DJ INTERWIEVS

Gregor Tresher: 5pm Interview

Every weekday we ask one of the hottest names in dance music 5 probing questions and get them to tell us their current Top 5 tunes. Then we post a new one here every day at 5pm UK time. How nice of us!

Germany's Gregor Tresher first made a name for himself in Electro circles long before the genre was adopted by the 'next big thing' brigade.

Now he's busy turning out exemplary cuts that could happily be called Techno, Electro or - dare we even say it - Minimal. However Gregor isn't simply following the latest trendy musical bandwagon, as his releases on Great Stuff, Cocoon and Datapunk earned him recognition as Best Producer 2007 from German dance bible Raveline.

His debut artist LP, A Thousand Nights, has just dropped so we caught up with him to find out how he manages to stay at the crest of the musical wave...

What influences you when you are making records?

"I find it very important to be out in the clubs and listen to new music a lot, this is one of my main influences. Of course, I'm influenced by all kinds of different music ranging from electronica to pop, whether from the past or current music."

Which clubs do you think are the best in the world right now?

"My favorite clubs right now are Watergate in Berlin and Fabric in London. Cocoonclub in Frankfurt is also very good and well worth a visit."

The sort of techno/electro you make has become very popular in more mainstream clubland recently – how do you think this has effected the music?

"Well, my sound changed over the last two years into a slightly different direction, I'm not into so-called Electro at all at the moment, especially not the kind of "Electrohouse" everyone´s talking about. I like Detroit Techno very much right now and there's a lot of great new music coming from that direction."

We hear you are moving into playing live too, how is it going and what do hope to gain from the experience?

"I've only played three live gigs so far, which were all very good. I'm really enjoying playing live, but I want to keep it quite special and will only play live for special occasions. I'm planning not to play more often than just a few times a year. Playing live is completely different from DJing, especially since you can´t really react to the crowd due to the limitation of tracks."

What else are you up to in the coming months?

"In a few weeks there will be a remix 12 inch release from my album A Thousand Nights with remixes by Dubfire and Extrawelt. Then there will be a new 12 inch release on German label Moon Harbour Recordings in March, called Break New Soil. I just did a remix for Dubfire's new label Sci+Tec for an artist from South America called Delete, and I'm working on a few other things right now, I'm planning to do lots of new music in 2008..."

Gregor's Current Top 5

1. Ripperton - Zugunruhe (Daniel Stefanik Remix) - Connaisseur Superieur
2. Gregor Tresher - Black Rain (LP Version) - Great Stuff Recordings
3. Haito & Diringer - Perception (Simon Baker Remix) - Kickboxer
4. GTMK - Panchakarma - Intacto
5. Audio Soul Project - Taking Shape (Samuel L Session Remix Part 2) - Systematic

Retro Cassettes Go USB

Check out these two quirky new retro-cool products we've found while wasting a bit too much time on music geek websites...

They both come from ultra cool UK design companies, who have picked up on the fact that although digital music files are great and everything, people are a bit misty-eyed for the days of painstakingly making compilation tapes for their mates, designing the tracklist/artwork by hand and - most importantly - being able to actually give them something physical to be treasured. It's just not the same with a CD-R!

Suck UK have the kitch MixTape USB Stick, which sees a 64MB USB drive slotted into a classic old cassette shell. It stores 1 hour of music, just like a good old C60 tape, which they hope will inspire you to compile a vintage mix, plus an authentic retro inlay card for tracklist. They have proved so popular the've already sold out, but expect more stock on the way soon.

Manchester's MagneticNorth are behind the MIXA, a 1GB USB stick that is actually inside an old cassette, meaning the old meets the new head on for an analogue/digital bastard offspring.

The card design is a bit more hi-tech here, allowing you to import files and Flickr photos to create a sleeve and providing stickers so you can 'pimp your cassette'. They're pushing a valentines design right now for those hoping to use the magic of music to get themselves a shag next week.

For two ultimately fairly ridiculous products, we reckon these are going to do very well. Do you think someone will come up with the same sort of thing for vinyl...