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.”

As the faceless Techno pioneers behind the groundbreaking Basic Channel releases in the early 90's, Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald have ruthlessly preserved their anonymity, rarely granting interviews and never allowing their words to go on the record. In an exclusive Berlin audience with the duo, Will Montgomery teases out the inspirations behind their dub-infused Rhythm & Sound project.

Such is the clarity of purpose behind the music of Rhythm & Sound duo Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald, formerly the producers behind Basic Channel, that I arrive in Berlin half-expecting a pair of musical ideologues. But their rigour is of a different nature: if anything they are dogmatic about their anti-dogmatism. Every time their remarks lurch towards anything resembling a large statement, one of them throws in a
qualification that causes the emerging position to unravel. They work hard at making music that sounds right to them, they say, but their responsibilities end at the studio door: finding the words to talk about it is up to others. Working on the material at hand and allowing a tune to develop along unexpected pathways, they point out, can be a good deal more complex than anything you can fabricate in advance in your head. It's
not about being on-message for journalists, but no-message. Their music, a private territory they've marked out somewhere in the no-man’s land between Techno and reggae, is built around working very slowly and listening very closely. Since the early 1990's, they tell me with crushing directness, all they've sought to do is to let their music happen.

We meet twice over the course of a hot August weekend at Basic Channel HQ — an office above the famous Hard Wax record store that Ernestus set up in Kreuzberg in 1989 (the shop moved down the road from the original small premises to the current location in 1996). We talk for quite a long time all told but how we talk is the first of our problems. Ernestus and Von Oswald have never done conventional interviews. No recording is permitted and they aren't about to break the rule for the man from The Wire. It's not an aggressive thing: they're courteous, careful to say what they want to say and generous with their time. But they won't bend on their ‘no quotes’ rule. So, never having mastered shorthand, I'm compelled to follow the conversation at a distance, getting my notes down as quickly as I can. In the erd I half-persuade myself that what I'm encountering s a variant of the single-mindedness that could conjure that extraordinary Basic Channel sound out of early 1990's Berlin. And, despite the restrictions on the interview, Ernestus and Von Oswald have come a little more into the open lately, bothered by the rumours and misconceptions that have grown up in the space opened by their media boycott. Their very invisibility has become too much of an issue in itself. As a partial corrective, the photographs that accompany this article are the nearest they've got to showing their faces in a magazine.

Their desire for anonymity has to be seen in the context of their grounding in early Techno. In the early 1990's, Basic Channel had close ties to Detroit's notoriously shadowy Underground Resistance collective, and like many others on the scene, Ernestus and Von Oswald developed a parallel antipathy towards presenting a public persona. It's also about diffidence: both of them admit to shyness, and our conversations grow more substantial when we've spent a bit of time together. However, as we speak, three shy men in a room, I find myself forming an idea of their work that is defined negatively — through what they say it's not rather than what they say it is.

Talking to them is like endlessly watching a washbasin fill up only for the plug to be pulled and the water to drain away again. The way that their points tend to fade begins to remind me of the play between substance and insubstantiality in the music. Rhythm & Sound recordings are often built on deep bass loops and simple insistent hi-hat patterns. But other elements — often processed middle-register synth — unsettle the music, as an ever-changing set of effects dissolves the fixities of the rhythm. Despite the spare, repetitive qualities of the work, the tonal warmth and the subtle sound processing give it a depth that rewards listening of an immersive nature. It somehow spans the divide between the physical pummelling of the sound system and the interiority of headphone listening. The plain card sleeve of the Basic Channel CD, a collection of the label’s 12" releases, urged the listener to “buy vinyl', but they've always addressed what they see as two distinct markets: one for vinyl and one for CDs. From the beginning they have issued series of vinyl singles followed by CD showcases that collect this material. The latest of these to emerge are two CDs of vocal tracks and versions released on the Burial Mix label, assembling Rhythm & Sound singles released since 2001.

One morning, in an effort to give me a glimpse of where he's coming from, Ernestus plays me some examples of inspirational tunes from the late 1980s, chosen rapidly and almost at random from the racks: Chicago House and late, Firehouse-era 'digital’ King Tubby. Something drops into place as he describes what he finds in the music. What he admires is the strange ambition of such records, a weirdness that grooves. It's a balance that, he feels, was soon lost in Techno as it marshalled itself into endless straitjacketed subgenres. That radical purity of vision can certainly be heard in the music of Basic Channel, Maurizio and some of the releases on the Chain Reaction label (made by various associates, many of them with connections to the Hard Wax setup). It's music made by Techno lovers who had grown impatient with Techno.

