As the conversation with Patrice Baumel winds down, I ask him my standard final question, just in case he has something on his mind. "Is there anything you'd like to add?" "Well... Maybe we should talk about music in general. The whole analog vs. digital, new vs. old debate." I would have gone there earlier, I explain to the Amsterdam-based DJ/producer, but it seems quite obvious that for him there isn't much debate at all. Despite a purist streak in his early days, Baumel is typified by the "if it sounds good, let's go with it" approach.

Not "cool," mind you. Baumel is anything but, preferring to DJ tracks that are full of life, which often gets him into trouble. (On a bad day, you might call some of it trance, but to Baumel it's simply music.) Baumel and 360 cohort Nuno dos Santos may run a successful night at local venue Trouw, but they've likely cleared as many dance floors as they've filled. That's what makes Baumel so fascinating, however. From his yearning Trapez debut "Mutant Pop" to the kickless Get Physical breakthrough "Roar" to his new album Vapour, you can always hear someone at the controls, wringing the maximum amount of drama out of everything he puts his name to.

You've been in Amsterdam for 14 years, but you grew up in East Germany. Dresden, right? Were you aware of the Wall when you were growing up?

Yes, absolutely. When the Wall came down, I was 14 years old. I mean, it starts with your holiday planning. You know, you're limited to five or six countries that you can travel to. [laughs] Also, from a consumption point of view, there were just a lot of things you couldn't get. Most people had relatives in West Germany and around Christmas time they would send us their hand-me-down clothes and packages with chocolate.

But you couldn't get cultural objects, like music?

You could. My Dad was a music journalist, and he had an old school friend that moved to West Germany that sent him all the records that he needed through a mail order system. Even in East Germany we could order records, and get them sent over. I can remember my Dad, even when I was eight or nine years old, asking me if there was any music I would like to have. He encouraged me, "Look, there is a new album by the Cure. There is a Depeche Mode album." He basically pushed me into that sound by ordering these records from West Germany.

What was he into?

He was all about jazz. Mostly free jazz, but also stuff like Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, also the weirder stuff like John Zorn or Pere Ubu. That didn't translate into an immediate love for music for me. Often that kind of stuff has the opposite effect. You get pushed away from it. Especially when you wake up in the morning and the first thing you hear is some aggressive free jazz coming out of the speakers.

There's no better way to push your child to pop music than to play free jazz at 6:30 AM.

That's exactly what happened in the first place. But, on the other side, when you are exposed to music as a child, you develop a musical brain and you develop a musical memory. It's strange—and it's an ability I lost later on—but I would spend a lot of time going through the records of my father and just looking at the covers, memorizing the entire collection. So whenever my Dad was looking for a record, he would say, "Where is X?" and I could just walk up to that closet and pull it out.

Now you can never find a record that you want.

With my own records? It's impossible. [laughs]

"I was a purist. I wasn't
a very versatile DJ at all."

You mentioned you were listening to Depeche Mode, Yello, synth pop type stuff. When did you begin to listen to more fully club-orientated music?

That was quite a bit later. When I was 16, I went to the US for a year. I was an exchange student in 1993. Which was just a year of country music. I was living in the middle of nowhere in Utah and it was all about Shania Twain on the radio and Michael Bolton. It was a different lifestyle that was more about being outdoors and stuff like that.

I was always a very shy person. I remember my parents would always have to push me to go out where other kids were. America helped me get over that and become a bit more outgoing. I also got my driver's license too. As soon as I came back I started going out, at first to normal discotheques. When they closed at 1 AM, there were still other parties going on. I just went along one night with a couple of friends, and all of a sudden I was in a room with a beat that never stopped, strobe lights...yeah.

What kind of music was it?

When I first went out the music that struck me the most was hardcore, gabba. I couldn't get it hard enough. I couldn't understand a DJ just playing normal techno, because, it was like, "Doesn't everybody just want it much, much harder?" I couldn't even fathom why people would play house music.

It was only as I started buying records and started to develop a taste that I got into normal techno. Hard Wax had just opened up a store in Dresden, and that's how I got a hold of the good stuff.

What was the good stuff to you?

The good stuff at that time for me was mostly Jeff Mills, Robert Hood. I also remember the Red Planet stuff was really big for me at that time. Early Dave Clarke, the Red series, the harder Dance Mania stuff, Robert Armani.

When did you change from harder stuff to what you're more associated with now? Can you put your finger on it?

My love for techno never changed. It's a constant thing, it is still today. I feel like a techno DJ, I still do. It just got more refined over time. Around 1994 there was a club in Dresden called Base where I became a resident DJ, and I got to see a lot of big name international DJs come through. That was where I first saw Laurent Garnier. As soon as I saw him play, it was just so obvious that he was so much better than anyone else at that time, at least in my eyes. His mixing ability and his set-building ability was just on another level.

Most DJs wanted to make their mixes sound as seamless as possible, but he would make the mixes the party. The center of attention. He would make these mixes that would be so dramatic, combining a really dry Chicago beat with some really outgoing trance. I think what made him fascinating to me is that he would play with a lot of contrasts. That is something I have always loved about techno. It's also what I love about Depeche Mode. There's always this contrast between the cold of the machine beats and the warmth of the synth and the voice. Garnier was a master of that.

