Hot Damn! | Those German DJs got style. Maybe that's why they get shoes named after them.
MSTRKRFT & Booka Shade
July 24 (9pm). The Starlite Room (10030-102 St). Tickets: $21, available through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.ca).
Not long after Germany’s Booka Shade struck a friendly corporate sponsorship arrangement with K-Swiss for a few of their shows, the American sneaker-maker came back to the duo—Arno Kammermeier and Walter Merziger—with a proposal: K-Swiss wanted to design a limited-edition line of Booka Shade athletic shoes. No sooner had they said, “Why not?” than a pair of the custom kicks turned up at their studio.
The shoes are pretty cool as white shoes go, Kammermeier laughs, while admitting he isn’t one to wear them regularly. Regardless, the rock-star treatment of a soleful homage remains somewhat surreal for the Booka Shade boys, pioneers of Frankfurt’s bustling electronic music scene. To the casual observer, Booka Shoes might signify that Booka Shade has finally made it to the top. But Kammermeier insists they haven’t let the fancy footwear go their heads.
“I think we’re still fairly underground,” he says. “Even with ‘Body Language,’ our biggest hit, I still consider it an underground anthem. I think it will be one of those tracks that people will look back in 10 years time and still remember. I’m happy that it never crossed over in a big, big way—like being #1 everywhere to the point where people were tired of hearing it. We licensed it to a couple of record companies, like the sample we let will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas use for ‘Get Your Money,’ but we’ve said no to a lot of projects too. We’ve been careful about it.”
Booka Shade has been anything but an overnight success. Now 40, he and Merziger have been working together for nearly 25 years, first in various synth-pop band incarnations to their current status as one of the world’s premier live electronic acts. After scoring trance hits like “Una Musica Senza Ritmo” on Sven Väth’s Harthouse label in the early ’90s under their Degeneration guise, Kammermeier and Merziger grew bored with the state of club music and went into hibernation. After a few years working behind the scenes on advertising contracts and songwriting for various pop acts, and finally coming up with the Booka Shade pseudonym, the duo re-emerged to start a new label: Get Physical.
Co-run with friends M.A.N.D.Y. (Patrick Bodmer and Philipp Jung) and DJ T. (Thomas Koch), Get Physical has become the toast of the underground dance scene. Still, despite a string of successful singles and the acclaimed 2004 release of Memento, their debut album, Booka Shade mostly remained in the shadows.
“We were always in the studio,” Kammermeier says. “It wasn’t until the guys from M.A.N.D.Y. told us that we should pay attention to playing either our records or any of the records from Get Physical live that we thought about setting up a live electronic act. People’s reactions were so good, with such good energy—that’s where things started.
“However, for us it was obvious that if we were doing something live, then it couldn’t just be a laptop thing. That was out of the question. We are musicians so we know how to play our instruments. We have photos in our studio from back in the day and our setup is basically the same: I still play the drums and Walter still plays keys, sings, and uses the vocoder.”
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it: clearly a formula that works for Booka Shade. The magazine XLR8R named 2006’s Movements one of the top electronic albums of all time, and the duo were recently recognized as Best Tech House Artist at the Beatport Music Awards. Their latest album, The Sun & The Neon Light, has been similarly praised. Regardless, Kammermeier is content to step out of the spotlight as required.
“We’re actually in the middle of rehearsing for an appearance in London,” he says, “where we’ll play music for a silent movie from 1908. It’s for a project called Noise of Art, where they take unknown movies from the British Film Institute archives, restore them, and get electronic artists to provide live music for them. It’s kind of unique because we’re not right onstage with the lights on us or anything. People watch the film and we can play with our music in a different way.”
