Everything dark: The rise of Rødhåd

The macho pyrotechnics accompanying tonight’s show only really begin to flex their muscles towards the end of Rødhåd’s set. An expensive-looking bank of dry ice cannons, fired in sharp unison, startle the 5,000-strong audience. As Rødhåd closes his set to a wild release of cheers, the spectacular lighting rig that illuminates tonight’s Awakenings show in Manchester’s Victoria Warehouse is just beginning to reveal its impressive, showy capabilities. It momentarily lifts the mass of energetic bodies from the dark and brooding soundscape Rødhåd has been building during his relatively short and early slot tonight. But the timing suits Rødhåd, aka Mike Bierbach. Later, when the visuals explode into the epic, Bierbach will have faded from view, leaving many with their favourite musical moments of the night: a superbly crafted build-up, expressed best within the simplicity of the plain walls of this industrial venue.

This energetic but often sparse sound, one that leaves space for freedom of physical movement but regularly rattles the brain with an innate psychedelic edge, is one that Rødhåd carefully nurtures. And it is one that his audience has grown to expect. As comfortable as he is setting the scene in tonight’s warm-up show, these days he’s more regularly to be found playing extensive sessions, such as the following night’s six hour stint at Concrete in Paris, or as the closing act at a major festival. At a time when techno music’s stock is at its highest, Rødhåd has emerged to become one of the leading DJs of its renaissance. He crosses time zones most weekends, taking his meticulously constructed collages to an international audience that wholly appreciates the attention to detail displayed in the curation of his Dystopian sound.

Although Rødhåd has only emerged onto the international stage in the last half-decade, Mike Bierbach’s success as a DJ didn’t happen overnight. It has not been prompted, as so many others have, by studio productions (he was already well established as a DJ in his native Berlin by the time he released his first EP in 2012). Nor has it been propelled by an active social media presence or an affiliation to any of Berlin’s globally renowned label or club brands. If, sitting in his hotel room before tonight’s big event, he shows no sign of nerves, that’s because tonight’s undertaking is a responsibility he knows only too well. Somewhat surprisingly, considering the dark aesthetic his music and his Dystopian label and parties are steeped in, he laughs and jokes his way through an interview which reveals his journey to becoming an internationally recognised talent as the refreshingly old-school tale of an outsider who broke through the ranks by means of talent, determination and vision, and with a little help from his friends.

“Around 2005 I had my first residency in Berlin,” says Bierbach, sipping bottled water, relaxed in the company of two old friends who now operate as his tour manager and label manager. They all speak pretty good English, albeit with heavy German accents, and are casually dressed – though Bierbach is distinctly well groomed, particularly the red hair and beard from whence he takes his DJ name. “It was a small club called Zementgarten. I was playing dub and techno, once every few weeks. Often I would play the opening set and I really liked that. I still like to do an opening set, to set a nice vibe for the night. But it was difficult in Berlin because there were always a couple of groups, crews, doing events and I never really felt like I belonged in any of them.”

Bierbach had grown into playing a slower, spacier, more atmospheric sound by the time of this residency in his early 20s, having grown bored of the relentlessly accelerating, hard techno associated with Berlin – particularly at places like Tresor, which was among his earliest club inspirations. Slowing down from the 145bpm sets he first publicly played as a teen, the dub he refers to is not the Jamaican sub-genre but music by the likes of Maurizio and Basic Channel. He kept the residency for about two years before the club closed and he was left without a home.

We would visit Berghain quite a lot,” he says of that time. “After Berlin lost the Ostgut and the old Tresor it was like the city was waiting for something new, and when Berghain arrived there was a room where techno felt right again. But there was the rumour that you couldn’t play Berghain unless you had a release. That wasn’t 100 per cent correct, but I needed to work on my DJ skills ’til 2010 to get my first chance. The long sets there helped me a lot, and I am really grateful to the club.”

Bierbach’s solution had been to build his own night. Despite having made a name for himself as a DJ rather than a producer (still, he believes, the central tenet of his identity), it took the best part of a year for plans for his own party to come together – largely because he couldn’t think of the right name. “I knew that once we started I’d need the design to be right as I wanted to keep this identity for a long time, to develop it as a record label and eventually release music,” he says, displaying a ruthless amount of fore-sight. “It took maybe six or seven months to come up with one. There were a lot of meetings where we would sit down and plan what we were going to do, but we couldn’t start because we didn’t have the right name.”

Luckily Bierbach already had in place the close-knit crew that still surrounds him. Their shared experience would help them find the right identity and their long-standing association would help usher the Dystopian night and label into being. Mike grew up in the new housing estates of Hohenschönhausen in the far East of Berlin with his father, a metalarbeiter (metal worker), his mother, who works in the financial system and older sister, and, despite not fully recognising its significance at the time, he remembers the fall of the Berlin Wall when he was six years old. “We moved there when I was one. My parents were living in Prenzlauer Berg before. At that time it was right next to the Wall, although now it’s quite a hip area, very expensive. But in the time we lived there it was kind of fucked up. The toilet was outside and the heating was the oven.”

It would be in these housing estates that he would develop a love for dance music, firstly gabba. “It was hard, radical,” he says unashamedly; “a lot of East Germans identified with it. It sounded like East Germany. Brutal, destroying.” It was on these estates where he would first try out his friend’s turntables (he bought his own when he was 15) and forge enduring friendships. “In the area where I grew up we didn’t have any people from West Berlin, so I was surrounded only by people from the East. The guys where I grew up were really rough, working-class people, you know? Maybe after school, when I started my ausbildung [apprenticeship], that was my first real contact with people from the West.” Bierbach’s ausbildung took place in an office where he learned how to do construction drawings for architects. It was a typically practical shoe-horning of his artistic sensibilities into a career path. “When I was younger I was really into graffiti, so it came from my love of painting and writing,” he says; although he recalls, with a smile, that “it soon turned out that I didn’t actually have to paint or write anything, because by this time everybody was already working with computers.”

