For the better part of a decade, Ninze & Okaxy have been absorbed in an ongoing investigation of sound, patiently assembling their amorphous findings into a language distinctive enough to constitute a genre of its own. They call it Ketapop: a slow, spherical and melancholic form whose emotional gravity seems to increase the closer one gets to it.

Their music unfolds through glissando drones and subterranean bass frequencies, pulsing with the measured insistence of a distant heartbeat. Melodies surface and recede; textures accumulate without announcing themselves; strange noises seem to arrive from somewhere beyond the visible limits of the composition. The result is music of considerable depth and intricacy – less something one listens to than a space one gradually enters, only to find oneself pleasantly disoriented within it.

Julian Mosch and Tom Rumberger are part of the formidable Laut & Luise family and, alongside their friend Niju, form Wide Awake, a live electronic trio whose sound extends the duo’s slow, exploratory sensibility into a more expansive live vocabulary. Their music has carried them from Leipzig across Europe and as far as North and South America, while collaborations with artists including Mira, Dwig, Chris Schwarzwälder, Canson and Oceanvs Orientalis have continually widened the parameters of their sound.

Music is always something out of the ordinary. This one is far out.

How come we love your music so much? What guides you in production? What role does your audience play in the process?

Good to know. There are so many things we consider when producing or performing. The compositional and technical quality of our material – just the way we like it – is certainly one of them, and an important one. But another consideration, no less crucial, is how that material is received: by whom, under what circumstances, and in what particular context. Otherwise, we would hardly bother taking it into the public sphere.

We are not as solipsistic as those who claim that feedback is irrelevant, adopting a take it or leave it attitude. Clubs presuppose an audience, and an active one at that; much less so artists absorbed entirely in their own egos.

Besides, each of us is, in a sense, a crowd. We have more ears than merely the two pairs attached to our heads. When producing, we continually shift perspectives, approaching a sound from different angles and engaging our internal ears – applying different aesthetic, compositional and practical criteria to what we hear.

We try our best to make the music broadly enjoyable, but you can never really know, during production, how a track will eventually land with an audience. And which audience? It is always different. The sound system, the architecture, whether you are indoors or outdoors, the visuals, the performances preceding or accompanying yours – all these things influence how music is delivered and, ultimately, how it is received.

We receive feedback from our audience all the time, and we value it enormously. People tell us about their experiences and sometimes point us towards tracks we would never have expected to carry as much – or even more – meaning for them than the pieces currently at the top of our own repertoire, perhaps simply because those tracks are new to them.
But that should hardly be surprising. No two ears are the same.

What has been your path as producers? And what makes your sonic diet as listeners?

We have known each other forever – since early childhood, when we grew up as neighbors and inevitably became best friends. At the age of eleven, we formed a band: Julian played drums and I played guitar. It was a punk band – loud, coarse and entirely without subtlety.

We have been making music continuously ever since. In that sense, it has been one long, uninterrupted journey, although it is difficult to say precisely how we travelled from that first band to what we are doing now.

Our style evolved slowly and additively, through natural changes in taste and outlook as we moved from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood. We responded to the music around us, to things we discovered by digging deeper into it, to the emergence and increasing affordability of new technologies, and to everything else that accumulates around a life spent making music.

As listeners, we have always been omnivorous. We consume all kinds of stuff – well-done or rare – and have never felt particularly compelled to observe any genre discipline. And we do not stick to any protocol as listeners. Last year, for example, we made an entire podcast devoted to blues.

What are your studio habits?

Our studio is close to where we live. Usually, we meet there in the morning and begin the day slowly. Sometimes we arrive with ideas that have been developing overnight; sometimes we arrive completely blank and begin from scratch, navigating samples and experimenting with different sounds.

It always takes some time before we press the record button. There is a period of listening, discussing, trying things out and allowing the material to reveal what it might become.
When a piece reaches the pre-mastering stage, you will most often find us in the studio in the morning, when the ears – and the other senses – are at their sharpest. Otherwise, we work whenever the moment presents itself.

It is a comfortable, intimate place. We spend time there by ourselves or with friends, trying one thing and then another, following an idea wherever it happens to lead. Sometimes the destination is clear; often it is not. The important thing is to see how far the music will take us.

