Loco Dice

Loco DiceEvery so often a DJ or producer comes along who inspires the collective imagination. If youve seen Loco Dice perform at his ten-year-long Tribehouse residency in his hometown Dsseldorf, or at DC-10 in Ibiza (from 02-06), you will have clicked to this. Loco Dice is someone who can puzzle together intangible moods with a direct approach. Via his DJ sets or his productions on labels like Minus, Cadenza, Ovum, Four Twenty and Cocoon, he merges perspectives in his delicate sense for sounds and… Show more reflective atmospheres, underpinned with solid, physical grooves inspired by the hip hop that was his early sonic stomping ground in the mid- to late 90s. Theres something there for the dreamers, as well as for the 9-to-5ers who just want to lose everything in a moment of abandon on the dancefloor.Dont think that merging of perspectives is accidental. This Loco Dice, with his mercurial temperament, may let his thoughts run away with him, but he tends to chase those ideas and make them into an artistic reality. His DJ sets, whether at Germanys biggest rave Timewarp, Cocoon in Ibiza or a beach party in South America, are spontaneous orchestrations fueled by the nuances of a night/venue/crowd. He began a fruitful studio partnership with Martin Buttrich in 2002 leading to tracks like Phatt Dope S~~t, Menina Brasiliera, and Seeing Through Shadows, and these productions are meticulously planned by Dice. Its a directorial, cinematic outlook, which permeates Dices everyday life, and comes not just from the outlandish escapades and scrapes that he has sometimes found himself living out in real life. It also stems from elaborate film scripts imagined as a young Loco Dice on the streets of Flingern in Dsseldorf and the Kerkennah Islands in Tunisia. This continues to be a habit of Loco Dices today: to close his eyes for just one minute, and see a whole cornucopia of scenes and atmospheres. As one manifestation of this, visitors to Dsseldorf early this year will be able to see an exhibition of photographs taken by Loco Dice & Martin Buttrich during the year they spent in New York City to work on the Loco Dice album. Its an album that re-imagines the soul of a city, built from careful observations of urban tribes that crisscross and sometimes clash, of minute details and sensory impressions.Family is important to Loco Dice, as you might have noticed if youve seen one of his tattoos, a Chicano-style artwork with the legend Guadelupe. His love for music stems from hearing soul and funk in the kitchen, and holidays with his mother to Tunisia, where he absorbed North African and Middle Eastern folk music and occasionally sneaked away to watch his grandfather playing dice at caf tables on the street. Family is how hes always regarded the people close to him, and its how he regards subcultures too. A football player, hes inspired by those who build strong teams of creative people around them. This sense of family is what he wants to create with projects like his and Buttrichs label Desolat, and an artist management agency he run with Tom Preuss called Artist Alife. When you visit the office of Desolat and Artist Alife, youre struck by the fact that everyone seems to come from a different cultural background. Loco Dices experience of Germany is one that includes friends and collaborators who are of African, Eastern European, Italian or Turkish descent. Loco Dice is interested in all kinds of people and artistic subcultures: hes proud of people who bring a creative flair to what they do, informed by lives lived ever so slightly less ordinary.

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