He obviously spans genres. Did he open your eyes to some types of electronic music that you hadn't been listening to much before? Open your eyes to the possibilities as a DJ of what you could get away with?

Garnier is really well known for crossing genres. Dropping an indie record or going down the drum & bass route. He's always done that, but I never felt that was what made him good. I was always into the way he played techno. I must say, certainly early on, I was a purist. I wasn't a very versatile DJ at all.

Top: 360 - Patrice and Nuno dos Santos at Trouw
Bottom: The hallway leading to Amsterdam's Club 11, 360's first home.

When did that change?

When I moved to Amsterdam. I had to slowly work my way up, so I started playing for nothing all night long in a bar. It was a really good learning process, because a bar is no place to play straight techno all night long. I had to really readjust my collection. I bought everything from lounge to deep house to secondhand '80s music. It helped me to diversify my sound, and find interesting music at a lower energy level. The sound that was going on in Amsterdam was way more happy, way more housey than the darker Detroit techno that I was used to.

Your big break in the city, I assume, was your residency at Club 11.

Yes, definitely. I met Olaf [Boswijk, co-owner] when I was doing the Red Bull Music Academy in 2002 in Sao Paulo. He was a music journalist at the time. We became friends after that, and around the time my first record came out on Trapez Olaf presented me with the opportunity to run a night together with Nuno dos Santos, who I also met through the RBMA network. He was a participant, but a few years behind me. We got booked together at a party because of that, and when we started playing back-to-back we quickly realized we had a lot of common ground music-wise. We were both Garnier trainspotters, so one of us would play something and the other would say, "Oh, that's a Garnier track." [laughs] Those big techno records that verge towards the trancey side. The ones that no one else would play. We were both suckers for that stuff.

Was Amsterdam accepting of those melodic, verging on trance-y, sort of records when you two first began the 360 night?

I think those records had a hard time in most of Europe because trance has such a bad name. It just wasn't cool to play this music. I mean, even today we get a lot of flak for playing really warm stuff because it takes people out of their comfort zone. They don't think it's accepted, they don't think it's cool enough.

I think that's what makes you guys so special. You're not afraid to go there. So you get a lot of response, sometimes negative, about it being too poppy?

Yeah. Whenever you experiment or ignore the conventions of what a good DJ set should sound like, you get negative responses.

Club 11 gave you the chance to experiment.

Absolutely. That's why we call our night 360, because we want to have a 360 view on music. We want to be open to everything, and we wanted to build our own crowd that is just as accepting. Our main tool to do that was to publish a new podcast every month. It's been critical to getting people to understand where we are coming from, and to spread the word.

Tell me about Club 11 in general. It seems like it was a very special place to a lot of people.

One of the main attractions of the club was the location. It was on the 11th floor of an office building with a view over the whole of Amsterdam with the bay behind. It was located next door to Amsterdam central station, so it was easily accessible to people that were coming in from outside. In the same building was the modern art museum. During the daytime, Eleven was a cafe and restaurant. So visitors from the museum would come up and enjoy the view, ease into dinner and then you would get this phenomenon where the club people would start mixing with the museum crowd. It was an interesting dynamic when you had a table with older art people sitting next to a bunch of young girls having their first drink of the night.

It was opened with the knowledge that it was going to close at some point. So people were really squeezing out what they could. It made the parties in the last six months that it was open really insane. It also makes running a business a very different thing. When you only have four years total to make something work, you really think practical. You think "OK, what part of the building can we re-use for the club without having to build everything from scratch?"

That's something that Club 11 and Trouw shares. We look at what's inside the building and see what will work for us rather than stripping it and turning it into a completely different space. You can see that the DNA of the building is very present in the club. It's a similar thing with Berghain, for example.

"Perfectionism is a bitch."

You've moved the night to Trouw and now you're starting a label too.

Yes, it's me, Nuno, Olaf and Melon that are behind the label. We were playing with the idea around the time that Club 11 closed. At some point, you think "we release all over the place, and we give all the good stuff away to labels outside of Holland. Why?" I think early on in your career it's important to associate yourself with good international labels, but once you've passed that bridge the next step is to build up your own place and have full control over what you are going to release.

Our aim with the label is to represent the club. Trouw isn't a techno or house club. We have dubstep nights there, we have indie concerts there. We want the label to cross genres, to crossover to new audiences because I think the house and techno scene itself is a really small scene. Whenever I go to a place like Sonar or WMC or even ADE here in Amsterdam, you always come across the same people. That tells me the scene isn't really that big, or at least the active scene.

I think it's really important for us to break out of that nutshell. When we are looking at Trouw as a label, we are looking at labels like Warp or Ghostly or even Domino, labels who are all about music in general. Trouw is always about constant renewal, constant flux, constant change, and that's something we always want to have with the label. There should be constant motion. I think that reflects music consumption habits of the listener of the 21st century. I mean, we don't listen to one type of music anymore. We have access to so much stuff. Me and all of my DJ friends, we don't just listen to house and techno. If there is a new Sufjan Stevens or Arcade Fire coming out, I'm interested.

