We speak to the production duo behind one of the exclusive records on Deep Down & Defected Vol.2, Robosonic.
What inspired the name Robosonic?
Cord: When we met around 2005 Sacha would go by his last name “Robotti” and I’ve been releasing records under the name of “Schall”, which basically is the German word for ‘sound’. When we started working together on mash-up bootlegs and subsequently original productions, we mashed up our names to form that new musical character.
What advantages have you have found working as a duo?
Sacha: To work in a duo means that you can support the other one and the other one can support you. You become partners in crime. You share and care!
What have been some of the toughest challenges you’ve faced so far in your music career?
Sacha: We faced some financially very precarious situations in the past because we are and were extremely idealistic about wanting to earn our money solely with music and living our dream, whatever it takes. Hence we refused to take on day jobs that would grind us down creatively, we didn’t want to compromise. It was super hard at times and we truly have seen the darkest side of the existence as freelancers in the so called “music industry”. Our story is one of artistic struggle, hustling, believing in our talent and destiny, making enormous sacrifices, and prevailing!
You’ve been building a reputation as DJs and producers for over 6 years now but finally gained international recognition with the release of ‘Worst Love’ last summer. Why do you think this track was so successful?
Cord: Well, it’s not the first house track taking advantage of well-known samples used in Hip-hop records. Listening to soul we stumbled over a brilliant William Bell recording. That encounter made me listen to ‘Worst comes to worst’ again, a classic West coast Hip-hop joint by the Dilated Peoples - been playing that tune a lot back then. We really liked the Acapella DJ Babu was using for his scratches and used that same Mobb Deep vocal on top of the house groove with a soul full of William Bell. This mixture has attitude and brings back memories. Some sweet, some street. It spreads instant love, that’s why so many DJs played it.
What relationships with other artists and labels have been most important to you over the years and why?
Cord: We both developed our personal and professional network over the years and it’s evolving more than ever. So hard to tell what is cause and effect, as one connection leads to the next and we met so many people over the years who influenced us. Talking about ‘Worst Love’ we have to mention OFF Recordings, its founder Andre Crom and the label manager Jens. It is still a young relationship, but we’ve had an exceptional 2012.
Sacha: Harry Avers from NOICE! has been following and supporting us since day one with his insatiable motivation, networking skills and industry knowledge. I highly respect his sense of honour and ethics, he is a very rare kind of breed in this business! Harry always believed in us, he even got us a gig at Miami WMC 2008 alongside Justin Martin and Carl Cox before most promoters had heard our name!
Cord: With Oliver Koletzki we have a connection since 2006. Back then he remixed our first Robosonic single (‘Yasmin’) – and in January 2013 we released an EP on his label ‘Stil vor Talent’. In-between we only met once or twice and just followed the mythical tales about his career! Now he and his lovely team have shown us a lot of respect, welcoming vibes and a tight organisation.
Sacha: Lucas and Nat – formerly known together as ‘Zombie Disco Squad’ – had their influence on a personal level on me as well as artistically on both. This connection has lead, amongst many other valuable things like friendship and solo work, to Robosonic being a part of the roster of our booking agency Jackmode. Also the Adana Twins, a fun bunch who booked us to Hamburg years ago before they were jetsetting around the world, became friends over the years! So far this culminated in a collaboration EP to be released soon..
Cord: Which leads to another circuit: I feel connected with Shir Khan – head of ‘Exploited’ – because around 2004 we did a mash-up label together called “Broken Bootlegs”. Also we want to say special thanks to Eule of Fusion Festival for offering us slots on the big Fusion stages since 2006.
You’re perhaps best known for your DJ sets – what do you think is the key to being successful DJs and what do you think sets your performances apart from the rest?
Sacha: I guess we’ve always been pretty freestyle and open to mix different genres of dance music, play beautiful emotional tunes followed by dirty bassy ones, and generally not being afraid to try out different things. We’ve never really played the Top 100s straight up or cared too much about massive hypes.
