Martin Stimming seems like a nice guy, but there was a lot working against this conversation. For ridiculous reasons the interview had to be conducted next to the world’s loudest elevator at the Sydney Opera House; at one point a drunk guy stumbled from it and tried to hijack the phone. Further to this was the usual delay in long-distance calls, plus the fact that while he is certainly comprehensible, Stimming has a rather peculiar grasp of English.

The relationship between house music and its listeners is something that almost transcends the music itself; it can be as dependent on physical movement as it is on any aural quality. Stimming is different, however – there is something compelling to his sound that makes him stand out amongst similar musicians. However, when I question him about a past remark – that he “[wants] people to see me as an evolving artist, where you never know exactly what you get”, and if he still feels the drive to keep pushing now that he has become established – I am met with a lengthy silence.

“Mmmmm,” he says at last, and another pause. “Well, the good thing about dance music is that as long as you play something danceable, you can pretty much do whatever you want.”

It’s to the point, but certain. Asking him about the response of his audience when he tries to take his music into new areas or branch into different genres finds a similar reply. “I feel that the quality in terms of being danceable, if there’s this moment happening when you feel they understand what it is you’re doing, then you can pretty much do what you want.”

With Stimming clearly reluctant to speculate on his performance appeal – which is fair enough, since the mark of a good artist isn’t their evaluation of their own popularity, but rather the quality of their art – we shift focus to the production and history of his rather distinct sound. Here he at last opens up, and the early development of his musical expression provides an interesting window into what he produces today.

“I have been wanting to find new music from the moment I could think,” he says. “I remember sitting in the garden, drumming on kitchen equipment and building my first drum set with the things I found lying around the house and yard. This wish to express myself musically has always been there. In [Butzbach, Stimming’s German hometown] there was a very good radio station in my area, and they really took care to play underground music. So I got to know the interesting parts of techno, and it was interesting because of the energy. This kind of was my musical education. This is what we call really hard techno – this was ten years ago, so it was basically about youth. Create this really massive, tribally part-techno. I’m pretty lucky – or at least, I admit I never went to Frankfurt to go out, because I was young and afraid of getting into clubs, so I didn’t learn the rave side of it, including drugs, including going completely crazy. I was just having the music. I was lucky, because otherwise things would have been very different, but for me it wasn’t too excessive.”

A hallmark of Stimming’s work is his reputation for never using the same sample twice, and incorporating everyday, unexpected sounds. It’s an admirable approach that gives the tracks more integrity, knowing they’re crafted at least partly in the real world. In my mind I’ve been picturing Stimming wandering the streets of Berlin with something that looks like a giant metal detector, honing in on unusual sounds here and there and storing them in little glass test tubes attached to his belt.

“What exactly I record can be very, very different,” he explains. “It ranges from using a portable speaker and playing stuff from that in a parking lot, then recording that with a good microphone, to a very small portable recorder which I always carry with me [and with which] I can just open the window and suddenly hear a woman singing in the street and can record it and hope that I can reuse those vocals. But also on the digital side, this ranges from simple presets on a software synthesiser to handmade tracks. That’s basically what I do. It’s important to combine digital sound with analogue ones. Basically it’s the combination that creates a complex texture.”

Creating that fusion is no simple act, either. For every ten hours of work, Stimming suspects he might fashion 30 minutes of decent sound. The end result, however, is truly striking, and is not something you need to put in front of an audience to appreciate.

“The basic approach I have about everything I do is finding something cool, something radical, something new, fresh, and it’s nothing specific really. It can be one little sound that catches me, and then I create a loop, tweak it, find out how it works, tweak it somewhere else, see if that doesn’t work. It’s hard, because it always feels like a fight between the music itself and the fucking music program not doing whatever it is I want it to do. In the end, though, I win the fight,” he chuckles. “That’s the important thing.”

Catch Stimming at The Spice Cellar withMurat Kilic onSunday November 23, tickets online.

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