Sitting in his studio, in Kreuzberg, Berlin, Objekt is rhapsodizing over a beloved childhood toy. The modular plaything, called Capsela, consisted of translucent plastic spheres kitted out with various components—a motor, a gearbox, a propeller—that could be fashioned into all kinds of gizmos: a boat, a car, a desk fan. “I can still clearly remember the smell of rubber and electric motors,” sighs the 37-year-old DJ and electronic musician born TJ Hertz; no wonder he went on to study engineering.
When it came time to name his new record label, the toy came to mind, and presto: Kapsela was born. The name feels like a fitting metaphor for Objekt’s productions, which tend to shape-shift between mutant strains of bass music and techno, festooned with so many pivoting, swiveling, precision-tooled parts they could make an industrial designer green with envy.
The label kicks off a new phase of Hertz’s career, putting the end to a lengthy fallow period. In the years since Objekt’s last album, 2018’s spellbinding Cocoon Crush, he was “feeling quite stuck, creatively speaking,” he tells me over Zoom. He’d put out only one two-track EP in that time, and he was getting fed up with writer’s block. He was juggling his DJ career with coding at a music software company, and he wondered if he’d been in Berlin for too long. “I felt in a lot of ways like I was doing the same thing I was doing 10 years ago, only with more of a platform and a bit further along in my career,” says Hertz, who grew up in Belgium before moving with his parents—his mother is Filipina, his father British American—to the United Kingdom at age 11. “I was still working part time at Native Instruments and touring part time as a DJ, still living in Wrangelkiez, in Kreuzberg, still making ‘forward-thinking bass music.’ Objectively, it was all going well, but I kind of felt like I needed something new to sink my teeth into.”
Kapsela is not Hertz’ first label: He self-released Objekt’s debut single, 2011’s “The Goose That Got Away,” on an eponymous imprint that has served as a periodic outlet for his club productions. But “the white-label series started to feel a bit rigid,” he says, “like there was pressure for each of those records to contain two hyper-detailed, fully formed club tracks that stood on their own. I like the idea of having a platform that’s a little more open-ended than that. Where if I wanted to make something weird and out there—or if I wanted to make an ambient record, or put out records by other people—I could, and it would totally fit.”
To that end, Kapsela’s debut EP is a curveball: “Ganzfeld” is a reissue of an Objekt track originally released in 2014 as one half of a split single with Detroit electro act Dopplereffekt on Berlin’s Leisure System label. The re-release is rounded out with three new remixes: a lumbering club version from Milan’s Piezo, an atmospheric reinterpretation from American ambient dreamweaver Ulla, and, most notably, a 10-minute, multi-part breakbeat epic from UK bass maverick Djrum that has been called “the bohemian rhapsody of the electronic music scene.” A 10-year-old B-side might not be the most obvious choice of repertoire to kick off a new label, but Hertz believes that, given changes in DJs’ playing habits and clubbers’ tastes, the track makes more sense now than it did originally.
“Ten years ago, I’m not sure how many people were actually playing it out,” he says. “By 2014 standards, it was very fast: 147 was quite an awkward BPM. In the intervening years, tempos have crept up, DJing styles have opened out a bit, and that tempo is pretty much par for the course.” A hard-charging, electro-adjacent anthem animated by an unforgettable bass solo, “Ganzfeld” had become a kind of sleeper hit over the years, an if-you-know-you-know ace up the sleeve for clued-in selectors. “Coupled with the fact that there’s a younger generation who might not have heard it the first time, it felt like a nice time to shine a spotlight on it and recontextualize it with a gamut of remixers that maps out part of the modern spectrum of music that I feel it could relate to,” he says.
Just three weeks after the Ganzfeld EP dropped, Hertz has turned around and released a follow-up today. Perhaps old habits die hard, because KAPS002 features… two hyper-detailed, fully formed club tracks that stand on their own. On the A-side, “Chicken Garaage” is loosely inspired by the skulking dark-garage sound of early-2000s acts like Horsepower Productions and El-B, but boasting Objekt’s typically dazzling sound design and hyperkinetic rhythmic flourishes. On the B-side, “Worm Dance” might be a chiropractic session transcribed for electronic percussion, every drum hit another vertebra being snapped back into place. Rhythmically, it’s prime Objekt, but, compositionally, it marks a new frontier for the producer: Much of it was constructed out of field recordings he made at a friend’s lake house outside Berlin one winter. “I spent the afternoon gaffer-taping my contact mics to whatever I could find,” he says. “Ice makes some crazy sounds—creaking, squeaking, friction sounds that are a lot of fun to work with.” For Hertz, accustomed to sitting for long hours in front of his computer in his former day job, “it was a way of throwing some uncertainty into the mix and working in a way that I was completely unaccustomed to,” he says. “I found that very refreshing.”
