Impact: Mechatok

You're also part of Bala Club. How did that relationship come about?

It was Uli that hit me up about trying to work together. After a little bit of talking and sharing music, we started making songs. We met IRL when Uli came to Berlin to play a show, we hung out and shortly after I started going to London more often, to play the Bala parties and work on music with Uli. At some point it just felt like I was part of it, since we became really good friends and had worked together so much.

Your work with Uli-K is some of your best, especially 'Fix Up', which is like this underground pop banger. How do you two approach collaborating?

That’s really sweet to hear. It’s sometimes either him or me sketching up some chords, then Uli writes lyrics and a vocal melody on top of them, records the vocals and sends them to me. Based on the acapella and the rough chord sketch, I produce the song to its final form. Sometimes I also just send a finished Instrumental and Uli jumps on it. We mostly never take longer than a day though, so if something feels right it’s finished in a couple of hours.

Your tracks with Uli just seem to appear online as if by magic. Is there a bigger plan for you work together though?

I guess we thought they should be dropped as spontaneously and quickly as they're being made. It’s really fun and liberating to break out of these traditional ways of the music industry and just drop stuff the day its finished. But yeah, there’s something that we just started working on, which is going to have a bigger format.

It's interesting that you talk about operating outside of the traditional music industry. Have you always thought that way? It must come second nature to you, having grown up in the age of SoundCloud, Facebook artist pages, etc?

The method of just dropping songs on SoundCloud works detached from the music industry, but I wouldn't say its necessarily by choice. It just results from the fact that I didn't have access to any more professional or traditional ways of publishing music. Now that there's more options [online], it turned into something I want to keep up, just because it's the most free way to drop a song.