Talking to artists on the move, I never miss an opportunity to ask about their favourite venues around the world. There are plenty of outwardly impressive places – lavishly designed, technologically sophisticated, millions invested in infrastructure – each competing with the next in terms of sound, architecture, service, location and prestige. Their ratings may reach five out of five in industry magazines. Somehow, however, that status is rarely corroborated with equal force by personal experience. The real thrill seems to reside elsewhere: on the periphery, in improvised spaces, or somewhere in the middle of nowhere. You know what I mean? What have been your most memorable gigs?

There have been quite a few such places, all exciting for different reasons.

We will never forget our Wide Awake travels through North and South America. One of the most impressive places was a beautiful, secluded beach in southern Chile, at Festival Nomade. It took us fifty-five hours to get there, but it was worth every bit of the journey. Some very good friends were also part of the lineup, which made the experience even more special.

Another unforgettable occasion was Fusion festival, where we played the Bachstelzen floor. We have returned to Fusion several times over the years, and there is something about that particular environment that makes the music feel inseparable from everything surrounding it.

Your interests extend beyond music into politics, history, sociology and cultural criticism. How do these interests inform your production, or coexist with your primary preoccupation with music?

The very first performance we gave in our current constellation took place about six years ago. It did not happen quite as planned, though. We had been booked to play at an anti-fascist camp in the Czech Republic, but the police arrived and shut the event down shortly after it began. We ended up spending several days in our cabin, jamming with friends.

Yes, we have our views, and we do not hesitate to express them by supporting various social causes and advocating for a more progressive status quo. But it is not as though every piece we produce is a political manifesto.

For us, politics enters music more indirectly, through our relationships with other producers, artists and creative people. The people around us tend to be progressive-minded: people who pay attention to what is happening around them and in the world, who connect things, who are sufficiently critical and imaginative to consider how things might – or should – be different.

So perhaps it is less about translating political convictions directly into sound and more about finding ourselves on the same page with other creative people when it comes to fundamental questions of coexistence.

Everything else follows naturally from that: collaboration, technical exchange, mutual support, the circulation of ideas, feedback, performances and all the other forms of exchange through which a creative community sustains itself.

Is there such a thing as a Leipzig sound? Music that reflects the character of the city and its perhaps more intimate scene? And, more generally, what is it like to make music in Leipzig?

The environment and social conditions inevitably have an impact on music, just as they influence mood, thought and attitudes – things that invariably find their expression in local art, literature and philosophy.

The music scene of a sun-drenched resort town must differ from that of a polluted industrial city in crisis. The contrast becomes fairly obvious if you place Ibiza alongside Manchester in the 1980s.

It is more difficult to say exactly how music in Leipzig differs from music in Berlin, because the underlying conditions are not necessarily so different. The genre we represent is certainly far from dominant here. In some ways, it suits Leipzig very well: the city is relatively small, quiet and unhurried, leaving more room for introspection. But I would not say that our music is determined by the local environment.

After all, Leipzig has a substantial house and techno scene, and that represents the city much more prominently than our small, relatively young enclave of melodic downtempo music. Perhaps, then, our scene reflects less the city as a whole than the character of the people who make this particular music – and of the local audience that congregates around it.

We really like living here. The rents are comparatively affordable, and there are still plenty of abandoned or unclaimed spaces that can be transformed into places for street art, cultural projects or something entirely new.

And if you look at the political landscape of Saxony, Leipzig stands out for the strength of its left-wing social milieu. That is one of the main reasons we live here. There is a certain relaxed quality to the social atmosphere: people are less preoccupied with money, status or where you come from. The locals have a fairly clear sense of how they want their city to develop, both structurally and culturally.

Our friend Gastique founded an online project called sLower East Side, and the name captures something essential about Leipzig. There is an unmistakable sense of scale and intimacy to the city: small enough for people to know one another, yet large enough for ideas and communities to develop independently.

When we perform here, we always feel at home, particularly in places such as Institut fuer Zukunft. There is a genuine passion for pushing boundaries, and you can see more and more artists and cultural enthusiasts moving here from Berlin, other German cities and abroad.

The scene is still evolving. Let's see where it goes.


► SoundCloud: Ninze&Okaxy – Blurry Mind