DJ DB has been a fixture in dance music through every renaissance the style has experienced. His archive of DJ mixes and flyers from the 90s rave era are a time capsule of electronic music’s first worldwide explosion, and in NO SCHOOL LIKE THE OLD SKOOL he shares some of these treasures. Get out your notepads…
In case you don’t know (but you fuckin should!), Sven Väth is another techno legend!
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His Harthouse label was one of my fave non-jungle dance labels of the 90s and it was responsible for many a classic, but possibly my favorite pick would be the epic “Acperience” by Hardfloor.
Sven began DJing at 18 at the famous Dorian Gray club. Since then, he’s created ripples through the world of electronic music in many ways: as co-founder of Eye Q Records, Harthouse, and Cocoon Recordings and as owner of the clubs OMEN and Cocoon Club. He’s considered by many to be the godfather of Germany’s trance and techno scene since its inception. This was also a time when “trance” sounded a whole lot different. ;)
This 1997 mixtape is from HR-3 – Clubnight, a famous radio show in Germany that inspired fans for years.
I only met Sven a couple of times 20 years ago, when I was running my club night called NASA. We did a showcase night during the New Music Seminar for some of the Harthouse artists.I remember the whole night was saturated only in deep blue light.
Here are two flyers from the NASA parties…The first from some warehouse afterparty we threw in Miami for a festival in 1992 and the second is the for one year anniversary of NASA. None of us knew it, but it turned out to also be the final night! The very next day the building was seized by the city because of back taxes they owed.
Like me, Sven is proper old-skool and still prefers playing with vinyl on two turntables. Bob Lefsetz ago caught him a couple of weeks playing in Ibiza.
Late edition to the post! My new friend Arthur Valaquez jest alerted me to the amazing fact that Sven actually smashed it in the German pop charts before his DJ career even took off! He had two big hit records under the artist name OFF and, as is obvious in this wicked video, he was quite a dancer too!
Two wicked classic OMEN flyers. (These are also great examples of the German club aesthetic.)
