When the two creators of Public Possession, the Munich record shop and label, wanted to promote an upcoming release in the 12th issue of our magazine, they encountered some difficulties: “It’s not dubstep. [Laughter] But it goes in that direction. I have no idea what this kind of music is called,” said Marvin Schumann, one of the pair. At the time, they did not explain exactly what they were about to release. A few weeks after our talk with Schumann and Valentino Betz, the debut EP from Mechatok aka Timur Tokdemir came out on Public Possession. The case seems clear: The Gulf Area EP is a collection of four pieces ranging from disco to grime, R’n’B—and yes, perhaps even dubstep.
That EP is now hardly spoken about anymore—Mechatok is generally praised for the See Thru EP for Staycore which came out the following year, and his contributions to a compilation on Bala Club, for example. Mechatok’s individual style can already be heard on Gulf Area though: these delicate and sugar-sweet melodies would eventually become his trademark.
In the spring of 2017, Mechatok appeared in a Balacore-showcase at the Hyperreality Festival during the Wiener Festwochen [see zweikommasieben #15]—next to Toxe, Dinamarca, Endgame [see zweikommasieben #14], Kamixlo and Uli K. The day after the gig, a small delegation from zweikommasieben Magazin met him to talk about his self-conception, his pieces and his sound.
Remo Bitzi In an interview with Mixmag, you said that you understood yourself to be a songwriter when you did the EP on Staycore. Did you consciously choose this role?
Timur Tokdemir No, it was not a conscious decision from the start. But after working on the first songs, it became clear that there were similarities with pop songs—not necessarily aesthetic similarities, but they were very poppy in terms of song structure. That is why I thought it might be a good decision to follow this approach to its logical conclusion.
RB Do you consciously take on other roles when writing music, or in other situations?
TT I feel like a band could almost cover the last EP. The melodies can be played on any instrument. Right now I’m working on a project, where I’m definitely more in the producer role than the songwriter role. In this project, the focus is much more on the sound that is being used. These compositions would perhaps be more difficult for a band to cover.
RB Can you tell us something about the project? What is it?
TT It’s an EP on the Presto?! label.
Guy Schwegler How did this collaboration come about? I think that you and Presto?! are a perfect fit.
TT I have always been a very big fan of Lorenzo Senni. We got in contact when I was working in a graphic design office in Munich—Bureau Mirko Borsche. Lorenzo had originally contacted the agency; it wasn’t about music. Then my good friend Benji [Keating aka Palmistry; see zweikommasieben #14] did a record with Presto?!. Finally, I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, in the sense that I was only working with close friends.
TT For me as a DJ, the club is always in the back of my mind. However, it is never particularly present in the production process. It’s quite interesting to entirely block the club out when you are making the music and then to have this challenge of somehow making your stuff work in the club.
RB How do you do that? Do you produce edits to play for club gigs?
TT I make versions of my own songs, but they aren’t really any club-friendlier, but they might be longer or have different variations in them. But I don’t just suddenly add a kick to my songs.
RB When you play, how consciously do you choose the setting? Do you just go somewhere and play—in the sense that it is what it is? Or are you thinking about it and trying to approach the setting differently?
TT It definitively depends on the context. Some gigs, like last night, are more traditional DJ sets. But depending on how comfortable I feel as part of the line-up and so on, I sometimes play more of or exclusively my own stuff.
GS Yesterday you also played some stuff from the See Thru EP that was mentioned, and those parts were real peak-time moments. Of course your friends who were there must have recognized the pieces. But I think that the pieces also work well even if you don’t know them. Why do you think that is?
TT I think that the tracks are catchy because they’re structured like pop songs and have clear hooks etc.—even without vocals. If you recognize a song in the club that you have often listened to on your own, that causes euphoria. But there is also a clash: all of a sudden, something that you connected to intimately is being shared with 200 people. I think one experiences a more intense euphoric clash with songs that have catchy hooks than with anonymous, functional sounding club tracks.
GS It’s interesting that you mention this clash. It must be more powerful for you personally because you don’t really think about the club when you write the music, as you said. And then when you play in the club, you get reactions to your songs, which you probably have heard many times and didn’t think about in the context of the club.
TT I have to say, there are also special songs—“Placer”, this one song that does it pretty well every time, somehow it’s kind of clubby.
GS About the sound design for this EP: Did you mean the sweetness of this sound design to be edgy as well? We were asking ourselves whether sweet might be the new hard.
TT In another conversation, I was once told that my music is surprising when discovered in the context of the scene, where there may be a tendency towards harder sounds. But it doesn’t sound like that, because it was a conscious reaction to the context—it rather is the result of my preferences and influences. In the context of Berlin the sound may actually stand out at the moment, but it’s quite different in London. There is less separation between pop and experimental or “intellectually valid” music there.
RB But your scene has also carved out a niche for itself in Berlin, hasn’t it?
TT Yes, of course. But it feels a bit more hierarchical in Berlin, the way it is decided what kind of music is supposed to have what sort of intellectual value, and what kind isn’t.
RB As I understand it, artists from the Staycore and Bala Club scene use many different references—and put them on the same level. Of course this is a great approach, but there are also some dangers. What do you think of that?
TT I definitely see the danger associated with it, but as long as one grapples with the references in a sensible way, it is possible to avoid it. I find it interesting that on the subject of cultural appropriation in club music, the conversation is mainly about rhythmic sequences, and rarely about melodies or harmonic phrases. As soon as the focus shifts to the latter, the interest in identifying the references seems to drop off.
RB I didn’t mean my question to be so much about rhythms or melodies, but rather about content: Endgame said in our interview that he chooses the music he plays based on its intensity. That’s not wrong in principle, but there is the danger that you never know what you’re actually playing.
TT If you choose music based on its intensity, that doesn’t mean necessarily that you aren’t really engaged with it. Besides allowing access to musical genres from all over the world, the Internet also provides information that puts all this music in a socio-cultural context. But sometimes when you scroll through Soundcloud, you get the impression that a very wild sort of referential chaos predominates…
RB …and it is also becoming frayed in the pop genre. But in that case there aren’t any real connections, are there?
TT Probably not. I don’t know whether this theory makes sense, but if you use the same foreign thing again and again and make it your selling point, that’s more problematic in my opinion than if you consistently take everything from everywhere and then normalize this sort of muddle. It is thus a muddle that doesn’t weaken the cultural position of the original creators [or the material being sampled].
GS Although you are quite young, you have been able to develop your own unique and special sound. Have you reflected on this?
TT I have been making music with very clear ideals about sound for a very long time, with the guitar for example—jazz, classical music and so on. At first, I imitated sounds from existing musical models. But the moment everything started to make sense was when I could no longer say: “Oh, I want to sound like this or that.” I guess everybody says that… But at that point the music came out intuitively and I was really trying to put everything into a frame that I thought was well conceived and engaging. In any case, it is difficult to really know how recognizable or special your own sound is.
Mechatok will be playing our concert- and club series zweikommasieben in Lucerne on May 12th, under the motto “Genuine Club Bliss and Synthetic Joy”. RSVP for the event on Facebook!