It’s a busy press day in Modeselektor’s new studio in Berlin, which doubles as the nerve-centre and rehearsal space for Moderat, the hugely successful and equally influential band that exists when Modeselektor’s Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary join forces, musical ideas and hard-drives with Apparat aka Sascha Ring.
MORE D4TA, is a tour de force of everything we’ve come to love from Moderat. Gritty synths, fractious beats and Ring’s haunting vocals bring the dancefloor into the song and the song out onto the dancefloor on what’s possibly their best musical offering to date. FM caught up with Sascha in between rehearsals for the forthcoming Moderat tour to find out how sometimes, stripping back software and equipment can make a world of difference to the finished sound. As the adage goes, less is sometimes MORE D4TA.
Was the decision for the three of you to reconvene as Moderat an organic thing?
“Yeah, it was obvious from the beginning that there would be another Moderat album… it was never a goodbye. We just didn’t know when it would be happening. Basically, because we have to plan our lives a bit in advance, we knew it would be happening and we’d started talking about making a new album in, maybe, 2018. It’s always like that, when we take a break, we barely see each other…[laughs] so we really take the term ‘break’ seriously. Also, we were touring with our separate projects, both doing different festivals, so we didn’t really bump into each other backstage for a while. Then we slowly started talking again, met for a coffee here at Modeselektor’s studio just to listen to some music before deciding to start work on a new album in August 2019. Then the pandemic threw us all out of our routine and flow, but it did give us a lot of time to concentrate on what we were doing.”
So, you were all individually making lots of musical ideas during the lockdowns?
“Luckily it was the early stages of the record anyway, so,
