In that sense, Dice’s innate understanding of people: what they sense, what they feel, what they want to imagine, is a part of what distinguishes him from other DJs. Loco Dice is interested in all kinds of people and artistic subcultures: he’s proud of people who bring a creative flair to what they do, informed by lives lived ever so slightly less ordinary. Loco Dice’s experience of Germany is one that includes friends and collaborators who are of African, Eastern European, Italian or Turkish descent. When you visit the office of Desolat and Artist Alife, you’re struck by the fact that everyone seems to come from a different cultural background. This sense of family is what he wants to create with projects like his and Buttrich’s label Desolat, and an artist management agency he run with Tom Preuss called Artist Alife. A football player, he’s inspired by those who build strong teams of creative people around them. Family is how he’s always regarded the people close to him, and it’s how he regards subcultures too. His love for music stems from hearing soul and funk in the kitchen, and holidays with his mother to Tunisia, where he absorbed North African and Middle Eastern folk music and occasionally sneaked away to watch his grandfather playing dice at café tables on the street. It’s an album that re-imagines the soul of a city, built from careful observations of urban tribes that crisscross and sometimes clash, of minute details and sensory impressions.įamily is important to Loco Dice, as you might have noticed if you’ve seen one of his tattoos, a Chicano-style artwork with the legend “Guadelupe”. As one manifestation of this, visitors to Düsseldorf early this year will be able to see an exhibition of photographs taken by Loco Dice & Martin Buttrich during the year they spent in New York City to work on the Loco Dice album. This continues to be a habit of Loco Dice’s today: to close his eyes for just one minute, and see a whole cornucopia of scenes and atmospheres. It also stems from elaborate film scripts imagined as a young Loco Dice on the streets of Flingern in Düsseldorf and the Kerkennah Islands in Tunisia. It’s a directorial, cinematic outlook, which permeates Dice’s everyday life, and comes not just from the outlandish escapades and scrapes that he has sometimes found himself living out in real life. He began a fruitful studio partnership with Martin Buttrich in 2002 leading to tracks like Phatt Dope Shit, Menina Brasiliera, and Seeing Through Shadows, and these productions are meticulously planned by Dice. His DJ sets, whether at Germany’s biggest rave Timewarp, Cocoon in Ibiza or a beach party in South America, are spontaneous orchestrations fueled by the nuances of a night/venue/crowd. This Loco Dice, with his mercurial temperament, may let his thoughts run away with him, but he tends to chase those ideas and make them into an artistic reality. Don’t think that merging of perspectives is accidental.
0 kommentar(er)
