MORE INSPIRED THAN EVER BEFORE: HOW BOOKA SHADE REMAIN AT THE TOP OF THEIR GAME

After 35+ years of writing music and heavy touring together under various guises, aliases, and genres, no one would have blamed Arno Kammermeier and Walter Merziger for taking a break from their Booka Shade project during the last two years of lockdowns and allowing themselves a breather from the relentless on-road grind. But no. Quite the contrary…

2020/2021 were arguably two of the German duo’s most prolific and creative years to date as they wrote their 10th album (‘Both’), a compilation of vocal collaborations (‘Voices Of Hope’) and remastered their iconic ‘Movements’ album into a Dolby Atmos vinyl release. They also sprang into action and toured the moment things opened up again in the middle of 2021. Oh, and they were nominated for a Grammy Award for their previous album ‘Dear Future Self’ which dropped just weeks ahead of the pandemic.

It's an impressive list of achievements, none of which they expected to achieve before things went a little off-track for us all, but most importantly during this time, they feel they’ve truly re-engaged with what Booka Shade means, what Booka Shade sounds like and what it’s capable of in the future. Fully refreshed and vision sharpened, even after all these years of writing and working together, the two friends – who began as electronic pop due Planet Claire back in the late 80s and had a whole illustrious career as popmakers during the 90s – are more inspired and in-tune than they have been in many years. The Standard caught up with them to find out more…

Considering the world is only just getting back to live music in the last half a year, you guys have been so busy. I think perhaps last year was one of your most prolific ever release-wise…

Walter: It’s interesting how much energy you have when you’re not touring! It was a lot of fun listening to things differently because we weren’t in that weekend/touring cycle. So the last few years were us going back to our roots as studio guys. This was like it was in the 90s when we were in the studio and didn’t travel much at all.

I sense a different relationship with the music. Between the two big release last year you have two very different perspectives on the Book Shade sound. Voices Of Hope was far away from the dancefloor while Both highlighted the fresh energy we all had coming out of lockdown. They were written in very different contexts, weren’t they?

Walter: They were. Plus, Voices Of Hope was all collaborations with singers. It’s very vocal-driven while Both is typical Booka Shade. Instrumental and a very pure club sound.

Arno: With Voices Of Hope we realized we could do what we’d wanted to do for some time. We were always going from weekend to weekend and writing music for our sets but with that, we had the time again. And so did everyone we collaborated with. Everyone was interested in collaborating. It was perfect. We had an album finished when the pandemic started too – Dear Future Self.

We had a full tour planned for that, so to cancel that was a bit of a shock. But then we realized it was a bit of a blessing. We could stop and think about everything we’ve done, reflect, and ask ourselves what we would like to do in the future. That’s why we went for things we really liked. We’ve always had our feet in songwriting and music with vocals. We don’t always make it, but we love it when we do.

Plus there was a Grammy nomination in the mix of all of that!

Arno: Yes, it was an exciting surprise. You work all this time and you think you’ve done most things, then all of a sudden something like that happens. You cannot plan for it.

Walter: I thought it was a joke from someone. It came from our German distributors and it felt unreal. I read it and thought, “Ah, that’s a mistake. That’s not meant for us!”

Arno: Just when you think you’ve tried out everything, this comes along.

Deep, deep, deep into a long and illustrious career!

Arno: It shows there’s still a lot to come. And, touching back on Voices Of Hope, what was interesting about it was that we could reach out to people, young talents we’ve been excited by, and see if they’re up for work, and now we’re meeting them in real life. SOHMI, for example, is from the States, and we got to meet him on our last tour. It was very nice to connect in real life.

So much of our life happened online and we all made new internet friends. As frustrating as a lot of it was, technology definitely enabled many things…

Walter: Yes and it wasn’t so much of a problem for sending tracks back and forth. It was the right time to do this collection of songs. That’s what we view that project as. Both, however, was a proper Booka Shade album.

What was it like getting back in the studio for that? I imagine you rolling your sleeves up like, “Right! Let’s get to work!”

Arno: We’ve worked in our own studios for many years. Working together for such a long time, it’s great to be together and the energy is different. But even if we’re not in the same place, we’re sending tunes back and forth and discussing everything on the phone. It’s a very efficient process which we’re very used to.

Walter: We don’t overthink things. In the past, we’ve spent three years on an album, just the two of us talking and talking. Now we see it more as a journey. Not every song has to be this brilliant moment of genius. For us, it’s important that we constantly work and stretch our style and not get stuck in one particular style.

That’s why we’ve explored so many different ideas. But it’s important for us to work constantly as writers and producers to get the shit out of your body. You might write 10 good songs to get one great one. It’s like if you’re a runner, you have to run every day to be trained. It’s the same with music – you work every day every day and sometimes something flies out of the universe and hits you. You have to work for that though. If you miss the moment, it’s gone.

Arno: The longer the time in between releases, the more unsure you become. You worry about expectations and all these things. It’s better for us to have this constant output or otherwise, it gets rusty.

I’ve spoken to some people who have written albums that have taken so long that they’ve dated by the time they’ve come out. Although I guess when you have your own sound you don’t have to worry about it dating so much…

Arno: You’re right. But, in our experience, there was a time when the whole EDM thing blew up and it took a lot of the big riff elements we’d brought into our songs. We suddenly felt like, “Oh this is a sound we can’t do anymore, we don’t want to sound like that.” It was a difficult time.

