DJ T. Interview: 'The timeless music remains on my shelf'

DJ T. has been partly responsible for two of dance music’s most enduring institutions. In 1989, T., otherwise known as Thomas Koch, established Groove Magazine in Frankfurt, Germany. It was one of Europe’s first specialist electronic music magazines, and under Koch’s helm and direction, became a sensation across Europe.

His association with the magazine also helped propel a transcendent career as a DJ, emerging from multiple residences to become one of the world’s most knowledgeable and best respected house and tech house selectors, with a record collection spanning some 50,000 pieces of wax. Later, Koch would co-found Get Physical with Booka Shade and M.A.N.D.Y.

For the past five years, Koch, who sold Groove over a decade ago, has remained only loosely involved in Get Physical, instead focusing on his DJ career and own productions, which are fixtures on a wide range of labels including Will Saul’s Aus imprint, and Matthias Tamzann’s Moon Harbour.

Ahead of his appearance at Get Diverted’s Birthday in London this weekend, the German selector speaks to John Thorp, reflecting on his timeless roots, his resilient influences, and whether he’ll ever be comfortable calling himself a producer.

As a music journalist, we’re all somewhat indebted to Groove. I know you’re not involved in the magazine these days, but it’s current form isn’t so far from it’s original intent. What inspired you to start a German dance music magazine in the 80s?

When I got the inspiration to start a magazine, I was 18. The only specialised music magazine was called Network Press. I didn’t know any English magazines. This was around 1988. My basic idea was actually very simple in the beginning. I had the realisation of how important charts would get as an orientation for the consumers, for the clubbers, for people that go out and go vinyl shopping.

If you look at the very first issue, that eventually came out at the end of 1989, you would find twenty four pages, or something like that, and 70-80% of it was charts. Charts from all the good DJs of the extended area around Frankfurt. So in the first few years, it was distributed locally in the area, and then step by step, I extended it to reach the whole of Germany, Switzerland and the bigger cities in Holland. There were charts from DJs, but also from record stores.

Back then, what was the state of music journalism? I know you were very into a particular Chicago House sound. Now, we can access interviews with the representatives and originators of any scene with ease, whereas in the past, that information was far less accessible.

I mean, that’s why I was so keen to fulfill my own needs as a consumer, as a clubgoer, as a vinyl collector, in starting Groove Magazine. It was basically the conviction that there were so many people like myself, who wanted to treat themselves with the information of what the DJs were playing, what record stores were selling… It was a new land to explore.

I still think we live in a culture of lists. There’s an insatiable demand for them, it seems, and they’re still a fixture of Groove. I often think there’s an amusing competitiveness among DJs when it comes to charts. At the time, what were people looking for? Were DJs attempting to showcase their taste as the most obscure, or looking for the big hits?

Already, both. You can’t imagine the impact that these kind of magazines, and this kind of information had throughout the whole 90s. I remember, before a new issue even came out, all the record stores would kind of try to squeeze out the information from me or one of the editors, for what was in the charts. They knew that whatever record Sven Vath had charted, they could order in the size of a few hundred.

It was a proper market factor on the underground. But there were so many formats in music journalism that changed over the years, that don’t even exist anymore. For example, when we introduced the magazine to national distribution, we had writers in all the cities where you had a proper club scene, and they would write text about the club culture in their territory. So, from a very subjective point of view, they would write long texts about what they experienced at certain parties, or even private after hours. I think this kind of fanzine-esque journalism doesn’t exist anymore, at least not in print form.

In the beginning, most people would think Groove started as a specialist magazine for early electronic music, but when we started, we wanted to be a magazine that covered all sorts of edgy dance music. So that included hip hop, RnB, EBM, for example, Front 242 or Nitzer Ebb. So the first two or three years still covered the whole dance thing.

You mention Sven Vath, who was known in the UK, but he really was a massive tastemaker in Germany, of the kind we don’t see today. Am I right in saying there was no other DJ who was equivalent to his influence?

Yes, at least not in Germany. I mean, internationally, you had Laurent Garnier, you had Jeff Mills and a few guys from the UK, but you could say that at least in the first half of the nineties, he was the biggest player in the underground, yes.

Were you a fan around that time?

Yes, I mean, my socialisation if you want to call it that, started with the opening of The Omen club in the summer of 1988. That was the first time, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, that was I able to enter the first clubs on the underground. It was also the so called second Summer of Love, with the very strong acid house wave that came from London and flooded the scene at the time in bigger cities and other countries in Europe.

That was a very intense birth of that sound, in the second half of that year. And Sven became omnipresent at that time. He was one of the first DJs in Europe, and especially in Germany, who got booked in other cities. So her very quickly had a whole entourage that I belonged to, that travelled to all those other cities.

So sure, for all the whole nineties, he had the biggest impact on me. But probably, the DJ I was looking up to most was Laurent Garnier. In terms of his techniques, his skills and the way he way he was telling a story in his sets with the choice of music.

You’re rooted in a particular house sound, but you’ve always been good at playing a broad range of records within that framework. Arguably, Laurent still does that better than anyone, really.