Cord: It’s common sense that your image and the success of a DJ career is reflected by and originates in the productions which are released under your own name and the labels you associate yourself with. We are musicians and when crafting our DJ-productions we aim for quality, functionality but also novelty and some kind of twist. The same goes for our DJ-sets; there is a surprising element for everybody, no matter which of our tunes you might have heard before.
Sacha: We both play out records for more than a decade now and have seen quite a few dancefloors over the years, so we have experience and take our job seriously! The bottom line is, we want to make people dance, so we play music that they can have fun with and hopefully they will experience a whole range of emotions up to physical exhaustion. We love what we do, so you’ll probably see us smile a lot on stage!
You took a 4 year break from working on original productions in the studio to concentrate on touring, something which is quite interesting given the current emphasis many artists seem to put on making tracks. For many it seems as though DJing and producing go hand in hand; why did you make this decision and what effect do you think this break has had on what you have done since in the studio?
Sacha: It wasn’t so much a conscious decision – we simply had no studio, no money, no equipment and not much time. We had to get by with small DJ fees, while we were still studying and hustling hard.
Cord: It was actually a little less than 4 years, but against all odds we managed to build a professional production environment - and then it took another while until we had productions in the pipeline and found the right partners to release our music.
What made you decide to abandon your Diskomafia label?
Sacha: Long story short: the decline of the vinyl market and the admin workload took our motivation away. We decided to focus on producing more own music and team up with professional labels, rather than doing everything ourselves.
You seem to have a wide interest in the arts and have taken inspiration from classical music. Your ‘Feldrecord Im Zirkus EP’, paid tribute to pianist Laura Weider… what made you decide to tape the whole concert and use samples and field recordings to create this EP?
Cord: To record that world record performance was no big decision but rather a reflex. I arrived at Bar25 after playing a gig abroad with Robosonic and it seemed that nobody had taken care of recording it. Laura was already playing. I remember I was kind of tipsy but could get two field recorders to tape the dry signal from the piano as well as one microphone on top of the piano. Later on it turned out that the atmospheric sounds contained a lot more of the whole bizarre scenery and it was fun to work with that material – although it took ages to listen to it and find useable parts!
Can you tell us about the creative process that goes into the production of your tracks – for instance are you quite methodical in your approach or would you say it is more organic?
Sacha: It’s pretty organic. Before producing, we often talk about ideas and what kind of a track we want to do. Then mostly one of us starts a sketch, the other one then continues working on it, and we bounce it back and forth until we finish it together. We then play it out in the club to see the crowd reaction and feel the sound. Then we go back to the studio and work on it some more, and play it out again. This can take several weeks or even months until we have a version we’re down with! We then mix it down with our engineer Jesco Lohan on his analogue Venice desk for some extra OOMPH. It only needs to be mastered after that, mostly by the label where we sign the track.
You have an exclusive remix of Johnny Corporate’s ‘Sunday Shouting’ which features on the Deep Down and Defected Volume 2…
Sacha: I bought the original on vinyl around 2000 just before I left Edinburgh, where I had studied architecture for 2 years. Love the original, it has some history for me because it was part of a mix routine of techno, house and ghettotech which I did for a Vestax DJ Competition in Scotland - which I won, funnily enough! My copy was all scratched and warped after it. Last year, Andy from Defected asked us to choose a track from their back catalogue for a rework: without hesitation we picked “Sunday Shoutin’”. The original is impossible to match in terms of its vibe and “Zeitgeist”, so we decided to take a new approach.
What other projects are you working on at the moment?
Cord: We are reworking another classic by Kerri Chandler for King Street right now and have something cooking for NOIR MUSIC. We also started working on our second album. May I say that, Sacha? Is it official?
Sacha: Well, you just did Cord so it’s official now! Also worth mentioning, we have a Robosonic & Adana Twins EP most probably scheduled for late spring or early summer on Hamburg’s most famed House music label; the main track of the EP totally rocks every time we play it, so we’re very excited!
Deep Down and Defected is out now - listen & buy from iTunes
