Emmerald: I know people ask you this like all the time, but let's start from the beginning and talk about who's in Jazzanova and what roles the various people play.
Jazzanova: Stefan and Roskow are more or less responsible for programming our tracks. They work also on their own projects or for others, but they mostly work on Jazzanova projects. And there's Axel who does all the mix-downs. He records all the artists for Sonar Kollektiv. Claas, Alex and me are concentrate on our work for Sonar Kollektiv, our record label. Claas takes care of all the contract things and all that. There are always teams of two who work on a Jazzanova track, so it's one of the programmers or engineers and one of us, one of the DJs. This team works on a track from the beginning to the end. And once it is done, they come to the other members of Jazzanova and all of us listen to it and we join with ideas and criticism and all that. But more or less a Jazzanova tune is done by two, one of the DJs and one of the guys who are on the computer and programming. Axel is responsible for the sound. He has a perfect ear, so he is for good for all sounds.
Emmerald: How long have you all been working together, and how did you come together in the first place?
Jazzanova: Actually it happened by accident. We were playing in a club called Delicious Doughnuts Research. The first letters, DDR, is the German expression for DDR, for the German Democratic Republic, the former East Germany. The club wanted to do a label compilation, so they asked us if we knew people with whom we could produce a track. We met Stefan and Axel at the club also. They had artist team called Real Dope Thing, a hip-hop project. Roskow was also involved in the hip-hop scene here in Berlin. We asked them if they wanted to work with us on the compilation. And from the beginning I got a good feeling and we had a lot of fun to working together, and that's why we decided to go on. Actually, the club didn't finish the compilation. So we had the three tracks we were working on, and we decided to put them out on a white label and see what would happen. We got feedback from Japan, from the United Future Organisation ("U.F.O.") guys and from the States, King Britt was the first there who was checking our stuff. We had people like Gilles Peterson talking about us and the U.F.O. guys asked us for a remix. Then the Koop guys from Sweden asked us to do a remix for them. Ian Pooley heard our music and asked us for a remix. So we did "What's Your Number" for him. That's how we started. We couldn't believe all these people from abroad were interested in our kind of stuff and how we produce. From the beginning on we were involved with this remixing thing. And for us it was a good thing to be producing and working with singers; those were all new things that we didn't have experience with.
