FJAAK don’t want to play the techno industry game

Which brings us again to ‘FJAAK THE SYSTEM’, all 23 tracks and 73 minutes of it. It’s an album that feels like it’s been made from the joy of hooking up a gamut of hardware — 909s, 808s, analogue synths, without, they claim, any major sampling and just letting rip. Here, the duo take an unbridled approach to creation, sifting through over 300 tracks made over a five year timeframe — the intention being to just create, not to write an album that was thematically thought out from the beginning. “We just produce a lot of stuff and there’s not enough platforms,” Aaron says simply. “We will never be able to release all of that, so in the end, you always just have a small window of listening to us, which is more like one percent.”

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Sonically, there are frequent moments during ‘FJAAK THE SYSTEM’ where Felix and Aaron nudge far beyond the four-on-the-floor big room techno of early EPs like ‘Attack/The Wind’ (2014) and ‘Oben/Unten’ (2015). The evolution here, which in places sounds, with its crunchy hardware beats, like an unearthed and remastered rave cassette from 1992, came out of this natural way of working. “Some tracks are obviously for the floor and they have a lot of power and energy,” Aaron says. “Some tracks have an acid ’90s influence, some tracks are more rave, some tracks don’t even have a beat. It was basically like four or five albums we did in the last years and these are our favourites.”

“Because we played live so much since the beginning, we created our own ideas of how to build up energies,” Felix adds. “Basically, we’ve been arranging live in front of people for 10 years and I think that just educated us, because if you do a bad arrangement in front of people in a club, it’s not like they’re your friends and are going to be polite about it.”