- 20 years with the brothers Schwarz.
- In the back half of this week's Exchange, Ali and Basti Schwarz bring up the notion of the DJ highway. The German brothers have been travelling on it largely uninterrupted for over two decades now. But the experience has taught them that, the second you take an exit, there's always more traffic waiting to take your place. So as musical trends came and went over the years, they've adapted to new conditions. They morphed from garage-tinged deep house to slinky minimal, and helped define the sound known as electro house along the way. Yet no matter what skin they were in, they always strove to balance dance floor kicks with a will to be weird. Todd L. Burns summed it up well when he described their music as "Weird enough to stand out, functional enough to destroy a floor."
Despite coming to notoriety in the 2000s, their roots in dance music actually stretch back to the glory days of Germany's club scene—in fact, they ran two hot clubs in Stuttgart during the '90s. In conversation with Matt Unicomb, the brothers look back on how the rave scene changed during their rise to fame and how they're navigating the new demands it places on DJs in the present day.
TracklistTiefschwarz - On Up
Tiefschwarz & Yawk - North