I imagine it's a bit easier to start something that broad these days when you already have something to pin it to, like a club.

Exactly. If the overriding idea doesn't have to be a sound, but instead a place, that gives you a lot of freedom. Having a club means that you already have an established brand, so you don't have to worry about becoming famous by successfully exploring a certain niche or something. You also already have direct access to a lot of customers. We have more than 1000 people coming through the club every week. We can sell our stuff in the club, which is a lot easier than selling online and competing with a million other labels.

There's a lot of care that's going to go into it, though. Trouw used to be a newspaper printing factory, so we were dealing with paint and it was a manufacturing process. We want to bring that idea also onto our record sleeves. Every sleeve is going to be unique. Basically, we're selling the art as well, not just music, but art and the lifestyle. I think that gives people a valid reason to buy the vinyl because if you look at the DJs, the vinyl DJ is going to... It's going to be there forever, of course, but it's going to be an absolute niche.

Vinyl is a shrinking medium.

It is. It's becoming a pure lifestyle item with no actual practical purpose anymore. It's an emotional piece. You're selling an emotion, you're selling a sentiment. But that is a really good opportunity for the club to carry out its vision. We want to make art, we want to make something special and personalized. That's going to be the function of the vinyl. The music itself will become part of something much bigger. That's why it will be easy for us to go down a more experimental road, and not rely on very practical DJ fast food.

When you started out in your production career, it seemed like it took quite a while between releases. Why was that?

I was finding my feet, and I wasn't very confident with my production process. It's something that many people struggle with because, first, you have to find the correct tools to get the job done. Then, you need to know who you are musically. I did a lot of things that I wasn't happy with after my first release on Trapez. I had a lot of computer trouble as well, so my studio wasn't running properly. But it was mostly a fight with my own perfectionism.

Perfectionism is a bitch. There is no perfection, and it only stops you from getting stuff out. It also takes away from the spontaneity. It becomes a heady process. With music you should never put too much of your head into it. It will sound forced. It took me a while to find a modus operandi that helped me to stay loose and relaxed and just be productive, just make music. I think I have only just come into that state of mind where I know how to make a track quickly.

I used to have an idea in my head, then I would go into my studio and try and make that idea work. Now, I'll do it the other way round. I'll create chaos! I will do something really random, just play around, twisting buttons, loading random sounds into the sampler, play around until I find something interesting and then start to tame that chaos.

Did "Roar" help you get around the perfectionism problem?

Yes, but it took a while to sink in. When I realized that you could make a tune in ten minutes that could start off a career, when you've spent months on other tunes that no one would want to buy, I just though, "OK, there is something that has to be said for just being spontaneous, just being playful."

"I'm not afraid of failure anymore.
Failure is a learning experience."

Is your new album produced in that way?

No. [laughs] The album is produced in a different way. I kind of made the album like a podcast. Because I was thinking to myself, "What justifies the existence of an album in 2010? What are the situations that a person will actually listen to an hour of music continuously?" A lot of people just listen to tracks, put their iPod on shuffle or whatever. I knew from doing the 360 podcasts that people were playing them at afterhours or while people were running or even use it as background music while they were working.

So, the album... I sort of call it headphone techno. It's hard to explain. It's a bit of a balancing act. You have to balance between a listening experience, but at the same time you also want something that has a relevance to the club and the dance floor. If I used the approach that I used for "Roar" where I played around and went crazy and came up with something really in-your-face and powerful, it was going to be something that got annoying pretty quickly. The energy is too much. With the album I had to take the foot off the gas a little bit, and also pay attention to the details. I needed to find dynamics and a frequency range that are pleasant when you have your headphones on.

That said, I feel that dance music, at the moment, needs an infusion of energy. There is a lot of so-called deep music out there which is fine, but I feel dance music should be about energy. I think there is a huge market for music that is really in-your-face and energetic, and that's not really catered for. For instance, it's extremely hard to book a live act that rocks the house. You have a lot of club or laptop live acts that stay underneath the surface. I feel personally that the album is kind of like a dividing line. The next thing I want to do is really focus on more energetic stuff. I really feel like going crazy.

You're setting up your own live act, right? When can we expect to see that debut?

Yes, I am. There isn't really a target. I think by the end of the year I will have something going, though.

By saying what you just said about live acts you seem to have a lot to live up to with your own.

I have a lot to live up to. My ambitions are always bigger than my actual skill level, because you always want something that you don't have yet. I'm not afraid to fall short, it will happen. A live act is a completely different business. It's a learning curve. I think I'm not really afraid of failure anymore. I used to be. Right now, I think failure is a learning experience. When we are doing 360 and try something new and freaky, the dance floor will just clear. But if you just go out there and rock the house the way you always do, you learn nothing. You're just staying within your comfort zone. Making those mistakes helps you grow as an artist, so I'll embrace failure. I'll embrace not being able to live up to something. Who knows? I might just pull it off.