Objekt: It went through a lot of iterations, as do most of my tracks, but “Ganzfeld,” in particular, sounded like a totally different animal up until about halfway through the process. Ned [Beckett], from Leisure System, signed the track based on a demo that sounded nothing like the final version, which I would never have released. I was like, “I’m happy you like it. There’s no way I’m releasing this, but let me see if I can turn it around.” It was honestly a struggle.
It was just a totally different track. It felt much more bare-bones; it was overcompressed, kind of overcooked. I had tried to lean too far into one idea and polish a track that wasn’t finished yet and ended up with something that wasn’t really complete and didn’t sound very good. It didn’t have the metallic drums; it didn’t have the bassline at the start. What it did have was the beginnings of that bass solo, from a very early version, and I think that was maybe the one thing that carried the creative development through this rut. That idea, at least, felt worth pursuing. But everything else changed a lot over the course of the 70 or so versions that followed.
It’s definitely informed the technical side of it. I’ve always been methodical—that’s just a core part of my personality. But I think working at N.I. in engineering, and, later, in a research capacity, has reinforced that aspect of my personality. It’s been a double-edged sword. The technical knowledge I’ve gained from working that job has been very useful and empowering in the detail-oriented stuff that I do. But I also think that if you’re not careful, it can hold you back. I’ve often wished I could be more spontaneous in the way that I make music, and being very methodical and rigorous can be antithetical to that. But it’s something that is, to a degree, encouraged by having a job where that’s required of you. I guess the flipside is that I could just work on developing a different workflow that allows me to get away from that, which is kind of what I’m trying to do now.
I’m very conscious of that, and I think it comes from my personality as much as anything. I’m detail-focused to a fault. I’m not sure it actually helps my creative process, because I can get stuck on details and miss some of the bigger-picture stuff. But it does mean that everything I finish is fully polished and sparkles to the fullest extent that I can manage. That’s always been the case. What’s changed over time is just how polished and sparkly I can manage to get it sounding. But I think that just comes naturally to me. I’m an incorrigible tweaker. When I sit down at Ableton and open up a project that isn’t finished yet—and this is something I’m trying to move away from—my first instinct is to make it sound better, and usually that means mix tweaks, micro-edits. Sometimes I need to remind myself to tackle the bigger-picture things. Even now, as I’m trying to teach myself to focus more on the task at hand—adding a new synth, or making the arrangement more effective, or making sure all the elements are there before I start tweaking and finessing—I think ultimately I’ll always have this urge to polish. I don’t even know if that necessarily comes from my musical influences so much as my own anxiety. It’s definitely an anxious procrastination thing.
It’s always interesting having these conversations with people in other creative disciplines, because there’s always parallels. I’m far from the only person afflicted with it—procrastinating by focusing on the details, rather than eating the frog, as I think Mark Twain put it. You know, doing the most important, scariest or most unpalatable thing first.
The sonic signature of the music that I make is very dependent on what technology is available to me. I think that’s true of anyone making music with the computer or electronics. Actually, it’s true of anyone making music with instruments. The music that you make is a function of the instruments that you’re using to make it, whether that’s a guitar or amplification, effects pedals, sequencers, synthesizers, computers, whatever. For sure, the sound of my productions has changed over the years based on the kind of plug-ins, synths, effects at my disposal. Also the kind of monitoring at my disposal. But I think your personality as an artist always shines through the tools you’re using.
I think I’m interested in sounds that feel satisfying. There’s a kind of ASMR element, I guess. Sounds that conjure up a physical feeling. But I wouldn’t necessarily say that my focus is on finding brand new and previously undiscovered sounds at the cost of anything else. I see sound design as a means to an end. I think interesting sound design is great, but, in and of itself, I don’t think it’s enough to move me. And, ultimately, what I’m interested in is music that moves me or is going to move someone else, whether that’s melodically and emotionally or more cerebrally. That matters to me more than novelty or being on the cutting edge. I just want to make music that is somehow evocative and meaningful and interesting and says something. It has to make you feel something. And I think sound design is a way of embellishing that story. It’s one of the brushes that I paint with, but it’s not the be all and end all.
When I was finding my feet, there was a sense of being part of a generation that was still figuring out what the fuck we were doing. We—or at least my friends and peers—emerged into a corner of the music scene that wasn’t yet so wrapped up in “industry.” Artists would get agents later in their careers, for example. Social media wasn’t a thing yet; it didn’t really play that much of a role in bookings or establishing you as an artist. Local scenes weren’t as dominated by big promoters, and small clubs had a slightly easier time making ends meet. It didn’t feel like the festival circuit was as established. Everything felt a bit more all over the place, more haphazard, less walled in. Ironically, the one area in which that didn’t really apply was tempo ranges, because everyone was pretty much playing between 120 and 140 BPM. But, in terms of the scene itself, it was much easier to get a foothold into the beginnings of a music career then, and to make things up as you went along. Also, I’m not sure if I imagined it, but I think there were way, way fewer people making music, DJing, touring. Although they were basically all cis male, of course.
