For todays artist feature, we have a little interview as well as an exclusive live-set by one of our favourite berlin live-acts Wesenberg.

Q1 Could you tell us something about yourself and your artistic background please.

I have been composing and playing my own music since the age of 12 when I started playing electric guitar. In the following years I had many different rockbands, the most of them very experimental and loud. I think I was nineteen when I discovered electronic music and it became another musical obsession for me. 2 years ago I decided to go to Berlin to focus on making my own music. I founded a Rockband called “Blau Neun” and started to work on my Techno Liveset.
This year my music was ready to be performed in some of Berlin’s smaller Clubs, e.g. LEVEE, about:blank, Ressort, ZMF, Brunnen 70, Insel der Jugend.

My understanding of techno was influenced a lot by the ideas of the two minimal composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass and by older Techno from the year 2000 and 2001. I guess I want my music to be pretty serious and complex, but still emotionally touching. In my liveset I focus a lot on polyrhythmic strucures within the “four to floor”-pulse.
Lately I have been working on some pieces of contemporary classic and I am more and more trying to create a synthesis of these kind of compositions and my idea of what Techno can be.

Q2 Do you work on your own, what collaborations do you participate in (label, musical partners, etc)?

I produce and compose on my own most of the time. Lately I have been playing some Liveset together with a Jazz-baseplayer called Richard Müller. We wanted to try out how a real bass-guitar would work out in a club. I am also working on another Liveset and some tracks together with “Juli N more”, who is resident at the Sysiphos club. This stuff will be more relaxed I guess.

Q3 Something you want to share about your local scene, some insights or recommendations?

Well, yes, I’d like to recommend the “Livingroom generation” (http://www.livingroomgeneration.de/) , a pool of artists, who have just released their first Sampler CD and made a great release party at the ZMF. And especially on of their Liveacts called “Gebrüder Goldstein”. The idea of the Livingroom generation is to mix up handmade with electronic music and provide a platform for this experiment.

Q4 What equipment do you use, what is your work process?

I like to keep my set-up as simple as possible, so I am just using my laptop with ableton and some midi controllers. In my actual liveset I am just using wav files and trying to find different ways to modulate them. Most of the wav files were originally taken from classic or jazz recordings, some are field recordings. Sometimes I work a long time and preproduce a certain part of a loop but some of the loops are still original files from a recording. For example in the liveset for the Shituationist Institute I am looping certain parts of Bachs Goldberg Variations.

Q5 What are your next gigs and where can we preview your works online?

I am now taking a little break from Livegigs to create a new Liveset but I guess one can hear the results in the spring of 2012, maybe earlier.
You can of course find some live recordings on soundcloud (http://soundcloud.com/wesenberg ) and I have just released my first track on the sampler of the Livingroom Generation that I have talked about.

Q6 How about some namedropping, do you want to recommend some artists that inspire you?

My greatest inspiration in electronic music is the album “loudboxer” by Speedy J.