A low key legend of Berlin, Estimulo has played some of the best venues Europe has to offer, and gets people grooving on a weekly basis with his EstimuloShow. Previously a pirate radio show host and still highly active in Mixomat Recordings, Estimulo is as busy as ever across various musical projects. Since we uncovered his weekly show, we haven’t been able to stop tuning in.
We spent some time with him to discuss his various contributions to dance music.
Hi E, first off thanks for putting the mix together for us! Can you tell us a bit about the idea/concept behind the it?
I’ve recently had the pleasure of playing quite a few nice gigs and also have a few lined up so the mix was basically a product of me going through the selections of the recent / soon to come shows and playing the “other” tracks from these records. Other meaning, well, there is always that one track that comes to your mind when you see the record, the track you pack the record for, that track you always play. you know? So in this mix I played the other tracks from these records. Plus a few new ones thrown in as well that fitted the flow. Plus an edit given to me from my buddy Florist, plus one of my edits. All over the vibe I would say is between Bleep and Ambient Techno/House with a few trancey overtones, but quite driving and danceable.
You have one of the most comprehensive RA biographies I have ever read! Music has been a huge part of your life from the very beginning, from your grandmother giving you your first record. Was music a big thing in your household when growing up and who/what were the other big influences in your music taste?
Oh yeah, wow, you actually saw that, that biography on RA is very old (i think I haven’t changed anything there since 2008 when I first uploaded it!) but I think its kinda cute so I just keep it there from a very early age I remember my father always sitting on his reel to reel recording music from the radio and from records. He actually had two or three reel to reel machines and a very extensive sound system with components, with several tape decks, turntable, 4 speakers, well, basically all you could dream of as a hi-fi freak in the 70s I guess. So when I reached a certain age it was natural for me to start to get into those things as well, I remember he showed me how to make tape echoes with the reel to reel and also I started to make my own edits of songs I liked at an early age, by just repeating or looping parts that I liked and thus extending the song. That must have been the early 80s. The musical taste was still quite broad but I remember I have always been into dance music. The other big influence was learning instruments. I guess it was very important to my parents that we (me and my siblings) studied instruments at least to some extent. The first thing i remember is the flute, then the keyboard/piano and then the guitar. With the guitar i actually managed to stick for 10 years (with lessons in classic guitar every week and all, from about 6 to about 16 years of age). Fast forward to 1987/88 when Acid House arrived and I smashed the guitar (figuratively π and started to make tracks on the Amiga.
I loved the story about you setting up your own pirate FM station! Pirate radio was synonymous with garage and grime in the UK, what kind of music was getting played on pirate radio in Germany and what inspired you to set up the station in the first place?
For as long as i remember i was always into the technical side of music and radio as well, so for example i remember taking apart radios and trying to “fix them” (LOL! it drove my dad nuts) or make them better or change some things like the antenna. So i def had this drift towards being an electronics tinkerer in my childhood. And ended up studying electrical engineering too after school. But the pirate radio thing came in earlier when I was about 14 or 15. I remember a friend of mine had a little FM transmitter that he brought to school (I think he bought it on an Asian black market) and we were just playing around with it. It had a very weak signal, maybe it carried out for a few hundred meters maximum but we were like WOW, that’s something fascinating – seeing that official radio wasn’t all that great at this time, i mean you can imagine there were a few nice programs in the night-time but that was it – there was an impulse to play “that other” music on the radio and even if it was just for your own neighbourhood.
So the first step was borrowing said transmitter from my friend, improving the antenna, changing a transistor to make it a little bit stronger and my first pirate transmitter was born. That was in late 89 and the music was what i would just call “Acid House” in the broadest possible sense. Some Chicago, some London. Even some records that came out of Berlin at that time. Lets say in-between Tyree, Marshall Jefferson and Baby Ford sound wise. Of course that changed very quickly at that time. I was already buying records like nutz so I just played everything that I bought. I didn’t care if someone was listening. I knew some of my friends from around the block tuned in. Finally I got busted in mid 90 (obviously the authorities must have tuned in or got a hint) and they took all my equipment. They tried to tell me I was intending to interfere with another radio station, which of course I didn’t. That would be a stupid thing to do given the weakness of the signal, you would always look for the most vacant frequency there was. Anyway, just shortly after i built another transmitter and went back on air.
