Intakt!

Analogue for me, means that there is a continuous, decelerating form of having something in your hand. Well, put differently; analog has certain aspects that make something analog. Obviously it has to be something haptic, in a way, but it’s something different for the analog signal. But, the term, as people use it today means there’s a haptic side to it. When people come to my studio and see my Eurorack for example, and assume it’s analog, when half the gear might be digital. And a record has continuity, until you take the needle off.

I have lived here for nine years. We began the project at the end of 2015, and then we founded the company the following March. But then we had to get money.

We had the opportunity to get our presses, and that was motivation enough. We were thinking about that before, but we didn’t have the chance to get presses, and then we knew it could be a successful project. We began to realise how difficult it was becoming for independent labels to have their records pressed in time. And we as we knew the market a bit, we knew the problems of getting records made at big pressing plants. Either having to wait four months, or getting pushed out from the capacities.

Well, it’s a lot of money, as you just mentioned. First of all, you need to get almost half-a-million Euros, and we didn’t have that money in our pocket. We had to work for it. And that was the first big effort, to have the banks convinced.

No, it wasn’t the Discogs account, it was more the financial concept behind it, so the business plan and the strategy that’s the whole backbone of the project, really. They wanted to see a plan for the next eight years which proved convincing to them. I have an economics background, while Alexander has a technical background, so it was probably convincing to them that we had somebody to monitor the industrial system, and someone who understood the whole financial side, to be transparent and that everything was calculated.

That was the biggest problem, I would say. Everything with the banks went pretty well. We got the money within three or four months, whereas, some people will be looking for money for two or three years. We had this romantic dream of locating the pressing plant in the city, in Kreuzberg or Neukolln, but when we were visiting the sites it became quite clear that it wasn’t the place to have a pressing plant. Not only due to the cost of rent, but in order to support the whole infrastructure. For example, the electricity power we needed. Sometimes the machines run at night, and we have a cooling tower sitting outside, which you can’t just put on a third floor. Also, the machines weigh one-and-a-half tonnes on one square metre, so it needs to hold, then you’d need an elevator to carry that…

Yes, but it took us four months, and it was quite frustrating. There was just nothing there, until we found this, the perfect spot. We have a huge gate, that meant we could drive the equipment right inside. When we get new deliveries of PVC, we have space to work with that and we have room for the oil tanks. If we had moved in somewhere else, we would have had to invest around 100000E just for infrastructure. We have a chimney, and each metre of chimney costs 800 euros. And that’s the cheapest chimney we can get. Imagine building 25 metres of chimney in Krezuberg. We just have three metres out here. All those old industrial buildings you see there, they are just full of architects offices. We needed something all industrial.

That is our capacity, but we are only running at around 60% of that, as we’re not fully booked. But it’s still more than we’d planned. That’s not bad for us, as it’s a lot of work and we need to get used to the processes, as we haven’t ran a pressing plant before. We started taking orders in May, the first records were pressed in April, but we were testing for a month in order to calibrate the whole system. There are new procedures and routines to be developed, and we are switching things round. There are optimisations ongoing all the time, and that would be difficult to do at full operation.

We wrote two or three press releases, and two or three local newspapers responded. But from that point onwards, it wasn’t us anymore. It went a little bit viral, and other newspapers, magazines and distributors were calling us to do the same story. We didn’t send it to Resident Advisor, but they did a story on us. We wanted to give them the story, but we didn’t need to!

Well, the hype is not bad, so long as you can control it. Right now, I actually don’t know if there’s any hype about us. We just need to focus. We get here at eight in the morning and leave at eleven at night. We have no social life left. You are the only social life we have right now!

He is the best friend of my brother, and the Godfather of my niece. We have known each other since we were teenagers. I had the idea and the initial business plan for the pressing plant, and my brother asked me, “Do you really want to do this by yourself? Wouldn’t it be better if you have someone else?” Alex was unhappy in his job, which he had been in for ten years. He lives in Hamburg, where he still goes back to at the weekend, and we had played the same parties. So, I spoke to him and explained that the next bank appointment was the following day. I told him if he came, he had to be in, because if he dropped out and didn’t turn up a week later, it would look very dodgy. But he came in, and then he quit job the next day. And that is some dedication. Also, it looked very good to the banks to have two of us there, covering both the financial and business side. But that works in reality too; I’m much more into the figures and the logistics, the pricing, developing a network of partners for printing and stuff like that.

Oh yes. We each have thousands of records.

Well, first of all, there’s the quality control. It costs money and takes time to press a record to vinyl, so it’s a commitment. Then there’s also the record stores, deciding whether to sell it or not. Considering that you can get software now that uploads music directly to online stores, it’s a risk. But mainly, people just like to hold music in their hands, to really connect with it.