ItaloJohnson: the mystery men

All three were old enough to have been around the block. R and J were hip hop-heads from Hamburg, R later becoming a drum ’n’ bass DJ (“really hard, angry stuff in clubs with no girls!”), while M was obsessed with Underground Resistance and other house and techno from a very young age, but – incongruously, given his dandyish demeanour – started his DJ career as a teenager in the mid 90s playing gabba, even playing at the notorious Dutch Thunderdome festival.

They all followed the techno scene as it got locked into Jeff Mills-style loop/tribal grooves then (“literally overnight in about 2002” says J) flipped to minimal/micro-house. For all that they’d get bored with its ubiquity by 2006, they all loved this scene (J laughs, “I still liked to get sweaty and go wild just as much as with the hard stuff”) and they participated gladly in it – until their lighting bolt moment in Panorama Bar.

It would be another four years before the friendship coalesced into ItaloJohnson, though, during which time Cassy and Prosumer’s influence would ripple out from the heart of Berlin, creating a climate that was ready for the three guys’ “ideas about sound”. Slowly, slowly (can you see a pattern forming?) they fell into producing as a trio, grabbing moments where they could and developing a patient, perfectionist work pattern. All of them have jobs – R and J “in club music”, M just smiles and says “I won’t tell you” – and even though R and J share a flat, between their work and weekends usually spent DJing, they’re lucky to get an evening or two a week to actually get into the studio. When they do, they never give up on a track, honing it until it works – so their tiny released output represents almost the entirety of their productions to date.

Their production process is as pragmatic as everything else they do, which perhaps explains how their tracks manage to sound both retro and futurist, electronic and organic simultaneously, with live percussion playing off muted rave sounds and super-subtle acid licks. “We like synthesisers and hardware,” says J, his hands mapping out the shapes of studio kit, “but there’s no rules about it.” And it’s the same when it comes to their attitude to vinyl. “We’re certainly not vinyl hardliners!” says R; “we play digital music when we DJ.” “I say to anyone,” says M, “‘hey, please play a good set, it really doesn’t matter what tools you’re using, and please produce a good record: if it sounds good, it is good’. Some things are faster to do with analogue gear – if you want a certain sound, you’ll spend endless hours with plug-ins – but if you use just analogue gear, you’re stuck in a certain domain of sounds, you can’t get this precise, super-loud, on-the-point, transient rich kick, for example. So the combination of analogue and digital has power that neither alone does.”

Yes, they release only on vinyl, but that has more to do with the practicalities of their desire to stay away from the pressures of having a big digital presence. “People are concerned about photos and quotes and things that you put on social media all the time, and this is so much what we don’t want to do,” says M.

J picks up the thread: “We realised anyway that we couldn’t even feed social media, with only two releases a year, and two remixes in six years – we’re just working on our third. Most times we don’t have anything to promote. Social media wouldn’t really work for us!” Gently mocking the standard DJ’s Instagram feed, they chime in with the clichés: “travel pictures, pictures of their food...” says R. “Always saying ‘Thanks so much to...’ or ‘Looking forward to...’” continues M; “I mean no criticism, no judgement, no nothing, but for me after five, ten years, I feel it could become boring!”