Show the teaser of Global Surveyor Phase 3

Dominance Electricity is the Electro sublabel of the oldest East German Hip Hop label Dominance Records. Since 1996 it releases Electrofunk, -bass and -breaks music by local producers like Dagobert and Sbassship as well as a row of international artists and legends of the Electro scene such as Keith Tucker, Imatran Voima, Newcleus, Decal, MAS 2008, Gosub, Dynamik Bass System, Mandroid and Paul Hardcastle. The various artist album series „Global Surveyor“, of which the third installment has just been released, is the labels portfolio.

Nexus 6: First of all, congratulations for the high quality of the “Global Surveyor” series and in particular the third volume. This project is no doubt one of the biggest to date on Dominance Electricity and one of the label highlights. How do you feel about it?
MMW: Thank you. I’m happy it all turned out the way it did and that the feedback has been really great so far. We have done several various artist albums before and our latest Bboy Breaks compilation in the “BOTY Soundtrack” series had even more artists involved, but “Global Surveyor Phase 3” is surpassing all that, as its our first triple vinyl album release. These kinds of projects are always very work intense, so it’s great to see it accepted so well.

N6: What’s the artistic line of “Global Surveyor” in general and “Phase 3” in particular? How would you describe the whole compilation?
MMW: The early years of Dominance including the “Global Surveyor Phase 1” release in 1998 were Electro purely out of the Old School Hip Hop context. Later on, with “Phase 2” it became more a mixture of that classic Old School Electrofunk and more modern elements of New School Electro. While on “Phase 2” these styles rather stood next to each other, I think on “Phase 3” it's all more of a homogeneous fusion within the tracks. The album has become one big colourful Electro gesamtkunstwerk combining elements of the old and the new – the clishé and the unexpected with a steady focus on melodic depth. I’d describe it as “Deep Space Electrofunk” or Drexciya meets Tangerine Dream meets Hashim.

N6: “GS3” seems to move away from the classical era of Dance music, going far beyond to explore more emotional landscapes, serving up a large variety of styles. Does it fit to your taste or to the current musical styles & forms of electro?
MMW: In the first place, we run the label because we love releasing music we like. So there is no pressure to follow any trends. It’s true that “Phase 3” has more IDM elements than most of our previous releases, but I think there is a bit of both - dancefloor friendly tracks next to listening music. The bigger the project, the more freedom there is to include some experiments. That’s what keeps it dynamic and makes it an album rather than a compilation.

N6: Why did it take so long between “GS2” and “GS3”?
MMW: It would not have been a problem to release a new various artist Electro album every couple of months after “GS2”. The problem was and is to find really outstanding material, that from our perspective, offers something rather unique and fresh in the context of the big picture. With the years we’ve become more picky, and the bad state of the music market makes you think twice if things are worth the effort and costs of a physical release. So it took a little while until all the pieces came together.

N6: How long did it take to gather together material from all the artists involved into “GS3”? How many tracks did you receive?
MMW: One of the first tracks that I definitely wanted on the album was the Sol_Dat remix of Paul Blackford’s “Quasar”. Luckily they were really patient with us and held that great version back for the “Phase 3” album. I have not counted how many demos we received specifically for this project, but there really were a lot to choose from. It’s great to see that this genre has spread so internationally and that new generations keep emerging. The material that ended up on this album came from artists in Germany, Serbia, Finland, Sweden, USA, UK, Italy, Holland and Lithuania.

N6: “GS3” contains 21 tracks, half of which have been done by new talents. So far, Dominance Electricity has released renowned producers such as Mandroid, Dynamik Bass System, Imatran Voima, MAS 2008, Decal, Paul Hardcastle and Newcleus. Do you want to place Dominance as a platform for new artists as well? How did you select artists on “GS3”? What were your criteria?
MMW: New talents are always welcomed as much as established artists. It’s all about the music. Since our previous releases had been pretty heavily on the Old School side, I wanted to push things a bit more into the New School direction again with this album. So it would be a good balance between classic and fresh elements with enough depth to fit to the whole Global Surveyor deep space Electro saga concept.

N6: How did this concept of the “Global Surveyor” arrive?
MMW: For the backcover of “Phase 1”, Prime Dominance came up with this funny Maggotron style sci-fi story about Dominance fighting back the “Wack Gags” in an interstellar war of bass frequencies. The “Wack Gags” represented the ultra cheesy commercial Electro wave that was going down in Europe and especially Germany at the time. Later on, I always wanted to do a new full various artist Electro album, and this Global Surveyor space saga concept just had to be continued. Keep looking out, Wack Gags! :)

N6: In your own production “Fall” on this album, the lyrics go “If I had known just how you are, I wouldn’t let it come that far…”. Is there a story behind this that you would like share? What is it about?
MMW: The lyrics were originally written by Gotthard Ortner and Maria Rhode for the Supreme.ja release “Never Come To Fall”, so I don’t know the story behind the lyrics. Sbassship “Fall” was meant to be released as a remix of this Freestyle/Latin Electro song along with other mixes. But when it all went downhill with vinyl distribution in the USA, the label cancelled the physical part of the project and we agreed to hold this version for a vinyl release on Dominance.

N6: Many labels have given up on the vinyl format and only release digitally these days. How do you manage to keep going with the black gold?
MMW: We do everything to keep the vinyl releases attractive to fans and collectors with limited editions on color vinyl, box sets with bonus posters, CDs and t-shirts etc. We also always have put much effort in presenting the releases with nice artwork and have worked with some known comic and “space art” artists that previously worked for Marvel Comics, the Perry Rhodan magazine or the NASA. Our releases are all as well available in digital formats, but vinyl will always stay something special for us – especially now that it becomes more and more a luxury good.

N6: Since 2008 Dominance also supports the scene via managing one of the oldest international Electro online communities, ElectroEmpire.com. How do you see the relevance of classic music forums in times of Facebook, Twitter and social networking?
MMW: The social networks might take away some of the chitchat that would otherwise happen in forums, but I think today the forums are more important than ever for the Electro scene. Because of the missing support of more mainstream electronic music media, the forums are the places were the scene is able to stage and organise itself. The former fan-houses have now become as well the central platforms for all Electro activists. They allow them to spread their information in a more solid way than is possible at places like Facebook where everything is quickly gone and spread on a million single pages full of spam. Electro Empire is concentrated Electro – past, present and future – whenever you need it.

N6: What does the future hold for Dominance Electricity? What are the next releases?
MMW: Next up is the second “Premium Edition” of “Global Surveyor Phase 3”. It’s on clear vinyl and accompanied with a bonus CD that includes remixes of the “Global Surveyor” theme song featuring Keith Tucker and Gab.Gato as well as some bonus track surprises. The remixes are by The Exaltics, Roadking aka üNN, Dr Schmidt, Scape One, Dark Vektor and Rob Real. There are also a couple of other Electro projects in the works right now which should see the light of day soon.

N6: I heard rumours about the finnish group Blastromen releasing their much anticipated delayed debut album on Dominance. Is it true and how did this come together?
MMW: That’s correct. We will release their debut album “Human Beyond”. It was already supposed to be out at the end of last year, but their original plans didn’t work out and so they reached out to us. We’re really happy about this as this album is pure dynamite! Look out for more news about this very soon!

N6: A few words to conclude?
MMW: Thanks to everyone who submitted demos, please keep sending! Thanks to everyone who supports us and the Electro scene! You rock!

Thank you very much Matthias and long live Dominance!

MMW : Thank you, Chris.