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Gratitude. Purpose. Just feeling like this is why I do it. Feeling like the set was playing itself and that every transition led to another in an arc that made sense and that justified itself.
For sure. The rapport that I felt with the crowd during that set and the mental image of the first few rows of the dancefloor, especially, really responding to some quite weird music that most other crowds would lose interest in pretty quickly. That’s something that definitely lives on in my head. That’s not a set that I would have attempted at a lot of places, and that was a setting in which I felt like I could not only get away with it, but it would be justified and appreciated. But those settings are relatively few and far between, I would say.
I went full-time again in September, because I went back to Native Instruments during the pandemic in 2020. Stuck around part-time for longer than I intended to—three years in the end. These days, I’m doing probably about five, six gigs a month. Last year, I was doing maybe three or four.
When I was working at N.I., I was being very selective about the gigs that I took, just because I didn’t have that much time. So, for most of last year, when I was doing three or four gigs a month, I definitely had a bumper year of transcendent gigs. It must have been at least eight or 10 really extremely special ones over the year, and then a lot of very good ones, and very few, if any, mediocre ones. I felt very blessed by the end of the year. To be honest, even this year, despite having to fill my calendar a little more, I’m still very fortunate to not have to play that many shows that just feel like work.
I love playing in the States, actually. A great number of my favorite experiences playing have been in North America over the last years. It just feels like a different energy over there. I feel like in North America, you feel closer to people’s passion for the music than in Europe. Not to say that music fans in Europe aren’t as passionate, but the scene [in the United States], as a whole, has been less developed around the industry side of it and the profitability side of it and is more genuine, as well as more community-focused.
I think there’s a lot of complacency in Europe when it comes to dance music events and the dance music scene. Because it’s comparatively underground in the U.S., I get the feeling it’s still a more welcoming home for the weirdos and freaks than it often is in Europe. I’ve generally felt more of a community feeling, people seeming more checked in and looking out for each other; at its best, it feels more sincere and less superficially hedonistic.
I’ve been having this conversation with a lot of people. I think there’s this broad consensus that a lot of crowds tend to have shorter attention spans, especially younger audiences; that it can be harder to get people interested in sets that are more subtle; that you really need to bang it out in order to engage people. And, yeah, I’ve definitely felt that at times, especially the first year after things started reopening. But I don’t know… I have to say it’s also gone the other way for me, too, especially in the last year or two, and I’ve had some really wonderful experiences playing sets that were extremely headsy and adventurous, even more so than I would’ve necessarily played before the pandemic. Sometimes I actually felt like I was able to connect with audiences on a deeper level than ever, you know? So I’m hesitant to make any generalizations, because I think it really depends where you are and who you’re playing to, and also depends on the artist and what kind of crowd you attract.
On a more concrete level, I guess there’s no getting around the fact that venues, promoters, festivals, they’re all struggling a lot harder these days to keep the lights on. The recession and cost of living crisis obviously really impacts how much people can spend on a night out. Plus, flights, hotels, venue hire, and commercial rent have all gotten more expensive in many places, so it’s become more expensive to put on parties and book out-of-town artists.
That’s my limited perspective from the corner of the dance music landscape that I move around in, anyway. As you venture into more mainstream territory, it’s a totally different picture. Certainly, some version of “techno” is more popular and lucrative than ever before. But that’s a whole other ball game.
Just for the record, I did not anticipate that tweet going any further than my own following of, like, people who I imagine mostly listen to relatively adventurous DJs. I feel like every couple of months I’ll tweet some random shower thought about DJing that sounded funny in my head and suddenly the entirety of EDM Twitter shows up.
Speaking totally sincerely, it wasn’t even aimed at anyone. I genuinely harbor no disrespect for anyone that does specialize in one genre. For context, I tweeted that a few hours before a gig as I was scrambling to try and Rekordbox 20 gigabytes of music of all genres and tempos that I’d purchased in the days leading up to the weekend and just wasn’t sure where to even start in figuring out how to approach this set. It was also right before Draaimolen Festival, which was an important gig that I really cared about, and I just wanted to play well, and I had no idea what to do and not enough time to figure it out. And, in that moment, I was like, life would be so much easier if I just, I don’t know, if I just played…
Yeah, exactly. Much fewer moving parts.
