#Purple disco machine series

Most of the music was banned by the government there was no chance to get The Rolling Stones or artists like that. Thanks to stories from my parents and from my grandparents, I knew we had problems, particularly if you were a music lover. I was quite young when the Wall came down – I was 10 – so I actually can’t remember it very well. What do you remember about what it was like to live there, and experience music there? You grew up in East Germany, and were quite young when the Berlin Wall came down and everything changed. But without any shows, it was a bit different – I had to trust my feelings.

Is the intro too long? Where would it fit into a set? I road test my songs and sometimes change the arrangement. So when I do an arrangement, everything is looked at from the DJ perspective. It’s one thing to sit in the studio and finish something, but when I’m producing songs I always look at it from the DJ point of view. Was it difficult to get into that headspace, to produce tracks that were going to work well on the dancefloor? But knowing that there’s no deadline for the next six or seven months, and no touring, you’re like ‘ok, let’s see what happens’.įrom a production point of view, some of your current singles are quite upbeat. If I have two days a week in the studio, and a deadline for something is in three days, I know what I need to do, and I can finish it. So your usual production cycle was to tour at the weekend and then have a couple of days in the studio during the week, and then on to somewhere else the following weekend? Maybe that’s why the album took so long in the end. As I found out, when I was here every day, it sort of stopped my creativity I wasn’t that productive because I could always do something ‘tomorrow’ or ‘the day after tomorrow’. I’m usually quite productive and quite structured, because in between touring I have a few days in my studio.

My kids have started asking me ‘when am I going back on tour?’, so I think they’re starting to get quite annoyed with me being at home every day. I actually quite enjoyed the first lockdown, because I have a family with two small kids, and I was able to have the weekend off every week, which is very different to only having 100 days a year at home. I was touring the time, playing something like 200 days a year, and when the first lockdown started, I realised that it was going to take some time before things got back to normal. In the beginning it was quite challenging. How was the lockdown period for you, on a personal level? I’m usually pretty quick in writing demos and writing songs, but now on the second album I decided to work more with musicians and other artists – everything remotely, of course, because of the COVID situation. The first album came out in 2017, and I think I started working on the second album at the end of 2018. It was actually a good thing that I had another 12 months to work on it. So, I decided to work a bit more on songs, work with other musicians and dive deeper into my sound. I started it three years ago and the plan was to finish the album in March of last year, but then COVID came, and we were locked down. I actually had aimed to finish the album pre-COVID. Because of the pandemic, how long have you been sitting on these tracks? Your second album is coming out in October, and you’ve released a couple of tracks from it already, including Playbox.

#Purple disco machine series

The Dresden-born DJ and producer has had quite the musical journey, growing up in East Germany listening to his father’s smuggled black market records, falling in love with house music in the mid 90s, and finding initial success with his previous pseudonym Stereofunk, before deciding to rip up the script and start again – a path that led to the development of Purple Disco Machine.Īs part of our ORIGINALS series of interviews, 909originals caught up with him.

He’s just released the latest single, Playbox, off his forthcoming second album a Hi-NRG disco house cut that’s certain to bring positive vibes as we emerge from a long COVID lockdown. Purple Disco Machine has been putting the funk back into house music for more than a decade now, with the producer behind the pseudonym, Tino Piontek, a regular on the international festival circuit, as well as boasting nine million monthly listeners on Spotify.