"...there are always lucky moments, where you don’t know anything about it and the outcome is better than everything else – but you might have much more success long term if you know everything very well but be able to forget certain rules in certain moments."
Do you have any other work besides the music business or does it consume your existence? I study music technology in London, this is very time consuming besides music production, label, Djing and other personal things... its hard but it works. Can you talk us through your journey into the techno scene and to Berlin? My journey into proper Techno like Jeff Mills, Surgeon etc started a bit later than my first contact with DJing – it was through a DJ mix and I loved the machine like sounds – it also fitted the time very well it must have been in 1999 when I was studying mechanical engineering: the music was the soundtrack to the mechanical things I learned there, and soon I started to produce music which was a very technical thing as well with all the parameters on a synth. For me, Techno is still half music half engineering. When did you first appear in public? In the year 2000, so with 15 years - I always played the warmup sets in Linz / Austria, where I came from, for the venues like Nova and Membrankeller. How would you describe your creative production process? I’m a bit bad in copying something or recreating exactly this or that, I’m more like exploring things and find a setup of gear and harmonies etc. and then produce many variations of this and select the best one after some time. This method is a bit more risky the the other one but the reward can be much larger. My process is basically experimenting and then selecting and further shaping.What tracks, remixes or mix-sets would you recommend to someone that is not yet familiar with your music?
The DJ-Mix player with almost all of my recorded DJ-Mixes inside which you can find here and my tracks which are all available on Beatport. Can you tell us more about your excellent Flash 151 EP? Yeah it was created entirely on the modular system and I recorded depending on the song only 1 stereo master channel or 2 stereo channels – so it was pretty much mixed on the fly and then only cut a bit in Cubase because I tend to record 15min. takes. A disadvantage I want to improve in the future is that it is a bit too much in mono. I tended to mix most of the things to the middle of the stereo field because I was focussing on the sound-shaping and performance too much. What inspired you and Oliver Koletzki to create your own label? The fact that we had different skills which merged together within the label and the opportunity to release tracks which wouldn`t fit perfectly to other labels. What is the record that you always carry with you, that never fails? There are some records of that kind of course but at the moment it’s Shifted – Persistence of Vision (MB Elektronics). I also like the title of it. And, please forgive me, I also have to name at least one from my own imprint FLASH Recordings because I play it in all sets which is a very energetic big room track called ‘Jar’ from the French producer Jusai. Is there any artist you would like to collaborate with? Yes many, I think collaboration helps a lot for the artistic development if the right people come together! Björk would be interesting to work with because she is one of the highest respected musicians in my record collection and she likes to collaborate with electronic music artists. Do you have any advice for the young Chinese DJs? They should invent their own way of Techno that would be very interesting! They should build up their own labels and show the world what is their sound, I like to collaborate with people who built up their own thing. https://soundcloud.com/florian-meindl/sets/florian-meindl-colorful-cage