Herb Sundays 121: Roman Flügel
Sitting with the famed German producer and DJ. "The morning sun shines pleasantly deep into the apartment and the cat lounges on the sofa. A cup of fresh coffee is a must."
Herb Sundays 121: Roman Flügel (Apple Music, Spotify).
Art by Michael Cina. Photo by Nadine Fraczkowski.
“When putting together the playlist, I imagined a sunny Sunday morning in Berlin. Not too late in the morning, I probably even slept well beforehand and didn't just get home.
The morning sun shines pleasantly deep into the apartment and the cat lounges on the sofa. A cup of fresh coffee is a must. For me, music is the most direct of all forms of expression, an emotion amplifier that helps to convey the unspeakable. The music gathered here tells of human fates and longings, unites different cultures and production methods, and aims to connect rather than separate. So I sit here on a sunny Sunday morning and am filled with hope that a being capable of creating something as wonderful as music is also capable of solving some real problems. But maybe music is just a vehicle for imagination to endure everything else.” - Roman Flügel
My few decades in music have been punctuated by run-ins with Berlin-via-Frankfurt artist and producer, Roman Flügel. Ghostly’s first club tour of Europe in 2003 which hit Offenbach’s Robert Johnson club, to booking his duo project Alter Ego to play our Movement Festival after party in Detroit the following year, to a handful of airport conversations, remixes and e-mails over the years, I’ve always seen Roman as a torch bearer to an elevated arts mindset.
His influence is not only as a producer and DJ but also a label runner with the Playhouse (Roman’s pick: Alcachofa by Ricardo Villalobos), Ongaku (“Make You Move / Our Music" by Roman vs. M/S/O), and Klang Elektronik (Farben's Starbox) imprints, which Flügel owned together with the late Heiko, M/S/O, Ata Macias, and Jörn Elling Wuttke (once owner of the famed Delirium record store). On some days, I think Playhouse (or the group as a whole) is amongst the greatest labels of all time, helping introduce the world to the likes of Villalobos, Isolée, Jan Jelinek, and countless others.
Recently I've been reflecting on a life well lived more, wondering what it's really all about. I use Roman as a guidepost sometimes (unfairly perhaps, but it's easy to project onto him) about making or simply being in art, just doing things consistently and on your own terms. He’s a steady model whose favorites across disciplines are Prince, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Hannah Arendt. A spirit of collaboration is also key to Flügel, a willingness to try things out. His collaborations with Wuttke include Alter Ego, Holy Garage, Acid Jesus, and Sensorama. On a solo front, Roman IV, Soylent Green, ro70, and Eight Miles High, the list goes on. I even made a little mix to prep for writing this.
If German electronic music is a tale of cities, Flügel strikes me a solid middle. Maybe less fancy than his Kompakt counterparts (Michel Mayer (Herb 67): “I've known Roman since 1993. I remember exactly when first I met him, at a pretty bad rave in a small town north of Cologne. I think we both felt we were kindred spirits….He looked like he just finished high school, and maybe me too. But since that moment, we've been in constant touch.”), and less maudlin like Dial Records (whom I love, more later), less psychedelic than Perlon, but just right in the mix.
When reviewing the catalog of Roman Flügel and its myriad aliases and projects, it’s helpful to see him as a painter. As
wrote for Pitchfork, “his ear for nuance and his feel for balance let him take the most shopworn sounds—an unadorned drum machine, a crackling breakbeat, a wily TB-303—and make them sound, if not exactly new, indisputably his."Flügel was perfectly placed as a young person to be fully engulfed by the first wave of American dance music as he told
:It all started for you with Chicago house, right? Is there an album here that encapsulated that early passion?
There's a compilation that really did change everything for me: Chicago Trax on Street Sounds, which my brother gave me for Christmas in 1987. That's how I initially came in contact with the different genres. [The album] had Chicago house on it, with tracks like "Rhythm is Rhythm," but it also had Detroit techno. That was the initial spark for me. But, before that, there was the track "Jack Your Body" by Steve "Silk" Hurley, which got played in the clubs and at parties [I was going to]. We're talking now about New Year's 1986-87, which is when you started to hear that kind of music in clubs [in Germany]. Sven Väth was already playing it back then. I still had a foot in Belgian electronic music and New Beat in those days: Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, and many weird Belgian projects. And Skinny Puppy from Canada. But all of the sudden you could feel a new vibe. "Jack Your Body" was an abstract, strange number that pulled you to the dance floor.
