Heir Apparat

The general consensus is that electronic music is in pretty rude health at the moment. Clubs are busy, labels are prospering and simply everyone likes minimal music. Great! But, thankfully, not everyone agrees. Meet Apparat, a.k.a. idiosyncratic German musician Sascha Ring – electronic auteur, snappy dresser and all-round disliker of all things techno.

“95% of the current electronic music sounds pretty boring to me,” he proffers fresh from a short tour of Japan (“It’s a cool place to hang out for a little while. But it also drives you crazy. People are pretty different over there. But I love the food.”)
“It feels like I've heard everything already. It’s OK since there are lots of kids who probably just got into it and it’s fresh for them but I can’t be exited about any minimal or tech-housey tunes anymore. There's quantity but not quality. If a mass of similar sounding music indicates that it’s a good time for a genre, then it’s a good time.”
Ring has long been involved at the fringes of things – he set up the uncompromising Shitkatapult label with T.Raumschmire, and his musical output has always tended toward the esoteric. How does he feel about the surge of interest in what he and others around him do?
“I’d say that electronic music was even a little bit more popular some years ago. Nowadays kids listen to hip-hop. I don’t think that electronic music is going to be any bigger or more commercial in the future. I never had any problem with commercialisation – as long as you do what you want it doesn’t matter if a thousand or a million people buy your records. As long as you stay – sorry about this term – ‘real’, everything is cool.” 
Commercialisation is something Ring knows all about having released an album of largely club-based tracks with Bpitch boss Ellen Allien, Orchestra Of Bubbles, that catapulted them onto the stadium circuit.
Was it a positive experience?
“Everything which doesn’t make me feel depressed – and a lot of things make me feel depressed – is a positive experience. I’m kind of negative and I think that’s a little annoying for people close to me. Maybe that’s the reason I enjoy spending time on my own.
"Playing with Ellen was pretty cool," he continues. "Actually, it’s hard to play alone again now. You feel lonely on stage. It’s fun to play events like I Love Techno, but I'd rather do small clubs with big soundsystems!"
Walls is a diverse album with depth – a mix of deep electronica, warm electro, glitchy interludes and weird pop. It sounds like Thom Yorke remade by Morr Music.
“Walls is not a conceptual record, just a collection of Apparat’s last two years. Most tracks on it have a different background. Unfortunately, positive experiences in the studio were kind of rare lately. It was great finishing the album, but it mostly felt like work.”
These are ‘songs’ as opposed to ‘tracks’, right?
“Not intentionally. I changed the way I make music and that changed the way the music sounds. Less computer nerdiness and more tunes.”
Ring has been making music for nearly a decade, but only picked up a mic at Allien's insistence during the Orchestra Of Bubbles sessions. He sings again on Walls.
“Ellen made me sing and that was good. It was so hard finding singers all the time. I even enjoy writing lyrics now. I figured out it’s such a cool way to express yourself. Or tell people they suck! And man, if you find my titles negative, check out the lyrics!”
The Thom Yorke-esque falsetto on ‘Arcadia’ is amazing.
“Thanks! I really like this vocal style. I think that’s me. Me in a pink shirt!"

Walls is out now on Shitkatapult