Q+A: andhim

Cologne's andhim have risen to electronic music’s top tier with their self-described brand of “super-house” whipping dancefloors into a frenzy from their native Germany to Ibiza, the US and all the way down under, where the duo have just landed for a week-long stretch of shows, including their debut Australian festival slot at Electric Gardens, Sydney.

Mixmag dropped by for a chat with Simon as Tobias manned the decks with soothing laidback house in Melbourne's summer heat at an intimate Monday night barbecue, with Kolsch, Monkey Safari, ANNA and Wehbba, streamed on Facebook Live.

Fresh from launching their own label, Superfriends, in December with the melancholic Tosch EP, we found out what was in store for 2017, including a heavier-hitting new release expected by mid-year and some previously under-wraps remixes.

I thought we’d touch on "super-house." I know you speak about the meaning of the term all the time but as journalists we love having a tag. I’ve heard you describe it as a feeling and something that’s really uplifting in the past. Where does it have its roots and what are its major influences?

It’s hard to explain, you know, when we started to do music together we, and obviously other people, realised it was a little bit different and not easy to tag, and so everyone was asking us “What is this kind of music you’re doing? Is it house, tech house, whatever, sunshine house, I don’t know!”

As you said people love to tag things. Then we thought we can answer the question ourselves actually because our songs can be happy or can be deep or melancholy, or whatever, but you would hopefully always recognise this andhim fingerprint on it, and so we said “Hey, you know what, and especially for you journalists, we call it ‘super-house’,” and then everybody will understand what we're doing because we just created our own genre.

It was more to satisfy the journalists. It was actually a fun thing to do but then it became like a thing and then everyone was like “Hey, they’re doing super-house” and nowadays when we play a set, which can vary from very housey to techno, or whatever, actually sometimes people come and say “Hey, that was not a super-house set!” Which is funny, you know, because we made this up.

You touched on the fact that your music can be melancholic as well. I’ve noticed with your latest Tosch EP that it is a bit deeper and darker than some of your other work. Is that something you consciously wanted to explore or did it just kind of happen?

It always happens, you know, we are very bad with going to the studio with a vision like “Hey, let’s do like a real summer tune now or let’s do a club banger or something” and this is the fact I really love about making music. I mean in our case, other producers work differently probably, but we never know what will come out and it’s so driven by our own feelings at the moment we’re in the studio, so it can be everything.

The Tosch EP fits the winter mood, the 'German Winter' song for instance, but the whole EP has this kind of melancholy touch. But we don’t know yet what the next EP will sound like.