But to begin at the beginning. we have to move forward from the 1980s moment captured in the records I'm being played, for Ernestus and Von Oswald were “born’ in 1990. Or that, at least, is what they'd have me believe of their joint trajectory. As we speak, they repeatedly discount the relevance to our conversation of anything they were doing before then. Sure, many of their musical touchstones stem from before the 1990, when both were deeply immersed in music, but the significant background to their work together, by their account, was the big Techno bang that came in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall late in 1989.

The collapse of the Wall and the opening up of a hedonistic grey area in the no-man’s land between the two jurisdictions coincided with the increasing availability of the new dance music from New York, Chicago and Detroit (pre-Hard Wax, black music was very hard to get hold of in the city). At a time when the distribution of dance music was extremely patchy, Ernestus began to make direct contact with the people making this music in the US in his efforts to secure vinyl for the shop. Soon he was importing the music directly and changing the lives of many who walked through the Hard Wax doors. Ernestus recalls the year zero fervour of the period: customers selling their CD players and their entire music collections, and burying themselves in stacks of 12" singles.

Shortly after Ernestus had established, through Hard Wax, a conduit between the Detroit Techno scene and Berlin, Dimitri Hegemann began flying people over from the US to DJ at his club, Tresor, and, a little later, to record for the Tresor label. Tresor, Hard Wax and Moritz's recording studio in southern Berlin became the focal points for the Berlin-Detroit axis. Producers such as Blake Baxter recorded at the studio and, under the name of 3MB, Von Oswald and Thomas Fehlmann collaborated with Juan Atkins (on the renowned “Jazz Is The Teacher") and Eddie Flashin’ Fowlkes for the Tresor label. Mark and Moritz met during that breathless early 90's period, beginning their series of collaborations in 1992. The first Basic Channel release contained a mix from a visiting Jeff Mills, and Carl Craig versioned Maurizio's “Domina”.

When Hard Wax moved to its current location in 1996, the Basic Channel studio was housed in the same building. Ernestus and Von Oswald have recently moved the studio to a quieter location nearby, though they absolutely refuse to let me have a look at it (a fear, perhaps, that I'll get round their equally determined refusal o discuss their equipment or working methods). The space above the shop now houses two operations, the Hard Wax office and the Basic Channel family of labels: besides the currently active Rhythm & Sound and Burial Mix, subsidiaries have included Chain Reaction, Main Street, the M outlet for the Maurizio releases, and the more experimental Imbalance imprint, set up by Von Oswald but taken over independently by Monolake's Robert Henke. Chain Reaction has another release slated but the others are now effectively defunct. Rhythm & Sound are also overseeing the rerelease of tranches of the catalogue of the pioneering New York reggae label Wackies, and they have set up a separate reggae reissue label, Basic Replay, which has released Keith Hudson's tremendous 1981 set Playing It Cool (which was mixed at Wackies). Ernestus, with too many irons in the fire. is currently negotiating the sale of his much in-demand Dubplates And Mastering record-cutting business, whose early engineers included Porter Ricks Andy Mellwig, Monolake's Robert Henke and Stefan Betke (aka Pole).

For all the evident clear-sightedness of the business activities, which appear to be doing well, the music of Ernestus and Von Oswald has always concerned itself with uncertainty and hesitancy. There was a blurred quality to the Basic Channel 12", for example, that drew the lateral, disorienting sensibility of dub into the rhythmic environment of Techno. With the advent of Rhythm & Sound and Burial Mix the make-up of the sound shifted towards a reggae-derived template but the basic concern with fashioning gradual movements over long, repetitive structures remained the same. Another continuity between the early and the post-Basic Channel music is its attachment to sonic debris: hiss and hum that would be anathema to most producers. Some relatively recent Rhythm & Sound tracks — “Imprint” and “Trace", for example are breathtaking exercises in textured atmospherics. I suggest to them that this is to do with their kinship with vinyl and also, perhaps, a means of taking a stance against the antiseptic qualities of the hard drive. That's only half the story, they tell me: there’s also an element of happenstance. The scratсhy atmospheres have never been added to the music on purpose. But then neither are such sounds taken out if doing so means watering down other parts of a track. Sometimes, they say, such ‘noise simply begins as a by-product of using old equipment and then gains other sonic qualities in the mixing and processing - as in the oddly spangling and elegantly panning hiss that can be heard in their production of Cornell Campbell's gorgeous “King In My Empire".

The attention they give to the overall sonic qualities of a track tallies with something Moritz says about his interest in the tonal breadth of classical music (he trained as a percussionist). When he stopped playing classical music, he remarks, he missed the three- dimensional nature of the listening experience, especially in concerts. He continues to have a close interest in the whole spectrum of sound in a piece of music. He talks about the work of Rhythm & Sound in terms of a ‘weave', working on it as a kind of texture. in which all the pieces closely lock in to one another. To kill hum or crackle, therefore, would be to unravel the whole arrangement. Mark, for his part, uses the German word ‘rund’ - “full’ or ‘round’ - to describe a quality he sees as a precondition of the Kind of sound they are after.

