For nearly three decades, AnD has been a unique force in electronic music. He has lived every side of the scene - the underground clubs, major festivals, the years of struggle and success, alongside the sacrifices that come with dedicating your entire life to music. Born in Veroia, a small town in the mountains, he moved around a lot, and had a particularly hard childhood. Dimi started to play the accordion and piano when he was 6 years old, later taking upthe guitar and bouzouki, a traditional Greek sting instrument. His father was a DJ, and run his own pirate radio show, so this was his first connection with dance music, at around 10 years old which led to him practising every day at mixing and then playing at weekends by the time he was 14.
His music has appeared on some of the most legendary labels from Hardwax to Electric Deluxe, Perc Trax, Soma, Blakworks and the list goes on. On top of that he also runs three labels, AnD Records, AnD HARD and Groove Generator, with each having a different focus on the sound that they sign and distribute. Whilst many associate him with his harder, more industrial sound, there's a lot more to him than that. With his work in sound design and scoring for film and TV for the last decade, his versatility when it comes to being a producer, is shown no better than in some of these landmark projects.
With no signs of slowing down, the year ahead sees AnD’s dedication to studio time be put into motion, with a string of releases to reinforce the rebirth and his position within electronic music. His releases will be split across his AnD Hard imprint and AnD Records which focuses more on groove, alongside an EP on Teletech which is out this Friday, October 9th. In addition he's planning to unleash an all new 100% hardware live set. With all of this happening, we sat down with the artist to talk about his passion, projects and what's next.
The Brvtalist: Hello and nice to connect again! How was your summer? Do you think your sound hits different in different seasons? Are you more of a winter club guy or does it not matter really?
AnD: Summer was fucking mental, in the best way. A lot of travelling, festivals, studio time, new music, and a lot happening behind the scenes with the labels and everything I'm building for the next chapter. I've never really thought about my music in terms of seasons though. Obviously there is something special about a dark club in winter. That intimacy, pressure, sweat and darkness is an incredible environment for techno. But I've also had some of the best experiences of my life playing outside in the middle of summer. The environment changes the way I communicate with people, but it doesn't change who I am musically.
That's something I love about techno. The same record can become a completely different animal depending on where and when you hear it. Something hypnotic in a warehouse at four in the morning can suddenly feel enormous in front of thousands of people under the sun. I've never wanted to make music that only works in one environment anyway. I want music with enough character that you can put it somewhere completely different and discover another side of it. So winter or summer doesn't really matter. Give me the right sound system, the right people and some fucking machines and I'm happy.
TB: Hardware live performance has been a major part of AnD for more a long time. How has your live setup and your relationship with performing on machines evolved over that time, and where are you taking it next?
AnD: Hardware live has been one of the foundations of AnD for more than 15 years. For a big part of my audience, it's actually one of the things they know me for. The machines have changed enormously over that time. My setups have changed, I've changed, but the reason I keep coming back to hardware hasn't changed at all. I want a physical relationship with electronic music. I want to touch something and immediately hear the consequence. I want to push a machine too far and get something back that I wasn't expecting. Then I have to react to it. That conversation between control and accident is where live electronic music becomes exciting for me.
I've never been interested in going on stage and simply reproducing finished tracks exactly as they exist on a record. If you want the record, listen to the fucking record. Live should be alive. I want to be able to stretch something for ten minutes because the room is locked into it. Strip everything away. Destroy something. Rebuild it. Make a mistake and turn the mistake into the best part of the performance.
That's also why DJing and live performance satisfy completely different parts of my brain. With a DJ set I'm taking finished pieces of music and creating a new journey between them. With hardware I'm standing inside the music while it's being created. After more than fifteen years, I'm not trying to make that process safer.
I'm trying to make the distance between my brain, my hands, the machines and the audience smaller and smaller. If I know exactly what's going to happen, where is the fucking fun in that?
TB: Your catalogue spans around 400 tracks and many different sides of techno. After nearly three decades, how do you keep evolving without losing the identity that connects all those different periods of AnD?
AnD: For me, AnD has never been a genre inside techno. It's always been a way of thinking about techno.
There are around 400 tracks behind me now, and maybe around 40 of those are what I would describe as properly hard. Across the rest there is groove, hypnotism, industrialism, experimentation, deeper music, stripped music, weird shit, repetition, machines and a ridiculous amount of sound design. That's nearly thirty years of me being obsessed with electronic music. So when I'm making more groove focused music now, I don't experience that as some dramatic change. Groove has always been fundamental to what I do. The same goes for the harder material. I fucking love that too. They're different expressions of the same obsession.
I've never understood why an artist should spend decades making music only to become less curious as they get older. For me, identity isn't BPM. It isn't distortion. It isn't a particular kick drum. It's the decisions underneath those things. Your taste. Your instincts. The way you understand tension, repetition, movement, texture and space.
That's the DNA. Of course I think about the people who have supported me. Some of them have been following me for twenty years or more, and that means everything to me. But respecting an audience doesn't mean repeating yourself for them.
