Booka Shade: On Positive Melancholy

Booka Shade. You know who they are. You’ve heard their music. You’ve seen their live shows on Youtube. And you know that they’re coming to Australia. And you can’t wait to see them.

Arno Kammermeier and Walter Merziger are the two men who make Booka Shade. Starting off as a synth pop duo in the early nineties, the pair quickly discovered trance and techno. The two changed their focus to club music, and the Booka Shade that we now know and love began to take shape.

Arno, one half of Booka Shade took time out from his busy schedule (touring, working on a new album, the release of first single due out in May, and producing fellow Get Physical artists) to have a chat with us. Australians will be lucky to hear the new single, entitled ‘Tickle’ and ‘Karma Car’ when Booka Shade commence their Australian tour next month. Arno has a lot to say, and his perhaps one of the most inspiring people I have spoken to in the music community. Rather than interrupt his words, I let him talk, and basked in his wisdom.

That being said, the first thing I noticed when speaking to Arno was his accent. Not because it was German, but because it was very English. “We’re both German,” he says, “but we talk English the whole day, and when we travel, English is THE language. I’m interested in languages, I like French a lot, I currently speak French with a very English accent now, but when I visit my sister in France, my French improves. I like languages, and I’ve always loved the idea of being able to communicate with anybody in the whole world, if you can speak different languages. English works pretty well except in the south of Europe…in places like Italy and Spain, they don’t really like English .” There’s a lot more to Arno than meets the eye.

The Name Booka Shade “doesn’t mean anything”, as Arno explained. Back in 1993, when their first single was released on Touché Records, the band now known as Booka Shade were looking for a project name. “We had a magazine, which we flipped through, and at one stage we saw ‘shade’ in one context, and ‘booka’ in another context. In fact it may even have been ‘booker’ as in booking agency, but we thought with an ‘a’ on the end it looks nicer, and has this Asian feel to it. Funnily enough, in the beginning, many people thought Booka Shade would be a Japanese band, because of this connotation of ‘booka’. And shade, night, shadow, this all works very well with the music we do. So yeah, it’s made up, but it sounds good!”

Booka Shade’s music is not your typical club music. “Our kick drum’s are about half the volume of most kick drums in club tracks…we have a lot of melodies in our music – we wonder how we get away with it in the clubs!”” Additionally, the music abandons the usually boring, monotonous, simplistic structure of most dance music, in favour of more complexities and subtleties. The appeal of Booka Shade transcends genres, and fans of every style of music find something in Booka Shade.

“I think the reason that Booka Shade has such a widespread appeal is because Walter and I have a broad background in music. We like classical music, a lot of jazz, sometimes even reggae. We’ve never limited ourselves to a certain kind of music, which is what makes the Booka Shade sound. We like to use the best parts of any music, put it in a melting pot, and see what comes out.”

Trance is one of the genres that goes into this melting pot. Cheesy, Euro-dance type tracks come to mind when one usually thinks of trance, with the same clichéd sounds, and the same two finger melodies, and arpeggiated bassline. So the fact that trance is an inspiration for Booka Shade comes as a surprise. Speaking of one the duos’ signature and most loved tracks, ‘Mandarine Girl, Arno explains how it has “this trance element, like a trance anthem.” Arno and Walter first became acquainted with the clubbing scene in the early 90’s, and this is when, as Arno puts it “is when original trance came out”.

“A lot of this trance background is in us, we like good trance records, but trance always has this really dangerous flare about it, as it has a really bad name nowadays – people think of trance as commercial big room music, but that’s not what we feel trance it as all. This is where we take a lot our inspiration form, and how we feel club music has a lot to do with the early 90’s.”

Unlike most ‘trance’, the complex melodies, counter melodies and harmonies in tracks such as ‘Mandarine Girl’ point to some kind of formal music training, in the classical school of thought perhaps. This turns out to be a half truth of sorts.

“We have some musical training, but we never studied music at like university or anything. We know how to play instruments, which is the main thing, but I think even earlier, we both came from very musically interesting families. My father loved jazz music, and he was a saxophone player. All my brothers and sisters play instruments. And with Walter, his father is a great, great fan of classical music, so Walter from day one when he was born, he listened, or was forced to listen to classical music, and if you listen to some of our songs, you realise that the layers or melodies that we use, even if its not melodies, even if its just sounds or effect, have an origin in classical music.”

“I play drums, and Walter plays keyboards, and he also knows how to play guitars. We have a songwriter background, we don’t just use the computer to fill in little points in the matrix, we actually know how harmonies go and stuff like that.”

