Trance with the devil

Perhaps no other label summarises the recent renaissance in music for dancing better than Get Physical. In short, the sketch goes like this: it started small and honest, quickly became trendy, had some minor crossover hits, released one genre-defying/defining belter, reached an electro-house tipping point, has become a monster. A nice monster. The kind of monster Pete Tong calls: “the new pop music”.
Now meet Booka Shade, the men who are — in more ways than one — responsible for this seemingly unstoppable brand of brilliant Teutonic techno-pop.
Well, it’s pop only in the sense that it’s the opposite of mechanical minimal techno. Instead of clicks and blips, austerity and space, there’s melodies and hooks and colour.
There’s no posing here. Booka Shade just want their audience to have a good time, as affable Booka Shader Arno Kammermeier tells us down a phone line from Edinburgh: “We're not afraid of including a melody line or a catchy bassline in our music – we’re not about just trying to be cool.
“You see, our families were surrounded by music, Walter’s [Walter Merzige is the other half of the duo] family liked classical and mine liked jazz. All our brothers and sisters play instruments. So we were always surrounded by music – and that gave us a broad appreciation of it. We are not afraid of melody, or to be a bit poppy.”
What's more important to him – credibility or success?
“Hmmm... (he thinks about this one and chooses his words carefully)... Being true to what you do is most important. It’s okay to have success as long as you're true to what you do.”
The pair have been making electronic music since the early ‘90s, for labels such as Touche and Harthouse. But toward the end of the decade they fell out of love with 909s [a partially analogue, sample-based drum machine – as if you didn’t know!].
“We stopped making music as Booka Shade around 1997 or 1998 as everything had got quite boring, lots of big room techno,” says Arno. “The scene was not good. And we went off writing movie soundtracks, doing pop acts and that kind of stuff.”
What made them change their minds?
“We started hearing acts like Metro Area and Chicken Lips and this made us realise that there are more people out there than just those making boring music. Other people that love music like we do. And it was fantastic – like there was a new spirit in music. And from that we started up Get Physical as something that six friends did to put out the music we like. Six people who all have a background in clubs and dance music.”
Which takes us back to the start. Around 2002, Get Physical — essentially Booka Shade, the MANDY boys and DJ T — was born. A slow couple of years saw the label finding its feet, before things snowballed. Key releases like DJ T’s ‘Freemind’, Chelonius R Jones’ ‘I Don’t Know’ and MANDY’s technoid ‘Jah’ established the label as a force for forward-thinking house DJs, until Booka Shade’s ‘Mandarine Girl’ took things up a couple of divisions.
“‘Mandarine Girl’ was and is a big record for us,” enthuses Arno. “It sort of captures a feeling for us – that euphoria, that good time feeling. Where we are from in Frankfurt, there used to be a club called Omen (Uncle Sven’s legendary haunt) where you would hear what we used to call trance music, from labels like Frankfurt Beat and EyeQ. It was very euphoric, and that was something we tried to recreate with ‘Mandarine Girl’, using elements of that trance sound.”
Aaahh, the ‘t’ word. ‘Mandarine Girl’ and some parts of Booka Shade’s excellent new album, Movements, the follow-up to 2004’s moody Memento, represent a change in direction of sorts for Get Physical: rather than get bogged down in the glut of mediocre electro-house records out there, the GP top table seem to have decided to plough a new, personal furrow.
“Trance is different today than it is was then,” he reflects, “and tracks like ‘Mandarine Girl’ have elements of that in it. It’s open to interpretation. Some people call it neo-trance, but I don’t like putting names on things.”

Booka Shade play live at The Garden Party on June 5.