Kruder & Dorfmeister Summer Sessions
March 14th, 2007 by rui
Let’s list classic downtempo albums, shall we? Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, NOW’s Car Boot Soul, Kruder & Dorfmeister’s K&D sessions, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, The KLF’s Chill Out. That was fun. Now let’s run through some of the all-time classic Big Chill moments – Sia belting out ‘I love you’ with Zero 7 at The Enchanted Garden, Kruder & Dorfmeister DJ+MC+sofa set at Lulworth, Norman Jay’s Sunday afternoon session every year…
Hang on. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?…
YES! They’re back!
Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister have been responsible for bass-heavy dubbed out tracks, live gigs, DJ sets, remixes and compilations – together as Kruder & Dorfmeister and seperately in side projects like Tosca, The Peace Orchestra, Voom:Voom and Dr Richard. Their Viennese sound is warm, enveloping and makes you dance in whatever way you can when you hear it, be it full on danceloor flailing or iPod-driven foot tapping and head nodding on the bus.
Expect heavyweight sounds from heavyweight names, in a long-awaited return to The Big Chill for Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister.
The Summer Sessions will consist of a two hour DJ set from each pioneer, Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister, plus the outstanding performance of silver-tongued MCs Earl Zinger and Ras MC T- Weed, plus VJ mastermind Fritz Fitzke. Those who were at Lulworth will already be familiar with his impressive visual skills. Your ears are in for a treat too, as K&D bringing more than a decade’s experience of choice club and funk tunes, whilst getting ample opportunity to express their forward vision of 21st century music, keeping things fresh and sophisticated with a sound that is guaranteed to keep you moving.
Kruder & Dorfmeister Biography
Well, basically two guys mainly known through their successful dj-sets and a respectable record of vinyl-releases since 1993. A dubplate-melting factor from Vienna. Two producers/djs/remixers whose distinctive trademark sound is at most times extremely mellow, has a lot of bass, downbeat tracks and a sense of epic soundscapes. There might be the occasional double-time breaks and the heavy and deep typically viennese feeling.
Consider K&D to roam in their own, unique realm of musical beutekunst that owes and gives a lot to rare funk tunes, electric jazz arrangements, the feeling of deep soul, hiphop, dub, reggae, ambient, fusion, brazil, chansons, dope beats and drum+bass and still a lot more influences that happen to find the interest of the two austrians.
At a time when hip hopbeats started to emancipate themselves from the rapping and everyone started to pay highest attention to the blooming breakbeat scene in the UK, K&D broke through out of nowhere with one 4-track e.p. (G-stoned) that featured a hypnotic track called High Noon and a cover that showed the dj-duo in true Simon & Garfunkel form, straight out of Richard Avedon anno 1969.
The impact was massive, especially since the first wave of enthusiasm came from the UK where musical imports from the continent are seldom appreciated. Gilles Peterson played the track first on his Worldwide show. Gathering momentum with support from people like Wall of Sound’s Mark Jones and tracks for fellow Austrians Count Basic or strange people like William Orbit, the further story of K&D and Richard’s Tosca project is well documented on various compilations and twelve inch releases. They met people like the Ninja tune posse, touched base with the leftfield dance, befriended Munich’s Compost crew, remixed artists as diverse as Bomb the bass, Bones thugs & harmony, Alex Reece, United Future Organisation, Rockers Hifi (the K&D version was used in the video of "Going under"), Lamb, Roni Size, Depeche Mode and dj-ed in more clubs than you would care to count.
Be it their self-produced tracks or the sound of their remixes, the K&D symptomatic feeling of lush european loungcore-dub pervaded all swift changes of the triphop hype and survived as a highly personal expression that found easy access into the world of drum&bass when the breakbeats became soulful.
Their regular presence in the club circuit, a characteristic side effect of their consistant travelling as djs, made them well-received guest at the various crossing of an international beat-set that took them from Vienna to London, to the American Westcoast, to Germany and back, with a tightly packed dj-bag full of remixes tracing their steps.
A mix-CD compilation, DJ-kicks, for German label Studio K7 marked a relevant change in the overall concept of K&D or rather in the way the audience seemed to take them in. From being well-respected underground heroes they had emerged to be full fledged media-celebrities in the music-press whose mix-CD was so excellently mixed and selected, that many new fans were attracted all over the world.
Kruder & Dorfmeister are somewhere between British breakbeat or the American illbient scene, but then again their musical imprint is outernational. They could achieve the special abstract global reputation that makes them neighbours to RockersHifi, Fila Brazilia, Howie B., DJ Shadow, the wordsound collective, Coldcut or the Thievery Corporation in a virtual neighbourhood of twekwando-ing beatmeisters.
Links
Kruder & Dorfmeister Myspace
Kruder and Dorfmeister Wiki
www.g-stoned.com