Most dance music is uplifting, it’s banging, it makes you want to dance, and precious else. Very little causes real emotion, or warrants multiple listens away from the dance floor. “There’s a lot of great music done by people who are perhaps more DJ’s and not so much musicians, but our aim is to push things a little bit further.”

“It is in a way quite easy to do a dance track, or a minimal dance track. I mean there’s great music out there, and lets not talk about Richie Hawtin and those people, but there’s a lot of music that is just so easy to see through; it’s very predictable. That’s OK for after hours at 8 in the morning, but our music aims more for the special moments in the peak time, or when people still want to listen to what’s going on in the music.” Maybe the music isn’t aimed towards people who are high on their substance of choice or drunk? Maybe it’s for those who appreciate the beauty of the music? Laughing, Arno replied “I don’t have anything against people who are high, if it helps them, and they are following the music that’s absolutely fine with me! We just like to offer a little bit more in our music, and it all comes down to emotion of course. There’s a certain emotion that you get when you listen to this minimal track at 8 in the morning, and sometimes I’m in this state also where I really appreciate this. But our thing is to give a different emotion, that is combined with the melody, or sometimes with a little bit more complexity. sometimes I’m very surprised at how we get away with it, and that people actually follow it.”

The fact of the matter is that this music works in clubs, early on, late in the night, on the drive home. It works as background music at party, and it works when you want to wear some headphones, dim the lights, and just listen to the complexities, the subtleties, and the overall sense of simplicity of the music. Arno quoted Brian Eno, when he said “’production is reduction’. Every sound, every melody has to have a purpose, a reason to be there, otherwise there’s just no point.”

Booka Shade fans would be familiar with the effect that sounds like smoke being blown out, or a deep breath in, which are present in a few tracks on the Memento album. “Many of the vocal effects were done ourselves, like breathing in.” Working on their new album, the duo are contemplating whether or not they should use more vocals beyond effects and ear candy, perhaps featuring a vocal track or two. “We discussed whether we should include some vocals, and for sure, it won’t be featured artists who do the vocals, as we don’t like the idea of bringing in a well known singer, unless it’s something very special. We tried out some things with our own vocals, as Walter and I have worked as a pop group, so we’re used to it, but it will be very limited I think, because somehow, we believe in the strength of a good melody or a good instrumental track.”

Vocals make songs more accessible certainly, but it also dates music a lot more quickly. Very few vocal tracks from decades ago are still popular today, but classical music, which is entirely instrumental, and a lot of early electronic music is still listened to today. “When you use vocals you limit yourself in certain way. You open up too, because then of course there’s a lot more radio stations that can play your music, and people are more focussed on you…but then again we like the idea of the best possible instrumental album, or the most emotional melody.”

Emotion. It’s a word that’s been featured a lot of times in this interview. It’s emotion in the music, in the melody, in the sound itself. “It’s a certain warmth in the sound, a certain positivity, a positive feeling. We’re not great fans of dark music, we always like a positive atmosphere in our tracks. Even on the album, there are tracks which are really dark, but we like what we call, ‘positive melancholy’. It may be sad, or emotional, but still there is this light at the end of the tunnel.”

This ‘positive melancholy’ present in Booka Shade’s work is a feeling that is very difficult to describe, but anyone who has listened to the ‘Movements’ album would instantly feel nostalgic. As Arno continued, “There may be sadness, but it’s the sadness you enjoy, it’s melancholy. You can take a lot of positive energy out of that. This is what we like, its all about the emotion. If we manage to give you, as a listener, this emotion that is sad, but still makes you feel good, then it’s perfect, we have reached our aim 100% and we are very lucky”.

In addition to producing their own music, the pair act as producers for other Get Physical Artists, including M.A.N.D.Y, DJ T, and Electrochemie. “DJ T is not a musician at all, but he would come to the studio, with interesting sounds, interesting songs, or a lot of the time he will sing a bassline to us. Basically all the basslines of DJ T, he sings into a dictaphone, it’s really funny! He brings this into the studio, and that’s the only kind of song writing that he does. With M.A.N.D.Y its pretty much the same, they tell us what they want to do, and we sit down together and do it. This is how the producer works in electronic music, the DJ and producer duo.”

Speaking of M.A.N.D.Y one of the biggest hits in recent dance music history, was ‘Body Language’. This song was a true hit, not only was it voted the biggest song in Ibiza in 2005, but people are still listening to it today. I can’t imagine people will still want to hear PYUFD in 2 years time.

