Steffen Berkhahn, known to the world simply as Dixon, is feeling good. His Innervisions label is only a year old and its second release, Âme’s Rej EP, is already an international hit; after selling thousands worldwide, it was just licensed by Defected for re-release this fall with new remixes.

This is no overnight success story, though. Berkhahn started in the electronic music business in the early ’90s, throwing parties with breakcore pioneer Alec Empire (of Atari Teenage Riot). “This was at a time in dance music [when] the tempo was nearly the same for all types of electronic music,” he clarifies. “You could play house or techno tracks in a drum & bass context. So I did.” As the most soulful member of the outfit, Berkhahn soon felt a call to greener pastures.

Branching out into remix work, his first commission came about through a friendship with Jazzanova’s Alex Barck, who garnered him a remix for Sonar Kollektiv in ’99. Its success led to a fruitful seven-year relationship with the label, one that led to the production project Wahoo (with Georg Levin) and the launch of Innervisions (which recently split from the SK stable).

“Sonar Kollektiv is a high-quality label but I felt it released so much different music that some [artists] didn’t get the attention they deserved,” Berkhahn says. “I wanted to change that.” Now seven releases deep, Innervisions is getting plenty of attention. Taking Berkhahn’s love of deep house and fusing it with electro and techno, its sound fills a dance-music void, and contributions from Franck Roger, Chateau Flight, and Henrik Schwarz are quickly making it into a brand DJs trust. “The label is what comes about when you listen to house for 14 years,” Berkhan offers.

Innervisions could easily rest on the success of Rej, but Berkhahn keeps looking forward. “We try not to focus on [Rej’s] success,” he says. “It’s a record we released that we loved, and that’s it.” He continues to step up the output; this fall, he will drop a full-length CD of singles and exclusive tracks and a 12” from Stefan Goldman that includes a remix by Âme. Dixon is feeling especially good about the latter; “I have feeling it’s going to be the Rej of 2006,” he whispers.

The biggest hip-hop brand in Berlin is helmed by an iconoclastic Frenchman named Jaybo, who traveled around the world (Sweden, Senegal, Nigeria) before a lost passport forced him to settle in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, where he spent nights freestyle MCing, DJing, and bombing walls, and days designing club flyers.

In 1994, three punk rock kids from a merchandising company asked him to create a reggae-flavored clothing line that would bridge the gap between punk and hip-hop. Eight printed tees later, Irie Daily–which sports a vector-heavy skate look not unlike DVS or Etnies–was born. Via a poetic email, Jaybo explains that the name means “taking life the easiest way, everyday” and he says he owes Irie Daily’s success to Kreuzberg: “It’s our hood, where everybody has supported us by buying our clothes and having fun at our parties.”

Jaybo (a.k.a. Monk) does more than just design Irie Daily’s look; he’s also the art director behind street music/culture/fashion mag Style & The Family Tunes, and recently released a compendium of his work, Lord of Mess: My Head Is A Visual Township (softcover; DGV, $55). No better person, then, to explain what Berlin style is about. “You will recognize a real Berliner by their understated, very personal style,” he says. “Since the Wall fell, there has been an influx of international artists showing off with bling bling and bullshit, but the real Berlin is a lot of tattoos and punk rocking on one side and Lacoste polos meets bad shoes on the other side!”

More on Jaybo.

“808 and bleeps and noise” is how Berlin’s Roger Semsroth succinctly describes his perfectly formed Sleeparchive project. Combining the asceticism of Mika Vainio’s recordings for Sähkö with the aestheticism of near-mythological labels like Basic Channel, Semsroth’s releases acquire power from their musical and visual reductionism. His debut EP, Elephant Island, was so stripped down as to fuel rumors that it was a collaboration between Pan Sonic’s Vainio and Richie Hawtin; a subsequent series of cherishable releases, hand-printed with identical stamps and catalog numbers that read “zzz,” further added to the mystery.

A conversation with Semsroth confirms that Sleeparchive is not only his own recording moniker and label name; it also brands the work of a number of collaborators. “Sleeparchive is the name for everything that is coming out [on the Sleeparchive label],” he says. “Most are made by me but there are also tracks made by [four other] friends. They don’t want to use their names. We have to keep it a secret.”

Curiously, given the dexterity with which he works the genre’s palette, Semsroth is credited with having said he doesn’t actually like minimal techno. “Maybe this was a misunderstanding,” he muses. “Minimal music is actually my first love. It’s true that I’m not such a big fan of the music that is called ‘minimal techno’ nowadays. That’s not because I think it’s not ‘real’ minimal–it’s just not the music I listen to at home and this is the main reason I buy records.”

Given Sleeparchive’s strange austerity and isolationist bent, it’s easy to envisage Semsroth as cut off from Berlin’s music scene and its coterie of music makers. “It’s true that I’m not as involved as other Berlin-based artists but I’m not isolated or more independent,” he counters. “I’m just not the type of person who parties for 48 hours every weekend. I hang out with my friends; some of them are artists, some are not. Sometimes we go out, sometimes we just have a beer at home.”