The Hard Wax complex

That community was how a lot of great styles of music happened. Basically that one source, that one place was Hard Wax records. Hard Wax in the '90s was one of those places where if you came in and asked for the wrong record you might get thrown out. They were militant about the music. If it wasn't reggae music, it had to be really good or it wasn't gonna fly, it wasn't gonna go in the store. DJ Rok, who was working there for years, he was always in fatigues []. That store was like UR Europe. It wasn't UR Berlin, it was like UR European HQ.Meanwhile, still acting as both trading post and meeting place, the Hard Wax shop has become a post-techno gateway, opening out into dub, electroacoustics and two-step jungle, as well as the inspired techno of former UR member Jeff Mills. In fact, a self-sufficient ecology has developed in its building, linking the shop floor to Chain Reaction and its satellite labels: Ernestus and von Oswald's reggae-inflected Rhythm & Sound and Burial Mix; Imbalance, established by von Oswald to release more abstract electroacoustic works and now run by Monolake's Robert Henke; Din, run by Sascha Brauer and Various Artists' Torsten Pröfrock. The building also houses the Dubplates & Mastering room, installed by Basic Channel so they could cut vinyl to Detroit standards. All these activities are independently interlinked, autonomous but related, detachable but connected. [ The Wire , 1998]This is partly what made the scene so attractive to me. I really had a sense of a community of like-minded people, sharing ideas, talking about releases, talking about music, talking about concerts, talking about performance—all of these things were an essential part of it. The fact that everyone was listening to what everyone else would release was a very unique experience I would say.It was always a situation where I went to Moritz's studio first, or their joint studio together, or Mark's own personal space with his gear. For me it's always been like a kid going into a candy store, because they get these rare pieces of gear. Mark had a [Sequential Circuits] Prophet 10, that was a big deal for me to see this thing. It's kind of crazy because he had a Prophet 10 but I think he got it in Detroit. They bought synths from United Sound where George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic recorded their music. For me it was really incredible to go to these spaces that they had, to see what type of outboard gear they were using outside of synthesizers or how deep they'd go on speakers.I set up a meeting with Mark and Moritz. We met at the Basic Channel studio, it was the first time I was at their studio. I was impressed because it was a very interesting electronic playground. It wasn't laid out in the way a classic recording studio would be laid out, it was really focused on making percussive sounds with electronic instruments. It had four loudspeakers in four corners and the mixing desk was not the most central part of it. A lot of things were done in a really interesting way.Of course, we also changed the equipment all the time... nothing is kept for too many years, except some special custom-made stuff I have. I try to get into new stuff and old stuff. [ Moritz von Oswald Lecture (Barcelona 2008) , Red Bull Music Academy]We had no clue. This is so true for many, many things which came out from the Basic Channel/Chain Reaction group of people. We approached it all in a different way. It was a really good thing because since we defined our own aesthetics, there was no necessity to adhere to certain standards. The only thing that counted was, does the result make us happy?We approached the whole mastering philosophy and vinyl cutting philosophy in very much the same way. In a normal mastering studio the music stays mostly untouched and just gets slightly better sounding. Our philosophy was what comes into the studio is material, let's make it shine. Completely changing the spectral balance of a track, or compressing a lot, or applying a lot of really dramatic changes was completely part of the game. This was not only due to our inexperience, but it was also a conceptual idea. It had to do with the fact that the people who were our customers at the time, we all had our own home studios. No one from the Chain Reaction crew had a big studio room, and that meant the environments where we produced our music were by no means a professional environment. And therefore Dubplates & Mastering was perhaps the first time you'd hear the track on big speakers. Going to that place and mastering basically meant you put in some raw material and you get something else back which is probably very cool. This was the promise, and I guess in many cases what we managed to do.There were moments where this completely went wrong, like really epic fails, but most of the time I think we managed to create a consistency in sound and aesthetics that also helped define this sonic brand. The process of cutting the record is a dialogue between the mastering engineer and the music, but also the dialogue between you and the mastering engineer. And the moments I enjoyed the most when I was still working there was sitting together with an artist in the cutting room and trying together to get something new.