Getting High With Stephan Bodzin

Image: Stephan Bodzin

Stephan Bodzin began as a producer in the truest sense - a technical master who has produced and engineered the likes of Mark Romboy, Oliver Huntemann and Thomas Schumacher, as well as his own impressive body of work via his legendary Herzblut imprint.

More recently he has become famed for his DJ/live sets, including this hugely popular Boiler Room mix B2B with his old partner in crime, Marc Romboy, recorded in Sao Paolo recently (hear below).

He will show off his technical mastery for Luna at Constellations in Liverpool on Saturday November 8th, but what a lot of people don't know is that this studio geek has a more adventurous side to him. He's been a regular skydiver for over ten years, so we decided to quiz him about his escape from the darkened solitude of the studio...

So tell us about your first jump...

My first jump was super cool. It was a tandem jump near my hometown Bremen. I was super inspired, addicted from the first second! I did another one that weekend, then two weeks later started my training for the license. I've since been around the world jumping, and I've done six or seven hundred jumps now!

What do you love about it?

Actually, the thing I love the most outside of the adrenaline and the freefall is that you have to focus on that and nothing else, just to save your life.

That's really something that's giving me total different input outside of music which is going in and out of my head, day in day out, and at night as well! This is something really, really different which needs full focus and I mean full focus - that's what I really like when I'm going skydiving.

Besides the focus thing, it's just pure fun. Hanging on the wing and waiting for the others, and just to let go is super fun man! And I'll do this as long as I'm alive, I'm pretty sure.

Does it actually help your creative process?

Maybe. Just the fact that it just takes me somewhere else and makes everything fresh on Monday. Feeling super new and super fresh is a good thing. But the creative process is a mysterious thing! I'm not going to be the first one to fully explain it.

That's why we love it isn't it? Those unexplained grey areas. So do you like to jump after you've come back from a long DJ schedule, to reset your mind?

Actually no. The more I'm travelling, the less I'm jumping. It's getting a bit rare these days, due to a super, super busy year! I'm looking forward to some jump holidays next spring, but I will just take two weeks off and do 10 jumps a day. And that's two weeks off and I mean it - off everything! But I don't have time to do it every week.

If you've done 600, 700 jumps - you must have done it in quite a few different places - what are the most extraordinary places you've jumped?

I've been to many drop zones in Florida, which is kind of a mecca for sky divers. One of the meccas anyway. There are some really beautiful spots with a lot of great planes and helicopters, super instructors. Also a really good and popular place, the biggest drop zone in Europe, is in Gerona near Barcelona. I've done a lot of jumps out of some really funny planes, like an old Russian Transporter which is not actually made for skydiving.

So a plane that is actually made for skydiving can slow down to 100km per hour so when you jump the air doesn't slap your face like crazy, but this one was not made to fly for skydivers. This one we jumped out at 400km per hours in the winter, and it was minus five in the ground, and you lose seven degrees for each thousand metres so we're between minus 30 minus 40, and that hits you hard man! You don't need no coffee the next morning.

You literally get high!

Yeah! Also I've jumped near Rome - that's beautiful. But Spain and Florida are the main spots if you want to do a lot of jumps. You can easily do 10-15 jumps per day.

From what height?

It's usually 4,000 metres. That's officially the limit for skydiving in Europe and the US but sometimes if you've got a nice pilot, he'll take you higher.

What made you decide to do skydiving in the first place?

It was something I used to talk about when I was younger. In the studio I'd always be saying to Oliver Huntemann "yeah man, one day, one day etc." and then after two years of this he bought me a tandem jump for a birthday present. So it was down to Oliver Huntemann!

Then I just fell in love with it. In my mind I'm always floating down through the clouds on a parachute.

Does Oliver jump himself?

No, not at all. I took Marc Romboy for a tandem jump once. He didn't really like it.

Are there any other DJs producers or industries figures into it?

The boys from Modeselektor did a photo shoot where they were skydiving. I was texting a bit with them… they liked it but I'm pretty sure they're not really into it now.

One problem is that DJing and skydiving is basically weekend business. You can normally only do one or the other.

Is Felix Baumgartner an inspiration to you?

He is a fucking hero! Jumping out of 40km from a fucking balloon to the earth. It was a super marketing thing, but still, he's a fucking hero. And everything else he did. He's not directly an inspiration to me, and I guess he's not my hero, but he is a hero!

Isn't he now trying to be a politician? How's that working out for him?

Hopefully he's not doing it. He's famous now, you know how it goes.

If Arnold Schwarzenegger can be a politician, anybody can.

You're absolutely right man!

So what kind of people do you meet when you're doing these skydives? There must be quite a few interesting characters.

Ummmm, yeah… call it 'a few interesting characters'! I couldn't say it better to be diplomatic. But it's kind of extreme characters, and my very personal opinion is that there are only a few guys I really like which focus on the right things.

A lot of skydivers these days look for the most scenic flight and landing and super cameras and head-down extremes, and it's super dangerous. And because of these freaks, as I call them, people still die. They're just so risky. Most of them don't really acknowledge that it's still dangerous, heading towards the ground at 200km per hour.

I don't like too many people in the skydiving community to be honest! And I'm actually not such a team player myself. I've obviously found some nice teams in the past, where there'd be 8-way or 16-way in the air, building shapes, but guys doing serious briefing and working on some serious stuff… they all live and talk about safety first. I don't risk my life - I have family. If I wasn't 100% sure I'd survive, I'd never jump out of a plane!

Have you ever had a jump where you felt unsafe? Where something's gone wrong?

Yes, it has happened. We had a plane stall where we were falling down like a stone… a whole plane full of skydivers. Everyone was shitting themselves! It was obviously really scary. But we had a good pilot who got through it in the end, but we all had to jump out after that anyway! Everyone had white skin and super-scared eyes… 'do we have to?' 'yes you have to!'

That was a bit scary. The rest of the jumps were fine. If you have a failure opening the chute, sometimes you have to throw it away and pull the reserve one on your back, but I've never had that situation. You just have to be prepared for the worse case. But I've been lucky.

Just as well really, otherwise he wouldn't be available for Luna on November 7th! Tickets available here.

Interview: Mike Boorman (follow him on twitter here)

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