But after a while, we thought, “No this is our sound, we do it our way”. So not as big or mainstream as the big EDM sound, but rather in our own style. We did what we’ve always done and showed different sides of our sound. And in recent years we’ve come to really understand what Booka Shade is all about. We go on different excursions, but the solid basis of what Booka Shade is has become very apparent and solid to us.

Wow after 35+ years you’re still discovering your sound. That’s amazing. It’s really interesting regarding your take on EDM. That must have been around the time of the Eve album maybe? Or Galvany Street? Or between those two albums? They’re two very different poles of what Booka Shade can be and the years between those were released were very much peak EDM.

Arno: Absolutely correct. So we escaped and wrote something very different. Most artists will have at least one album like that to their name. Where they’ve completely refreshed things. And it was a fulfilling feeling. Like, “Okay that’s out of the system.” And by then EDM had calmed down a bit and we made our peace with everything.

Walter: We couldn’t compete with all the big fireworks and big mainstream sound so we went on tour with a singer and did something very different. It was more like a band and was very different. It was a shock for some fans and critics, but on the other hand, new people discovered us through the album. It was more alternative; it wasn’t club-style music but a lot of electronic fans saw something in it and liked it. In retrospect, it was a good thing but at the time we wondered if it was too much for our fans. Galvany Street was our first Dolby Atmos album and we sold 6000 Blu-Ray copies, which is a lot for a niche medium.

And this is still a niche music in the wider scheme of things. Niche overload!

Arno: We are the masters of niche!

Love that. That’s a testament to the loyalty of your fans, too…

Arno: Yes. And at the end of the day, we’re speaking about art. We started doing this because we love it and we wanted to create art. You have to follow your feelings. I’ve seen this fantastic documentary about the band Sparks. They are so inspiring and every album they do is different. They do what they love and it’s difficult for fans to follow them because they’re a couple of steps ahead, but that’s very inspiring from an artistic perspective and gives me confidence. They’re in their 70s and they’re still creating and releasing incredible, inspiring art. They are always reinventing. You’ll lose fans along the way, but gain new ones too, and you need to be at peace with that.

I think shows faith in fans and not spoon-feeding the machine or resorting to formula…

Walter: After a long career it’s always nice to see when you’ve been influential. We don’t want to bash EDM and some of the biggest guys in that particular world have told us they are fans of our music and how we inspired them with our music. That was nice to hear. They blow it up and make it a lot bigger, but the emotion is the same. It’s nice to hear when people say something is important.

I guess you don’t realize what influence you’re having when you’re putting things out into the universe…

Walter: Totally. And there’s so much out in the universe now. In fact, we realized that there had never been a vinyl edition of our Movements album. So another thing that we did during the time away from the road was to go back over the original tracks remaster it and create a Dolby Atmos mix. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it and the reaction to that was also huge. It sold out in a day!

Vinyl is having such a great resurgence…

Walter: Yes, it’s great to see! It’s great to have a range of outlets full stop. Blu-Ray, vinyl, Dolby Atmos, and of course streaming. I know people have different opinions about that. You can always say people aren’t paid enough, but I believe it saved the music industry. For us, it was an important factor to survive these times. It gave us a form of income when we couldn’t tour. We focused on streaming from 2017, we were creative with playlists and things like that and this all paid off for us during the pandemic as people listened to a lot more music. It pays and that’s very important – there were times when we didn’t get paid, like the times of Napster and torrenting platforms. So the fact we get paid is very important. We set a goal to reach a million monthly listeners. Once we hit that we make new goals.

You hit that recently, what’s the next goal?

Arno: One particular goal is to find new collaborations and singers and artists we want to with so we can keep this balance between the typical Booka Shade club sound, and the sound we have with singers and vocals. We want to do as much as possible before the live playing starts again, but we’ve also become a lot pickier about the selection of gigs. It’s a bit of a turning point. We’ve said, “Do we want to go every weekend? Or do we select where we know it’s going to be fun and the people are nice?”

Walter: The goal is not to do the same thing every day. It’s always important to have new challenges and play places you’ve never played before, or explored a concept you’ve not explored before. That’s always been interesting to us. That’s why we’ve always said we won’t do a new Movements album. The future is important – not the past. We want to write new things and work with people who aren’t from our world. Things that make us go, “Oh, wow! I’ve never thought about that in that way.” We’ve learned a lot from them, and they’ve learned a lot from us. You always learn a lot from collaborations – it’s important to learn and push the boundaries.

Yeah definitely! You guys seem very inspired and engaged right now…

Walter: We feel that too and we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved over the years. And the best thing is, Booka Shade was never created to be huge in any way. Not like when we did our pop productions in the 90s, where everything had to be big or a hit or a number one and things like that. Booka Shade has always been an outlet to create our own little universe. The fun part is to always let it grow, do different things with it, and keep it on a smaller scale. When you want too much, and you push things too much, it destroys things more than helps you. It has to come naturally and when it does it just flows. You don’t overthink, it just happens. This is the best feeling. We love that.

Arno: The small long steps always work best for us. Step by step.