I think the greatest respect you can give people is to remain fucking honest. If I'm excited, they'll hear it. If I'm pretending, they'll hear that too. Evolution isn't about becoming somebody else. It's about discovering another part of yourself.
TB: You're also running multiple labels. Give us a quick breakdown of all three and how do you think running a label has changed today vs. 15 years ago? How do you approach looking for material to release?
AnD: There are three labels because I wanted three genuinely different worlds, not three logos releasing the same fucking music. AnD Records is home, that's the foundation. I started it because I needed somewhere my own music could exist without compromise, and that freedom is still the whole point of it. AnD:Hard gives the harder side of electronic music its own space, but the bigger vision is also about new talent. I want to find people with something genuinely individual and help give them a platform. I have no interest in building a vanity label that only exists to release myself. Then there's Groove Generator. That's another universe built around groove, movement and energy. The first six EPs are already ready, including DIMI and music from some seriously talented people.
Running a label now compared with fifteen years ago is fucking insane. Everything is faster. Music can travel around the planet overnight. Discovery is easier, but attention is harder because everybody is drowning in content.
So my approach to demos has actually become simpler. Don't send me twenty unfinished tracks. Send me the two or three records that make me understand who you are. And please don't study my catalogue and manufacture something you think I'll sign. I already have AnD. I want you. I don't give a fuck how many followers somebody has if the music says nothing to me. I'd rather discover somebody with 300 followers and an unbelievable identity than somebody with 300,000 followers making music I forget ten seconds later. Technical ability can develop. Numbers can grow. Personality is much harder to manufacture.
TB: Speaking of releases, you have a new release coming up on Teletech. What can you tell us about that one?
AnD: This release goes directly into one of the harder extremes of what I do. It's Schranz, but I'm not interested in dressing up like it's twenty years ago and recreating something that already existed perfectly well the first time.
I'm interested in what that energy means to me now. The main track is Kalt bis ins Herz, built around German vocals. The idea is emotional hardening. That point where you've been through something enough times that eventually something inside you becomes cold.
I wanted the vocal to be fundamental to the record rather than decoration sitting on top of it. The voice becomes rhythmic. At certain points it almost behaves like another percussion element. Musically it's fast, physical and brutal, but the emotion underneath it is probably the most important part for me. That's something I've become increasingly fascinated with. People sometimes talk about hard music as though brutality and emotion are opposites.
I think they're fucking perfect together. Some of the heaviest music that influenced me had enormous emotion inside it. Sepultura taught me that when I was a kid. Years later I watched Godflesh live at Berghain on the same night I was playing there and they completely destroyed my understanding of distortion. Distortion wasn't just dirt or aggression anymore. It could have weight, emotion and physical presence. That thinking is still inside what I make today. So I'm not trying to bring Schranz back. It never fucking left. I'm showing you what it means to me now.
TB: After so many years in the game, what is the biggest thing that still drives you? Playing for a crowd, the travel or maybe just the music?
AnD: The music. No hesitation. I fucking love playing. I love crowds. I love that moment when thousands of people suddenly become one organism because of a piece of music. I've travelled around the world because of this and experienced things that the kid I was in Greece could never have imagined. But take all of that away tomorrow.
No flights. No festivals. No clubs. No cameras. No Instagram. Nobody watching. I'll still wake up, make a coffee, have a cigarette and start making music. That's how I know what the answer is.
Nearly thirty years into this and I'm still buying machines. I'm still learning. I'm still experimenting. I'm still capable of losing hours changing some tiny fucking detail that almost nobody will consciously notice because I know when it's right and when it isn't. Music has cost me a lot over the years too. Time, sleep, relationships, stability. I've always joked that I'm married to music, but there is probably more truth in that than I should admit. I've given this blood, tears and sweat. But what it has given me back is impossible to measure. And somehow, after all of that, I still get excited when I walk into the studio. That's why I'm still here.
TB: What else are you excited about right now?
AnD: A fucking lot. But what excites me most is that at this point in my career everything feels like it's opening rather than closing. There is a lot of new AnD music coming across very different parts of techno. The Teletech release represents one extreme. There is loads of groove focused material coming from another direction. The hardware live show continues evolving after more than fifteen years. Then there are the three labels, each becoming its own world. But probably the biggest evolution in my head is that I'm increasingly excited about what I can build for other people too.
For a long time, naturally, the obsession was building AnD. Now I can be sitting there listening to demos from some young producer nobody knows, hear something completely individual and immediately think, "What the fuck is this?" That feeling excites me. I want to find those people. I want to release them. I want to give them opportunities and then watch them become whatever the fuck they're supposed to become without trying to turn them into me.
At the same time, I'm nowhere near finished with myself. There are around 400 tracks behind me. Nearly three decades of music. More than fifteen years performing live with hardware. And somehow I don't look at any of that and think, "Look what I've done." I think, "What haven't I done yet?" I'm 42 and I'm still in the fucking laboratory.
I don't think I'm ever coming out.
Pick up Kalt bis ins Herz on Teletech October 9th HERE.
Photos by @georgeverinderr