era, the faceless anonymity that characterised much Techno chimed well with the sense of equality that obtained in these Year Zero times. “I remember when the first small group of DJs came to the shop twice a week, not to miss any delivery,” says Ernestus, recalling Hard Wax's early days. “The attitude was almost hysterical about vocal bits. Because vocal bits were automatically too pop, and the whole idea was a radical break from all this.... The whole pop business, it was still coming from song based music,and I guess in that situation it was important to make that point.

“We don't want the song, we don't want the melody, we don't want the voice,” he smiles, mimicking the typical DJ attitude of the time. Instead: “The rhythm and the groove and functionality.”

The productions Ernestus made with Moritz von Oswald still pulse at the heart of electronic music. Their work suggests a blueprint or process, with rhythms set in motion and then repeatedly treated, echoed and filtered. The music remains ageless. or perhaps more accurately, the music ages itself, its progressively degraded sounds gradually emerging as bold new forms. It's a compelling paradox - physically pleasurable music that feels virtually uncontaminated by the human touch.

Ernestus’s own production work has been intermittent in the last couple of years, pretty much limited to a remix of Tony Allen and a re-version of Tortoise. While he often deflects attention from himself, he certainly doesn’t devalue his impact on dance music. He draws a distinct line between professional matters and his creative life, commenting: “The business stuff I don't want to give it too much room.

“I would like to avoid the word sacred,” he says, ‘addressing his attitude to production, “but I'd just say, it's something very special and I'd like it to remain something special. Because if it's not. it doesn't mean anything, if t's a day job. I'd rather do another day job, and then keep that something very special.

“I don’t know If somebody famous said this originally, but experience is the enemy of creativity... I remember my first synthesizer, every knob was magic. Because I didn't have a clue what it did technically, I just tweaked it and heard what it does. And I can't do that today. Before I even touch the knob, I hear what’s going to happen.”

For the present Ernestus is channelling his creativity into spinning dancehall records - not DJing, he emphasises, preferring the term selector, as it's used in reggae sometimes with vocalist Paul St. Hilaire in tow. I like to believe that I'm completely open in my decision what I play as the next tune,” he says. “My main focus is on the production, the rhythm, the groove, the overall sound.” He's a picture of concentration behind the decks. Letting dancehall instrumentals spin all the way to the end, then carefully putting the next one on while scrutinising his stack of 7"s for clues as to where to go next. You can't help but notice the contrast between his slow, deliberate motions and the colourful, cartoonish and constantly innovative productions booming through the speakers.

His selections focus on instrumentals, which suggest misses one of the primary attractions of reggae - its ability to bounce a track’s vocal and dub versions off each other in the mix to create a new synthesis. “I wouldn't say I miss it, it's just not there. If you don’t know it's there, you wouldn't say it’s missing.” he reasons, continuing: “When you play the vocal, it's immediately obvious it's reggae. Especially in reggae of course because of the patois and everything, so immediatly it's in that category. And that's something that I like to avoid. I have great pleasure for an audience that you would define as completely non-reggae to get an audience to completely enjoy it... some of the current dancehall things that I play, where you play the instrumental, you know, people say, ‘What the hell was that? That sounded extraterrestial’.

“Sometimes I think I make it too sifficult for myself," he admits. “The possibility to fail is somehow important, because if you don't put the pressure on yourself, that there is a possiility to fail, maybe it's important somehow to bring a level of concentration,
which is a condition, potentially, for something to be very good.”

Ernestus’s interest in Jamaican music long precedes his involvement in dance music. A self-confessed record junkie, he recalls the fleeting encounters of a cash-strapped, information-starved, but ever-hungry music hunter. Minor epiphanies include a tape of
Lee Perry’s Revolution Dub picked up at a new wave record shop: another revisits a UK holiday many years ago. “One moment I remember for year and years, I was at Portobello market, and I walked by and there was a stall there selling reggae, ”he remembers. “At that time I didn't have the money. Or when you bought a record, it was a lot of consideration. You wouldn't just go ‘Ah, that sounds great and get a copy. But
that stuck in my ear for years. It was just very sparse, dubbed out, strictly drum and bass, very slow,” he says, slowly and deliberately. “That was something, just knowing there is music like that, sometimes, it keeps you searching. And I never found out what that was, and by now the memory is fading, but I had a very specific memory of the sound for many years.

“There's acommon thing between electronic stuff and reggae, or the reggae that I'm interested in” he explains. "You don't have the song arrangement that builds up and goes somewhere, but for those three or five or seven minutes, it's a permanent condition more or less, it's a space... It's not very well expressed,” he sighs. “A tune creates a space for a few minutes, and then the next tune creates another space.

“There is a seriousness about the reggae that I'm talking about, or the dub. It's not a trial and error thing. It's not something you do to get famous or get rich. You know your audience, you're on a level with the audience, and that I would see as the same
in serious club music... Probably the best term is seriousness, but that’s also a bit misleading, because sometimes, especially in reggae, some of the greatest things are very silly and stll have what I would consider the seriousness.”

Acurrent dance obsession is mbalax, the Senegalese and Gambian pop form that grew out of the 1970 music of groups such as Orchstra No 1 De Dakar, Etoile 2000 and, mostly famously, Youssou N'Dour and El Hadj Faye's Etoile e Dakar. As usual it's a serious matter for Ernestus. Sitting in Berlin while the rain beats down outside, he shows me YouTube videos on his phone of frantic groups of dancers somewhere in West Africa, vying to keep up with the polyrhythmic chart hits of Salam Diallo or
Babacar Seck. The videos are filmed front-on and roughly cut, straining to fit the movements of dozens of dancers into the frame. Choruses are merely preludes to passages of complete rhythmic freakout from a small army of percussionists, freeing up the dancers to do their thing. It is at once completely joyous and intensely serious.

Records are finished products, Ernestus comments at one point, drawing a distinction between the role of the producer and that of the DJ. Given the time and space he insists on for producing music, though, you wonder when the next major step in his music will came. Perhaps these very standards are what gives his discography its rounded feel. It's compact — Maurizio and Basic Channel each released less
than ten 12"s in all, exerting an influence in inverse proportion to output — but feels self-contained, internally complete, at least for now.

“I have always been quite conscious that I don't want music to ever feel like a day job,” he says. “At the same time I really wish I had more time for it.” The daily affairs of Hard Wax, of course, take up much of his time. The shop is currently mulling over a move
into digital retail, which they re approaching with their customary attention to detail. The importance of the shop is not something he takes for granted. “Sometimes I feel it when I travel, playing records, and I come to cities and you meet people and the music scene, and you realise other cities don't have a focal point like that,” he says, “and that
sometimes makes me realise that Hard Wax is there, yeah, and how important it is." Hard Wax takes the opposite approach to the usual marketing strategy of spreading your brand name far and wide. Long term reputation trumps short term remuneration, meaning they're careful to keep the operation pared down to the essentials. “Our customers are our universe,” he declares at one point.

Given Ernestus's concern for nothing but the essentials, perhaps his future productions, when they finally come, will tap deeper into electronic music’s DNA. “My reflex, especially after so many years since the last major thing, says that I need
to do something,” he concludes. “But my instinct says. ‘Wait a minute. I don’t need to do shit’, you know. When the time is right I will do something.”