This led him to making his own mixes, as Diego Andrés found for Public Records:
DA: Tell us about the famous mixtape you made when you were 12 years old.
RF: Back in 1982, a friend of mine and I, both having older brothers who visited the infamous Dorian Gray Discotheque at the Frankfurt International Airport regularly at that time (it was considered one of the most exciting nightclubs in Europe back then), were blown away by mixtapes that our siblings purchased at the club. So, we wanted to find out how to DJ and created our first mixtape….I was hooked and decided to learn how to mix as soon as I could get two turntables.
I've loved myriad aliases and projects of Roman's. The stately house and acid of Roman IV, the louche downtempo of Eight Miles High, the impeccable Tracks On Delivery series of course. As
explored in a 2022 reissue review of the seminal series. “Tracks On Delivery was among the first records that Flügel released under his given name, and it was more minimal than anything he had done before—though we're talking Robert Hood minimal, not scarves and micro-sampling. That would come later.”
RF: "I would sit at home or in the studio with four machines and record something right away. I wouldn't think too much about arranging something," Roman Flügel tells me over the phone from Berlin. "I did it completely unheard—it was more like just muting the bass drum here and there and going back to it, adding another hi-hat pattern, keeping things quite simple. Tracks that are supposed to put people into a trance, maybe—but nothing more."
Flügel has seen all sides of it, even delivering twin aces in early ‘00s no easy feat with “Geht’s Noch” and Alter Ego’s “Rocker” which bridged the Gigolo Records/Electroclash Era into the “minimal” techno era, but these hits are hardly the most interesting things about Flügel. Over a 35 year arch, Flügel has been a regular DJ fixture at the likes of Berghain, Amnesia, fabric, and Robert Johnson.
“I try to remain playful” he told Tim Sweeney on Beats In Space recently. Another adage for living. But it’s not all fun and games, his debut trio of records with Hamburg label, Dial: Fatty Folders (2011), Happiness is Happening (2014), and All The Right Noises (2016), form a body of work which for my taste are some of the best electronic albums ever made. They don’t present a narrative, but they give so much of it without trying.
Noises penultimate track: “Life Tends To Come and Go” (likely a lyric pulled from The Smiths if you’re clocking) is as delicate a piece of electronic music as you’re likely to find. Sakamoto-esque keys drift in space, floating downstream, towards an embraced nothingness. A willful submission to nature.
RF: “the essence, I mean the array of emotions we are capable of, and the way you experience your surroundings – and that is something which is quite hard to change. I assume that everybody’s life is a mystery for him or herself, including the present day, isn’t it? So having that in mind, I believe I can’t really answer the question.”
Reading your lovely introduction to Roman's work, which I also rate VERY highly among the turn-of-century, German minimal-house (my generalization of the sound) posse, I notice a word missing that I've always associated with him: "art." Maybe it's knowing early on that Roman was from Darmstadt, which I **only** recognized because it's the location of the New and Electronic Music Institute, but to me his records always evoked an Art Music for dancing, created after the form of "Chicago house" (and to a lesser degree "Detroit techno") became part of his artistic DNA. (This, to me, always differentiated Playhouse/Ongaku from Kompakt and Perlon, which to me had a druggy ravey aspect to their sound - again, generalizing like a MFer.) Reading Roman's quote about having his head turned by Silk Hurley's "Jack Your Body" reinforces this notion. How much the appearance of House in Europe made budding artists who were already kinda headed in a 4/4 beat direction, stand up and go, "Scheisse!" and begin to reimagine what they were doing. Roman is almost a paradigm of that sound for me. (Down to his longtime no-digital policy.) Anyhow, kudos to one of the best, and, in my mind's eye, the most under-rated.
One of those DJ's/producers I've long been aware of and admired the bits of his output I came across, However, 3 hours in his company at Houghton festival last year was the highlight of the weekend for me and those I was with. Truly a master at work.