Yes, well recently, David Mancuso died and we look back to the very beginning of everything again. And in the beginning, there were no specialised DJs, and DJing meant jumping between styles and tempos with unexpected breaks or changes of mood. And for me, the key discipline of DJing is still mixing a lot of styles and eras in one set.

But, if you’re good in this discipline, you have to be able to put these things together in a way that still sounds homogenous - that it’s not too much of an interruption for the energy of a dancefloor. To bridge and connect these things in a way that people can follow. And Laurent is still doing that nowadays in a sense, even going into breakbeat and jungle sometimes, jumping between Detroit house and techno within a set two hours.

You had multiple residences in Frankfurt in the early nineties, amassing in between 40,000 and 50,000 records. Was that when you really began to grow as a DJ?

Yes, I think looking back, the first half of my career was that kind of local thing. Being a local hero, or just travelling a little bit to other cities in Germany, but not really leaving the country. And having had around four or five or six residencies through the nineties, in different clubs, including my own one, between 1999 and 2003, it’s a whole different energy if you play every weekend, or every second weekend.

You create something together, with your crowd, that starts to follow you. The crowd gets bigger, you have records you drop every time, they force you to play it, and it’s an interaction between you and that crowd, that builds over months or years. And then, in my second half of my career, I haven’t had any of my residences anymore. And I did all the international travelling, and stand in front of a different crowd every night, and that of course is a different challenge, a different approach and a different kind of fun.

And right now, to be honest, I wouldn’t have something against and would appreciate to go back again to that original energy, to my roots of DJing. I’m actually checking out right now whether I want to become a resident again in a new project in Berlin. It’s still an idea, but I want to cut down the international travelling over the next two years dramatically. I want to be able to pick the roses once or twice a month.

It’s interesting how these things come full circle. There has definitely been a renewed interest in residences, in the concept of the ‘local hero’, as you put it, with DJs like Bake in Glasgow, or Haii or Jasper James at Phonox in London. I think international DJs became so big in the past five years, people are into community focused DJs, who then ironically do get booked on an international scale.

It would mean also to make less compromises, musically. I come from the old school of DJing. Before specialised DJing even started, you learned to please a crowd over four, five or six hours. I had one residency that would run over nine hours, playing out of two vinyl boxes. Changing from pop to danceable rock, soul, RnB, hip hop, early house records, etcetera.

So, coming from that school, I never completely let that to become a super specialised DJ that follows one style over years. I just have to go with a certain flow, or I get bored of one style, so naturally go a little in another direction, perhaps for one year, and then I naturally feel like integrating other things in my DJing.

As for playing locally, the crowds in Berlin are super open minded, and in most clubs, you can play differently than 80% of the average peak time set in Europe.

A few years ago, you presented your own compilation of Strictly Rhythm edits. I know that label has been a huge part of your life. Did that represent a big deal to you?

Yes, one of the most honorous jobs I’ve ever got as a selector or producer. I grew up with that label, and in a way you could say it was the most influential house label of all time, or at least through the whole nineties. And I guess in terms of the number of releases, it’s one of the most prolific.

My perception changed of it through the nineties. Most the tracks I chose were from the first five, six or seven years. It then went perhaps more commercial, or away from the musical feeling that I had moved away from in that time. 

Do edits come easy to you, from a DJ’s perspective?

I’d already had a history of collaborations and edits, with disco and jacking house compilations on Get Physical. I really liked to do edits. I get asked sometimes to see sense in some of these edits, as I don’t really change a lot. People nowadays, with an edit, they expect a remix job, you know?

In the original sense, it’s just cutting along with original pieces, not adding anything new to it. Take Soul Clap ‘Extravaganza’, sung by Jamie Foxx. People would call that an edit. But that’s kind of a bootleg or remix, as around the acapella, they did a completely new composition.

So when I do edits, I just do a DJ friendly intro or outro, maybe I extend the break, add another break, but I don’t necessarily add new stuff. Maybe it’s a boring or unnecessary edit to some people, but to me, it’s important. Some of these records have a full on start, they directly start with the musical theme, and for a DJ it’s very convenient to take a pure rhythm part and put it in the beginning, making the first break where the record originally started. In my eyes, it makes sense, to make classics playable in a contemporary set.

I know you’ve had successful productions, but I feel your identity is very much one of a DJ, rather than a producer. I’ve always liked your honesty in discussing how you bring ideas to projects, rather than technical ability, and have even confessed in the past that production methods, hardware and so on, is less than exciting to you. Would there ever be a stage at which you would be comfortable considering yourself a producer?

Well, when I was standing in front of God when he was giving out brain parts for the technical side of things, he completely left me out. So that strain has gone. I sample a lot, with a very simple software like Audacity. I prepare a lot of samples for every studio session, as all my tracks always have been 70 or 80 percent sample based. That’s my fingerprint on the productions.

