Event: Kruder & Dorfmeister with DJ Jason Bentley (bossa:nova) and J-Boogie at Club N

[clubmaster]

The story of Kruder & Dorfmeister's is not just a story of refusal and renunciation. As the two began making music together in the early 1990s, there was hardly anything that the two didn't do "wrong", and therefore, exactly right. At the time, Vienna was a metropolis of the aspiring techno movement and was active, during the initial heyday of the revolutionary style, with numerous successful artists, such as Pulsinger & Tunakan, Christopher Just or Electric Indigo. The gentlemen, K&D, rather followed the tradition of the continental "dancefloor" of the 1980s, which searched for a universal language of dance music, influenced by hip hop, rare groove, acid jazz, acid house and last but not least, of music between all those categories, preferring to play their favorite records in smokey bars than in the early mega-raves of the city. As the first post-acid jazz productions of labels like Ninjatune or Mo Wax heralded a new era, K&D were already a step ahead of those protagonists. While still working from time to time on an awkward formula for making "hip hop without rap" function, the sound of K&D's groundbreaking debut "G-Stoned", already apparently influenced by the elegiac arrangements of productions from the 1960s and 1970s of Afro-jazz and Pink Floyd, made many top producers begin scratching the backs of their heads, asking themselves who could have generated such an organically-flowing, complex yet subtle sound with two E-mu samplers, a Roland Space Delay and a dusty mixer. As the early heyday of techno then evaporated and the first generation of groundbreaking clubs closed their gates (today it's hard to believe that techno was declared dead, time and time again, in the mid-1990s!), K&D were already distinguished heroes in England and could hardly dodge all the offers for remixing. But yet again, the two stubborn gentlemen didn't play along: after the success of their "DJ-Kicks" and "Sessions" CDs, which sold millions worldwide, they turned down most of the offers made to them. After all, interviews with the hysterical tabloid hacks chasing after them was never fun for either of the two. Any marketing strategist would have smacked the two of them for skipping out on so many reported offers. Nonetheless, K&D always enjoyed not following advice and abandoned all of the enticing major offers, all of the promises of full-speed marketing machinery. Instead, they provided musician friends with distribution on their G-Stone label, hung out in the studio and put together follow-up projects, like Dorfmeister&Huber's Tosca or Kruder's Peace Orchestra. Meanwhile, their co-founded style had become established as wasted background sounds for elite bars and hair salons and was debauched as a farce under the terms trip hop, lounge or chillout, which had nothing to do with a deeper understanding of music that made the phenomenon of K&D what it was. Whoever heard the two DJing at the time, noticed that the cliche of smokey time-loop jazz had long been an obligation to the dancing populace and gave way to their own spirit of research. Besides excursions to drum & bass and sub-genres, such as broken beat, straight 4/4 rhythms crept into their sets and many felt snubbed, because the sound didn't fulfill those cliches anymore, or worse, they didn't even get it and still believed in the eternal Balearic sunset. The two still maintain an open concept, influenced by a wide-ranging taste in music and their ability to hear music, to feel and to be able to realize their musical conceptions. Kruder&Dorfmeister's career can, therefore, be more closely compared to that of major role model, Brian Eno, whose work, from Roxy Music or "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", to his productions with David Bowie and his "Music for Airports", was similarly influenced by an all-embodying, perpetually visionary and never shortsighted understanding of music. Since the beginning, the goal was to produce a very personalized sound, in which satisfying guidelines of genre was secondary. Peter Kruder ultimately proved that with his productions of DJ Hell's celebrated "Teufelswerk" or his wonderful "Private Collection", for example, which consists of his favorites of 5 decades of music history. Even Tosca's ceaselessly minimalist, almost dadaist tonal studies clearly point in that direction. So the two are happiest when people take their music and their DJ sets seriously for what they are: odes to hearing, feeling, sensing music and tonal language, which does not function like the many spoken languages of the world, but rather as body language: universal, global, unifying.