One of house and techno’s foremost talents, Loco Dice owes it all to hip-hop — his initial roots in music. Following his CNTRL: Beyond EDM tour of the States with Richie Hawtin, high profile sessions at Ushuaia in Ibiza and his new mix comp for Defected, the German DJ/producer's stock has never been higher. Ahead of a UK b2b set at SW4 with Carl Cox, DJ Mag hangs with Dice to check how he
rolls... Words:KRISTAN J CARYL Pics: KEVIN LAKE
L
oco Dice is so
hip-hop it hurts. Literally. “When I left it behind it broke my
heart, but I had to escape,” he says in a rare moment of reflective calm during an otherwise booming and quick-paced conversation. Despite having officially “left it behind” almost 15 years ago, the hip-hop form, culture and spirit (Dice litters his speech with hip-hop slang and often slips into a Brooklyn drawl when doing so) that still courses through this Tunisia-born German is likely what has set him apart in the often homogenized world that is house and techno: his clothes, label’s releases, own productions and of course DJ sets all owe something to the genre that first rescued a young and rebellious Dice from the shady streets of Düsseldorf during his teenage years. “When I was depressed and had a shitty job, I would go home and put the radio on. That’s how I first discovered hip-hop,” he says with loud but charismatic bombast. “I couldn’t understand what these guys were trying to tell me through the videos and lyrics, but GIs from the former US military bases they had in Germany explained what this was all about — they exposed the messages of Ice-T and Public Enemy. I immediately found parallels to it — I mean, we didn't have the crack and gun shooting and all that stuff, but we had some of the same things. I was an immigrant living in Düsseldorf trying to fight my way up, you know, and this is what I found I connected with in hip-hop. Of course, it can be a negative, but it also taught me a lot of good things. It was nice knowing people had the same feelings that I had.”
Before long, Dice had given up on his dream career of “being Michel Platini” and playing professional football, and began to spit his own raps at the same time as developing a career as a hip-hop DJ. This early career reached a zenith playing support slots for the likes of Usher, Snoop Dogg and R. Kelly, but Dice’s interest eventually began to wane. “Hip-hop was losing it, man,” he says with genuine pain in his voice. “It started fighting with itself and was losing its identity. It was a slave to MTV, was all over the radio and suddenly made tremendous movies like Boyz In The Hood. Hip-hop became commercial very quick. There was no underground left: or what was left was so dark and radical that it was too tough, too tight
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for me — a bit like minimal years later.” Around this same time, Dice’s friends began disappearing at weekends. He soon learnt they were checking out places like Düsseldorf's cult Hof Ratingen club where the likes of WestBam and Sven Väth were playing techno. “I was fascinated. People were going crazy just for an instrumental. The way people reacted to just a snare or the way the bass drum comes in and out, that made me think, 'Wow, I want to know more about this'.” Setting about realigning his musical interest, it wasn’t long before the dots between hip-hop and house were connected in Dice’s head. Artists like Todd Terry, DJ Sneak and Armand van Helden all made what sounded to him like “fast hip-hop”, and, adding to that the fact that Dice already owned some Basic Channel and G-Man, the path to house and techno was complete. Eventually in 1998 someone offered Dice his first house gig, playing the same bill as Mousse T at Tribe House in Düsseldorf. “It was tough times to go from the top in hip-hop and then start from zero in house,” He tells DJ Mag. “I felt the hate and people were like, ‘The fuck does he want?’ I think they thought I just wanted to fuck their women, and even my baggy clothes and the brands I wore were wrong.”
Education
Minimal was Dan Bell and Plastikman to me. I loved Steve Bug ‘Loverboy’ and Mathew Jonson and all that, but I just wanted to reduce it a bit. I took my cues from Ricardo, as he seemed to be doing the same, but [DC10 proprietor] Andrea didn’t like what we were doing when playing together, so gave us separate times. But it made it better! Now I was playing for gay Spanish guys, weird Italians, all the educated people from Manchester and London, and it was different. Suddenly with Cocoon rising too, the minimal sound was there.”
Minimal
But as we all now know, Dice was in it for the long run, buying any and all dance magazines (which he excitedly reports he still owns) and soaking up as much as he could about his new musical universe. He cites his best education as that received in the record stores of Düsseldorf, however. “This guy Klaus ran a store called Voices. He sold me my first hip-hop 12”, then followed my transition right until Loco Dice was born — and I DJed at Amnesia in Ibiza — by pointing out Miami bass, my first house record and the importance of B-sides. There were also two gay guys who I think had experienced Studio 54 who taught me about Sasha, Digweed, Danny Tenaglia, but I wanted more. ‘Who is Mad Mike, who is Jeff Mills, what is Detroit?’ It was like a lexicon, I was sucking it in all the time and record stores were my research hub.” Enter DC10, a place Dice played early on in his career and that he refers to as “my playground, where I could do whatever I wanted to — and did”. This was back in the early days before the sit-downs, perennial threat of closure and… minimal, a genre Dice was closely associated with back then but has managed to survive better than most in the wake of its long, slow demise. “I didn't know it was fucking minimal, man.
Essentially then, that Dice became synonymous with minimal was merely a matter of timing. Listen to his music and that bares out — none of it relies on the dry, abstract, alien, reductive tendencies of minimal, be it his debut full- length '7 Dunham Place' or the latest EP for his own Desolat, 'Toxic'. Instead it is heavy, sub bass-driven house-funk with a keen emphasis on the placement of hi-hats, snares and drops that first drew him to the genre in the first place. Of course, you can’t talk about such music without mentioning Dice’s long-time studio wingman, Martin Buttrich. The pair first hooked up through a mutual friend in Timo Maas, who had taken Dice on tour with him in the early days. “Martin was a shy guy always in the back, a hip-hop skater kid always with a broken ankle, and I was the loud guy always listening to the stuff. We found each other always hanging out and having a doobie and enjoying life, and there came a day where he was like, 'Come to the studio when you have an idea'.” It took a while but soon that hook-up happened and the first session the duo spent together spawned the anthemic hip-house bomb that was ‘Phat Dope Shit’. Soon after, they decamped to Brooklyn to work on Dice’s debut album and a life-long relationship was set in stone. “We understand each other,” Dice says. “He’s not just my engineer or producer. We sit together, I bring in ideas and we work like a hip-hop team... Two guys figuring out what's in your head, what your message is. We do everything together. I'm not a bass or key player but nor is Martin. We just try things, I show him and he understands me and knows where I want to go. I have tried producing on my own but it's boring, like when I catch myself DJing at home or playing Playstation alone. I can't do this! I'm a team player, I need people around me!”
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