Recently, I’ve produced music for labels like Moon Harbour, Aus Music and True Soul, where people don’t necessarily recognise me anymore. Previously, it didn’t matter which producer I worked with, whether it was Walter from Booka Shade, if it’s Matthias Tanzmann, Steve Bug… They always recognised the DJ T. fingerprint on these productions. Now, that might be a little bit more confusing over the past two years, but that’s how I produce. I really rarely use plug-ins or outboard, as I really just love the charm of samples.

You ran Get Physical full on for a long time, listening to everything you got sent. From a label manager’s perspective, what makes working with labels like Aus or Moon Harbour a good experience?

One thing was that, I had this Get Physical stamp on my forehead for so many years, and people were associating me only with that label and I left the label as a co-owner, and as an A&R around 2010. Since, for the first time in my life and career, I’ve been completely focused on my music and DJing. The benefit of that was huge. And then, step by step, I grew into another direction, musically.

Recently, I don’t play so much that’s coming out on Get Physical. I still think it’s a quality label. There’s no bullshit coming out, no fillers, like I find on so many other labels. From my personal perception, they can be really hit and miss. The average quality is still quite high on Get Physical, it’s just not what I’m playing right now. 

So after all this deep house became a formula again, it started to bore me to death, I naturally had to go in other directions again. And while many of the others went into this minimal, progressive deep trance which is deep house nowadays, I had go back into more techno stuff, more tracky stuff. It was great fun, after all these years playing deep, disco-ish and slow, into styles that were big room comfortable and just play beats and grooves.

That’s what I’m partly still into, and that’s why I wanted to get new platforms that could reflect my own productions. So I choose (Matthias Thamzann’s label) Moon Harbour to showcase my tech-house side, but I love the quirky, non-categorizable stuff that comes out of the UK, and Aus Music is a very good example.

It was interesting to see you feature on the recent Aus 100 compilation, alongside people like Pearson Sound, Midland and Appleblim. It wasn’t necessarily where I’d have expected to see a DJ T track, but it worked alongside that UK school.

That was a very special track, it didn’t get any attention, but it was one of the best I ever did! At first, I wanted to release it on Planet E. Carl Craig liked the track, but he doesn’t release much at the moment. And I wondered where else it could fit, and a good choice was to send it to Will Saul at Aus. And it really reflects the open mindedness of the UK market.

If you compare Aus to other labels that release lots of different stuff, it’s just different styles, but not one concept. With Aus, it doesn’t matter if it’s releasing deeper stuff from Cassy or Huxley, or tough stuff, as a whole, it’s a clear musical statement. It’s an edgy range of club music that is timeless, it’s not fashion stuff, you know? There’s always a little bit of old school in there, it’s conscious of it’s heritage. As a whole, that’s a statement that really makes sense for me.

That brings us onto your set in London this weekend. You naturally want to move forward as an artist and a DJ. Has it been difficult to rub off that Get Physical stamp on your head, as you put it? And what can people expect from a DJ T. set at the moment?

I’m in the moment that people can’t be sure what they get. When I play peak time sets for bigger floors, it’ll always be a mix of classic tech house, jacking house, techno-not-techno stuff from the UK. But I’ve also been getting very technoish, it’s very technoish house, if you want to call it that... and it can get a little bit Detroit.

Buf if it’s a floor where I come in and feel the vibe, feel the crowd and can do anything what I want with the deepness possible there, then I’ll go into deeper stuff. I have five thousands tracks on my USB, including hip hop and RnB. That’s always a favourite surprise of mine, to go into the stuff I played at the beginning of my career. Butt you have to create that space, and you have to have the balls sometimes. So, it’s actually the mix of different kinds of gigs I have means I don’t worry myself at the moment.

You mention having 5,000 digital records at your disposal, but as we mentioned before, you once owned somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 records. Was scaling down from that many a relief, or a cathartic process, perhaps one that forces you to reflect on your tastes?

It was a constant process over the whole last fifteen years. I have ten thousand left now. You know, the older I become and the longer I’m playing, it’s about timeless music. The last time I really followed a fashionable sound, that was just belonging to a certain era, was the beginning of a new deep house, those samples from eighties RnB and hip hop.

For me, that was very refreshing. Suddenly, all these young producers started to sample my roots. I was just generally so happy that deep house was back after the domination of minimal for so many years. But, of course, this became a formula again. And I had to leave that field again, because everybody and everything sounded the same. 

I think Booka Shade’s ‘In White Rooms’, which you signed, was one of the first big club records I ever really loved…

Yes, and that was the birth of electro house. And that sound belonged very much to that time. I don’t dig out of any of these records ever more, and I don’t think I ever will again. In conclusion, it’s about timeless music, so that’s timeless house, timeless techno, maybe more the Detroit and Chicago side.

Chicago house just doesn’t seem to ever die, it’s a truly timeless sound, and I think you’re quite lucky to be rooted in it.

Yes, to stay in this time of timeless sounds, arrangements and production. A lot of new music, to me, is kind of over designed. It’s kind of dying in design, because there's’ not enough soul of the machines, you know? Not enough quirkiness, or analog feel. The timeless music remains on my shelf.

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