Dystopian’s label manager (who, like his tour manager, firmly shies away from telling us his name, despite his integral part in Rødhåd’s story), recounts being impressed by his dedication to his day job at the time. Drawn together through music, he recalls that many others he met at the same time, through art or music, would solely inhabit those worlds, eking out existences on social benefits. “But as an artist it’s not really easy,” says Bierbach. “You don’t have a regular income, and I actually wanted to make money so I could buy records and have my own apartment. Also I liked the job, because I’m really into technical stuff.”

Bierbach would keep this parallel pursuit that paid for records right up to 2013. Unlike the foresight shown in the founding of Dystopian, he had never had a grand plan of becoming an international DJ and devoting all his time to techno. That only became an option with his increasing popularity. “The first real parties we’d done were ones we put on ourselves,” says Bierbach of his first forays while still a teenager. “We had another friend who was working at a company which rented out sound-systems. At the weekend he’d just get transport, put a soundsystem in the back and we’d go to a field not far from where we lived and set up for maybe fifty to eighty people. We had a little tent and a small desk, turntables, the soundsystem and that’s it. We weren’t thinking about doing crazy stuff with lights; it was just about the music.”

Although their parties these days are a lot less basic, that same emphasis on music above everything else is still evident. It now comes with an industrial, bleak and futuristic aesthetic that’s evident across all Dystopian activities, from their choice of venue to the artwork that adorns the label’s releases and the night’s promotional posters and flyers (which they still insist on producing, despite admitting social media makes them unnecessary).

“I was always a fan of a certain sort of movie – Blade Runner, The Matrix, Running Man,” says Bierbach, who knew that they had found the right name after his label manager called him from an all-night session at a beach-based festival. The inspiration had come as he dreamed of being able to replace the bright sun with the dark confines of the more familiar raving space of Berghain. “When you show people who are observed by a bigger authority, like in those movies when society is divided, I’d always identify with those people who would be living hidden in the underground. When you went to Tresor or Berghain it was like entering a new, unseen society,” he says. “Everything dark, the sound of machines. It was a perfect aesthetic: visually and in sound. And maybe we identify with it, because we’re from the East of Germany. There was always this feeling that we were the outsiders, from the corner of society; that we were being watched.”

“We weren’t actually that subversive,” he adds, laughing. “I mean, we had good parents, I had a job. It’s not like I was one a revolutionary desperate for a struggle with authority. It was just what we could see.”

The first DystopiaN party was held in 2009 and after a fitting line-up of guests (including Ben Klock, Shed and Sandwell District), Rødhåd (who had changed his name from Redhead, or locally Der Rote, for the party after discovering a DJ from Belgium was using the same name) took to the stage to play the kind of epic closing set he’s since become famed for. They had shown the futuristic 1927 black-and-white Fritz Lang movie Metropolis as part of the backdrop, bolstering the aesthetic, and Rødhåd set the tone for future parties and more far-flung excursions that night with his trademark shifts through space, percussion, dub and psychedelic techno sounds.

The Dystopian label followed in 2012, debuting with Rødhåd’s own Orwell-inspired ‘1984’ EP. Since those first steps it has grown, in direct correlation to the confidence of Rødhåd’s own productions, and undoubtedly had its most musically diverse and accomplished year in 2015 with releases from Daribow, Stone Edge, Armitage, Distant Echoes and two EPs from Rødhåd himself. Alongside his haunting 2015 remix of Howling’s ‘Signs’ these EPs mark a distinct high point in terms of Rødhåd’s production career and a distillation of the dark and melancholy mood that characterise Dystopia.

“For me, sad feelings are stronger than happy feelings,” says Bierbach. “That doesn’t mean I’m a sad person. Everyone who knows me can attest that I’m a happy person. But for me, when I search for music, even on the radio, if I hear that kind of uplifting sound, [he mimics inane, cheerful radio music], it doesn’t transmit any real emotion for me. I’m more touched when I hear sad songs, a melancholy vibe. It’s more real than this... instant happiness.”

His increased output and marked evolution as a producer suggest that a debut album could be on the cards, and he admits this is something he’d like to complete, time permitting, before the end of 2016. Although as a thoughtful and careful planner, his current stage of deciding just what makes a great techno album could – like the fact that he’s currently moving and building a new studio – hinder any deadlines. Self-taught in the studio, his fondness for the technical lending itself well to hours spent reading hardware and software manuals, he cites Efdemin’s last album and Ben Klock’s 2010 release
as benchmarks.

He’s also excited by the prospect of playing live. “The way I work in the studio is more like jamming, and that way of working is more how I can imagine working in a live set, perhaps in collaboration. It doesn’t have to be a proper peak-time live set for clubs, it could maybe be something more experimental, for a festival.”

Juggling the future studio work he is relishing with the amount of commitments he currently undertakes in a ceaseless DJ schedule (he only takes time off for a break in September) is not going to be an easy task for Mike Bierbach. But he’s clearly not a man who will acquiesce easily when his vision is challenged. The future looks to be more promising and full of possibilities than ever: hardly dystopian at all...

Rødhåd plays Belfast’s AVA Festival on June 4 and London’s Found festival on June 11