Misc.

Classically trained musician Christopher Bleckmann (b. Bremen, Germany) and Hannes Wenner (b. Kassel, Germany) apparently met on the night shift at a video rental store in Münster, and it would be tempting to identify their full-on take on techno as an attempt to create an aural equivalent of the blast and explosions of the most thrilling of shoot-em-ups via crunchy techno. Misc., however, say their intent is not violent: ‘We always want to touch people. Some of the times the emotion in a track might be aggressive but destruction is nothing we like to transmit’. Bleckmann and Wenner admit that it ‘probably isn’t coincidence’ that their first techno records were made after their relocation from Münster to Cologne. The duo initially created their music on separate laptops before converging their ideas and though the division of labour is not strict, they admit that Bleckmann is the ‘better technician’ and Wenner is the one ‘doing the main arrangements’. After 2004’s appositely monikered Crunch Time’s ‘grand attempt at maximizing techno’s euphoric potential’, the poetically-named and less aggressive Like Morning In Your Eyes was an attempt to include a broader range of emotions alongside the duo’s own brand of rave euphoria. Each of their albums, however, ranks among the finest to have emanated from the eerily productive techno city of Cologne. Bleckmann/Wenner also record as Monophace (drum ’n’ bass for the Precision and Krush Grooves labels), Van Delta (electronic music), Niederflur (funky minimal techno on Richie Hawtin’s M-nus imprint), and Clubsessel (ambient). In 2005, they were notably commissioned to remix Depeche Mode’s ‘Precious’.