Marcel Dettmann's kingdom of techno

When Marcel Dettmann opened the door to his hotel room in Taipei, he flashed a genuine smile so big that it somehow softened the demeanor of the big Germanic warrior figure that stood beneath it, a sight that was in every way proportional to the DJ and producer’s musical dimension, except that this modern techno combatant doesn’t need a sword to stun people. The weapons he uses instead are his powerful DJ sets and meticulous productions, but just as if we were talking about a sword swing – powerful and ferocious yet precise and crafted with elegance.

Marcel Dettmann is an unavoidable monster when on the subject of techno. Known for his rough, textured and minimalist approach to music, Dettmann masters a hypnotic and repetitive yet nuanced style, where the beauty lies in the fact that it transmits so much with so few elements going into it.

But despite his raw approach to music, his artistic sensibility is much more complex. To him, art is all around us. He described it as being even in the smallest of details and that human curiosity should be the driving force for the discovery and appreciation of it.

Dettmann finds flair in even the smallest and most mundane things that happen in his daily life, and even in the things he sees on the street everyday. He even finds appreciation in a nice hand signature, and joked that it was certainly something he didn’t have.

“What makes me interested in art, music, paintings or film, or whatever draws your attention, and always makes me curious is when I don’t get it in the beginning. I want to understand it and that’s the reason I became interested in it, and that’s also the reason I watch a movie or buy a painting. You don’t know what was on the mind of the actor, the director or painter.”

“With music it’s the same,” he continued. “And that was the reason I became interested in techno music.”

But in fact, his taste for techno was something he developed over time and his curiosity played a big role in its growth because like all of us, he wasn’t born with a shaped and trimmed musical taste. Dettmann says that in the beginning of his techno discovery he wasn’t only listening to good music by his current standards, yet it was what delved him into the process of exploring underground music.

“Before I was listening to EBM and synth-pop and for me that was the pre-techno phase. Then all that music became more underground, with people in the peripheries starting to make music with samplers (these machines that capture whatever sound you want, enabling you to manipulate it after). So they started sampling different noises, like a phone ringing for example, or voice distortions, etc. and that started to evolve what we now call techno.”

But for his mother and father, he joked, it still just sounded like boom boom boom. They didn’t get it.

“Mainstream and commercial music is totally not my cup of tea nor my type of music, but I remember when I started to get into techno I was also listening to crappy things and that was the starting point. Real underground music – you don’t get it in the beginning because you don’t have immediate access to it, you don’t know where you can buy it, where you can hear it, who is making it, and which clubs are playing it. That comes step by step. And the introduction you do have is to popular music like David Guetta or Avicii. So you go to these parties and maybe you don’t like the music that much, but then at some point you listen to another guy and perhaps you think it’s a bit better, or more your cup of tea, so you start doing your research and then step by step you get into it. That’s the reason I play in Ibiza, actually.”

He went on to comment on how some big pop stars are becoming interested in techno because it’s considered cool these days and it’s becoming more widespread, but asserted that techno is still a very small planet.

A very small planet indeed, but it is one that still has enough dimension to encompass a diversity of structures and feelings unknown to many people. In a way it’s similar to the planet Earth, a planet that is smaller than others like Jupiter or Saturn, but is notoriously less arid and more diverse despite appearing mostly blue from a distance.

And contrary to popular belief, it’s exactly this diversity in techno that allowed Dettmann to take his music outside of the club. In 2013, he collaborated with Frank Wiedemann of Âme on the production of the score for MASSE, a ballet curated by the Berlin State Ballet and Berghain, the illustrious Berlin club that is considered to be Dettmann’s home, furthering the idea that despite what his parents and most parents think, techno can be regarded as far more than just pounding beats. He enjoyed the process in how he and Wiedemann were in constant exchange with the choreographers who would offer them perspective on the music so it would all fit together seamlessly with the dance.

“The process for the MASSE project was really interesting and really new for me. I’m always interested and curious in working together with people from different areas and different approaches to art,” he said of the experience.

He also worked on a project with close friend and movie director Parker Ellerman, who was always asking him to do music for his short films but Dettmann was never able to find the time.

“One day he told me that he really liked Seduction, a piece of music from my second album, and he asked me about what I thought of him doing a movie for the track since I never have time to do the other way around. That was really interesting because normally it’s the opposite, you make the music for the movie.”

He also uses his own label, Marcel Dettmann Records, to showcase the several faces of techno while keeping a critical view about how equal and non-creative a lot of the music out there can be. But he points out that there was, there is, and always will be artists exploring new and creative paths inside the techno universe.

Through his label he’s also been able to release stuff from his friends and people that are somewhat unknown. He has used music from people like this in his Fabric 77 mix CD and that’s the way he found to keep it special, he says. He also added that it’s easy to dig into your records and play your favorite tracks of the moment, but it’s more delicate to manage if you have unreleased and unknown music. People would ask him for the music but he couldn’t distribute what he was playing since it had never been released, and so, he decided to release them on his own label.

It all comes back to looking for that interesting element in things for Dettmann. He finds it boring to simply ask some popular techno name to send him music to release on his label. Instead he prefers to include artists like Ryan James Ford, who have never released any music before. Ford once sent him some music and as it turned out Dettmann really liked and so he decided to release it. It was more interesting this way, giving room to talented new artists, he said.

Despite his more than twenty years of deejaying experience, acclaimed accomplishments as a producer and his current globetrotting schedule, he keeps his feet on the ground with zero traces of a detached diva attitude, which is quite common to find nowadays. Instead, he has concerns about the world and since his daughter was born, he’s been more scared about things like religious fanatics inflicting harm and people’s lack of reasonability than reaping the kind of celebrity status that he is entitled to.

In a world where in detriment to artistic value, it’s notoriously easier and more lucrative to follow trends and what large profit driven industries are pushing the masses to consume, Dettmann is a reference and an example of how maintaining your vision of things and fighting for them can pay off in the end.

His views on electronic music have helped set the pace of what has been a strong resurgence of techno music over the past years. Be it melodic, deep and psychological techno, or intense, rhythmic and powerful grooves, made for the mind or for the body, the techno kingdom’s army is here to stay in whatever form it assumes, conquering more and more territory and recruiting new soldiers each day while defying all preconceptions.

And having Marcel Dettmann as one of its generals will surely grant him a long-lasting and peaceful reign.

Listen to Marcel Dettmann’s set from Berghain on New Year’s Eve below, where he kicks off Deckmatel’s new podcast series.