When discussing the early Basic Channel releases Moritz talks, gesturing, of their desire to add a horizontal layering to a genre: hat was motored by vertical' percussive jolts. The Basic Channel tracks added cavernous spaces and overlapping rhythmic patterns to the basic beats. With the Rhythm & Sound material, however, this quality of breadth is as much to do with the warmth of the sound as anything: the deliquescent effects bounce off the rock steady rhythms but the parts are tightly integrated. Sometimes it can appear that there are very few layers to their sparser mixes. But there are always other, more or less submerged elements knitting everything together. Their use, for example, of delay effects, from the Maurizio material to the most recent tracks, can be a beautifully percussive component of the overall texture.

The Burial Mix style was established with the series of records Ernestus and Von Oswald recorded with their main vocal collaborator, Paul St Hilaire (formerly known as Tikiman), beginning with “Acting Crazy", released in 1996 on Main Street (a sublabel associated with a more direct dancefloor approach). The records combined basic looping, Techтo-style patterns with Vocals that, with some of the strangeness of phrasing of Horace Andy, hovered delicately above the backing track, often paying scant attention to conventional song structure. The sound came into sharper focus with 1996's “Never Tell You". There the basic Burial Mix template was set: a deep bassline; effects used to create the feeling of motion; vocals with the freedom to roam.

The Rhythm & Sound sister imprint mainly explores instrumental pieces. Most of the label's singles output is collected on a 2001 CD. However, the recent "Aground"/"Aerial" single is one of the pair's finest moments: on “Aground” a simple set of chords carries the song along in a prim skank against thickets of late-Black Ark percussion activity; “Aerial” is given an aching quality by some beautifully eerie backing vocals. It's a wonderful single, perfectly capturing the respective forces of movement and stasis that animate the music.

While the parallels with reggae are numerous, the two are keen to point out that they are not interested in imitation. Although the lyrical content dots the music with Rasta motifs and the language of dub is everywhere, the sound they have arrived at is a distinctive adaptation of Jamaican music that is unmistakably inflected with Techno. The use of repetition sometimes threatens to tickle the boredom threshold, but the listener tends to bounce off it and sink into the ample folds of the mix.

Another curious aspect of the music is velocity. While the basic loops set up a rigid groove that makes no concession to verse/chorus demarcations, there’s an elastic quality that almost gives the effect of slowing down and speeding up. Often, with bass and hi-hats anchoring the two sonic poles of the music, the varying effects on the other sounds in the mix act as destabilisers, continually refocusing the listener's attention on different moments of the groove. The music can be almost unbearably still, and yet contain a time-wobble that makes it impossible to pin down.

Speed is also crucial to the vocal mixes. On tracks such as “Mash Down Babylon” and “Making History” by The Chosen Brothers (Lloyd “Bullwackie' Barnes's vocal alter ego) there is a real disparity between the gravity and pace of the vocal line and the zip of the percussion. Mark says that it was almost intimidating to work with “Mash Down Babylon” - he prefers to see it as another song entirely rather than a version of Barnes's original. Yet the Rhythm & Sound backing track, with fine horns, makes for a deep and powerful ‘accompaniment to Barnes's spine-tingling vocal, locking into place underneath it and giving it an unstoppable forward momentum. And over the mastodon groove of “Making History”, Barnes doubles up the vocal line with an intense falsetto. This is another trademark Rhythm & Sound device: singers are sometimes accompanied by recessed versions of themselves, giving the effect of a ghostly choir.

For a while, towards the end of our second conversation, we discuss their distinctive use of dub, which depends on quite subtle effects and avoids the baroque overkill favoured by many dub revivalists. They reject my attempts to characterise a refinement of the sound as Burial Mix and Rhythm & Sound have evolved, though they concede that these days a different type of attention is paid to the music in the studio. As the second conversation draws to a close I still feel that I've learnt most about their music through the feints and parries with which they've declined to comment on what they do. My notes close with a restatement by Mark that they have no particular message for the world.

That doesn't mean they think there's nothing outside the music, of course: it's just where they choose to draw a line. Their music took shape, after all, in musical crucible, the Berlin of 1990, which could barely have been more fired with extraneous determinations. In the end, their unwillingness to adorn their working processes with explication is heartening as well as frustrating, It suggests a commitment above all to the elusive physicality of the listening process and it turns the listener back towards the loudspeakers. There’s something reassuring about people who won't risk saying something that they're not absolutely sure they mean.