From Detroit to Berlin

Magda’s apartment in Berlin is reverberating to the sound of distorted, repetitive noise, but it’s not the latest minimal tour de force.
“They just started drilling again now, sorry if you can’t hear me clearly,” she says, her soft tones barely audible as the pneumatic drill pounds the pavement.
Like the rest of the German capital, the street she lives on is one big building site, a never-ending project to accommodate the thousands of producers, visual artists and other creative types from Germany and the rest of the world who've flocked to the city to avail of its generous arts grants and cheap rent.
For Magda, moving to the city a few years ago with close friend and Minus/Plus 8 boss Richie Hawtin felt like a homecoming: she was born and brought up in a small town in Poland, just across the border, and her family moved to the States when she was 10.
“I love it here: it’s so relaxed and I have a bit of German, but I don’t know if it'll get too popular in the next few years and lose its spark. There's also talk of the government clamping down on the clubs. At the moment, anything goes here,” she laughs.
The backlash against Berlin, and the music that soundtracks it, is already well underway. While some of the spurious, pseudo-intellectual rubbish that’s written about minimal techno deserves a sound satirical kicking, how does Magda feel about getting slagged off, seeing as she’s one of the main DJs associated with this music?
“This scene gets so much attention and the music is getting very popular, so you have to laugh at it,” she believes. “In the past, techno was much too serious in its attitude. People got bored with it, whereas nowadays it’s more fun and more exciting.”
Certainly Magda, Hawtin and Villalobos have brought more of a ‘party’ feeling to techno, but it would mean nothing if the music was second-rate.
“The music I play isn’t instantaneous and it takes time to get into it,” she admits, “but the more that people are exposed to this music, the more they will understand and appreciate it. There are a lot of new producers and many of the old ones have started to make great music again, so there's been a renaissance in the past few years.”
Magda has deftly captured this renaissance on her debut mix CD, She’s A Dancing Machine, which features over 70 tracks pieced together using Ableton. It should finally dispell the cynics who say that she's become an international DJ by default, based on her close friendship with Hawtin.
...Machine features contributions from the usual minimal names - Konrad Black, Villallobos, Marc Houle, Troy Pierce and Matt John - but the listener will also hear Metro Area’s cosmic disco, Larry Heard’s deep house, Italo melodies and 80s electro pioneers Portion Control amid the sick acid lines and clicky grooves.
“I’m influenced by the alternative scene from the 80s, bands like Throbbing Gristle and the weirder end of Italo. Living in Detroit had a big impact on me, it has all of these scenes that are connected,” she enthuses. “I always thought that when I did a mix, it would feature my favourite music since the beginning as well as up-to-date material, and I tried to make a connection between what has been happening in techno in the past few years and that weird, spacey 80s feeling. A lot of techno nowadays has that weird feeling.”
While living in Detroit gave Magda the opportunity to DJ with Claude Young and Dan Bell and meant that she hooked up with Richie Hawtin, she believes that her current home is responsible for her approach to performing.
“I play a lot differently to how I did when I lived in the States. When I came here first, people didn’t really get my Djing at all,” she admits. “In Berlin, you need to build up a really good groove, build it up for hours, layer bassline upon bassline, that’s what people respond to here.”
Magda believes that ...Machine would make ‘the most sense’ at that great German institution, the after-party. But isn’t that just a nice way of saying that her music only sounds great when you’re wasted?
“C’mon, people always say stuff like that and it’s not fair,” she snaps. “So you’re telling me that people weren’t snorting K at big techno raves in the 90s? When I play people react to the music, they scream and shout and have a great time. If they were sitting on the ground, gurning at the walls it would be time to get worried! In my experience, people are just up for having a good time.”

She’s A Dancing Machine is out now on Minus. Magda plays Electric City, Wax, Dublin on August 10.