BARKER & BAUMECKER

Barker & Baumecker take Turns from techno, bass, breaks, and experimental terrain with their second album on Ostgut Ton.

Sam Barker and Andreas Baumecker’s lives have always revolved around different kinds of music. That’s partly why their productions as Barker & Baumecker are more unpredictable, harder to pin down than what you might expect from a label borne out of a techno club. And while their music is clearly built for dancing, listening to it reveals a deep love and respect for many forms of electronic music – bonding over more experimental dance forms is what brought them together in the first place. Imagining their music at any decent club, but disrupting the flow on the floor is what brings us to their second album Turns. An amalgamation of their unique musical minds, transcending electronic music genres and styles, while further developing and refining the Barker & Baumecker sound aesthetic.

Barker & Baumecker first met via their day jobs back in 2008, when the former was a booking agent and the latter was the booker for Berghain. Baumecker was instrumental in encouraging Barker and his colleagues at LittleBig booking agency to start Leisure System – first a party and now also a record label championing irregular dance music. Shortly after, their friendship – sparked by a kinship in musical curiosity – became a partnership in production. Now, with two EPs, an album, and almost 20 remixes under their belts, Barker & Baumecker continue to steadily explore and reshape their shared electronic musical interests, especially in techno, bass, breaks, and experimental terrain.

Baumecker’s been a clubber pretty much from day one in his hometown of Frankfurt am Main. As he recalls, “Frankfurt has a really good history in club music. There was a party series called Techno Club at the No Name venue, which began in 1984. It was an American gay club, basically. It was super tiny, but really happening. I went there for the first time in '86 when I was 18.”

As the DJ nd_baumecker, he cut his teeth in the ‘90s playing house at Wild Pitch Club – an early party thrown by Playhouse/Robert Johnson founder Ata and Heiko MSO – and left-field techno, electro, and Warp-influenced sounds in Mannheim with Move D and D-Man. A regular guest at Berghain’s predecessor club, Ostgut, he moved to Berlin in 2004 after an invitation to become a resident at the newly opened Panorama Bar inside Berghain. 12 years later, he’s still a resident there, as well as a frequent DJ flyer worldwide.