Kruder and Dorfmeister – 25 Years Anniversary Session
K&D are two producers/djs/remixers whose distinctive trademark sound is at most times extremely mellow, has a lot of bass, downbeat tracks and a sense of epic soundscapes. There might be the occasional double-time breaks and the heavy and deep typically viennese feeling.
Consider K&D to roam in their own, unique realm of musical beutekunst that owes and gives a lot to rare funk tunes, electric jazz arrangements, the feeling of deep soul, hiphop, dub, reggae, ambient, fusion, brazil, chansons, dope beats and drum+bass and still a lot more influences that happen to find the interest of the two austrians.
At a time when hip hopbeats started to emancipate themselves from the rapping and everyone started to pay highest attention to the blooming breakbeat scene in the UK, K&D broke through out of nowhere with one 4-track e.p. (G-stoned) that featured a hypnotic track called High Noon and a cover that showed the dj-duo in true Simon & Garfunkel form, straight out of Richard Avedon anno 1969.
The impact was massive, especially since the first wave of enthusiasm came from the UK where musical imports from the continent are seldom appreciated. Gilles Peterson played the track at first on his famous now called Worldwide-show.
Gathering momentum with support from people like Wall of Sounds Mark Jones and tracks for fellow Austrians Count Basic or strange people like William Orbit, the further story of K&D and Richard’s Tosca project is well documented on various compilations and twelve inch releases. They met people like the Ninja tune posse, touched base with the leftfield dance, befriended Munich’s Compost crew, remixed artists as diverse as Bomb the bass, Bones thugs & harmony, Alex Reece, United Future Organisation, Rockers Hifi (the K&D version was used in the video of “Going under”), Lamb, Roni Size, Depeche Mode and dj-ed in more clubs than you would care to count.
Be it their self-produced tracks or the sound of their remixes, the K&D symptomatic feeling of lush european loungcore-dub pervaded all swift changes of the triphop hype and survived as a highly personal expression that found easy access into the world of drum&bass when the breakbeats became soulful.
Their regular presence in the club circuit, a characteristic side effect of their consistant travelling as djs, made them well-received guest at the various crossing of an international beat-set that took them from Vienna to London, to the American Westcoast, to Germany and back, with a tightly packed dj-bag full of remixes tracing their steps.
A mix-CD compilation, DJ-kicks, for german label studio K7 marked a relevant change in the overall concept of K&D or rather in the way the audience seemed to take them in. From being well-respected underground heroes they had emerged to be full fledged media-celebrities in the music-press whose mix-CD was so excellently mixed and selected, that many new fans were attracted all over the world.
K&D are maybe something like the continental answer to the british breakbeat or the american illbient scene, but then again their musical imprint is outernational anyway. They could achieve the special abstract global reputation that makes them neighbours to RockersHifi, Fila Brazilia, Howie B., DJ Shadow, the wordsound collective, Coldcut or the Thievery corporation in a virtual neighbourhood of twekwando-ing beatmeisters.
But, with a number of prolific dj-dates of K&D all around the world and the production and releases of Tosca and Peace Orchestra as well as numerous remixes, it seems unavoidable that there will be a lot of talk about Peter Kruder & Richard Dorfmeister.
