Classic Album: Modeselektor, Hello Mom!

BPitch Control, 2005

Back at the dawn of the new millennium, thriving art communities took root in downtown Berlin as they’d done for decades. This was before the heavy hand of gentrification swooped in and flicked all the weirdoes and musicians out.

You could live in a big old building with likeminded nutters and make beautiful music for a pittance. “That’s what we did,” says Gernot Bronsert of Modeselektor. “Now it’s not affordable anymore. If you want to buy a flat there it’s around€10,000 for a square meter. Back then we paid, like, 150 bucks a month!”

Gernot, along with Sebastian Szary, hunkered down in this cheap and cheerful little world and made the beats that would wind up on their absurd and nevertheless engaging, grime-laced techno debut, Hello Mom!.

Gernot would come home after a shift at Hard Wax records, ears ringing with current club shenanigans, and find Szary cooking up next-level sounds on their makeshift studio setup.

“We had some classic techno gear,” says Szary. “And, because we had no money, things we found on the street like these old JBL speakers. They had no bass so we cranked all that up. It made the whole album sound really heavy. There was no real plan. It was just punk – y’know?”

Whatever it was, you could boogie to it. And that was the point. The so-called ‘Intelligent Dance Music’ of the day had forgotten one thing. “For us it was not danceable enough,” says Gernot. “So we always tried to do that with this album.”

They sidestepped the clichés, let the randomness of their machines take some of the creative weight, and laced the tracks with fizzing ideas and chance collabos with friends.

“It was a great time,” says Gernot. “We’d never made an album before. This was kind of pre-internet. No YouTube tutorials. There was MySpace going on, but everything took ten times longer. It was nicer, because we were more relaxed back then. And you can hear that on the album.”