Hi-Five: DJ T.

Raised on disco and funk, steeped in Teutonic electronics, Germany’s Thomas Koch—better known to clubland citizens as DJ T.—is one of the founding fathers, along with the Booka Shade and M.AN.D.Y. duos, of Get Physical, the label that first came to prominence in 2002 through a series of releases that tended to focus on steely and spacious electronic house. But to some degree, Koch’s sound stood apart from his labelmates: His productions tended to add plenty of boogie and bounce into the equation, and tunes like 2003’s “Philly” sounded as good in the headphones while rollerskating down the boardwalk as the did on a dark dancefloor. Get Physical, of course, went on to be one of the millennium’s defining clubland labels, and Koch is going as strong as ever. And now, there’s this: Not only has Koch just released a splendid new EP, The Growing, on Moon Harbour, but Koch and Classic cofounder Luke Solomon (currently serving as the Defected label’s A&R guru) have put together the three-disc compilation Defected Gets Physical Mixed by DJ T. and Luke Solomon, coming out in late August. Koch mixes disc one, a selection of tracks from the Defected vaults; Solomon tackles the second disc with tunes from the Get Physical discography; and the third sees Koch and Solomon contributing eight exclusive (unmixed) edits to the comp. In the run-up to the album’s release, we tapped Koch to give us five of his favorite…well, we’ll let the man himself explain.

“The older I get and the longer I work as a DJ (currently 27 years) the more discerning my ear gets when it comes to listening to club music. In the past five years, I put more time than ever before into listening to music and digging around for new gems. In the process, I realized that I generally divide club music (all styles as well as each individual track) into two large groups; timeless music that transcends decades and short-lived trends, and what some would call fashion music. You can’t miss the styles in the latter category; they completely dominated the scene for one to two years before inevitably turning into a formula that has been copied to death, then vanishing from the scene. The type of nu deep house with its bouncing baselines and deep-pitched ’80s R&B samples suffered this fate, and new Minimal progressive house (or whatever you want to call it) that has dominated Beatport’s charts in the Deep House genre for the past 12 months is in for a similar fate. I have focused on timeless music more than ever before in the past three years, and I am increasingly losing interest in trendy fast-lived music formulas. Some of my most important roots are in ’80s Chicago and acid house, which, in part, only needed a handful of elements, but this is exactly what made it sexy and funky, there’s just no other way to achieve this. Of course, hardly anyone today produces music that sounds exactly like it did back then, but old school house and techno have never fully vanished from the scene. Countless producers draw on these styles from the ’80s and ’90s and preserve the legacy of this music. That’s exactly that I wanna tell in this Hi-Five piece: the funk of reduction, simple drum machine madness all represented by five tracks that cite the old, but are still very much a product of the here and now.”

Makam “What Ya Doin” (Dekmantel)
I’ve always liked it when tracks elude categorization. Makam is an underrated Dutch producer, a resident DJ at Trouw and a gifted DJ in general. His love of ’90s house and techno emanates from all his tracks. “What Ya Doin” is a mixture of jacking Chicago beats, New York house, and a powerful shot of R&B all combined in a way you’ve never heard before. A track that definitely polarizes the dance floor, I’ve seen all types of reactions, from total indifference to collective orgasm.