“Comparing it to what it did, and how many people liked the song, it’s very funny that this song was basically an accident. It was an accident done in 10 or 15 minutes. The guys [M.A.N.D.Y] were working on their compilation, which was then called the Body Language compilation, the first of the series. It was almost finished, then we all sat down with the label, and we said ‘wouldn’t it be good to have an exclusive track on this compilation, not a single but a song which is only on this compilation.’ Walter went to the studio, and played on the keyboard. The bassline that you know, wasn’t the bassline at first, it was played in the higher octaves, it was the melody. He transposed it down, and all of a sudden, the bass melody was born. The others came back, and said ‘wow this is great, lets do it.’ At first we didn’t really want to bring it out as a 12 inch, because it sounded very different to anything else that was around at the time. Then after a while, we said, you know it may be a summer track , so lets just bring it out. The song wasn’t embraced by people directly, it took a long time to be accepted by people, just because it was so different. It’s housey, but the backing is quite techno, its quite fast; it’s 130 b.p.m, which is quit fast for a house track. Week by week, we saw there was more appreciation and more people liked it.” And the rest is history.

The actual production values and sound quality of Booka Shade productions are nothing short of amazing. The warmth of the sound conjures up images of lots of analogue hardware, and the attention to detail is equisite. “In the studio, we use a Mac G5, Pro Tools, and Logic. We are Logic users from day one – we use the Pro Tools interface, but we don’t work with the software. We have the whole basement filled with old synthesizers, but it just works well for us to use software. We use a lot of soft synths, because it gives us the ability to switch from one project to another in a matter of seconds. The software Korg MS 20 is one of the few soft synths we like to use as much as the original, as we use it a lot for effects sounds, and layers. For bass sounds it’s not very phat. It has a tiny, sharp sound, which isn’t so good.”

Because the duo produce others’ music as well as their own, a hardware based system wouldn’t work . “We are working on multiple projects at once, and if we had an analogue system, it just wouldn’t work for us.” The warmth and non-digital, non-clinical sounding nature of their productions is put down to the fact that they have been producing music for over well 10 years now. It’s the experience, and the knowledge and the ideas which create the sound and the music, and not the equipment, a point which Arno emphasises greatly – “we like using a lot of little shareware synths that don’t cost a lot, but sound very cheap if you listen to them alone. But sometimes in the arrangement, these are the best sounds.”

The Booka Shade sound makes extensive use of the Arturia Minimoog V. “We’re quite pragmatic about our use of instruments. There are these people who say ‘but ahh you know, in the low end the original Minimoog is just so much better’, but we say ‘do the people in the club give a shit if it’s the original Minimoog or if it’s soft synth?’” The fact of the matter is that most people don’t know what a Minimoog is, despite the fact they have probably heard one hundreds of time. Laughing at this, Arno continued “Many times we’ve had people say, ‘that’s a good organ that plays’, or a piano, but its not, it completely different. The organ like click you hear is completely by coincidence. And because we use a lot of shareware, we’re not the ones to say that you need to have the most expensive equaliser, or compressor, in order to have the sound to be played in clubs.”

Their drum sound consists of multiple layers of sound. “If you hear a snare sound for example, it’s very likely that it’s not the one sound, it’s maybe six sounds.” Layering sounds today is a trivial task, but it wasn’t always so, as Arno remembers. “In the old days with MIDI, if you tried layering a snare sound with 3 other sounds, you would go crazy because the sound would never be in the same place or time, and because of this, it would flange. But when you have everything now in the computer, you can have 10 different sounds, and they’ll all arrive at the same time.” Booka Shade too then, have embraced the digital revolution.

Time was running out. We had been talking nearly an hour. Since Booka Shade are coming to Australia, to perform their world renowned live sets, in this day of superstar DJs who do nothing more than fade CDs in and out, it was refreshing to hear that their show truly is a live show.

“We bring the electronic drum set, Walter brings keyboards, we do a lot of vocoding on stage. We have mixing boards, and Kaoss pads, and the laptops too. We use four laptops – one is for Ableton, one is running Logic Pro with Battery for my drums, the third runs Logic Pro with various synths for Walter, for the keyboards, and the fourth is purely for the visuals, that run in sync with the music. Its synced via wireless MIDI with the Ableton computer.”

Sounds impressive. And I’m sure anyone who see’s their show will be impressed. And if you have not yet heard ‘Movements’ go out and buy it now. You will be impressed.

‘Movements’ is currently available at all good record stores. Their next album is due out in September, of which the first singles, ‘Tickle’ and ‘Karma Car’, should be out in May.

Booka Shade tour dates:

Thu 05/04/07 – Sydney @ Killer (SOLD OUT)
Sat 07/04/07 – Gold Coast @ Platinum
Fri 06/04/07 – Melbourne @ Room 680
Sun 08/04/07 – Melbourne @ The Prince with DJ T (SOLD OUT)