For the sound of pirate radio in general can only say that in Berlin there wasn’t really much other pirate radio going on in the 90s but the ones that were there and I knew (for example Twen FM, that i also came to work with later on) were playing all kinds of underground dance music, from UKG to Italo disco to deep house and techno, even some hip hop. So basically all kind of music that was played in the clubs.
I spent a few weeks in London in 1991 and the sound of pirate radio there was at that time mostly UK hardcore. That early mixture of bleep techno, (post)-Acid House, Breakbeat and Dub. And Belgian hoovers and rave stabs. Also lots of pirate reggae stations.
Can you tell us a bit about Mixomat – the mix series, the record label concept, and its current function as a radio show, your main passion?
It started as a mix series that i ran with a friend from Munich, we met via the Soulseek program way back in the day when it was new, 2001/2002 perhaps. We were both pretty much into deep house with a special drift towards the more minimal or intelligent side of it. Kind of what Force Tracks, Raum Musik and Stir15/Lo-Fi Stereo or United States Of Mars etc were doing at that time. So we hammered out a mix in 128kbps mp3 via our own webpage every week or so, that was long before Soundcloud and the likes.. We were inspired by Deeprhythms that went online shortly before (I saw Timo also just did a mix for you :)).
The label came in a little bit later when there was just so much music around from people we knew that was unreleased or these people just didn’t wanna go thru the painful process of possibly having something released on a record, so we set up this digital label and just churned out whatever we liked and felt. I guess the sound was pretty much deep house / deep techno with a minimalistic or ambient/dubby edge, so pretty much the continuation of what we’ve been doing with the mixes page.
Right now I’m still running the page as a blog (mixomat.org) and its function is to connect the dots of everything i do.
Things have finally started to open up properly over in England over the past few months, it has been great for everyone to get back in a club or to a festival. I feel like nightlife culture is such a big part of Berlin, are clubs starting to open up in Berlin and Germany in general?
We had the possibility to do open airs here with a few limitations for all of summer and since September the clubs opened up indoor as well again.
They have the 2G model though which means that only vaccinated or recently cured people can enter.
London is suffering a little from a rise in ticket prices for nights out since COVID. How has the industry responded in germany?
Yes, prices have gone way up for club entrance and also there are no guest lists / free entry lists anymore. I think that’s OK seeing that the entry fees here were very low before and each event had a really big guest list.
Unfortunately it didn’t really lead to DJs getting paid a little more, which would have been a possible effect of that price rise.
Are your days of DJing for crowds a thing of the past, or can people catch you at any venues in the near future?
I’m still playing out, actually had quite a few nice things lined up here in Berlin and in France in the past weeks.
Next up is Switzerland for me now (24/25th of September) in Winterthur and ZΓΌrich respectively, then ZΓΌrich again in mid-October (Zukunft) and back in Berlin on the 5th of November in Paloma Bar and then later on in November in Denmark (Aarhus) with the Regelbau crew.
I try to keep my calendar up to date these days on my Soundcloud page, so that would be the place to always get the latest info on shows.
Do you have any new projects (radio or otherwise) lined up? And what other plans, music or otherwise do you have planned for the rest of the year?
There will be a few nice collaborations of EstimuloShow with others in the near future and hopefully the relaunch of my label which is already on the agenda for a while. I’m hoping to be able to bring the vibe to many places and circumstances, whether that will be online or in a live / club situation.
Interview By: Unknown Writer and James Acquaye Nortey-Glover